Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, & Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy.
Sykes, John D., Jr.
Wingless Chickens, Bayou Catholics, & Pilgrim Wayfarers: Constructions of Audience and Tone in O'Connor, Gautreaux, and Percy. By L. Lamar Nisly. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-88146-214-2. Pp. xiv + 254. $35.00.
Nisly's thesis is suggested by his title. He argues that these three Catholic writers from the American South can be helpfully distinguished by the different ways in which they conceived their audiences. Flannery O'Connor believed her readers to be hostile to her Christian vision, the religious impulse having been rooted out of them by a secularizing culture just as some chickens have been bred to diminish the size of their wings. Tim Gautreaux by contrast takes a companionable attitude toward readers he conceives as sharing his most deeply held beliefs. Finally, Walker Percy writes for the seeker--the uneasy skeptic who senses that something is deeply amiss with his world and sets out to name the disease and find a cure. Correspondingly, O'Connor's purpose is to shock her readers, which she does by beguiling them into sympathizing with characters who suffer an unexpected and seemingly undeserved blow. Gautreaux seeks to reinforce his readers' moral sense and alert them to the operation of grace in their daily lives--to show them more clearly what they already know. Percy's mode is typically satirical. He prods the reader into adopting an observer's stance that reveals the folly and oddness of modern life, sardonically pointing to an emptiness that only God can fill.
To make his case, Nisly inquires into the backgrounds of the writers. He focuses on two aspects of each writer's relation to Catholicism: the position of Catholics relative to the larger society in the communities in which the writers came of age, and the attitude of each writer to the Second Vatican Council, the major event in Catholic history in the second half of the twentieth century. Among the most helpful sections of the book for English teachers will be those on the development of Catholicism in the South and the major aims of Vatican II, which are found in Nisly's first full chapter on O'Connor (chapter 2). In a brief span he adroitly and succinctly sets out an important part of O'Connor's context that is likely to be unfamiliar to students. Equally important are the conclusions he reaches. Concerning the Catholic community in Milledgeville, Georgia, Nisly maintains that although O'Connor's mother's family had enjoyed local prominence since the antebellum period, the majority Protestants held Catholics in suspicion. As a cradle Catholic, O'Connor felt herself to be part of a tolerated minority. Thus her biography predisposed her to think of those outside her circle of co-religionists as uncomprehending and dismissive. In the case of Vatican II, O'Connor was generally enthusiastic about the spirit of aggiornamento that characterized it, but since it took place in the final years of her life, it did not significantly shape her outlook. Some of the changes she did live to see she did not like. She disapproved of having Mass said in English, for example. Nisly generalizes that O'Connor "embraced the pre-Vatican II mindset that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church" (43-44).
Nisly is equally careful in describing the Catholic context of Gautreaux and Percy. Like O'Connor, the Cajun Gautreaux was a cradle Catholic, but unlike O'Connor's Georgia, the south Louisiana environment of his childhood was one in which his religion was the norm. However, Morgan City, the town Gautreaux grew up in, was what Nisly calls a "hybrid" town, multicultural in its make-up even though largely Catholic. Gautreaux himself married a Methodist, a crossing of religious lines O'Connor would never have contemplated. Nisly concludes that "experiencing the opening, ecumenical stance of the post-conciliar Church appears also to have shaped Gautreaux's sense of audience" (94).
Percy's case is perhaps the most complicated of the three. Soon after his father's suicide when Percy was thirteen, Walker Percy and his brothers passed from the liberal Presbyterianism of his mother's family to the nominal Episcopalianism of William Alexander Percy, the distinguished cousin who adopted them. The only Catholic influence in Walker's childhood was passed on by Will Percy, whose mother had been Catholic and had sent him to a Catholic school. Only after the life crisis initiated by contracting tuberculosis while serving his medical internship did Percy the novelist begin to entertain Catholicism as a serious option. These facts are all relevant to Percy's adult conversion. However, the one serious mistake I believe Nisly makes in drawing biographical inferences has to do with his claim that Uncle Will's respect for Catholicism (which he never embraced) disposed Walker to the Roman church. In fact, Will Percy's attitude toward religion, expressed by characters Walker modeled after him in his novels, was close to the views of Hegel as criticized by Kierkegaard, one of Walker's intellectual heroes. According to Hegel, all the great religious traditions contain a kind of wisdom that the philosopher can extract and absorb into a more comprehensive understanding. Walker Percy explicitly condemned this view and turned to Catholic Christianity for its particularity. For him, the Catholic Church offered a stark alternative to Uncle Will's southern stoicism.
Nisly's description of Percy's relation to his communities and his section on Percy's attitude to Vatican II get back on track, however. From the two biographies of Percy and from letters, Nisly shows how the writer maintained a degree of detachment, even from social, civic, and church groups to which he gave his support. And where Vatican II is concerned, Percy, who was drawn to the authority and stability of the pre-council church into which he was baptized, criticized what he viewed as the trendiness that swept the American church in the 1970s. As Nisly points out, Percy was more critical of the Roman church than was either of the other two writers, although he certainly never gave up on it. And no doubt the personal and historical factors which led Percy to prefer the role of observer also affected his conception of his audience. There is, indeed, something conspiratorial about Percy's relation to his reader. The author in his novels at once invites confidence and at the same time directly or indirectly issues a warning to the reader to maintain his independence in solving the conundrum at hand.
To my mind, the weaker chapters of the book are those devoted to the fiction of the three writers. Whereas the chapters on biographical and historical context draw upon a range of sources to construct a plausible picture of audience and tone, the chapters on the fiction sometimes seem redundant after this initial, primary work is done. A reader familiar with the fiction will already have thought of examples before reading Nisly's. And the brief treatments of stories and novels, while plausible, are seldom original or arresting. Nisly is at his best in making suggestive generalizations, as in his claim that O'Connor means to relate to her readers as Old Testament prophets related to their audiences. Her stories, he maintains, function as enacted parables, in the manner of leremiah wearing a yoke or Hosea marrying a prostitute. Thus the focus falls on the message for the audience, not the plight of the characters in the drama (69). However, sometimes such theologically inspired comparisons misfire, as in the argument in the chapter on Gautreaux's fiction that the author's attitude toward violence in his novel The Clearing reflects Catholic just war theory. Although not entirely without merit, the analogy between state warfare and the attempt to impose law and order in the midst of bar fights and Mafia activity in a Louisiana lumber camp in the 1920s seems a bit strained.
I am also not entirely convinced that including Gautreaux in this volume was a good idea. Although he clearly belongs with O'Connor and Percy as a serious Catholic writer from the American South, in my view Gautreaux's fiction is not as theologically substantial as that of his mentors. Nisly's book does relatively little to show that Gautreaux has achieved the profundity of which both O'Connor and Percy were capable, which leads one to question the value of analyzing his sense of audience in relation to them. I agree that Gautreaux is a very good writer, and one worth promoting, but I am not sure that this kind of comparison does him credit.
Nisly's theoretical approach, while not sophisticated, is nicely framed and adequate to the task he sets himself. His approach is a version of reader-response theory that owes more to the legacy of Wayne Booth than to that of Wolfgang Iser or Stanley Fish. He sets out to describe what Peter Rabinowitz calls the "authorial audience" (9) for each of the three writers. In reconstructing these audiences, Nisly acknowledges that he is also doing work related to that of scholars engaged in cultural studies. However, in reading the chapters on the fiction, I sometimes wondered if Nisly had remembered his own theoretical brief. Missing from the treatment of the stories is the kind of systematic, sequential development of the relation between author and reader one finds in Wayne Booth's analysis of how Jane Austen establishes sympathy for Emma in The Rhetoric of Fiction, for example. From the cultural studies side, I missed in Nisly's account what Gilbert Ryle and after him Clifford Geertz called "thick description." In this case, thick description might helpfully have included a richer sense of context that goes beyond what the authors said and what has been said about them. For example, it would have been instructive to know more about the actual audiences of these three writers. Where did these writers publish, and why? And how might historical events and currents outside the sphere of the Catholic church--the Montgomery bus boycott, the race riots of 1968, the sexual revolution, the growth of consumerism--have affected notions of audience? I also wonder if Nisly believes the authorial audiences of these writers to be affected by gender; feminist critics have certainly thought so.
Despite these reservations I find much to like in this latest offering from the Mercer O'Connor series. The work is informed, drawing upon representative scholarship on O'Connor and Percy and showing ingenuity in assembling material on one of their literary heirs. (In its June 22, 2009 issue, The New Yorker published "Idols" Gautreaux's tribute story to O'Connor.) The writing is clear and free of jargon, making this volume accessible to undergraduate students. Nisly lays out his own theological interest in the writers, and his appreciation for their Christian vocations is evident but not polemical. And by taking a reader-response tack, Nisly goes in a new, potentially fruitful theoretical direction.
John D. Sykes, Jr.
Wingate University
