Jessica Hooten Wilson Archives

Cover image of "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage" by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do The Heathen Rage, Jessica Hooten Wilson with illustrations by Steve Prince. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436185), 2024.

Summary: The text of O’Connor’s unfinished work with commentary on her literary process and the tensions she wrestled with in writing.

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 from lupus at the young age of 39. Despite her illness she penned a number of short stories and two novels. She also wrote numerous letters, essays, and reviews. She was working on a third novel at the time of her death, a fact known mostly among O’Connor scholars. But none dared put the fragments of this novel into print until now. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes how she was a fan of O’Connor since her teen years. During her doctoral research on O’Connor and Dostoevsky, a friend encouraged her to look at the unpublished novel as the most Dostoevskian of O’Connor’s works. This began research that culminated in this work.

In this work, Wilson has arranged the fragments of the novel into something of a coherent narrative. Between fragments she offers her commentary on the work, O’Connor’s process, and the literary influences on the text, and her struggle to complete it. Portions of the novel are introduced by woodcut illustrations by Steve Prince of One Fish Studios. He provides an afterword describing his work with the O’Connor text.

The principle characters of the story are Walter Grandstaff Tilman, a scholar who spends his days writing letters to all and sundry between bouts of illness (shades of O’Connor’s own life?). His father, T.C. Tilman, is nominal head of the family but has suffered a stroke, and is tended by Roosevelt. His mother keeps up the slowly fading farm, directing the efforts of the farm help. She is frustrated but has come to accept Walter’s lack of interest in the farm.

Oona Gibbs is the one other character who plays a significant part. She is a civil rights activist. She lives with a domineering mother and one gets the sense that her correspondence and activism is part of her liberation. Walter begins corresponding with her. He tells her about his life but portrays himself as lack. Too late he realizes the consequence of his deception. Her interest awakened, she wants to visit. To avert the visit, he writes asking her not to come, trying to end the relationship. Too late. She is on her way.

Wilson takes liberty with what O’Connor wrote in the final part, fashioning a crisis and conclusion of sorts from a cross-burning scene on a neighbor’s farm. Wilson borrows scenes from other stories and acknowledges this as presumptuous. To me, it seemed an effort to offer some kind of closure to what was plainly unfinished and unsatisfying. While it would have busied up the text, I wish she would have annotated this chapter: what was from Why Do the Heathen Rage, what came from other works, and what was Wilson.

Wilson interleaves commentary with the fragments of O’Connor’s work. She traces the different iterations of the story, including the name changes Asbury/Walter and his different backstories. Speaking of backstories, Wilson introduces us to the friendship of O’Connor with Maryat Lee, a New York playwright. Lee, a polar opposite to O’Connor, is the likely inspiration for Oona Gibbs, with shades of Ivan Karamazov.

Wilson’s commentary also explores O’Connor’s wrestling with race. She contends that this, as much as illness, helps account for O’Connor’s inability, despite three years of work, to fashion and finish a coherent novel. She notes the plot elements of Roosevelt, Walter’s conflicted choice to write as a Black, and Oona’s activism, as well as the closing scene as part of O’Connor’s struggle. Wilson discusses O’Connor’s segregated life, her blind spots of experience, and a bifurcated spirituality that relegated civil rights to an “earthly and political position.” Yet she sees the novel as an attempt to address the racism of the South.

For Wilson, the unfinished novel represents the unfinished racial awakening in O’Connor’s life. But how ought we evaluate this unfinished story? On one hand, O’Connor fans will revel in new material to read. On the other hand, despite Wilson’s efforts, O’Connor’s text is fragmentary and lacks cohesion. Given all this, the book is one for O’Connor scholars and devotees. For me, as one who has read O’Connor on and off since college, it added to my appreciation of this complicated Southern Catholic writer. And I grieved afresh that she died so young.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program for review.

Reading for the Love of God, Jessica Hooten Wilson. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: An exploration of reading as a spiritual practice, including the reading practices of Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Sayers.

Jessica Hooten Wilson believes how and why we read to be as important as what we read. She invites us to imagine the message of the angel to John on Patmos to “eat this book” and what that means for reading the Bible and for reading other books. For those of us who read for amusement or information, she invites us to consider what it means to read as a spiritual practice. For many of us lost in screens, this means the recovery of a lost art. Along the way, she will introduce us to guides from whose reading practices we may learn.

She begins by asking why read anything but the Bible, acknowledging the Bible’s unique place in the life of the Christian. She proposes that we are not self-contained knowers of all and that other books often cast light on scripture, filling out what is lacking in our own knowledge of the world scripture discloses to us. She leads us into the distinction between “use” and “enjoyment” and the “uselessness” of much in life, including God. To “use” God is to turn him into an idol–we are meant to enjoy God and use things. In the case of books, she proposes that if we just use them, we denigrate their value in promoting our enjoyment of God and God’s world. She notes how many see poetry as “useless” and yet how poetry points us to the good, the true and the beautiful, toward what is of great value.

She asks whether reading good books can make us good people. Not necessarily, and there are vicious as well as virtuous readers. Among other things, virtuous readers are slow, attentive readers, receptive to what gifts they might receive in a book. There is a trinity in the ART of reading–author, reader, and text. We seek to discern clues to the author’s intent. We receive the text almost sacramentally, looking for the image of God and the presence of Christ, even in fallible and fallen works. And we approach humbly, charitably and generously. Reading that weaves these together is a kind of perichoretic dance.

She explores the different senses we employ in the reading of a work. She proposes a recovery of the four senses employed by the church fathers in sacred reading: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, or moral, and the anagogical, or spiritual. The last two seem very important to reading as a spiritual practice. In moral reading, we internalize truth so that we may live and pray it, and in spiritual reading, we so contemplate upon a work that it shapes our imagination. Memory is part of this. The author goes on to consider how works are remembered and that memorizing is also a spiritual practice. We also remember through repeated readings of important works such that they become part of our mental furniture.

I mentioned that Jessica Hooten Wilson also introduces us to guides at different points in the text. They are four: Augustine, who read humbly and in silence, contemplatively and spiritually; Julian, who shows us a woman reading in a world of men, seeing multiple sense of scripture, and particularly the tropological; Frederick Douglass, who discovered liberation in reading and used it to empower others through his speaking and writing; and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose reading of fiction, particularly of Chesterton, illumined her translation of the gospel in radio plays and of Dante.

The book concludes with an invitation to recover our character as people of the book, whose reality begins with the Word and ends in the book of life. She rounds out this treatment with an example of a “twofold” reading of a story of Flannery O’Connor. This is followed by an FAQ about how we determine whether a book is “good,” how to decide what to read next, on marking up books (she encourages this), on finding time to read more, and intriguingly, why Catholics have all the good literature! The final appendix includes reading lists by age and time period.

This is far more than just a book about books or an apologetic for reading. Jessica Hooten Wilson conveys how, for the Christian, reading is an important spiritual practice. Nor is this just reading of scripture. Other great works often illumine the human condition to which scripture addresses itself and the matters of ultimate reality and our destiny. How and why we read, both in terms of virtues and practices is vitally important to the discovery of the riches on offer in literary works. She also casts a vision of the sheer enjoyment that awaits families and communities who engage in reading of good literature for the love of God. It has been my observation that those who have discovered this have a richer and deeper hope in God, as well as a shared language of illusions to stories, to characters, and places, and the memories of sharing these stories with one another. Through Jessica Hooten Wilson’s book, I hope their tribe will increase!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.