It's About Everything Human

I came across this today (via Jonathan Rogers), and oh, how it speaks to me. It's from Flannery O’Connor's Mystery and Manners - a  piece entitled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” (pp. 67-68). 

The nature of fiction is in large measure determined by our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses through abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what beginning fiction writers are loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions…

The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them, all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.

One of the most common and saddest spectacles is that of a person of really fine sensibility and acute psychological perception trying to write fiction by using these qualities alone. This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

Meanwhile, over at his blog, Keith has been ruminating on the nature of fantasy and science fiction (and he needs to get on with unpacking that passage!). It strikes me that these two writers, from different times and different philosophies, in different ways, are both emphasizing the same basic truth (from opposite sides of the glass, perhaps). That as humans we are complexly dual-natured. We are both spirit and dust, we are rational and fantastical, we are utterly common and mundane and also uniquely miraculous and wonderful. We were created that way. To ignore one or elevate the other, we only ever end up with shattered and halved beings, living fragmented and disjointed lives. We must be both, we must embrace both, to be whole.

*ETA: See also....here