Fiction: an incarnational art

In her non-fiction collection of essays and talks about the nature of fiction, Flannery O’Connor – a firm Catholic – observed that fiction is ‘an incarnational art’. It’s less about explaining and pointing things out (as Fielding and the Victorians did) and also less about describing emotions or ideas and more about experiencing people vicariously in unfolding time. There’s some telling and explaining – even O’Connor can’t help herself at the end of some stories – but the world of matter – uh – matters.

This is most important for anyone who is a ‘spiritual’ writer of any sort, because the abstract is meaningless unless it is made concrete. We agree with Aristotle that one can say a person is just but it means little until we see the person acting justly. It doesn’t help to say ‘Uncle Jim was mean’ but we must show Jim kicking the dog that brought him his slippers. Why say “Nancy was happy’ when we can show her skipping through puddles and saying hello to everyone on the sidewalk? Yes, this is the ol’ ‘show, don’t tell’ dictum, but consider how more difficult it is to ‘show’ redemption, depravity, healing, forgiveness, reprobation, reconciliation, enlightenment? The ‘word’ must ‘become flesh’ as we present people doing stuff in the flesh by words.

Making the abstract come to life is what we do in fiction; we make the unseen seen, and point to universals with particulars. It’s what Jesus did in his stories. Heavens, it was Who Jesus was:  The Word made flesh. It’s a ‘sacramental’ way of seeing, something Catholics and Anglicans are especially comfortable with. Bread, wine, water, oil, incense, bells, statuary, architecture, stained glass, icons, song and Scripture-read-aloud engage all the senses and enlarge the imagination at the same time. They are real things that point to things more Real than themselves. It's what quality fiction ought to do: The unseen becomes seen.