Barry Moser, Valley of Dry BonesIn an essay titled, "The Fiction Writer and His Country", Flannery Oconnor addresses the concern of literary critics that American novelists do not accurately represent the "joy of life" in a country which is "enjoying an unparalleled prosperity", which is "the strongest nation in the world", and which "has almost produced a classless society."
She responds in such a way that encourages me not only as a Christian, but as a Christian artist, especially in a cultural climate hostile to Christianity, at Florida State and in the United States at large.
Christian artists have the inconvenient responsibility of conveying a need for redemption to an audience convinced of a reality where such redemption is not only an insult, but an unnecessary fairy tale. The belief in the depravity of man and his desperate need for redemption is a make-believe cop-out of living life in the here and now, a crutch for the weak, instead of hope for every soul with the curse and blessing of being confronted with the reality of his soul: needy.
Flannery says:
"Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.
The novelists with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, they you have to make your vision apparent by shock--to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."
Christian artists are often accused of having a view of the world so dark that it is dishonest. Each artist faces this accusation singularly, with no other conscience but his own.
"It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little--or at best a distorted--sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life.
Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these time to make transparent in fiction."
She is right about that. This is not a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy.
