"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have"
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O'Connor slides a shiv into the velvet cushion of literary prestige: even our so-called glamour narratives, she implies, are secretly poverty stories. The line turns on "revolting" - not just excessive, but faintly indecent, as if the writer's attention to the poor violates good taste. That word choice matters because it acknowledges the suspicion that empathy can be voyeurism, that "the poor" become an aesthetic resource for people with typewriters and distance.
Her real target, though, isn't compassion; it's the moral accounting that fiction can't stop doing. When she says writers fixate on "what they lack", she's describing an instinct to measure souls, not net worth. The rich can be described in inventory - houses, lovers, pedigrees - but novels get traction from absence: belonging withheld, meaning evaporated, love conditional, God silent. O'Connor, a Catholic Southern writer steeped in grace and grotesque revelation, understood that deprivation is narrative fuel because it creates the crack where truth leaks in.
The subtext is a critique of both capitalism and the tasteful liberal imagination. In a culture trained to admire acquisition, fiction remains stubbornly suspicious of it, instinctively hunting for the hunger underneath the abundance. That "attachment" is also an accusation: writers can't quit the poor because the poor make the moral stakes legible. Even stories about penthouses end up asking the same question as stories about shacks: what does it cost to be a person, and who gets to pretend the bill isn't due?
Her real target, though, isn't compassion; it's the moral accounting that fiction can't stop doing. When she says writers fixate on "what they lack", she's describing an instinct to measure souls, not net worth. The rich can be described in inventory - houses, lovers, pedigrees - but novels get traction from absence: belonging withheld, meaning evaporated, love conditional, God silent. O'Connor, a Catholic Southern writer steeped in grace and grotesque revelation, understood that deprivation is narrative fuel because it creates the crack where truth leaks in.
The subtext is a critique of both capitalism and the tasteful liberal imagination. In a culture trained to admire acquisition, fiction remains stubbornly suspicious of it, instinctively hunting for the hunger underneath the abundance. That "attachment" is also an accusation: writers can't quit the poor because the poor make the moral stakes legible. Even stories about penthouses end up asking the same question as stories about shacks: what does it cost to be a person, and who gets to pretend the bill isn't due?
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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