Mystery and Manners by Flannery O’Connor Read Free Book Online Page A

has itself an arts festival where Southern writers can be heard and where they are actually read and commented upon, and people in general see now that the type of serious Southern writer is no longer someone who leaves and can’t come home again, or someone who stays and is not quite appreciated, but someone who is a part of what he writes about and is recognized as such.
    All this sounds fine, but while it has been happening, other ground has been shifting under our feet. I read some stories at one of the colleges not long ago—all by Southerners—but with the exception of one story, they might all have originated in some synthetic place that could have been anywhere or nowhere. These stories hadn’t been influenced by the outside world at all, only by the television. It was a grim view of the future. And the story that was different was phony-Southern, which is just as bad, if not worse, than the other, and an indication of the same basic problem.
    I have a friend from Wisconsin who moved to Atlanta recently and was sold a house in the suburbs. The man who sold it to her was himself from Massachusetts, and he recommended the property by saying, “You’ll like this neighborhood. There’s not a Southerner for two miles.” At least we can be identified when we do occur.
    The present state of the South is one wherein nothing can be taken for granted, one in which our identity is obscured and in doubt. In the past, the things that have seemed to many to make us ourselves have been very obvious things, but now no amount of nostalgia can make us believe they will characterize us much longer. Prophets have already been heard to say that in twenty years there’ll be no such thing as Southern literature. It will be ironical indeed if the Southern writer has discovered he can live in the South and the Southern audience has become aware of its literature just in time to discover that being Southern is relatively meaningless, and that soon there is going to be precious little difference in the end-product whether you are a writer from Georgia or a writer from Hollywood, California.
    It’s in these terms that the Georgia part of being a Georgia writer has some positive significance.
    It is not a matter of so-called local color, it is not a matter of losing our peculiar quaintness. Southern identity is not really connected with mocking-birds and beaten biscuits and white columns any more than it is with hookworm and bare feet and muddy clay roads. Nor is it necessarily shown forth in the antics of our politicians, for the development of power obeys strange laws of its own. An identity is not to be found on the surface; it is not accessible to the poll-taker; it is not something that can become a cliché. It is not made from the mean average or the typical, but from the hidden and often the most extreme. It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes, because they are related to truth. It lies very deep. In its entirety, it is known only to God, but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.
    The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed to and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light. In these things the South still has a degree of advantage. It is a slight degree and getting slighter, but it is a degree of kind as well as of intensity, and it is enough to feed great literature if our people—whether they be newcomers or have roots here—are enough aware of it to foster its growth in themselves.
    Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he