“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside you can give you any place… In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.” (Flannery O’Conner, Wise Blood)
My work between the worlds of literature and theology often overlap and allow for me to see the ways each inform the other, work with the other, or can help me explain the other. One that has been standing out considerably as of late is that of prophets—not just the prophets of ancient Israel, or the idea we sometimes hear of prophets coming to give us warnings. Instead, the ones captured in observance of our world. To me, this is the continuation of the biblical prophets. Not merely men from days gone by, but people able to speak to the depths our souls. Prophets helping us to see both where we are coming from and where we are going, for better or for worse.
Prophets, for me, have always signaled a connection to two things. One is the connection to the culture. Prophets are watching, assessing. They are much like what philosopher Giorgio Agamben described as the Contemporary— “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it, through a disjunction and an anachronism.”[1] This person is unique in their ability to assess what is going on in culture, not only to assess it but to recognize roots (often the sinful roots) and the need for correction. Secondly, they are connected to the divine—God speaks through the prophet, giving warnings and consequences to the direction of the culture. I think of often cited concerns—inhospitality to the suffering, oppression of the foreigner or the outcast, or lack of care for the vulnerable. These prophets are meant to correct the behaviors of people of God.
So, where have we been? This is where the genre of Southern Gothic literature—rich with grotesque imagery, hauntings, and actions that are morally repugnant. They force us to see the world exactly as the author intends, and for many of these authors, that means we have to face the moral assessment being given.
For example, William Faulkner’s brand of Southern Gothic literature is an attempt to wrestle with the anxieties arising from changing social norms and cultural shifts. In Faulkner’s work, the collective memory of the South is being brought to judgment—and this is something often happening in Southern Gothic lit. The belief is that the South has a constructed history—a memory of the Civil War or Reconstruction that frames the South in a better light, a way of dealing with the fall out of both. Faulkner and others are investigating the extreme cultural divide that seems to be placed between the North and the South, and for many with this collective memory, it is an idea that the North is to blame for the destruction of a memorialized South.
Flannery O’Connor likewise uses exaggerations to demonstrate our attempts to ignore the truth—much as she did in Wise Blood, which I quoted above. In this novel, Hazel Motes has been so horrified by war that he has rejected religion. He sets about trying to preach a “gospel of antireligion,” complete with a jesus (not Christianity’s Jesus) that can help direct our moral understandings. The novel forces us to see the connections between our religious beliefs, our actions, and the justifications we make for both ourselves and our communities when the actions are clearly in violation of supposed beliefs. Themes of racism, sexism, and isolation are paired with the philosophy of free will.
In her book on Southern Modernism and US Nationalism, Leigh Anne Duck spends a great deal of time expanding on what I am rather quickly explaining, but particularly the issues of economic disparity, racial segregation and racism generally, and the theory of American exceptionalism. She explains that this notion of American exceptionalism requires a backward South. The rest of the “liberal nation” of the US can shrug off and say, that’s just the South, and thus excuse connections to these same practices existing in the North. As a Northerner myself, I’m here to attest to certain similar attitudes. This is not surprising—we can see it in discussions of current events like the destruction of the Voting Rights Act, placing the blame and concern on the Southern states alone. The existence of a “backward South” not only provides a kind of scapegoat for the rest of the United States to place all its problems at, but it is also precisely the element Southern Gothic literature employs in order to dismantle the very idea of regionality.[2]
I want to stress that my take on how Southern Gothic literature is operating is my own—while I am working off theories Duck and others have initially discussed, I believe it is important to take this a step farther. Faulkner’s haunting work is not only a prophet to the people of the South. O’Connor’s religious Southern Gothicism is not limited to a specific region of people. Instead, much like the prophets of ancient, these works serve as a mirror to the sins of the nation wholistically.
Erskine Caldwell serves as a great final example of this. His work was truly a masterpiece in the grotesque. In exaggerating his characters, giving them fully embodied, and really messily embodied, experiences, his stories heightened the anxieties of people regardless of where they read them. If you’re unfamiliar with Caldwell, one of his most popular works is Tobacco Road, a story about a poor white family living as sharecroppers during the Great Depression. This book was made into a play for Broadway as well as a film adaptation, bringing the messy family to life for people all over the country.
I read this book in grad school, and I still have clear memories of Bessie and her nose-less face, as well as the others, digging for turnips and exploring their sexuality. The book is incredibly forthright with taboo subjects, particularly in the way Caldwell allows his characters to have sexual urges and sexual experiences that are not among those we would call acceptable. Yet this is part of the gothic prophecy—as Duck says, “Theoretically, when encountering such a space, audiences cannot imagine a stable object on which to project whatever disgust or outlandish delight they might feel; accordingly, our fear, derision, or celebration implicates us as well.” [3] We may want to see these characters as extreme or entirely separate from us, but in fact our reactions to them are drawing us in to the very thing making them what they are—a family suffering from the specific oppression this regionalization of the South has caused as well as the economic issues being faced by many throughout the US. We cannot simply say that this family is the way they are because they are in the South when we realize we would oppress them regardless of where they exist—a fact made clear by the emotional reaction of the reader or viewer. We are disrupted by their existence, and this disruption causes us to immediately recognize the specifics—when the play was going to be shut down for being too grotesque, Duck explains “by identifying with the ‘inexcusable degradation’ it depicted, audiences would reveal their own divergence from national standards.”[4]
It is a wound to the conscious—a notion that these events infect us morally—that I believe brings most clearly a notion of the prophet. Again, as Duck states, “Faulkner’s novels suggest not a simply backward culture but one in which individuals damage themselves and others by avowing an absolute split in time and refusing to engage in more nuanced investigation of the relationship between the past and present. … In this effort, gothic tropes provided him with a method to estrange characters’ belief in a distinct southern temporality, presenting such ideas as sources of distress, passivity, and isolation and also as a strategy that enabled white southerners to disavow their knowledge of racial injustice.”[5]
Viewing the South as “backward” only serves to allow for distance between the US nationalist ideal and the realities of the US as a whole. Economic disparity, racism, oppression of others (in fact our three prophetic sins of inhospitality, lack of care and oppression) exist throughout, not just in the American Southern states.
I initially gave a version of this paper at the American Academy of Religion Southeast’s annual conference. While at the conference, I connected all of this to a particular contemporary novel by S.A. Cosby, but here I am going to simply speak to us all. Specific current events may appear to be limited to the American South or those we associate with it, but scapegoating this region only allows us to continue centralizing a national problem so that some of us can pat ourselves on the back as the “good” citizens. And so I come back to Hazel Motes and his search for truth.
“Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.” (Wise Blood)
In her article on Wise Blood, Susan Srigley notes that we must examine Motes’ actions through several questions:
Do Hazel Motes’s penitential acts improve life for himself or others? Do they generate a love for self, God, or others? … Is there spiritual progress made…?[6]
While Srigley is specifically examining the ascetic practices, I want to bring us back to our overall concern. Southern Gothic literature, our prophet, calls out the ways the people of God are acting out of line—whether that be lack of care, oppression, selfishness, etc. As the people of God, we are meant to listen to these, but listening is not enough. We must then proceed to somewhere, and like Motes, we ought to question where that somewhere is. Do our acts improve the lives around us? Do they generate love? Is there spiritual progress made? These cannot be examined in isolation. Our actions, as O’Connor reminds us, are entwined in the world and its needs, its events, its influences. I cannot simply bind myself (as Motes does) and hope that God will forgive me for inaction. Instead, I must proceed onward, attempting to align my actions with my beliefs.
[1] Agamben, Giorgio. Nudities. Stanford University Press, 2010, 10.
[2] Duck, Leigh Anne. The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. University of Georgia Press, 2009.
[3] Ibid., 91.
[4] Ibid., 93.
[5] Ibid., 159.
[6] Srigley, Susan. “Penance and Love in Wise Blood: Seeing Redemption?” Flannery O’Connor Review 7 (2009): 94–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26671167.
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