Flannery O'Connor and the poetics of apophatic theology

Abstract

This dissertation explores the previously overlooked connections between the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and the writings of the apophatic (or "negative") theological tradition. By arguing for a greater relevance between O'Connor's stylistic negativity and her religious imagination than has been recognized, this study challenges the critical assumption that thematic approaches alone adequately explain the theological import of O'Connor's narratives. Accordingly, I read O'Connor's so-called negative style as part of a cultural rethinking of modernity that recalls the poetic-theological strategies of apophasis (negation) and its aesthetic of "unknowing." O'Connor's fiction, I argue, exploits the modernist crisis of meaning in order to underscore the transcendent dimension of experience, which most often admits something incongruous, even contradictory. Like apophatic writers, O'Connor uses tropes of darkness, emptiness, and silence to renew a sensitivity to transcendence; she relates the absence and unknowability that follows from the "death of God" ethos to the absence and unknowability of a "hidden" divinity that surpasses the furthest reach of comprehension. In doing so, she challenges the hierarchical and gendered meanings of tropes like darkness and light, presence and absence that have long dominated Western culture. Thus, my thinking toward the poetics of apophatic theology offers a method for approaching the fundamental aporia of theology in specifically literary terms. It also queries an opposing line of theoretical interest in apophatic discourse that valorizes its negative language forms as a dimension of postmodern antifoundationalism but ignores its vital interest in the constitutive power of language. I conclude that O'Connor anticipates the role of negativity and operations of the negative in the revaluation of the Western intellectual tradition that defines postmodernity, but by paradoxically exploring premodern modes of speaking and knowing.