Ce livre
édité en 2020 brosse un panorama objectif et actuel des développements
de l'intelligence artificielle (IA), incluant ceux que la crise du
coronavirus accélère. Contrairement à ce que l'on peut attendre,
l'aspect technique n'est pas très poussé, il s'agit plutôt d'un ouvrage
d'intérêt général, vraiment exhaustif, qui met l'accent sur les
possibilités actuelles et futures de ces techniques informatiques,ainsi
que sur les dangers de dérives et abus. Les auteurs, père et fils
Jakobowicz, se gardent de prendre position, mais ce qui doit être dit
l'est sans ambages.
Après
une première partie qui brosse l'historique et signale les déceptions
et hibernations du secteur, la seconde aborde davantage l'aspect
technique. On note que les programmes d'intelligence artificielle, grâce aux performances élevées des machines actuelles, ne sont jamais «que» des algorithmes relativement simples, exécutés très rapidement, qu'on applique à un très grand nombre
de données. Dans les requêtes plus complexes, les algorithmes sont
superposés en couches successives. L'acquisition de grands volumes de
données est la base indispensable aux systèmes d'IA. Tous les moyens
sont bons pour les récolter, depuis les cookies qui mémorisent nos activités et nos goûts jusqu'aux "CAPTCHA" : on apprend que lorsque l'on clique sur ces images, l'on travaille gratuitement pour Google, car ceci permet de gonfler le stock d'informations pour la reconnaissance d'images en IA.
Apprentissage : les expressions "machine learning", "deep learning" et "transfer learning" sont
succinctement expliqués. Ainsi, en reconnaissance visuelle, la machine
ne «voit» pas, elle mémorise les caractéristiques des pixels d'un tas
d'images représentant tel sujet, un chatpar exemple, afin
d'apprendre à détecter l'animal sur n'importe quelle image. Il ressort
surtout de ces techniques que si la machine est capable d'apprentissage,
l'explication des processus déterminant une décision est insatisfaisante : "Ceux
qui prônent une adoption massive de l'intelligence artificielle ont
tendance aujourd'hui à mettre en avant des arguments visant à accepter
cet inconnu lié aux algorithmes plutôt qu'à parier sur une meilleure explicabilité de ces derniers. L'un des arguments évoqués est la difficile explication de nos décisions humaines." Oui, mais on demandera quand même à un médecin d'exposer les symptômes qui lui ont permis de déceler une maladie !
Pour ma part, au plan plus technique, j'ai été intéressé par le système "Hadoop"
(p 65) qui permet d'accélérer la recherche d'informations sur
d'immenses bases de données en les répartissant sur plusieurs serveurs.
Par exemple, un assureur veut connaître toutes les transactions de ses
clients en rapport avec l'un de ses produits : la recherche ne
s'effectuera pas sur l'ensemble des données en ordre séquentiel, mais en
parallèle sur chaque serveur qui en contient une partie, divisant le
temps de requête par le nombre de serveurs. Pour certains systèmes, en
effet, la vitesse d'accès aux informations est vitale : chez "Amazon", une minute de blocage coûte 6000 commandes et un gros manque à gagner...
On
remarque également qu'un système de données distribuées implique une
augmentation du nombre de serveurs consommateurs d'énergie. Saviez-vous
que l'énergie nécessaire à l'envoi d'un simple courriel avec pièce
jointe est comparable à celle d'une ampoule électrique pendant une heure
? (p 207)
Dans la troisième partie, sont exposés les différents types d'IA,
de l'assistant personnel qui gère un agenda à la voiture autonome, en
passant par les applications dans le domaine de la santé et de l'armée.
Du robot qui aide à la consultation médicale au drone tueur, on découvre
le tableau étonnant d'innovations qui relevaient hier encore de
la science-fiction. Les auteurs ne manquent pas de souligner les dangers
et problèmes qu'occasionnent ces applications, tant au niveau de la
sphère privée que par l'excessive emprise de grandes sociétés (GAFAM) et d'États totalitaires sur la population (Chine).
S'il fallait absolument lire une partie de cet ouvrage, la quatrième "Quel avenir pour l'Intelligence Artificielle ?"
m'a paru la plus significative. Les auteurs s'y montrent circonspects.
Certains métiers sont menacés par le développement de l'IA et j'ai été
surpris d'apprendre que les programmeurs et les juges sont impactés. Car
se développe rapidement aujourd'hui une IA permettant de transformer
une description des fonctionnalités d'un programme en code informatique.
De même, il existe désormais aux États-Unisdes systèmes capables d'automatiser des décisions de justice : "Cet outil reste aujourd'hui une aide à la décision (le juge décide toujours), mais il peut l'influencer, et on imagine bien que ce type de mécanisme peut assez facilement se passer de validation humaine". Les biais de la «boîte noire» des algorithmes évoqués plus haut (explicabilité) peuvent affecter gravement ces dernières décisions.
Au
rang des opportunités, le développement de l'IA permet une plus grande
spécialisation des métiers, davantage d'emplois dans la gestion humaine,
une baisse de la pénibilité et la valorisation de compétences
transverses (relationnel, créativité, ...).
Les auteurs ne croient guère à la prise de contrôle de la société par la machine (cf "Skynet/ Terminator")
et pensent que l'IA telle qu'on la connaît aujourd'hui, malgré
d'énormes avancées, souffre de son incapacité à créer une représentation
du monde. La recherche en IA est confrontée à l'absence de toute
théorie scientifique concernant l'intelligence humaine, de sorte qu'elle
avance sans direction précise. (p 216)
Pour conclure, retenons d'abord que "même s'il existe des risques de dérives, presque aucune invention n'a été abandonnée à cause de critères moraux". L'arrivée
de l'intelligence artificielle dans nos vies peut être très utile et
implique des enjeux et des risques que ce livre nous aide à comprendre
avec les bonnes clés.
Merci à Babelio et aux éditions Leduc.s (opération Masse Critique).
Dark, sinuous lines float in a
blue sky. It seems straight out of sci-fi or fantasy—a fantastical
spacecraft transitioning into its cloaking shield, or a mythical beast
in flight. In reality, it is cranes at Gallocanta Lake in Spain, dozens
of them, traveling between where they feed in the fields and where they
sleep in the water. It is many frames, compressed to a single moment.
Catalan photographer Xavi Bou
is fascinated with birds and the challenge of making their flight
patterns visible. He has combined his passions for nature, art, and
technology to create these images which he calls “ornitography,” from
the Greek ornitho- (“bird”) and graphe (“drawing”).
The photographer learned to appreciate
nature from childhood walks with his grandfather in the town Prat del
Llobregat, where Bou grew up. It is located in the Llobregat Delta, one
of the most important wetland zones in the region around Barcelona, and a
key spot along bird migration routes. “He made me look at how to
differentiate them [the birds],” Bou writes, about his grandfather, in
an email, “how they were not the same throughout the year.”
Ornitography #97.
An an adult, “One day I wondered what
types of trails the birds would leave in the sky if that were possible,”
he says. “That is when I imagined those lines that would appear in the
sky. I thought it might be interesting to make them visible.” He made
his first test images in 2012, and the project has changed his life so
much that he stopped his professional work as a postproduction artist
and has dedicated himself exclusively to his ornitography work for the
last five years.
Creating these images is a slow process.
He might spend a couple of days at a site recording video footage. Then
it can take a week to 10 days to process the images in low resolution,
and then another week to create a high-resolution final image. “To be
able to show a period of time in a single image and not do it through a
long exposure,” he says, “what I discovered is that I had to take many
images per second and merge them into one. I shoot between 30 and 120
frames per second, so I use high-resolution movie cameras and shoot most
of the time in slow motion … Then I merge the sequence into a single
image.”
Initially, Bou focused on the flight of a
single bird , against the background of a colorful landscape. Over time
he’s been drawn to groups of birds against the flat backdrop of the
sky. “It is a more abstract result,” he says, “but for me, it is much
more powerful…. It goes beyond the simple ‘beauty.’” In some cases they
can resemble Asian calligraphy (Ornitography #123) or frantic knots of scribbles (Ornitography #169).
Ornitography #130.
A particular favorite subject of Bou’s is starling flocks, because of their unpredictable flight patterns. One image (Ornitography #130)
shows beautifully soft and amorphic abstract shapes—but depicts a
life-and-death drama of hunter with prey. According to Bou, the voids in
the middle of the image were produced by hawks attacking the flock. “I
am passionate about the idea of how a sculptor, the hawk, shapes the
shapes of starling clouds,” he says.
Atlas Obscura has a selection of Xavi Bou’s images, which are on view at the University of Rennes in France until January 15, 2020.
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words
with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these
experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These
words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English
equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that
are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of
East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project
aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are
distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we
might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have
already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all –
think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but
there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our
vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable"
experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these
words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced
understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing
the world.”
Gigil
is a Tagalog word that describes the irresistible urge to pinch or
squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished (Credit: Alamy)
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu,
which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of
adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”,
“perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner
strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in
the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the
English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued,
he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature
and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The
first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
Saudade
(Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place
or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague,
dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In
addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the
personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our
long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
Pihentagyú
(Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes
quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or
solutions
Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website,
where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily
admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an
approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work
in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the
words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback
and suggestions in that regard."
Portuguese fado singers like Cristina Branco channel the intense longing of "saudade" (Credit: Getty Images)
In
the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore
the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our
understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated
research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of
scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with
the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing
our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our
stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and
emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas
says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones
we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I
think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate
whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence,
Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern
University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our
emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired
by the observation that certain people use different emotion words
interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions.
“Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer
to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them,
they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive
feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is
called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the
participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a
few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their
reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Wabi-sabi
is a Japanese term that describes our appreciation of transient and
imperfect beauty - such as the fleeting splendour of cherry blossom
(Credit: Getty Images)
Importantly,
she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If
you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety,
for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those
feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being
able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In
this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to
call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough,
people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol
as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic
success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10
and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both
Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could
be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our
emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words
and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says
Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or
appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research
that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas
is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to
nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas
says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such
as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving
transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty
in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the
world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in
life.”
-- David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
Flannery O’Connor and the Terrors of American Sentimentality
In a recent issue of the New Yorker,
Paul Elie accuses novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor of
possessing “a habit of bigotry.” He argues that her opinions and
language about race are seriously flawed, and that her admirers must
come to terms with this unsettling reality when interpreting her
fiction.
But Elie’s orientation is backwards. As O’Connor herself understood,
art is not meant to be approached by way of dissecting the artist; the
only way to appreciate O’Connor as a writer is to closely examine her
stories, which emphatically are not racist. Elie’s argument is
both wrong and dangerous—it is a sign of the type of terror O’Connor
prophetically sees coupled to the sentimental pursuit of justice
unhinged from charity and friendship. Elie’s Case for O’Connor’s “Habit of Bigotry”
As evidence of her racism, Elie points to the personal letters
O’Connor wrote her mother in 1948 at the age of eighteen while visiting
New York and Massachusetts with extended family. The letters reveal
O’Connor’s shock to see a black man in the same college classroom as her
cousin, and that she avoided sitting next to black people on the
subway. Elie understands that these were the reactions of a teenager
leaving the 1940s South for the first time, but asserts that she never
successfully or fully excised these racist attitudes from her soul, and
that they therefore have to be taken into account when interpreting her
work. They are part of the character of the artist, and therefore part
of the art.
The proof of O’Connor’s enduring bigotry are letters written at the
height of her talent to her friend, the Civil Rights activist Maryat
Lee, in which O’Connor plays the part of gradualist reformer lamenting
the forced demise of Southern society by Northern radicals. Elie
acknowledges that there is a playfulness to these letters, but insists
that they are not always in jest, that much of what O’Connor says to her
correspondent reflects her real opinions about race. And because these
letters come in her more mature and reflective years, Elie uses them to
claim that O’Connor’s bigotry was “clearly maintained and growing more
intense as time went on.”
One of the passages from O’Connor’s correspondence to Lee cited by
Elie comes from a May 1964 letter written just months before her death.
Here O’Connor says:
About the
Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying
pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never
silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem
but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I don’t think is
the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has
to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him
but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person
be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a
minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,”
says Cassius, “and you leave, that don’t mean you hate the tiger. Just
means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.”
Cassius is too good for the Moslems.
Unlike O’Connor’s youthful letters to her mother, many of her letters
to Lee, including the brunt of that quoted above, have been available
to readers since the publication of Mystery and Manners in
1979. Elie claims that O’Connor fans have been downplaying these types
of comments for a long time, happily accepting those parts of her
correspondence that are witty and wise but refusing to acknowledge her
racism. These admirers cheer at the Christian spirit that went into
O’Connor’s stories, with little if any comment about her bigoted
opinions. But, says Elie, these letters to Lee “were written at the same
desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of
correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature.”
For Elie, a reassessment is necessary of O’Connor’s work, considering
all parts of the author’s character—the racially-biased side as much as
the daily-mass side. O’Connor’s admirers are mistaken, Elie tells us,
in elevating the published letters and occasional prose that they like
while explaining away the racial epithets and evidence of bigotry. This
approach “cordons off the author from history” by refusing to look
squarely at her more controversial statements: “Those remarks don’t
belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They
belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.”
In terms of her fiction, Elie’s only substantial example is the
vision of Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” the story of a proud Southern
lady who unreflectively equates the class hierarchies of her community
with God’s divine plan. She wonders what she would have done if Jesus
had made her choose between being black or white trash, and she gives
thanks that she was made a respectable white lady with “a little of
everything.” She is offered, however, a chance to grow in self-knowledge
after encountering a hostile Wellesley student in a doctor’s waiting
room. The young girl throws a book at Mrs. Turpin and tells her,
memorably, to “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
Mrs. Turpin interprets the incident as a message from God, and after
questioning him in the spirit of Job, experiences a revelatory vision of
souls marching heavenward in a subverted form of the hierarchical
categories that shape her imagination. For Elie, this is a
“segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and
class, equal but separate.” O’Connor’s racism is thus part of her
fiction.
Part of Elie’s turn to “Revelation” is to clarify his point about
O’Connor’s letters to Lee. Both correspondents would frequently and
playfully use pseudonyms meant to caricature their positions on race.
O’Connor would sometimes sign hers as “Mrs. Turpin,” and Elie sees in
this O’Connor’s embrace of a racist worldview that the writer’s fans are
loath to admit. The time of reckoning, however, has come. We must face
O’Connor’s true feelings about race and shake our heads at her willing
blindness to the truth of human equality. If we refuse to acknowledge
this side of O’Connor, we can never fully understand her literature;
rather, we’ll make it out to be far more holy and exemplary than it is.
Whatever goodness it has is stained by her habit of bigotry. Such is the
thrust of Elie’s essay. Finding the Interpretive Key
Elie’s approach to literary interpretation assumes that O’Connor’s
letters and posthumously published prose can serve as—and should be used
as—the interpretive key to her work. Elie claims that O’Connor
was careful to keep carbon copies of her correspondence and public
lectures because she intended for these to be the interpretive lens for
reading her short stories and novels. Everything came from the same
mind, written on the same typewriter, and thus is part of the same body
of work. The only way, then, to understand O’Connor’s art is to read it
through the autobiographic picture she drew for us through her letters.
Elie has plenty of company in this regard. There is no shortage of
admirers who like O’Connor’s stories because they know she was Catholic,
or a woman, or had lupus. This is why the stakes over O’Connor’s racial
views are so high. If we can’t like O’Connor the person, can we really
like her stories?
I stand with O’Connor in thinking that this orientation is the wrong
way to read literature, particularly from an artist as self-conscious
and deliberate as the one Elie puts on trial for racism. The irony of
using O’Connor’s letters to form an interpretation of her work is that
she frequently admonishes her correspondents not to take this approach.
She insists that her fiction must be read on its own terms, without
distracting adventures into her psyche.
For example, O’Connor jokes in a January 1956 letter to her friend
Betty Hester that she can see two critics that look to the artist to
understand art “chained together by mutual hate on one of the less
important circles of the inferno, eternally arguing if church steeples
are phallic symbols.” In May of the same year she wrote, again to
Hester, that a story should say “something about life colored by the
writer, not about the writer colored by life.” A few years later she
rebuked her friend Billy Sessions for his use of Freudian literary
criticism in the classroom, reminding him that it “can be applied to
anything at all with equally ridiculous results,” adding, “My Lord,
Billy, recover your simplicity.”
A little simplicity can go a long way when it comes to reading
literature. O’Connor would have had as little patience for race-infused
readings of her stories as she did for sex-infused interpretations. In
both cases readers are more concerned with the author’s mind and
character than the fruits of hard work and a dedication to the vocation
of writing. In fact, O’Connor frequently argued against using her
biography as a lens for reading her stories. The writer’s task is to
look at reality and render a vision of what is seen. Vision is, of
course, shaped by social mores and experience, but a good writer tries
to look beyond the temporal to a fuller reality, however mysterious it
may be. O’Connor insisted that her Catholicism broadened her ability to
see, and what she saw was grace acting on nature, God intervening in the
lives of souls living in modern America. But readers need not know that
O’Connor was Catholic, or had lupus, or lived alone with her mother in
rural Georgia, or had a short courtship with a book salesman to grapple
with her vision of the world we inhabit. All that’s necessary are the
stories.
Elie’s essay is a good example of the danger of interpreting art
through the biography of the artist. He argues that because O’Connor
possessed the habit of bigotry throughout her life, her many admirers
must come to terms with the fact that an author they cherish held
unacceptable racial views. He suggests that any serious interpretation
of her work going forward must account for the fact that she was wrong
when it comes to race, whatever we might think of her artistic talent or
theological acumen. He does not say the stories should stop being read,
but that is a logical step for the next critic to make. Elie just
throws the first punch, knocking O’Connor off her pedestal.
O’Connor’s letters, of course, do make for wonderful reading. They
are valuable for understanding the woman who wrote such startling and
memorable tales; they reveal a deeply philosophic soul living a simple
though painful life on a small dairy farm outside of Milledgeville,
Georgia, raising peafowl and other exotic birds, and struggling with the
ravages of lupus while devoting herself wholeheartedly to her vocation
as a writer. O’Connor’s biography is worth knowing, and in many regards
it is inspiring. But we must have the discipline not to conflate the
artist with her art.
A serious
reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction without having heard
of her could not in honesty conclude that the meaning of the stories
justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to different degrees,
questions the racist attitudes of the American South and points to the
individual conversions necessary to bring about the new code of manners
based on charity for which she hoped.
Rather than her correspondence, critics like Elie would do well to
follow O’Connor’s advice and treat the body of O’Connor’s published art
on its own terms. Importantly, this includes her introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,
the biography of a twelve-year-old girl who died of cancer, written by
the Dominican sisters who cared for her in Atlanta. Regarding this
essay, O’Connor says in a June 1961 letter to Hester that the
introduction is particularly important for understanding her work. When
critics ignore it, they miss O’Connor’s concern with the modern
proclivity to govern by tenderness rather than faith, a move that
becomes dangerous when tenderness is divorced from charity. O’Connor
predicted that tenderness without charity would end in terror, and in
Elie’s accusation that she possessed a “habit of bigotry,” she risks
becoming subject to the very terror she foresaw.
The passage from O’Connor’s introduction to the Mary Ann book is worth quoting at length:
In this popular
pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other
ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind,
prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.
In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a
tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is
wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of
tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in force-labor camps
and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
O’Connor is not just remarking here on the causes of those depraved
atrocities of mid-20th century communist and fascist nations on the
other side of the world. Her fiction makes clear that her gravest
concerns about modern terrors are of the home-grown variety connected to
her own regime, where tenderness comes packaged in various theories,
including the social-justice variety. People absorbed in such theories
are prone to a sentimentality that can lead them to terrorize those who
see things differently. Fascists and communists excel in terror—but 17th
and 18th century New England Puritans also knew how to scare people
into having the “right” opinions. O’Connor understood that we still have
Puritans among us.
Simply put, Elie is looking in all the wrong places for an
interpretative key to O’Connor’s work. His use of the phrase “habit of
bigotry” is a clever, if underhanded, play on the title of Sally
Fitzgerald’s edited volume of O’Connor’s correspondence, The Habit of Being,
meant to convey O’Connor’s virtues as a person, a Catholic, and an
artist. To the extent that we are concerned with O’Connor’s biography,
an accurate account of her vices is as important as attending to her
virtues—but trying to understand her habits, good and bad, can and
likely will distract us from her art. We end up seeking the source of
her vision rather than the rendered product.
Elie claims that O’Connor intended for her letters and occasional
prose to serve as the interpretive lens for reading her fiction. But
this is strange given that those same letters and essays make plain
O’Connor’s hope that the stories be read on their own terms. She
shuttered at the idea of literature being a game of hide-and-seek, with
audiences trying to find the author behind every Freudian symbol. Are we
to see O’Connor relationship with her mother in “The Enduring Chill,”
or her broken heart in “Good Country People,” or her semi-conscious
racism in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”? Such an orientation
makes it impossible to appreciate and learn from her fiction as it was
offered to the public. O’Connor’s Fiction is Not Racist
Jessica Hooten Wilson offers a good counter
to Elie’s misreading of O’Connor and a more balanced articulation of
O’Connor’s racial attitudes. As she points out, Elie neglects to mention
O’Connor’s friendships with African Americans and civil-rights
activists like Father McCown and Tom and Louise Gossett. In fact, much
of O’Connor’s biography can be used to show that Elie’s portrait of the
writer lacks complexion and nuance; that one would have to be heavily
influenced by the sentiments de jour to think her comments to
Maryat Lee are sufficient evidence of an unreconciled bigotry. I don’t
mean to defend everything she said in those letters or elsewhere. Like
all of us, she had flaws, and was guilty of sin.
But in terms of her biography, a fairer complaint about O’Connor
would look not to her feelings, but her stated opinions on policy
questions about race. Elie is simply wrong that O’Connor fans have been
ignoring the issue. They have been trying to understand it since at
least the publication of Habit of Being, in which Fitzgerald
provides evidence that the real difference between O’Connor and Lee was
not their views on race, but their proposed solutions to the injustices
of the South. Lee was an activist wanting immediate change, while
O’Connor thought the only solution was the development of “a new code of
manners based on mutual charity,” which can only be worked out slowly
over time. Readers like Elie can side with Lee in this debate, but they
cannot justly demonize her opponent as a racist.
Even if one insists that O’Connor was a racist, that does not mean that her work was ipso facto
racist. A serious reader who happened to come upon O’Connor’s fiction
without having heard of her could not in honesty conclude that the
meaning of the stories justifies racism. Rather, nearly every story, to
different degrees, questions the racist attitudes of the American South
and depicts the individual conversions necessary to bring about the new
code of manners based on charity for which she hoped.
Serious exegesis of literature is not to be expected in short essays,
but Elie’s claim about the racism of “Revelation” misses completely the
fact that the vision is reported to us by the narrator through the eyes
of Mrs. Turpin, and cannot in fairness be attributed to O’Connor.
Plainly, Mrs. Turpin experienced a moment of conversion, and that the
revelation she witnesses is personal—a grace from God particularly for
her. It upends her previous attitudes about people she had thought
beneath her—both blacks and whites. It is a corrective of her opinions,
not a reflection of O’Connor’s mind.
Like “Revelation,” O’Connor’s other stories are about individuals who
suddenly have their theories crushed in a moment of grace, a
devastation that opens up the possibility for conversion. The
Grandmother from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for example, thinks of
herself as good, tender souls fully in accord with the theories of
Southern hierarchy that reigned in the mid-20th century. She dresses up
for road trip because if she were to be in an accident, she’d want
everyone to know that “she was a lady” and not some white trash. Not
until she is confronted by the Misfit does she see the shallowness of
her opinions. Thanks to a moment of violence, she dies with more
important things on her mind than appearing as a lady. The Southern
code, including its racist assumptions, ends up meaning very little when
faced with real rather than hypothetical death. Sinners of all types,
racists among them, might act and think differently if there were
someone there to shoot them every minute of their lives.
In what O’Connor thought was her deepest story, “The Artificial
Nigger,” the suffering of black Americans is united to the suffering of
Christ on the cross. One of the most striking moments of the story takes
place in the opening pages, when a young boy responds to his racist
grandfather’s question about what he sees when a colored person walks
by: “A man,” responds the boy. The point is that social categories that
correspond to skin color are accidental, or artificial, rather than
essential to personhood. The grandfather’s bigotry and selfishness are
tied to the harm he causes his grandson as they walk through the city,
and it is only in their confrontation with severe suffering and
humiliation, represented in a racist lawn statue, that they are
reconciled.
And then there are the stories of social reformers, like Rayber from The Violent Bear It Away
and Sheppard from “The Lame Shall Enter First.” They are the epitomes
of atheistic tenderness wrapped in theory, and everything they touch
breaks. In both stories, a romantic sensibility leads these characters
to care more for misguided youth than their own flesh-and-blood sons.
And in both cases their upside-down priorities lead not just to harm,
but to death. These are tales of the sort of terror that can accompany
sentimentality in America—fathers endangering the lives of their
children in the name of social reform.
The examples of characters like Rayber and Sheppard should give us
pause in the summer of 2020, as America battles a health pandemic and
violent instances of racial injustice. In both cases, our political,
medical, and academic authorities may be motivated by tenderness to fix
these problems, but when rightly read, O’Connor reminds us that seeking
health and racial justice without charity can easily lead to
American-style labor camps and gas chambers.
What this may mean in terms of the COVID-19 response I’ll leave to
the reader to discern; regarding racial injustice, the obvious answer is
character assassination, even of those who have long been resting in
their graves. As with all sins, racism will never end without God’s
grace and a willingness by all to conduct themselves with charity.
Racist hunts, like all witch hunts, appear necessary when otherwise good
things, like justice, are tethered to the latest intellectual theories
rather than the time-honored, self-sacrificing demands of charity. One
need not be a Christian to accept this—Plato and Aristotle worried as
much as Thomas Aquinas about justice without friendship. Whatever
opinions O’Connor held about race—and the evidence suggests they are not
nearly as shocking as Elie claims—the vision proffered by her fiction
contains vital tools for helping us navigate the difficult terrain in
which we’re traveling as human beings and citizens. What a shame it
would be if she were subjected to the very terror she predicted.
