Flannery O'Connor: Toward a visual hermeneutics

Flannery O'Connor's work in the visual arts remains a largely unacknowledged aspect of her creative life. From early childhood and through adult years, she drew and painted. When she attended Peabody High School and Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, Georgia, she created numerous cartoons and other illustrations for the schools' student publications. These images comprise an independent and influential body that informs her work as a creative writer and is important to understanding the highly visual quality of her prose.;O'Connor's early work as a cartoonist is documentary in nature, capturing the attitudes of her fellow students and commenting on events of local and national importance. Her cartoons are also philosophically evaluative and intellectually critical, and they show the origin of her descriptive ability and her choice in constructing narratives that operate by visual appeal. Often the kinds of jokes and humorous subjects addressed in her cartoons resurface in her fiction. The early analysis of character types observable in her cartoons appears in more polished forms in her later work as a fiction writer. More profoundly, however, O'Connor uses a visually driven form of presentation to create ironic distance, a method identical to situations found in her cartoons.;The prioritizing of the visual in O'Connor's fiction, when approached from the critical perspective of phenomenology and hermeneutics, indicates the crucial point of engagement between the observer and the physical presence evoked by a work of art. For Martin Heidegger the primal engagement between work and observer takes place at the level of phenomenology. The work of art, according to Heidegger, creates a physical presence from within which Being is simultaneously disclosed and concealed. This event anchors the mystery expressed by phenomenological revelation to the "thingly" presence of the work of art. Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical approach defined by "horizons" of interpretation at play further defends the integrity of the work of art against assimilation by its interpreters, including the artist, and against the threat that art can be limited by placement within a historical context.;If literary critics remains limited by the way they approach the visual qualities of O'Connor's fiction and by generally neglecting their origins in her work as a visual artist, visual artists themselves engage O'Connor's writing with astonishing frequency and result. The priority given to visual communication in the postmodern era may indicate that strategies for visual reading may prove vital for analysis of the literary arts.