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

by Mark McGurl

If this metafiction attempts to exorcise the spirit of the literary amateur from O’Connor’s career, it also announces another project on O’Connor’s part: the disciplining of the egoistic authorial self with the whip of impersonal narrative form. In the ironically amateurish heavy-handedness of its satire, “The Crop” allows us to see this project at its point of first assemblage. Later versions would be more subtle, and would be put to other thematic ends, but the structure would be essentially the same: the author simultaneously commits a “sin” of individual pride (as autobiographical projection, as character) and punishes herself for it (as impersonal narrator). Enabled by the amalgam of intimacy-and-distance embedded in third person limited narration, this auto-punitive enterprise could be described as the narrative equivalent of self-flagellation.