{"id":30427,"date":"2012-04-30T13:45:57","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T17:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=30427"},"modified":"2012-04-30T17:51:00","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T21:51:00","slug":"flannery-o%e2%80%99connor-and-the-habit-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/04\/30\/flannery-o%e2%80%99connor-and-the-habit-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Flannery O\u2019Connor and the Habit of Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration from The Spectrum<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cFor the writer of fiction,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor once said, \u201ceverything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.\u201d This way of seeing she described as part of the \u201chabit of art,\u201d a concept borrowed from the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. She used the expression to explain the way of seeing that the artist must cultivate, one that does not separate meaning from experience.<\/p>\n

The visual arts became one of her favorite touchstones for explaining this process. Many disciplines could help your writing, she said, but especially drawing: \u201cAnything that helps you to see. Anything that makes you look.\u201d Why was this emphasis on seeing and vision so important to her in explaining how fiction works? Because she came to writing from a background in the visual arts, where everything the artist communicates is apprehended, first, by the eye.<\/p>\n

She had developed the habits of the artist, that way of seeing and observing and representing the world around her, from years of working as a cartoonist. She discovered for herself the nuances of practicing her craft in a medium that involved communicating with images and experimenting with the physical expressions of the body in carefully choreographed arrangements. Her natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations, two rudimentary elements she later asserted form the genesis of any story, found expression in her prolific drawings and cartoons long before she began her career as a fiction writer.<\/p>\n

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Beginning at about age five, O\u2019Connor drew and made cartoons, created small books, and wrote stories and comical sketches, often accompanied by her own illustrations. Although her interest in writing was equally evident, by the time she reached high school her abilities as a cartoonist had moved to the forefront. After her first cartoon was published in the fall of 1940, her work appeared in nearly every issue of her high-school and college newspapers, as well as yearbooks\u2014roughly a hundred between 1940 and 1945\u2014and most of these were produced from linoleum block cuts. When she graduated from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville in 1945, she was a celebrated local cartoonist preparing for a career in journalism that would, she hoped, combine work as a professional writer and cartoonist.<\/p>\n

In her three years at GSCW, she earned a reputation among the students and alumnae as the \u201ccartoon girl.\u201d The staff members of the 1944 Spectrum yearbook gave her special recognition, publishing this acknowledgment for her in the yearbook: \u201cMary Flannery O\u2019Connor, of cartoon fame, was the bright spot of our existence. There was always a smile in the Spectrum<\/em> office on the days when her linoleum cuts came in.\u201d During her senior year, she was The Spectrum<\/em>\u2019s feature editor, and her cartoons were the organizing principle of the entire design concept, providing a retrospective of O\u2019Connor\u2019s years as the school\u2019s documentary cartoonist, caricaturist, and resident comic wit.<\/p>\n

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Taken as a whole, her cartoons comment on a predictable range of student experiences\u2014the anticipation of vacations and holidays, complaints about teachers, cramming for final exams\u2014and represent an impressive collection of single-frame satires anchored by human interaction. She targets the anti-intellectualism and social pretensions of her fellow students most frequently, but she also takes up some of the popular cranks about the school\u2019s shortcomings and responds to the effects of World War II on the lives of the students, particularly the presence of the training school for WAVES that invaded the campus in early 1943. Her cartoons showed a talent for mimicking what she observed about people, their appearance, behavior, and manners, and what these things revealed about their character, or what she thought they showed.<\/p>\n

Her first cartoon for The Peabody Palladium<\/em>, \u201cOne Result of the New Peabody Orchestra,\u201d published October 28, 1940, responds to an announcement on the front page, \u201cOrchestra and Music Club Are Organized.\u201d \u201cThe orchestra and the \u2018Music Lover\u2019s Club\u2019 are two new organizations that have been started by the music minded people in Peabody,\u201d the article reports. According to the cartoon, it appears that the music-minded are not always the music-talented, and at least one girl may be planning to keep her distance from this school activity. The school\u2019s music programs were the subject of at least one other cartoon, \u201cMusic Appreciation Hath Charms\u201d which has a girl snoozing in her chair with her legs stretched out and her arm hanging to the side as bars of music float in her direction. O\u2019Connor later wrote of herself that she not only had a \u201ctin leg,\u201d but also a \u201ctin ear.\u201d She was sent to piano lessons and tried her hand at the accordion and the bass violin, but it was never quite her bag. The only time her mother ever recalled spanking O\u2019Connor was to make her wear hose to her first piano recital.<\/p>\n

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Beyond the occasions for providing comic illustration or a witty counterpoint to one news item or another, she seemed to strive in her cartoons to hold up a mirror to the hothouse environment of a rural women\u2019s college. In Hazel Smith\u2019s column \u201cCampus Fashion\u201d for GSCW\u2019s newspaper, The Colonnade<\/em>, smartly dressed girls could expect to have their wardrobes regularly dissected on the verbal runway. \u201cDoing our usual snooping, we find that plaids and checks have become essentials of the college girl\u2019s wardrobe,\u201d Smith wrote for a 1942 issue. \u201cHelen Clay, a petite brunette, chose a black, yellow, and red plaid skirt. It has two kick pleats in front and two in the back. She combines white silk and a red cardigan with her outfit.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s eye was drawn to the fashion parade, too, but not at the high end of the spectrum. She thrived on eroding the idealized version of the all-American college girl and turned a glaring spotlight on the reality of oversize sweaters hiding dumpy figures, as well as sloppy skirts and frumpy hair and saddle oxfords and loafers sometimes drawn so large they would embarrass the clowns at Barnum\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Her fellow students, however, saw something of the truth, and themselves, in her cartoons. \u201cShe was a genius at depicting us \u2018Jessies\u2019 running around campus, with scarves hanging out of pockets, or messily draped on our heads,\u201d says former student Gertrude Ehrlich. In her article \u201cFashions\u2019 Perfect Medium\u201d for the Fall 1944 Corinthian<\/em>, GSCW\u2019s literary journal, O\u2019Connor moves her satire of college fashion to prose, writing detailed descriptions of the Jessies\u2019 wardrobe choices: \u201cTake sweaters for instance. By now they are practically standard. In fact, there are only two rules which govern their being worn\u2014they must be either four sizes too large or three sizes too small\u2014and since only those who weigh over two hundred and fifty pounds feel inclined to wear them three sizes too small, the oversize sweater is the only one to be considered.\u201d<\/p>\n

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From 1943 to 1945, fifteen thousand WAVES, or Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service, were trained at GSCW, among them were some WACS, SPARS, and Women Marines who were placed there temporarily while they waited for their bases to open. The influx of WAVES would forced a competition for space and resources over the next three years, as well as inspiring some curiosity and envy among the Jessies. \u201cSome of us were probably a little jealous,\u201d Elizabeth Knowles Adams recalls, \u201cbecause they seemed so glamorous in their uniforms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In her WAVE cartoons, O\u2019Connor has students asking to try on the WAVES\u2019s hats and stumbling over navy jargon, exercising like maniacs to achieve that ideal military physique, climbing trees to avoid being trampled by WAVES marching by in formation, and climbing onto rooftops because the navy has left them with a shortage of classrooms, as well as a shortage of dorm rooms.<\/p>\n

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* * *<\/p>\n

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In O\u2019Connor\u2019s fiction, the urge for cartooning can be seen in the superficial sketches she created for certain characters, pegging them with one or two quirky physical features and allowing them to remain otherwise flat and peripheral. In her story \u201cRevelation,\u201d O\u2019Connor puts a few of these in the doctor\u2019s waiting room, like the \u201cwoman with the snuff-stained lips.\u201d On the bus in \u201cEverything That Rises Must Converge\u201d there\u2019s the \u201cthin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair\u201d and \u201cthe woman with the red and white canvas sandals.\u201d<\/p>\n

These simple, vivid impressions are reminiscent of the figures in her cartoons and the attention she gave to certain features of an otherwise spare composition\u2014a particularly loud pattern in a plaid skirt, a row of wildly grinning teeth, or the texture and shape of some out-of-control amoebalike hairdo. The minimalist faces described in her fiction also sometimes recall the faces in her cartoons, in their small, seedlike or ice-pick eyes, or in their exaggerated proportions, such as Mr. Shiftlet\u2019s head in \u201cThe Life You Save May Be Your Own,\u201d whose \u201cface descended in forehead for more than half its length.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Some of the scenarios O\u2019Connor invented to dramatize in her fiction could work just as well as the basis of a cartoon, like Enoch Emory being insulted by a man in a gorilla suit in Wise Blood<\/em>; Sally Poker Sash standing on the stage at the premier of Gone with the Wind <\/em>with her brown Girl Scout shoes sticking out from under her evening gown; and a white woman meeting a black woman on the city bus wearing the same garish purple and green hat in \u201cEverything that Rises Must Converge,\u201d which ends, of course, with one of them clobbering the other with her pocketbook. Bailey in \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d with his bald head and Hawaiian shirt, and the children\u2019s mother, whose face, \u201cas broad and innocent as a cabbage,\u201d is tied off with a green scarf that has \u201ctwo points on the top like rabbit\u2019s ears\u201d\u2014all have the appearance and substance of animated characters in a cartoon script for 1950s suburbia, complete with a couple of bratty comic-book-reading kids in the backseat of the car.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor had early developed the habit of inventing characters and situations that would be suitable for a cartoon. In 1943, when she was describing to Georgia poet and former GSCW music teacher Nelle Womack Hines how she came up with the ideas for her cartoons, she said first you had to catch your \u201crabbit,\u201d or good idea, then you had to tie it up someway with a situation or event. When O\u2019Connor went hunting inspiration for her fiction, she was still looking in the same sorts of places and catching that same kind of rabbit.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Flannery O\u2019Connor: The Cartoons<\/a>, edited by Kelly Gerald, to be published in June by Fantagraphics<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFor the writer of fiction,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor once said, \u201ceverything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.\u201d This way of seeing she described as part of the \u201chabit of art,\u201d a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[35,131,538,1888,411,75],"class_list":["post-30427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-art","tag-comics","tag-fashion","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-humor","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFlannery O\u2019Connor and the Habit of Art by Kelly Gerald<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 30, 2012 \u2013 \u201cFor the writer of fiction,\u201d Flannery O\u2019Connor once 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