{"id":5077,"date":"2009-11-20T15:33:34","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T20:33:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=5077"},"modified":"2013-05-10T14:45:51","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T18:45:51","slug":"november-20-2009-flannery-oconnor-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2009\/11\/20\/november-20-2009-flannery-oconnor-redux\/5077\/","title":{"rendered":" Flannery O\u2019Connor Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David E. Anderson<\/strong><\/p>\n

Readers coming upon the work of Flannery O\u2019Connor (1925-1964) for the first time in this first decade of the 21st century can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing her as a \u201cCatholic novelist.\u201d Many of her original readers in the 1950s and early 1960s did not, on first reading, or even second and third readings, know of O\u2019Connor\u2019s personal Catholic commitment nor read her novels and stories of so-called \u201cbackwoods prophets\u201d\u2019 and grotesque Southern Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalists as exemplifying a particular Catholic sensibility.<\/p>\n

\"post_oconnor_peacocks\"Still, readers found O\u2019Connor brutal, broadly brushed stories compelling, and she is well embedded in the canon of both Southern fiction and most \u201creligion and literature\u2019\u2019 reading lists.<\/p>\n

But how has she fared over the past half-century?<\/p>\n

Revisiting O\u2019Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings\u2014in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works\u2014become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style\u2014character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning\u2014no longer shock, no longer convince.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor made her mark as one of the most original and boldest story-tellers of the mid-century South, writing two novels, two major collections of short stories, and a number of other miscellaneous stories and occasional prose. She was also a prolific letter writer and wrote numerous books reviews, principally for Roman Catholic diocesan newspapers. While mining some of the same social milieu as Faulkner\u2014the poverty-stricken, illiterate backwoods and the small town lower-middle-class gentility\u2014O\u2019Connor imbued her stories and novels with religious imagery and themes drawn primarily from a corner of Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalism, as well as pre-Vatican II Catholicism.<\/p>\n

She had a certain contempt for both her time and her audience, believing her present was not only secular but also mired in nihilism, and considering her principal audience to be unbelievers who needed the shock of her paradigmatic and emblematic violence in order to be brought to belief. \u201cMy audience is the people who think God is dead,\u2019\u2019 O\u2019Connor wrote in one letter. In her influential essay \u201cThe Fiction Writer and His Country,\u2019\u2019 she argued: \u201cThe novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock\u2014to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor defended her approach in a 1955 letter complaining about readers who found her powerful and jarring story \u201cA Good Man is Hard to Find\u2019\u2019 brutal and sarcastic for its depiction of the killing of an entire family, including a sleeping baby, by escaped convicts: \u201cThe stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

But what she calls \u201cChristian realism\u201d seems more like the judgment of a wrathful God. It is a notion of the human situation so distorted by sin that all understanding of the orthodox Christian conception of humanity created in and retaining the image of God is absent. It was hard then and is equally difficult now for some readers to see grace announced with the point of a gun and a mass murderer as a prophet of God in waiting, or to \u201cbe on the lookout,\u201d as O\u2019Connor once told students before reading \u201cA Good Man,\u201d \u201cfor such things as the action of grace in the grandmother\u2019s soul, and not for the dead bodies.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

In any version of Christian realism, dead bodies count; they are not soulless plot appendages. As Joanne Halleran McMullen, in her book \u201cWriting against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O\u2019Connor,\u2019\u2019 has noted, both the central characters in this story are nameless. Neither the grandmother nor the pathological murderer is given a name. The latter, McMullen notes, is called by what<\/em> he is\u2014The Misfit\u2014not who<\/em> he is. \u201cHe has no Christian name; it is his depravity that has become specifically \u2018incarnate\u2019 in O\u2019Connor\u2019s world.\u201d Grace may somehow be operating in the final gestures between the grandmother and The Misfit when she reaches out to touch him but he recoils as if bitten by a snake\u2014a biblical symbol that is the antithesis of grace. But this seems more apparent in O\u2019Connor\u2019s intention than the story\u2019s realization. In her lecture on the story, O\u2019Connor describes The Misfit as a \u201cprophet gone wrong\u201d who, because of the grandmother\u2019s touch, would become \u201cthe prophet he was meant to be.\u2019\u2019 But, again, the story as written provides the reader with no clue for understanding The Misfit as a prophet either gone wrong or yet-to-be. Throughout her fiction, O\u2019Connor\u2019s characters seem only faintly realized as human, as people with individualized souls and personalities meriting the author\u2019s or the reader\u2019s sympathy, compassion, or even revulsion.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor wrote before Vatican II threw open the windows of reform in Catholicism, and it would be understandable if Catholics, or other readers familiar with some of the new, more pastoral accents created by the Second Vatican Council, had difficulty recognizing O\u2019Connor\u2019s Catholicism. But even in the pre-conciliar church, some critics within the faith were quick to denounce O\u2019Connor\u2019s work. Essayist Robert O. Bowen, reviewing \u201cThe Violent Bear It Away\u201d in 1961, was fierce: \u201cNeither its content nor its significance is Catholic,\u2019\u2019 he wrote. \u201cBeyond not being Catholic, the novel is distinctly anti-Catholic in being a thorough, point-by-point dramatic argument against Free Will, Redemption, and Divine Justice, among other aspects of Catholic thought.\u2019\u2019 Yet O\u2019Connor read widely in contemporaneous Catholic thought, and much of her book reviewing, albeit mostly brief notices, concerned Catholic theology and doctrine.<\/p>\n

To the contemporary reader, O\u2019Connor\u2019s fiction does, indeed, seem to eschew the notion of free will for her characters; they seem to be playing out preordained roles in a cosmic drama of divine anger and judgment. And while there are sacramental elements in her work\u2014at least one story centers on baptism\u2014they appear mostly as ornament, like the comparison of the sun to an elevated host during the Eucharist in \u201cA Temple of the Holy Ghost.\u201d In part that may be because O\u2019Connor was concerned that her message and meaning not be transparent. While her Catholicism can be veiled, it can also leave her readers confused. In her nonfiction, O\u2019Connor stressed the role of mystery in Catholic doctrine. \u201cThe fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,\u2019\u2019 she wrote in \u201cThe Church and the Fiction Writer.\u2019\u2019 Too often, however, the Mystery became mystification for the reader.<\/p>\n

Perhaps O\u2019Connor greatest lapse, and the element that makes her fiction more of a footnote in the history of American literature than work of enduring value, is her total exclusion of the civil rights movement and the religious elements\u2014black Protestants especially, but also white mainline Protestants and Catholics\u2014that fueled it and that were so much a part of the texture of everyday Southern life in the period in which she was writing. It seems a curious omission for a writer of O\u2019Connor\u2019s sensibility, who sought to be attuned to the action of \u201cgrace through nature\u2019\u2019 and who boasted of being a Southern writer, a regional writer, to ignore that drama of biblical proportions being played out in her own front yard. It was a drama with many of the same elements\u2014violence, lynching, castration, rape\u2014that she rooted her fiction in. The critic Ralph Wood is most probably correct when he says O\u2019Connor was no racist, but he fails to explain away her ambiguous attitudes toward African Americans and her contemptuous dismissal of efforts, especially by Northern sympathizers and others, to heed the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to join in the struggle to dismantle segregation, in some instances by giving up their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms,\u2019\u2019 O\u2019Connor wrote in \u201cThe Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.\u2019\u2019 \u201cShe is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home.\u2019\u2019 Apparently O\u2019Connor feared that \u201cmoral energy\u2019\u2019 might dilute or undo the racial status quo on which Southern identity depended, believing that only time and history would resolve the race issue. In Wood\u2019s view, racism and segregation were, for O\u2019Connor, \u201ca species belonging to a much deeper and more pernicious genus of evil.\u2019\u2019 If so, it is nowhere evident in her work.<\/p>\n

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike<\/a>, Walt Whitman<\/a>, and American religious poems<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forty-five years after her death, how do Flannery O’Connor’s views about the South, race, violence, Catholicism, and Christian realism hold up? 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