Carson 1
Poetry As Ontology:
Jacques Maritain’s Aesthetics in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor
by:
Nathan Carson
for:
ENG 5306: The Bible and Literary Theory
Dr. David L. Jeffrey
Baylor University, Spring 2007
Carson 2
I. Introduction
In connection to either human or divine realities, what does a work of art do? Is
artistic work revelatory, and if so, in what sense is that true? Is art revelatory in a salvific
sense, and can poetry save us, as I.A. Richards indicates (Eliot 124)? If so, the question
remains as to what is meant by salvation. Does a work of art merely play upon and draw
out the aesthetic emotions latent within the viewer or reader, as Belgion suggests (Belgion
71), or does it draw them into a longing for the “unquenchable” eschatological “not yet,”
as Baudelaire indicates, in the form of a desire for immortality (Maritain, AS, 134)?
Finally, does a literary text merely exert itself as a discourse of power over against the
reader’s own response of power (Yaeger 191)?
In this study we will be focused on another such claim, offered by French
philosopher, theologian and aesthetician Jacques Maritain, about the status and function of
art. Drawing from his immersion in existential Thomism, Maritain suggests that when the
artist submits to the good of the work to be made, art can perform a revelatory function; it
can disclose the splendor of transcendent beauty in and through the sensible world. Indeed,
speaking more narrowly of poetry itself, Maritain goes so far as to borrow Charles
Maurras’s striking claim that “poetry is ontology” (Maritain, AS, 71). In short, poetry, as
well as the work of art in general, have for Maritain the revelatory potential to unveil the
“splendor” of God in the things of the world; it can effect an “excessive disclosure of
ontology” or point up the “overflow of presence,” as two prominent scholars have recently
described it.i But how, we might ask, does the artist accomplish such an unveiling of
splendor in the artistic work? What is more, what qualifies as truly a “revelation,” and does
a mere disclosure of beauty or being suffice as a Christian revelation?
Carson 3
In order to answer these questions, in what follows we will examine not only the
foundation Maritain lays for how this unveiling of being might be possible, we will also
examine the work of one artist who sought to incorporate these claims into her own work.
When asked about her aesthetic influences, O’Connor commented that Maritain’s work
was what she cut her “aesthetic teeth” on, and throughout her work and personal life the
direct influence of Maritain’s aesthetic theories are palpable.ii O’Connor’s integrated
emphasis on “manners” and “mystery, on the concrete, local and sensible on the one hand,
and the ineffable, mysterious participation in the divine life on the other, readily aligns her
work with Maritain’s “transcendental realism,” whereby the concrete reality of the natural
world is opened to the supernatural that is latent within and extending beyond it (Maritain
AS, 20; O’Connor MM, 72, 96). The value of examining O’Connor’s work, then, it that it
offers a chance to evaluate Maritain’s claim, that a literary text can indeed open the reader
to the being and beauty of God. Therefore, in this paper we intend to show that Maritain’s
metaphysical appeal to “transcendental” beauty, his suggestion that artists can uncover that
beauty, and his application of analogical thinking to literary symbols, are all incorporated
and augmented by O’Connor as keys for producing a truly “revelatory” fictional text.
Alongside this main agenda, we will further argue, by way of analysis of O’Connor’s
“Parker’s Back,” that Maritain’s program falls short of enabling artists to achieve a fully
Christian revelation, and that O’Connor’s story only succeeds on that score by, unlike
Maritain, appealing to uniquely biblical images and symbols.
Carson 4
II. Maritain’s Metaphysical Aesthetics
Maritain’s conception of the work in which an artist engages is rooted in his intense
study of Thomas Aquinas, and the latter’s robust account of the way that every sensible
thing participates in the life of God. Maritain’s existential Thomism owes a great deal to
Thomas’s
ratio entis, the notion of being, and he held that the properties of being can be known by
way of analogical abstraction from the “real,” sensible things of the world.iii For Maritain,
the concepts thus abstracted are, the “transcendentals,” which include the ratio entis itself,
as well as the concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful. What is more, for Maritain,
as well as for Gilson, all things in the sensible world do not merely exist as things in fact,
but are an actus esseni; they exist as thing in act, and the action of existence is a
participation in the life of God, who is both “pure act” and “first cause” of all things.
With these preliminary remarks in mind, we can better discern the way that, for
Maritain, Beauty is a “property of being” or a “transcendental” among those concepts
which “surpass all limits of kind and category...because they absorb everything and are to
be found everywhere. Like the one, the true and the good, [Beauty] is being considered
from a certain aspect, it is a property of being” (Maritain AS, 24). For Maritain, however,
beauty is no mere philosophical category of metaphysics, but is rather a divine attribute of
God, who is both “beautiful” and “beauty itself” (Maritain, AS, 24-25). Further, Maritain
affirms that, as First Cause, God imparts his beauty to all created things such that every
“particularized” instance of beauty in the world proceeds from and participates in His
beauty. Quoting key statements from Thomas’s De Divinis Nominibus, Maritain
summarizes this view in the opening section of Art and Scholasticism:
Carson 5
He is beauty itself, because He imparts beauty to all created beings...He is the cause of all
harmony and brightness. Every form indeed, that is to say every light, is ‘a certain irridation
proceeding from the first brightness,’ ‘a participation in the divine brightness.’ And every
consonance or harmony, every concord, every friendship and union of whatever sort
between creatures, proceeds from the divine beauty, the primitive, super-eminent type of all
consonance, which gathers all things together and calls them to itself…Thus ‘the beauty of
the creature is nothing but a similitude of the divine beauty shared among things.’ (Maritain,
AS, 25)
In this passage, Maritain’s mention of “form” as “light” or “irridation” proceeding
from and participating in the divine brightness, is an important concept to grasp as we
move toward an understanding of how an artistic production can be called “revelatory.”
Following Thomas and the ancients, Maritain sees “splendor” as “the essential character”
and “intelligibility” of Beauty (Maritain, AS, 20). Form, on the other hand, is a “remnant or
ray of the creative Mind” intelligibly communicated to created beings. In a passage which
O’Connor herself marked up for future reference, Maritain fully elaborates this concept:
…form, that is to say the principle determining the peculiar perfection of everything which
is, constituting and completing things in their essence and their qualities, the ontological
secret, so to speak, of their innermost being, their spiritual essence, their operative mystery,
is above all the peculiar principle of intelligibility, the peculiar clarity of every thing. Every
form, moreover, is a remnant or ray of the creative Mind impressed upon the heart of the
being created. (Maritain, AS, 20)
For Maritain, citing Thomas, the splendor formae is “the splendor of the secrets of being
radiating into intelligence....the radiance or clarity inherent in beauty itself,” that proceed
from God into the intellectus of his beings (Maritain, CI, 161). This, then, is the heart of
Maritain’s thesis that human beings can indeed have an “intuition of being,” which
elsewhere he calls “poetic intuition,” or a sense of the “inscape” of things, as Hopkins
would say.iv However, the splendor of form intuited by the artist does not amount to
conceptual clarity; it retains the character of “mystery” and thus constitutes the inner
“ontological secret” which Maritain mentions above (Maritain, AS, 23). Nonetheless the
artist perceives something of this “mystery,” and as he devotes himself to the good of his
Carson 6
artistic work, the work will attain to beauty as the splendor and mystery of form, the
ontological essence and inscape of things, shines forth from it as an “overflow of presence”
(Williams 4).
All of this appears to be what Maritain means when he claims that “poetry is
ontology,” or a “divinization of the spiritual in the things of sense” which, at least in his
early work, he seems to apply to all artistic endeavors.v How is this accomplished, we
might ask? Maritain’s answer is that by attending to the specific sensible symbols that are
the grist for the mill of artistic work, and by further illumining the way that these symbols
open out into the splendor and mystery of being through “exchanges” and
“correspondences,” the artist can offer “spiritual nourishment” to the world. Drawing many
of the fine arts under this umbrella, Maritain aptly summarizes the point here:
Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, Music, even Dancing, are imitative arts, that is to say arts
realising the beauty of the work and producing the joy of the soul by the use of imitation or
by producing through the medium of certain sensible symbols the spontaneous presence in
the mind of something over and above such symbols…. And the things made present to the
soul by the sensible symbols of art—by rhythm, sound, line, colour, form, volume, words,
metre, rhyme and image, the proximate matter of art—are themselves merely a material
element of the beauty of the work, just like the symbols in question; they are the remote
matter, so to speak, at the disposal of the artist, on which he must make the brilliance of a
form, the light of being, shine. (Maritain, AS, 45-46)
The secret, then, of how it is that a work of art can indeed be “revelatory” in any
sense, has to do, in Maritain’s view, with a very specific literary technique whereby the
artist uses the sensible symbols in such a way that they point to something “more.” Here
the question with which we began this study must be reemphasized. If a text is said to be
revelatory in some way, what precisely is revealed and how does the artist bring it about?
At present it would seem that, for Maritain, it is beauty that is revealed as the splendor and
mystery of our participation in the life of God. The way the artist brings this about, it
seems, is through the use of symbols that somehow operate on multiple levels at once; they
Carson 7
at once remain a concrete, sensible symbol and a pathway into mystery. Flannery
O’Connor is one artist who took Maritain’s suggestions quite seriously, and we turn now to
look at her understanding of concrete symbols and mystery, and the way the two might
work together in her fictional texts.
III. O’Connor and Maritain
In a comment on the character of good fiction writing, O’Connor offers a distinct
echo of all that we’ve explored in Maritain: “If a writer is any good, what he makes will
have its source in a realm much larger that that which his conscious mind can encompass
and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader” (O’Connor,
MM, 83). Here it might seem odd that O’Connor defines a “good writer” as one who can
appeal to a “realm” that may touch, but is not remotely limited to the writer’s own mind. It
appears that, like Maritain, O’Connor is arguing that only a writer who acknowledges the
participation of the sensible in some kind of greater reality, can do justice to the world as it
really is. And, following Maritain, this does not mean that representation of the sensible
and concrete is left behind, but rather that it is only within the concrete spectrum of
sensible things that the full register of participation in the divine life can be discerned.vi
This again aligns with Maritain’s contention that ratio entis and the “transcendentals” of
being can indeed be intellectually grasped, by analogy, in and through the sensible things
of the world. Thus O’Connor continually emphasizes that good fiction must appeal to the
senses: “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer
begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot
appeal to the sense with abstractions.” Thus O’Connor saw fiction as not “an escape from
Carson 8
reality,” but rather “a plunge into reality” that is “very shocking to the system” (O’Connor,
MM 78). Because of her artistic insistence on immersion in the sensible and concrete
O’Connor calls herself a “realist.” It is important to note here that for O’Connor, this
“realism” which seeks to “penetrate the concrete” is rooted in an ontological understanding
of the goodness of creation. Citing Augustine, O’Connor affirms that the “things” of the
created world are good because they “pour forth from God” and “proceed from a divine
source” (O’Connor, MM 157).
However, as for Maritain, this affirmation of a “divine source” is precisely
what gave O’Connor a reason, as Sykes suggests, to “place confidence in the power of
artistic symbol to reveal truth. Symbol-making mysteriously puts us in touch with a level
of reality otherwise unknown to us” (Sykes 45). Thus O’Connor adds to her concern for
sensible things a stress on “mystery,” which for her is an essential element of being that is
disclosed when the artist “penetrates the concrete.” The true novelist knows, she contends,
that he must “make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it
touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets” (O’Connor, MM 45). For
O’Connor, this “realm” that exists “beyond the surface” is the special province of
“mystery,” which involves “the Divine life and our participation in it” (O’Connor, MM
72). The mystery of life, for O’Connor, is that at the depths of the concrete world lies “the
image of its source, the image of ultimate reality,” which is that divine life from which all
sensible things proceed (O’Connor, MM 157). Thus she brings together surface and depths,
“manners” and “mystery” in her attempt to illumine in sensible things, as Maritain says, “a
secret which it first discovered in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless
exchanges and correspondences” (Maritain, AS, 74):
…if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he
Carson 9
looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond,
then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it
into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own
limits outward toward the limits of mystery…
I would not like to suggest that this kind of writer, because his interest is predominantly in
mystery, is able in any sense to slight the concrete. Fiction begins where human knowledge
begins—with the senses—and every fiction writer is bound by this fundamental aspect of his
medium. (O’Connor, MM, 41-42)
By now it should be fairly evident that O’Connor explicitly shares Maritain’s
affirmation of the analogia entis (O’Connor, MM 71-72), as well as the possibility of an
“intuition of being” whereby the artist make the brilliance of a form, the light of being,
shine” upon the concrete realities of the world (Maritain, AS, 45-46). Imaginative literature
can indeed, in O’Connor’s view, reveal the participation of the sensible world in “mystery”
of the divine life. What we have yet to examine is how, precisely, O’Connor goes about
accomplishing this in her fiction, and here we must take a closer look at both her debt to
New Criticism on the use of symbols, and suggest several ways in which she surpassed it.
In addition to a theological impetus, in both the Eucharist and the Incarnation, for
her close attention to the detailed texture of the sensible, O’Connor clearly drew upon the
insights of New Criticism and its emphasis on the integrity of the literary text as an
interconnected series of symbols and images. Having taken a course at Iowa under Austin
Warren, and being constantly fed the most recent critical developments of Allen Tate’s
thought through his wife and her close friend, Caroline Gordon, O’Connor was quite
immersed in the New Critical scene (Fodor 72). Of course the connection to Maritain is not
lost here, since his strong emphasis, through Thomas, on “the good of the work” itself as
opposed to Romantic notions of art as self-expression, was itself quite formative for many
of the leading proponents of New Criticism.vii However, the point to get at here is the way
in which O’Connor went beyond New Criticism in her understanding of the literary
Carson 10
symbol, and its efficacy as a catalyst for precisely the revelation of being that Maritain
suggests is possible in a work of art.
It is fair to say that none of the New Critical thinkers, with the exception perhaps
of Tate, clearly connected the literary symbol with “universals” or “transcendentals” in the
way that Maritain did.viii The effect of Maritain’s emphasis, which O’Connor only
discovered after prolonged exposure to New Criticism, was that it provided her with the
metaphysical framework for placing confidence in the real, intelligible power of the
literary symbol to reveal and mysteriously participate in the truth and splendor of being
(Sykes 45). Even though O’Connor does not draw her understanding of literary symbols
from him, it is important to note, as we examine her view of symbols and their revelatory
function in the fictional text, that Maritain effects a shift in her thinking.ix
O’Connor’s understanding of the character and revelatory power of literary
symbols owes a great deal to a lesser-known colleague of Maritain’s, William F. Lynch,
S.J. From 1950-1956 Lynch was the senior editor of Thought, the leading Catholic journal
to which O’Connor subscribed. She was exposed to Lynch’s thinking on several fronts,
most notably in a series of articles he wrote called “Theology and the Imagination,” as well
as in his magnum opus, Christ and Apollo, for which O’Connor wrote a highly favorable
review (Zuber 94). Himself intimately connected to the developments of New Criticism,
while also being aligned with the existential Thomism of Maritain, Lynch offered
O’Connor a workable understanding of the literary symbol as embedded in the analogia
entis, and this, like Maritain’s project, thoroughly outstripped Ransom and Brooks, while
supplying Tate’s analogical thinking with needed precision and weight.x In his introduction
Carson 11
to the recent reprint of Lynch’s Christ and Apollo, Arbery notes Lynch’s unique
contribution to O’Connor:
Finitude and limitation…can only be understood only in terms of the infinite and limitless
being always present to them by analogy. His emphasis on analogy distinguishes Lynch’s
thought from the focus on the limited image present in literary criticism since the first
decade of the twentieth century…. For O’Connor, I think, Lynch more than Ransom,
Brooks, or Tate provides a framework of analogy that puts the questions of ontological
poetics into a new perspective. (Arbery xiii; xxvi)
In the practice of writing fiction or poetry, Lynch describes with precision the technical
aim that a writer with an “analogical imagination” must have: “For our present purposes,
we may roughly and initially describe the analogical as that habit of perception which sees
that different levels of being are also somehow one and can therefore be associated in the
same image, in the same and single act of perception.”xi Compare this comment to an
absolutely crucial passage in O’Connor:
“The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the
meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to
see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.”xii The full implications of
Maritain’s project are beginning to register here in the attempt to see “different levels of
being” or “reality” in a single literary image. This strongly echoes Maritain’s suggestion
that the aim of art is to illumine “through the medium of certain sensible symbols the
spontaneous presence in the mind of something over and above such symbols” (Maritain,
AS, 45).
The really substantial contribution from Lynch, however, is his strong emphasis on
medieval exegesis and the four senses of scripture, applied beyond the biblical text to the
function of the literary symbol in imaginative fiction. This fundamental shift is rooted for
Lynch, in the Incarnation, which provides the rationale for reading not only the book of
Carson 12
Scripture in allegorical, typological and anagogical terms, but also the book of nature.xiii In
her brief review of Christ and Apollo, O’Connor offers substantial remarks which echo her
later, now somewhat famous words on the application of medieval exegesis to the literary
symbols in her fiction (Zuber 94). Here also is the context and further clarification of what
she means by “different levels of reality”:
The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the
meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to
see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. The medieval commentators on
Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called
allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral,
which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do
with the Divine life and our participation in it. Although this was a method applied to
biblical exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature
which included most possibilities, and I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that
the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of
becoming a permanent part of our literature. (O’Connor, MM, 72).
In this crucial passage, O’Connor explicitly encourages writers to apply, as she has done,
the medieval exegetical method to their fiction, to their reading of and writing about the
book of nature. However, what she implies here (and makes explicit elsewhere) is that her
stories ought to be digested like the medieval exegetes read scripture. In her stories, she
suggests, the reader ought to find images and symbols operating not only on the literal or
moral levels of meaning, but also on the anagogical, offering the reader an eschatological
vision, in the reading moment, of the “mystery” that is “the Divine life and our
participation in it” (O’Connor, MM, 72).
In her fiction O’Connor does in fact employ images that possess a register of
meaning on multiple levels, as we will presently show in her story, “Parker’s Back.” It
seems, then, that one of the questions we began with has been answered: If the artistic
work has the revelatory potential to “make the brilliance of a form, the light of being,
shine” upon sensible matter, how is this accomplished (Maritain, AS, 46)? For O’Connor it
Carson 13
is through the development of multi-layered images and symbols. The most important
question, however, remains unanswered: If a text can be called revelatory in some way,
what precisely is revealed and can the revelation be discerned as specifically Christian?xiv
It is quite possible that the content of such a revelation is merely, as O’Connor perhaps
unwittingly suggests, an “enlarged view of the human scene” rather than any substantially
Christian ontological understanding. However, it is entirely possible that an artist may
succeed in attaining to a revelatory work that has enough religious specificity to be truly
called “spiritual nourishment.” We now turn to an analysis of O’Connor’s story, “Parker’s
Back” in order to see which of these two she seems to accomplish.
IV. Opening to Mystery in “Parker’s Back”
In O’Connor’s short story, “Parker’s Back,” the main character carries the name of
Obadiah Elihue Parker, though he hates his first and middle name so much that he simply
goes by O.E. Parker. During the story Parker recalls that as a young boy, while at the fair,
he saw a show featuring a man, “tattooed from head to foot,” whose patterned body
appeared to Parker as a “single intricate design of brilliant color” (O’Connor, CS, 512).
While the man flexed his muscles on stage so that “the arabesque of men and beasts and
flowers appeared to have a motion of its own,” Parker experiences a moment of Romantic
transcendence; he is “filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the flag
passes” (O’Connor, CS, 513). From that point on Parker goes through his life putting
tattoos on his body, but experiences a profound “dissatisfaction” at the result. He is not
“lifted up” at the sight of them: “Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would
get in front of it and study his overall look. The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of
Carson 14
colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would come over
him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up”
(O’Connor, CS, 514). In this passage and throughout the story, O’Connor operates with the
concrete image of “tattoos,” together with the “intricate arabesque” and “colors,” on the
literal level of the story; they remain tattoos throughout. However, the implicit effect of the
images suggests another level of meaning; the “botched” and “haphazard” tattoos signify
Parker’s own fragmented subjectivity and broken soul, and the “intricate arabesque” comes
to indicate that sought after state of a self made whole.
The connection between the state of Parker’s self, or soul, strengthened by another
series of images, some of O’Connor’s favorites, involving “eyes” and “sight.” It is
significant that Parker’s dissatisfaction with the tattoos he already has are linked to the fact
that “there were no tattoos on his back” because he didn’t want any tattoo “where he could
not readily see it himself” (O’Connor, CS, 514). However, his dissatisfaction grows so
great that “there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be on his back,” which
was the only clear place left on his body (O’Connor, CS, 519). After some time
deliberating over when he would go to the city to get his back tattooed, Parker is involved
in a tractor accident, reminiscent of Moses encounter with YHWH in the burning bush.
This passage takes the symbol of “sight” to another level, the level of fully-fledged vision,
and it is actually more packed with biblical allusions than almost any other scene in
O’Connor’s fiction:
As he circled the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The sun, the size of a
golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it
both place as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out
to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an
unbelievably loud voice, ‘GOD ABOVE!’
He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into the tree and burst into
flame. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was
Carson 15
caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in
them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards,
still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if he had known how to cross himself he would have
done it. (O’Connor, CS, 520)
A scene like this is typically, in O’Connor’s stories, accompanied by immediate
death; the finality of an “anagogical vision” is absolute (O’Connor, MM, 72). Parker’s case
is different, however, and the action here develops further the symbol of sight. That he
appears to “see” the sun in front and behind him “as if he had eyes in the back of his head”
is significant, because O’Connor’s use of sunlight, later in the story, will suggest the light
of divine revelation, as it typically does in her other stories. Furthermore, the sun stands
still, recalling the moment when the Lord fought for Joshua and his people at Gibeon,
while the tree of flames echoes the burning bush of YHWH, which Parker “saw” take on a
life of its own and knock him out of his shoes, leaving him in shock with “his eyes
cavernous.” The scene as a whole, charged with biblical imagery and incorporating while
elevating the symbol of sight to the level of vision, does indeed seem to reveal the
purgative fire of the holy in the text. This is in marked contrast to extreme moments of
vision in O’Connor’s other stories, for instance when a grandmother yelps out an
empathetic phrase and is immediately shot, or when a brazenly nihilist woman has her
prosthetic leg stolen and is left, ambiguously, with a “churning face” (O’Connor, CS, 132,
291). For Parker at least, there is no mistaking the holy, as he “would have” crossed
himself had he known how.
Knowing only that “there had been a great change in his life,” Parker immediately
heads to the city and goes straight in to get the tattoo on his back. Insisting on the tattoo
book with pictures of “God” in it, he flips through, and the symbol of sight emerges again:
He continued to flip through until he had almost reached the front of the book. On one of the
pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too
Carson 16
appeared to cut off; I, there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a
language itself, GO BACK.
Parker returned to the picture-the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with alldemanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began slowly to beat again as if it were
being brought to life by a subtle power. (O’Connor, CS, 522)
Drawing out yet another facet of the symbol of sight, O’Connor draws upon what is
perhaps the ultimate symbol of the sensible partaking of the limitless being of the divine:
the icon. As Jean-Luc Marion suggests, the icon differs from a mere image in that it cannot
be possessed, but rather the eyes of the icon make a claim upon the viewer, a demand of
investment that decenters the viewer from their illusory autonomy (Marion 61, 68). This is
certainly the case for Parker, as the eyes of the Byzantine icon-tattoo place a demand of
obedience upon him. Even though he cannot see them “he could still feel their
penetration”; they are “still, straight, all-demanding” and “enclosed in silence,” (O’Connor,
CS, 524, 526). Throughout this section of the story O’Connor also draws connections again
between the “eyes” of the icon and the “vision” of the burning tree (O’Connor, CS, 524525).
However, it is only after Parker admits that “The eyes that were now forever on his
back were eyes to be obeyed,” does he return home and experience a final, consummate
vision. His fundamentalist and iconoclastic wife has locked him out of the house and
refuses to recognize him when he tells her through the keyhole, “It’s me, old O.E.”
(O’Connor, CS, 528). Parker’s final vision, and it seems regeneration as well, only takes
place after he finally calls himself by his true name, “Obadiah”:
“Who’s there?” the same unfeeling voice said.
Parker turned his head as if he expected someone behind him to give him the answer. The
sky had lightened slightly and there were two or three streaks of yellow floating above the
horizon. Then as he stood there, a tree of light burst over the skyline.
Parker fell back against the door as if he had been pinned there by a lance.
“Who’s there?” the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that
seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, “Who’s there, I ast you?”
Carson 17
Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. “Obadiah,” he whispered
and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a
perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.
“Obadiah Elihue!” he whispered. (O’Connor, CS, 528)
In this final vision and regeneration scene, all of the central symbols of the story come
together. The symbol of sight has been fully transfigured, embodied in the rays of sunrise
and the return of the original vision of the tree that bursts over the skyline. The symbol of
sight is also embodied implicitly in the presence of the eyes of the icon, as Parker turns his
head expecting “someone behind him to give him the answer.” Finally, the symbol of light
and its connection to sight, vision, and the presence of the holy in the burning tree comes
“pouring through him” and the “arabesque of colors” returns to the story and comes to life,
whose “garden of trees and birds and beasts” suggests a garden of Eden springing to life
inside of Parker.
Having merely worked through the story in summary fashion, we have noted how
some of its controlling symbols take on new levels of meaning throughout. The symbol of
sight is the dominant one, and O’Connor appears to have succeeded in moving her symbol
into a realm of “mystery,” of what Maritain would call the “splendor of form” that
suggests participation in the life and beauty of God. It is important to note that O’Connor
does not leave the literal level of the sight-symbol behind. While it starts with Parker’s
viewing of a muscle-man at the fair, and continues in his “dissatisfaction” over the tattoos
he can “see,” the literal level is left behind neither in the vision of the burning tree, which
remains at once vision and tractor accident, nor in the encounter with the demanding eyes
of the icon, which remain needled ink in Parker’s skin. Thus in her uncanny ability to
portray the surplus of being in and through the literal level of her symbols, rooted as they
are in sensible matter, we suggest that, at least in this story, O’Connor does indeed succeed
Carson 18
in moving from Maritain’s “intuition of being” to a text that is unveils the “secret
ontology” inhering in the world; she does indeed offer not just human insight, but
“revelation” and “spiritual nourishment.”
However, we will also suggest that the only reason this story succeeds in offering a
truly Christian revelation, is due to the preponderance of biblical images and allusions
within it, which give to the story a sense of the holy in specifically biblical terms. In most
of her other stories the symbols of sight, vision, light and color stand alone, and the
revelatory effect is far less powerful. Though O’Connor does succeed in conveying a sense
of “mystery” in these other stories, they communicate a far more generalized intuition of
being that could equally be received by the reader as a violent yet bland existential insight.
Thus in conclusion we would offer a critique of Maritain’s project inasmuch as he remains
fundamentally rooted in philosophical categories of being, detached in many ways from
the story and symbols of Scripture. In this way Belgion’s simple yet incisive critique of
Maritain holds a great deal of weight (Belgion 69). When Maritain says that “poetry is
ontology,” and that the poet provides “spiritual nourishment” through an act of divinizing
“the things of the spiritual in the things of sense,” what exactly do these vague assertions
mean and how can they in any sense be called “revelation”? Without some specific
rootedness in the specific symbols and story of the biblical text, it seems a difficult
question to answer.
Bibliography
Carson 19
Primary Sources
Kinney, Arthur F. Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being. Athens, University
of Georgia Press, 1985.
Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasticism. J. F. Scanlan, trans. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1930.
___________________. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Pantheon Books,
1953.
O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
___________________. The Habit of Being. Sally Fitzgerald, intro. and ed. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
___________________. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1971.
Zuber, Leo J., comp. The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery
O’Connor. Carter W. Martin, ed. and intro. Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 1983.
Secondary Sources
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Belgion, Montgomery. The Human Parrot and Other Essays. London: Oxford University
Press, 1931
Eliot, T.S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber Limited,
1933.
Fodor, Sarah. “Proust, ‘Home of the Brave,’ and Understanding Fiction: O’Connor’s
Development as a Writer.” The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, Vol.25, 1996-97.
Hazo, Samuel. “Maritain and the Poet,” Renascence 34:4 (1982:Summer): 229-244.
Lynch, William F., S.J. Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination.
Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004.
__________________. “Theology and the Imagination,” Thought 29:112 (Spring 1954),
61-86.
Carson 20
Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Blind Man of Siloe,” Image 29:1 (Winter 2000), 59-69.
Milbank, John. “Scholasticism, Modernism and Modernity.” Modern Theology 22:4
(October 2006), 651-671.
Sykes, John. The Aesthetics of Flannery O’Connor. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2008 [forthcoming], Chapter 2.
Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968.
Williams, Rowan. “Flannery O’Connor: Proper Names,” Lecture 3 in Grace, Necessity and
Imagination: Catholic Philosophy and the Twentieth Century Artist. Clark
Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005.
__________________. “Modernism and the Scholastic Revival.” Lecture 1 in Grace,
Necessity and Imagination: Catholic Philosophy and the Twentieth Century Artist.
Clark Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Flannery O’Connor and the Aesthetics of Torture.” In Flannery
O’Connor: New Perspectives. Rath, Sura P. and Mary Neff Shaw, eds. Athens,
Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
i
Milbank, 659; Williams, 4 (respectively). Maritain has been wrongly criticized for
elevating the artist to the level of priest, to the status of one who can mediate the overflow
of God’s presence in and beyond the world to the rest of humanity. The intuition of esse, is
indeed a key element in explaining why the artist can be a good artist. However, Maritain
does say that this intuition is available to everyone, but that artists and poets are the ones,
among the masses, who devote the entirety of their being to a development of this
intuition. In our view, Maritain does not elevate the artist to the status of sacral priest, but
rather does elevate the artistic work to this level, but even then not remotely to the level, to
continue the comparison, of the presence and glory of God mediated in and through the
Eucharist. The question we will be concerned to ask in this paper, is, what precisely is the
revelatory character of art, and how does Maritain suppose that this revelation happens?
O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 216. O’Connor immersed herself, on her own, in
Maritain’s work (as well as Gilson’s), especially in his Art and Scholasticism. The
markings in Maritain’s texts, her published book reviews of his work, and her numerous
references to his work in letters and speeches all demonstrate Maritain’s pervasive
influence on her thinking. In 1952 she left her copy of Art and Scholasticism at the home
of her good friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and in a letter quickly requested it back.
ii
Carson 21
iii
For Aquinas’s discussion of ratio entis, see De Ver. I, 1c and XXI, 1c.
Milbank aptly summarizes the move Maritain makes here, says that “in speaking of an
‘intuition’ of esse that is finally to be identified with God, Maritain in effect conjoins a
phenomenological moment to his theological metaphysics.” Milbank, 656.
iv
AS, 74-75; 46. The “divinization of the spiritual in the things of sense” is actually the
specific definition Maritain gives to poetry. However, in his early work Maritain did not
seem to distinguish between art and poetry as much as he would do later on in his Mellon
Lectures, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. In this later and more mature aesthetics of
Maritain’s, he argues that poetry is naturally connected to art, but that “in the very order of
creativity poetry transcends art.” Maritain give two reasons for this: First, poetry
transcends art because it has no object, as beauty is “an end beyond any end.” Second,
poetry is a special form of knowledge, the “knowledge of the very interiority of things,”
which in its own way amounts to “spiritual communion with being.” Art, by contrast, is
“entirely encompassed in and committed to practical knowledge in the strict sense of this
word, knowledge only to make.” CI, 236. However, in AS both of these distinctions don’t
appear to apply, and indeed it is unclear even in CI how, at the end of the day, poetry really
is any different than art, at least in the terms Maritian claims that they are.
v
vi
Here it seems, in her emphasis on the Incarnation as the impetus behind artistic
representation, that O’Connor aligns quite well with Erich Auerbach’s contention that
representation of reality only comes to full fruition because of the generative touchstone
that is the Incarnation. See especially Auerbach’s Mimesis, Chapter 8: Farinata and
Calvacante, 174-202.
vii
For a thorough study of Maritain’s formative influence on Tate, Warren, Brooks and
Ransom, see Neal, Oxenhandler “Maritain and Recent Critical Thought,” Renascence, 34:4
(1982:Summer), 262ff.
viii
Arbery, x. Arbery notes that Ransom and Brooks were concerned with analogia poesis,
how to relate the particularity of poetic textual image in its peculiar Dinglichkeit, to the
“universal” structure of the poem.
For a detailed textual analysis demonstrating this shift in O’Connor’s fiction, see John
Sykes, The Aesthetics of Flannery O’Connor, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2008 [forthcoming]), Chapter 2.
ix
x
While it is true that Tate also attempted to understand literary symbols in analogical
terms, and that O’Connor was familiar with his arguments, Lynch appears to be far more
decisive. This may be due in part to the fact that whenever Tate ventured beyond a focus
on the literary text itself and into metaphysics, his thinking involved such ambiguous
concepts as the “yield” of “analogies to a higher synthesis.” For more on Tate’s explication
of analogy, Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968). 422;
430.
Carson 22
Lynch, “Theology and the Imagination,” 66. In her copy of this article, O’Connor
underlined this passage. Cf. Kinney, 180.
xi
MM, 72. We must note here an argument we have recently put forward in “Tarwater
Reads Surnaturel: O'Connor, Lynch and de Lubac on the Natural and the Supernatural”
(Paper submitted to Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University, Spring 2007): “If the similarity
between Lynch and O’Connor is striking, the difference should equally jump out. While
Lynch uses the word ‘analogical,’ O’Connor uses ‘anagogical.’ While this is perhaps too
significant an error to attribute to O’Connor, and while I am familiar with the way several
O’Connor scholars differentiate the two, the evidence nonetheless seems substantial that
O’Connor did indeed, on occasion, elide the meaning of the terms ‘analogical’ and
‘anagogical.’ For starters, she refers to ‘anagogical vision’ as ‘the kind of vision that is
able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.’ But the ability to see
different levels has in Christian tradition (as well as in Lynch) always referred to the
analogical. The anagogical refers to the highest of the four levels opened up by analogical
vision. What is more, it seems more properly the analogical which, connecting with the
analogia entis, bespeaks of ‘the Divine life and our participation in it.’ By connecting that
participation to the anagogical, O’Connor narrows the terms of participation to a single,
albeit the highest, register or level of analogical meaning.
As we mentioned [elsewhere], O’Connor does make one fully verifiable mistake,
when she erroneously tells the Fitzgeralds that Lynch’s work is ‘about the Manichean vs.
the anagogical or Christian imagination’ (O’Connor, HB, 132; Letter to Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald, 22 Jan. 56). In truth, Lynch contrasts Manichean and analogical (or
Christic/Christian) imagination. In his extended analysis on medieval exegesis, Lynch does
use anagogical, but in the proper proleptically eschatological sense of the term, which
refers to ‘the world of complete insight, the world of eternity and Christ in glory’ (Lynch,
CA, 189). Further, Lynch holds that the anagogical ‘is the end, the last moment of time, an
end effected by time itself, both natural and supernatural, and it produces the anagogue in
its moment of final exhaustion’ (CA, 189). However she may have elided the terms, truly
anagogical moments frequent O’Connor’s fiction, such as Tarwater’s vision of the
multitudes being fed the bread of life, and Mrs. Turpin’s glimpse of the last resurrection.
xii
Lynch, CA, xiv, 250. In this move, Lynch of course draws a great deal upon Auerbach’s
argument in Mimesis, that the Incarnation slowly brought about the downfall of the
classical division between high and low rhetorical styles, such that reality could eventually
be represented.
xiii
xiv
This is a critique that was leveled against Maritain soon after Art and Scholasticism was
published. See Belgion, 69.