“We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.” –Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers”
But for Flannery O’Connor, a renewed sense of mystery is bound up with a commitment to “fact.” Continuing in this same passage in “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” she writes: “St. Gregory wrote that every time that the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. This is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.” But there is a danger in this for the writer who is also a religious believer. “The danger for the writer who is spurred by the religious view of the world is that he will consider this”–i.e., describing a fact that reveals a mystery–”to be two operations instead of one. He will try to enshrine the mystery without the fact, and there will follow a further set of separations which are inimical to art. Judgment will be separated from vision, nature from grace, and reason from imagination.”
So the task for the writer is to dig so deeply into the concrete that mystery, like precious oil, wells up out of the ground. Mystery is hidden within the concrete data of human experience; it is not “sold separately” elsewhere. And so the writer attuned to mystery is someone who sees more of the facts than other writers do. He does not stop at the surfaces of things. He knows that the full complexity of human beings opens us up at least to the possibility of the transcendent.
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