The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

by Mark McGurl

unexpected.”16 O’Connor’s narratives do contain oddballs who do unexpected things for mysterious reasons, but the stories don’t often, for all that, take a metafictional turn, drawing attention to the mystery of narrative itself. Rarely in her fiction does one even encounter an enthusiastic storyteller—to represent the raconteur in action is perhaps inevitably to invite a heightened reflexivity into one’s text—although O’Connor claimed that a fervor for storytelling was one of the things that distinguished her region from others, especially the North. As she put it in a panel discussion held at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, “I have Boston cousins and when they come South they discuss problems, they don’t tell stories. We tell stories.”17 And yet she did not often write stories about storytelling.