I am a little annoyed with the internet right now for its failure to make the important and necessary distinction between what an author says and what an author's character says. In the usual Flannery O'Connor quotes collected on all kinds of internet sites there is one without any cite or reference, making it appear as if it is O'Connor who saying this:
"I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth."
Yes, O'Connor wrote those words -- but they were not her words, rather they came from the mouth her character the Preacher Hazel Motes in her brilliant novel, Wise Blood (Chapter 10, 1952 edition). Motes, like many of O'Connor's characters is haunted by religion and Christ -- determined to bluster against his fear by creating his own "Church Without Christ." This quote makes perfect sense as Motes tries to deny that there might be an ultimate truth -- God's truth -- which O'Connor most certainly believed in though the quote as it appears on the internet gives a different impression.
So imagine...those of us who write... if we should be remembered by the quotes of our troubled and twisted characters as though they represented without qualification our own convictions. Annoying sloppiness of the internet (especially when the cite they offer is their own website, not the origin in O'Connor's writing from where the quote is taken.)
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
