flannery o'connor's sacramental icon: 'the artificial nigger' · flannery...

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Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Icon: "The Artificial Nigger"Author(s): W. F. MonroeSource: South Central Review, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 64-81Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central ModernLanguage AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3189463Accessed: 11-05-2016 17:24 UTC

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Flannery O'Connor's Sacramental Icon: "The

Artificial Nigger" W. F. MONROE

McMurry College

Despite its frequent appearance in freshman anthologies, Flan- nery O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger" is by no means an "easy" story. One difficulty, certainly, arises from O'Connor's use of the word "nigger" in the title and its use throughout the story by the main characters, Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson. By now, of course, this term has become so charged with emotional valences that its public utterance, regardless of context, can isolate and stigmatize its user; or, conversely, the word can unify a speaker with a broad but, I think we would agree, racially prejudiced community of those who habitually employ it. "Nigger" is, in fact, a powerful symbol for both the speaker and the hearer, an outward and audible sign indicative of an inward and ethical ste te. It goes without saying that "nigger" is not roughly equivalent to other terms; it is not synonymous, not interchangeable with other words. Like other terms of cultural derogation, its power lies not in denotation, derives not at all from what it signifies. Rather, the term "nigger" has a rhetorical efficacy that goes beyond content and knowledge to what Kenneth Burke calls incipient action. In short, the term "nigger" makes us squirm.1

Such squirming, I believe, is what Flannery O'Connor has in store for her careful readers. That was why she defended the title of this story and resisted the genteel efforts of John Crowe Ran- som, its first publisher, to change the title. She wants her words and her stories-her symbols-to carry enough charge to shock us. Rarely does she try to teach us something, some bit of knowledge; she would rather engage us in an experiential process, especially if it is a moving or unsettling one.

For this reason I think of O'Connor not as a didactic writer but as

a rhetorical writer: she wants to move us through an experience rather than to teach us a proposition. In fact, "The Artificial


W. F. Monroe 65

Nigger" may be read as linking, in the character of Mr. Head, two seemingly disparate attitudes, two philosophies of life which are surprisingly similar in their mutual dependence on propositional truth. I plan to argue that O'Connor's own favorite story critiques the propositional and abstract propensities of both secular rationalism and iconclastic Christian fundamentalism. By linguistic as well as dramatic means, O'Connor associates both of these knowledge- centered ideologies, these "gnostic religions," with racism and with spiritual pride.

I do not claim that O'Connor utterly dispenses with propositional truth, but she distrusts it. She has much more faith in experiences, and thus propositions are used in her story as a means of achieving a rhetorical or experiential effect on her audience. Her alternative to propositional truth, as I perceive it, is not another proposition to be found somewhere in the story but an experience evoked by it. One alternative to a gnostic confidence in things known consists of a process-oriented and experiential way of life emphasizing the importance of signs, or what we may justifiably call sacraments, that evoke symbolic experiences. I will argue my case using internal evidence primarily, but my vocabulary as well as my analysis has been influenced by the recognition that, for Flannery O'Connor the individual, the most personal and important experiences were associated with sacramental Catholicism.2

O'Connor provides us with a useful structural model for her story on the first page when we learn that Mr. Head "might well have been Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante."3 Thus in its simplest terms the plot can be seen as a journey by Mr. Head and his grandson through a kind of hell, the city of Atlanta, to a kind of salvation-in-the-making. Their journey begins in a rude shack in rural Georgia. They travel to Atlanta where Mr. Head hopes Nelson will be repulsed by the city of his birth. There they become "lost" and their futile attempts to find the way home exhaust them physically and emotionally, just as their respective humiliations deplete a fierce spiritual pride that they both share. Near despair, the two happen upon a lawn ornament, an instance of the miniature statues of Negro boys and men found at one time throughout the South. This statue in a mysterious way brings the grandfather and grandson together and renews them. They soon after find their way home. But this home is, never- theless, still an unfinished place, part of the unredeemed natural world. Similarly, Mr. Head and Nelson, I believe, are still on a


66 South Central Review

journey: they are still proceeding toward salvation even after their moment of redemption.

When the two Heads begin their journey, they are proud and at the same time naive. Their cloistered environment lacks women

and blacks as well as other sources of temptation and "impurity." The overt comparison of Mr. Head to Vergil, and Nelson to Dante, is one example of O'Connor's calling our attention to their pride- and at the same time, as Louis Rubin rightly observes, using the obvious incongruity between classical authors and middle Geor- gian rustics to poke fun at that pride (130). Throughout her work O'Connor characteristically deflates the pride placed in reason by all sorts of "heads," and also characteristically, she does this by linguistic as well as dramatic means.

In "The Artificial Nigger," she is able to critique the confident pomposity of Mr. Head and Nelson by ironically linking them to the words "dignifying" and "dignity." From Mr. Head's perspec- tive at the story's outset, the moon seems to cast a "dignifying light on everything" (249; italics mine). Viewed objectively, though, "everything" is hardly anything: a "stiff and attentive" straight chair with Mr. Head's trousers "hanging to the back of it," the "silver" floor boards of a shanty, and the exposed "ticking" of a pillow-ticking that Mr. Head imagines as "brocade," a fabric of beauty and worth. The undistinguished reality belies the silver and brocade fantasy enjoyed by Mr. Head: thus we know that the "dignifying" light which he perceives is not actual but only a product of his own prideful imagination. Similarly, Nelson's self- importance later in Atlanta is based on his making the most of Mr. Head's transgression, keeping his mind "frozen around his grandfather's treachery as if he were trying to preserve it intact to present at the final judgment" (267). His unforgiving nature leads him to a gesture of superiority and rejection: "Nelson, with a dignity he had never shown before, turned and stood with his back to his grandfather" (266; italics mine). Both the words "dignity" and "dignified" come from the Latin dignus meaning "worthy"; and both Heads, then, are affecting a worthiness that perhaps no O'Connor character can justly claim.

Furthermore, O'Connor may well have been recalling her Latin Missal: before receiving Communion, the priest and the people must affirm three times the confession of iniquity, "Domine, non sum dignus... "-"Lord, I am not worthy."4 It seems clear, then, that O'Connor, by ironically associating "dignity" first with Mr.


W. F. Monroe 67

Head and then with Nelson, is hinting at the pomposity and deleterious spiritual pride of both the old man and the boy that he resembles. And it is clear that Nelson is in the process of emulating his grandfather's overconfidence in the rational mind and what it can contain: "[Nelson's new gray hat] was too big for him but they had ordered it a size large because they expected his head to grow"-as indeed it does in the course of the story (251).

The elder Head, though, is more than sufficient for our examina- tion of O'Connor's treatment of faith in worldly knowledge and rational processes. If Mr. Head's blatant characternym were not enough, his hectoring demand of Nelson convinces us of his satisfaction with himself and his knowledge: " 'Have you ever,' Mr. Head had asked, 'seen me lost?' " (250). Yet we know that the old man's vision is far from perfect, that his knowledge is severely delimited. Mr. Head literally sees "through a glass darkly," not face to face: when he perceives the moon, it is only a reflection in his shaving mirror, and he only sees half of it even there. Yet to his prideful heart the moon seems to have "paused as if it were waiting for his permission to enter" (249). Mr. Head's pride, his "dignity," depends on his murky view of himself as a kind of exalted Vergil, a paragon of reason. But Vergil was not enough for Dante, and anyway, the similarity is undermined by the fact that Mr. Head could not understand the Latin poet even if he did "know of" him.

The received wisdom of our time, a decidedly secular wisdom, holds that in human reason is man's greatest distinction, his highest calling. Yet O'Connor's purpose is to challenge our secular wisdom and the pride taken in our all-too-human nature. To this end she repeatedly undermines-with humor-Mr. Head's nar- row knowledge and his limited reason. One of several instances is Mr. Head's "reasonable" analysis of a store-front weighing machine:

Mr. Head's ticket said, "You weigh 120 pounds. You are upright and brave and all your friends admire you." He put the ticket in his pocket, surprised that the machine should have got his character correct but his weight wrong... Nel- son's ticket said, "You weigh 98 pounds. You have a great destiny ahead of you but beware of dark women." Nelson did not know any women and he weighed only 68 pounds but Mr. Head pointed out that the machine had probably printed the number upside down, meaning the 9 for the 6. (259)



By similar humorous undercutting throughout the story, O'Con- nor ridicules the old man's faith in himself, a faith based on his sure knowledge of the world and all its hierarchies. Moreover, as readers of the story we begin to realize that Mr. Head's reason, a combination of his knowledge and logical processes, is always comically limited and, more importantly, self-aggrandizing. So- called reason, O'Connor suggests, if it is not moored to something higher than itself, may be little more than a sophisticated tool for domination and power.

II

Mr. Head's pride in what he knows is not limited to the machines and mechanisms of Atlanta, however, and it is not meant to be merely amusing; the story's title reminds us that the limitations of the rational mind functioning without the benefit of revelation are displayed most poignantly through Mr. Head's pernicious bigotry towards the people he calls "niggers." As in many of her other stories, O'Connor has been scrupulous that her narrator avoid the use of the word, while the characters who refer to blacks as "niggers" are marked by the darkness that they try to attribute to others. Thus "nigger" becomes a kind of shibboleth for identifying those who would deny their commonality with fallen humanity, those who rest easy in the sure knowledge of their superior place.

I think that it is important, however, to avoid an easy condemna- tion of Mr. Head based on our instant recognition of him as a "prejudiced" or "racist" white Southern male. Our society's public posture towards blacks has changed so radically in the thirty years since this story's composition-witness Jesse Jackson's campaign for the presidential nomination-that Mr. Head may seem merely anachronistic, pathetically ignorant and benighted. O'Connor's story, though, supplies ample evidence to support Mr. Head's racial discriminations. For example, when Nelson and Mr. Head visit the dining car on the train to Atlanta, they see that the Negroes have been "set off from the rest by a saffron-colored curtain" (256). Mr. Head correctly explains the phenomenon to Nelson: "They rope them off" (256). Later, as the Heads make their meandering tour of Atlanta, they inadvertently enter the black section of a segregated city, and O'Connor makes it clear that any


W. F. Monroe 69

objective observer would be able to perceive the changes noted by the two Heads: "The houses they were passing now were all unpainted and the wood in them looked rotten; the street between was narrower" (260). No wonder then that Nelson observes (O'Con- nor's word) that "niggers live in these houses" (260). Throughout the story, in fact, we see solid evidence that the received "wisdom"-blacks are segregated, third-class citizens-is continually practiced by the secular world. When Mr. Head and Nelson stumble upon the artifical Negro at the climax of the story, they discover a statue that ordinarily would articulate very clearly Mr. Head's semi-literate knowledge: niggers are inferior to white folks like him.

I have resisted the self-protective urge to place the words knowledge and niggers inside inverted commas because I want to emphasize my claim that Mr. Head has drawn a valid conclusion from the environment in which he lives; though a rustic, he has acquired a reliable piece of knowledge about the larger world. Whereas Mr. Head uses his powers of analysis with the weighing machine, he has practiced his powers of abstraction in the form of racial generalizations throughout the story, indeed throughout his life. Racism, after all, can be defined as a way of arranging individuals into groups based on a common property; it is thus a "logically" valid example of classification. Once an abstraction has been made, particular individuals are simply seen as instances of the general. Since O'Connor provides Mr. Head with just cause for his infer- ences, she is able to connect his powers of induction and abstraction to his bigotry, to link his racism to his reason. As Mr. Head tells Nelson, "A six-month-old child don't know a nigger from anybody else" (252); but the process of growth and matura- tion in Mr. Head's world will more than adequately teach him this distinction. So Mr. Head is being nothing else but rational when he formulates the proposition, based on a life of observations, that black people are "niggers."

O'Connor's point is that depending on propositional truth is not enough. She wants us, as enlightened readers, to suspect Mr. Head's limited knowledge and the bigotry it generates. " 'The day is going to come,' Mr. Head prophesied [to Nelson], 'when you'll find you ain't as smart as you think you are' " (250-51). From our superior vantage point, that day should also come for Mr. Head, a day when his reasonableness will be recognized for what it is, pernicious racism, a day when Mr. Head will see himself as a



profoundly flawed Vergil in need of revelation. To a certain extent, that day with its revelation does come to Mr. Head, and when it does the revelation appropriately takes the form of that once- common Southern cliche, a statue of a black boy-in this case eating watermelon-the artificial Negro that Mr. Head and Nelson discover near the end of their circular wanderings through Atlan- ta's suburbs.

As the means of revelation, the artifical Negro is both precise and appropriate. The two Heads, grandpare and petit-fils, have been contending throughout the story, jockeying for position, attempting to attain a clear superiority, one over the other. Mr. Head has demonstrated his superior knowledge and scored his most telling points by stigmatizing blacks-in the country, on the train, and finally in the city. To see himself as what he would call a "nigger," then, is a most dramatically effective way for O'Connor to demon- strate Mr. Head's beneficial humiliation, his recognition of his own radical insufficiency. And Mr. Head does finally see himself as "black," a sinful and suffering third-class human being. Nelson, too, relinquishes his false "dignity" and incipient racism when he stands with his grandfather before the statue of the suffering Negro. For the misery that they see embodied in the artificial Negro is their own misery, and the face that they see there is a face which they both share. The figure is "about Nelson's size," and it is perched on a suburban wall-just as Mr. Head had been perched on the garbage can in the city. The Negro is "pitched forward at an unsteady angle" and is "sitting bent"-just as Mr. Head and Nelson are leaning forward with their necks "at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way" (268). Lest there be any mistake, O'Connor informs us that "it was not possible to tell if the artifical Negro were meant to be young or old" and then describes Mr. Head as looking "like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man" (268-69).

Because of these resemblances, I cannot agree with a widely- used classroom guide which says of Mr. Head and Nelson that "their common incomprehension and rejection of the alien artifact unites them."5 The artifact is not alien, and in some profound if mysterious way they see the resemblance: ultimately, it is this seeing, this realization, that unites them. The artificial Negro is both Nelson and Mr. Head, and they are it. This equation of youth with age, an equation which recurs throughout the story, belies the value of acquired propositional truths. Thus it is appropriate that


W. F. Monroe 71

their mutual revelation, a painful sense of equality, is proposition- ally false but experientially true.

O'Connor herself explains the rationale behind her decision to use a Negro in this story of redemption: "What I had in mind to suggest with the artificial nigger was the redemptive quality of the Negro's suffering for us all," she writes in a 1955 letter to Ben Griffith.6 And O'Connor's theological language describing the mystery of redemption dispels any doubt that the Negro hanging on that wall in Atlanta represents Christ hanging on the cross at Golgotha: "[Mr. Head and Nelson] stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat" (269). By recognizing their kinship with the suffering Negro, Mr. Head and Nelson are able to see their kinship with one another. They have been travelling near each other while remaining isolated by their precious dignity, a dignity based on an overweening pride in themselves and a condescension toward others not as good as they. Thus the artificial Negro is a dramatically effective means of dissolving their differences. But the historical suffering and misery of the black race in this country provide the real power of this icon, and this historical suffering makes O'Con- nor's choice rhetorically moving as well as dramatically right.

III

Mr. Head's incompleteness, suggested throughout by O'Con- nor's humorous undercutting, is made explicit even to him just before he confronts the broken statue. The old man's sure knowledge of things has not served him well, and he cries out to an Atlanta suburbanite, "I'm lost!... I'm lost and can't find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train and I can't find the station. Oh Gawd I'm lost! Oh hep me Gawd I'm lost!" (211). By this point, Mr. Head's "worthiness," along with his "dignity" and his static knowledge, has vanished: his experience and his ratioci- nation have not proved sufficient to deal with the world of process and flux into which he and his grandson have cast themselves. His final astonishment before the statue, then, dissolves not just his racial discriminations, but also his smug confidence in what and how he knows. He calls on a higher authority, for he is no longer certain of who he is or where he is going.



Mr. Head, however, might well have had his smug "racism- rationalism" effaced by the sight of a black human being rather than a statue: Nelson and his grandfather might well have seen themselves in the visage of a Negro whose features resembled their own, who was alive and physically suffering, perhaps at the hands of a visible white oppressor. After all, "crucified" characters that function as suffering "Christ figures" abound in literature, and finding them is one of the finger exercises of literary criticism. So Mr. Head and Nelson could have been redeemed by a living Christ figure, and an easy-to-read Christian plot might well have been the result. In fact, many readers are understandably nonplussed by the artificial Negro, and ask how it does whatever it does to and for the characters. My explanation is that O'Connor wants an explicitly symbol-oriented (or "sacramental") resolution for her favorite story. Moreover, it may even be helpful to interpret the story's climax as specifically Catholic, for the action of grace works through an icon, an artificial man-made object that some would denounce as a "graven image."

Certainly it is not justified to reduce O'Connor's story into a lesson on the virtues of one religious tradition versus another. Louis Rubin convincingly shows in his essay what O'Connor herself affirmed more than once: that she is essentially a storyteller. Nonetheless, by using an icon whose powers are oblique and mysterious rather than a dramatic action whose lesson is direct and obvious, O'Connor demonstrates a preference for a process- oriented rhetoric as opposed to a knowledge-centered didacticism-even if it be a Christian didacticism. It is possible to distin- guish dramatic actions which point a neat moral-and are therefore didactic-from dramatic actions that defy propositional reduction. Dramatic actions or gestures which, in O'Connor's words, make "contact with mystery" become for the reader sacramental artifacts or symbols in themselves.7

A sacramental icon or symbol, as I am using the term, does more than teach; it "cathects" or focuses a composite of emotions and even commitments, much as Eliot's "objective correlative" does. Moreover, a sacramental icon such as the artificial Negro, though it may indeed have a power to communicate some knowledge or fact about the world, surely has the additional power to move its audience-Mr. Head and Nelson are certainly moved in some important way. Traditionally, a religious sign or any kind of "sacrament" unites spirit with materiality through human artifice,


W. F. Monroe 73

and-to the frustration of both literary critics and theologians-a "sacramental symbol" retains a measure of mystery about exactly what it means and how it works. One convenient definition holds

that "the two aspects of all sacraments are the external or outward act, which can be seen, and the inward or internal change, which is unseen."s I am assuming that sacramental symbols, like sacraments proper, involve emotions as well as knowledge, that they can affect attitudes, that they can change a human life. By the same token, however, the felt or invisible cannot be facilely separated from the external or visible, the "tenor" cannot be ration- ally abstracted from the "vehicle," the res from the verba. In other words, the experience evoked by a sacramental symbol or artifact cannot be extracted and processed into a discrete piece of knowledge.

I am recalling these generally acceptable definitions because the final paragraphs of the story cannot, I think, be understood without making a distinction between sacramental symbols or icons that move us and lessons that merely teach us. For O'Connor as for many poets, the mystery of existence is best embodied in symbols, images, icons, and even in some supercharged words that have power to hurt, or to help. Thus when Nelson's eyes seem "to implore [Mr. Head] to explain once and for all the mystery of existence," the grandfather feels obliged to concern himself with the concrete particular, the statue. "They ain't got enough real ones here," he says. "They got to have an artificial one" (269). Now this crucial and puzzling remark by Mr. Head can be inter- preted as a return to his deep-rooted racism, and no doubt Mr. Head is attempting to regain some of his old bluster. But his attempt to "make a lofty statement" comes out wrong; he is not quite in control of his language and meaning. At one level, for instance, his remark can be properly seen as an unintentional indictment of a society that makes diminutive and demeaning monuments to its own sinful oppressions. In other words, Mr. Head is unconsciously saying, "They don't make enough of them suffer in the ghetto; they have to cast others in plaster and hang them out on suburban walls."

Furthermore, if I am right about the importance of the statue as a sacramental icon, then Mr. Head's remark can be given a less political and more rhetorical gloss: "They got to have an artificial one"-that is, the artificial status of the statue is needed by the audience so that it will be able to apprehend its own insufficiency.



O'Connor knows that as readers we are no more likely than Mr. Head to see that we have "conceived in [our] own heart[s] the sin of Adam" unless we have the assistance of a symbol, an artifact, an icon. The artificial Negro serves that purpose for Mr. Head, provid- ing for him an outward sign, a concrete "sensible thing" that works as a means of conveying God's unearned, invisible grace. A society can never have enough "real ones," Mr. Head says, una- ware that he speaks a profound truth-that human communities need such icons, such works of artifice, for their own good. Symbols, with more power and affect than propositions, can often move an audience, readers, people, to feel a shared insufficiency, a common alienation from each other, from God. I am sure that O'Connor wants us, as we imagine the artificial Negro-a modern "cruciform" to be sure-to recognize that we too are implicated in both political and theological Sin. Our penchant for abstraction and our sure sense of "the way things are" implicate us, as they do Mr. Head, in the way things indeed are.

IV

But O'Connor is not through with Mr. Head yet, nor is she quite finished with us. Her final task, a difficult one, is to associate Mr. Head's former way of knowing, which can be described as secular rationalism, with his new way of knowing, which seems to be a version of born-again Christianity. Both "epistemologies" can be distinguished, I think, from the sacramental way of life, that habitual apprehending of mystery in manners which O'Connor advocates elsewhere specifically and here by implication.9 Mr. Head and Nelson have had a sacramental experience by approach- ing the infinite through the material: they have felt the action of grace working through an iconic cruciform. Yet Mr. Head characteristically feels obliged to "get a handle" on what is essentially the experience of a "great mystery" (269). He knows now that his previous knowledge was imperfect, flawed; he knows now that for years he had not been sufficiently aware of God's role in his salvation. But that benighted stage he has left far behind him. He has a new set of propositions, and he has surely found the right ones this time:


W. F. Monroe 75

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him.

He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that moment to enter Paradise. (269-70)

Now I suppose that, like myself, most readers initially com- prehend this paragraph as a helpful lapse on O'Connor's part, an atypical but welcome explanation of what happens when, in a fictional context, God's grace is somehow offered to a character and accepted.10 But after reading Rubin's fine essay, a needed corrective to theologically obsessive readings of O'Connor, I was forced to go back to this overt articulation and reexamine it.

While I cannot agree with Rubin that this paragraph is primarily another example of the linguistic, cultural, and social distance between the narrator and Mr. Head, whom Rubin sees as a stock country-come-to-town character, I think that Rubin is right that this passage cannot be a "correct" formulation of the action of grace and the mystery of redemption. Mr. Head's recognition of his own depravity is a bit too well articulated-but not merely, as Rubin would have it, for comic effect. No, Mr. Head has revived his confidence in himself and his ability to understand not only the way of the world, but now the ways of grace and God as well. Mr. Head has been born again, and he knows it.

Examine the simple, even simplistic sentence patterns and the active verbs of the paragraph: "Mr. Head stood...felt... understood ... understood... burned.., stood... saw now ... realized ... saw ...." Mr. Head is knowing and understanding and realizing once again. He has clearly processed his epiphany into



something less mysterious; the sacramental action of grace has again been transformed into a static knowledge of what God's grace is and how it works. More importantly, Mr. Head now sees that God's grace has done its work, once and for all, on him: "He now felt ready to enter the gates of Paradise." By making Mr. Head's knowledge seem static, pat, and even hackneyed, O'Con- nor is able to suggest that the sure knowledge that one is saved may be as treacherous as other kinds of static knowledge. And since, as Rubin observes, a middle Georgian rustic could not frame his knowledge in such terms, O'Connor is able to extend her critique beyond Mr. Head to more well-read Christians who explain with confidence exactly what God has done to them and for them.

Mr. Head's pride in his racial superiority earlier in the story is not unlike the pride he now takes in the knowledge that once he was lost, that his depravity had been hidden from him, and that now-he knows-God has saved him. In sum, Mr. Head is in

danger of ignoring the process now that he thinks he possesses the product. Mr. Head's surname earlier in the story signified his inordinate faith in the human mind; now he is in danger of becoming the "head" of his own personal church-a place that ecclesiastical Christianity traditionally reserves for Christ alone.

The action of grace, Mr. Head apparently has forgotten, worked through the artificial Negro, a sacramental icon. By abondoning a symbol- or process-oriented experience in favor of a dogmatic or knowledge-centered religion, Mr. Head risks another fall."1 His new presumption is that God can be directly apprehended by those who possess the proper knowledge-those who, like himself, understand the workings of grace and realize the nature of the deity. Mr. Head has clearly not kept alive a hesitant humility that O'Connor sees as beneficial, even essential. A sensibility that included, in her words, "a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured" would naturally lead to what I have been calling a sacramental way of life (Mystery and Manners, 209). Nelson, fortunately, is more conscious than his grandfather that the journey is not now over. "Let's go home before we get ourselves lost again," he says after Mr. Head tries "to make a lofty statement," that is, after he tries to reduce the sacramental power of the statue to an abstract, propositional truth. Though Mr. Head may now have things figured out


W. F. Monroe 77

and feel ready "to enter Paradise," Nelson continues to eye him from "under the shadow of his hat brim," watching with "a mixture of suspicion and fatigue" (270). Nelson's less self- confident reaction to the sacramental experience would suggest that the Heads need to keep moving, to remain "in process." Since "home" is still part of the unfinished world, they had best remain open to sacramental experiences rather than rely on static knowledge and rational, abstract propositions.

V

O'Connor extends her endorsement of the evocative or symbolic process and her suspicion of empirical reason and static knowledge beyond the choices made by her characters to the choices which she herself makes as an artist. By extension, therefore, O'Connor's story can be seen as a kind of graven icon-a concrete particular made, wrought, and crafted to represent an unworthiness that the generalizations of "real life" do not sufficiently press upon us. O'Connor was aware of her own artifice, and in her letters she often objects to being labelled a "writer of the realistic school." In the 1955 letter to Griffith cited above, she writes, "I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see" (79). She also justifies her use of artificial, unrealistic distortion in a famous phrase from Mystery and Manners: "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost- blind you draw large and startling figures" (34). She thus affirms her preference for efficacious signs of the Holy, as opposed to realistic representations, and I have no doubt that she hoped that her own stories would have some sort of "sacramental" efficacy, that the action of grace might somehow work through them.

Her stories, she said, were intended for an audience that main- tained a disbelief in the Holy, a disbelief that she claimed "we breathe in with the air of the times" (Habit, 349). She lamented the predominant religion of the South, what she called a "do-it- yourself religion," and she decried the fact that many people thought they had only to look within themselves to their own "wise blood" as a means of grace: "They have," she wrote to John Hawkes, "no sacraments... [this is] something which I as a Catholic find painful." The religion of the South, she wrote, "is full of unconscious pride that lands ISoutherners] in all sorts of ridicu-



lous religious predicaments" (350). So we have seen, with Mr. Head.

I believe, then, that O'Connor wants her story to have the same rhetorical force that we perhaps reluctantly discover in the word "nigger." Neither the word nor her story should be something we can take or leave with equanimity. The story, like the word, and the plaster statue it represents, is something man-made, something graven and artificial, and something which calls forth an emotional and intellectual response from us, a spiritual response that puts us, perhaps, in a position of incipient action. O'Connor says that in all of her stories she tried to find an action or gesture that made them work and that constituted "the real heart of the

story" (Mystery and Manners, 111). She even uses sacramental terms to describe these crucial actions, claiming that they should "suggest both the world and eternity" and "be on the anagogical level, that is, on the level which has to do with Divine life and our participation in it" (111). It is true that the "real heart" of most of O'Connor's stories consists of a dramatic action rather than a sacramental icon: Haze Motes watches his rat-colored car disinte-

grate; the Misfit shoots the grandmother; the black actor pushes Tanner through the stair balusters. Nonetheless, these moments in O'Connor's fiction are notoriously mysterious, and I think that "The Artifical Nigger" provides one possible explanation. These actions or gestures are as iconic as the plaster statue: they are figural attempts to evoke the mysterious through the concrete and can thus be seen as sacramental symbols in themselves. If they are working, O'Connor says, the crucial moments in her stories will "transcend any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make"; irreducible to propositions, such moments will "somehow" make "contact with mystery" (111). In the final analysis, then, I see Flannery O'Connor not merely as a teacher of ideas or doctrines but as a rhetorician, a user of symbols- sacramental symbols that can, temporarily at least, modify attitudes and change lives.

As her now-published notes make clear, O'Connor believed that "a definition of faith" is not as effective as having "trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac." She believed that an

overemphasis on "the abstract.., impoverished" the imagination's capacity for prophetic insight (Mystery and Manners, 202-203). The storyteller makes "sensible things," and these can perhaps become, like sacraments, "the channels of that grace by which our


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lives are elevated and sanctified."12 Thus the storyteller's focus on what is at the same time mysterious and concrete is given a spiritual dimension; the natural particulars of a story, no less than those of a sacrament, should partake of the abstract supernatural. As O'Connor somewhat reluctantly admits in Mystery and Manners, the storyteller and his audience both want him to perform "the redemptive act" (48).

I want to close and I hope clarify my point about the sacramental and rhetorical efficacy of O'Connor's story by relating a story that she herself told in a letter to her friend known in The Habit of Being as "A.":

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy.... She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn't opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I being Catholic was obviously sup- posed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the "most portable" person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. (124-25)

McCarthy, in addition to being condescending, was clearly trying to reduce a sacrament to what she chooses to call a "symbol," something that can denote, and aesthetically please, and perhaps even teach, but which lacks what I have been calling the sacramental power to move, to change a human life.

O'Connor, of course, could never accept the reduction of a Catholic sacrament to a Mary McCarthy "symbol," and I think that she would have much the same response to any reader of her story who wants to reduce it to a purely aesthetic or even a didactic experience. "Well," she would say, "if it's just a symbol, to hell



with it." O'Connor hopes to move us, I think, to challenge our secular rationalism as well as our tendencies to look only within our natural selves, to depend on what we have already learned and therefore "know" about. I submit that she has done her best to

create an unnatural, artificial, graven icon that may very well function as a vehicle for God's grace.

Notes

1When I read an earlier version of this paper at the Conference on Christianity and Literature meeting at Baylor University (October 6-7, 1983), I noted that many members of the audience were probably feeling the urge, as I was at the time, to shift physically in order to release some of the tension generated by even an "academic" discussion of the word.

2While I find it useful to think of "The Artifical Nigger" as one of O'Connor's more "Catholic" stories, I try to present it not as dramatized dogma but as a story, specifically as the product of a rhetorical imagination that makes use of narrative, dialogue, character, plot, and a particular dramatic situation, among other literary devices. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. has made me conscious of the error of reading O'Connor as a mere proselytizer of theology rather than a storyteller in an essay he calls "Flannery O'Connor's Company of Southerners: Or 'The Artificial Nigger' Read as Fiction Rather Than Theology" (A Gallery of Southerners [Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1982], pp. 115-134). Further citations to this essay will be noted in text.

3The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), p. 250. Further references to "The Artificial Nigger" will cite page numbers in this edition.

4Saint Joseph Daily Missal, ed. Rev. Hugo H. Hoever, rev. ed. (New York: Catholic Book Publishing, 1957), p. 694.

sCarl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, and J. Paul Hunter, The Norton Introduction to Literature: Classroom Guide, 3rd ed. (New York and London: Norton, 1981), p. 30.

6The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), p. 78.

7Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 111.

sGene E. Sease, "Sacrament," Christian Word Book (Nashville, Tenn.: Graded Press, 1968), p. 268.

90O'Connor lamented the pressure "to separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision, in order to produce something a little more palatable to the modern temper" (Mystery and Manners, p. 30).

10David Eggenschwiler, as Rubin notes, offers a good example of this kind of gloss on the paragraph. For Eggenschwiler, O'Connor is "yielding to the temptation to address the reader through her characters and to explain what [Mr. Head] senses but could not so thoroughly explain" (The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1972], p.90).

"In her letter to Griffith about the story, O'Connor presented a more positive gloss on the story's resolution. "In those last two paragraphs," she writes, "I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise" (The Habit of Being, p. 78). I think that I can agree with this summation, but I would emphasize


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the word practically, specify the exact nature of the Eden from which the Heads come, and insist that they arrive only at the Gates of Paradise.

12"Sacraments of the Gospel," A Catholic Dictionary, by William E. Addis and Thomas Arnold, rev. 17th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 728.


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