(short stories, 1971)
If one expects religious fiction to be sentimental, inspirational, and encouraging, they will be surprised to discover that one of the finest Christian writers of the twentieth century penned unexpectedly dark tales about the murky places in the human heart and the violence that it sometimes takes to awaken it to the motions of grace. Flannery O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for The Complete Stories in 1971, demonstrating that these strange and fascinating stories, mostly located in the South, resonated with readers and critics alike, whether they were people of faith or those who would never darken the doors of a church. Her stories are marked by unexpected twists and turns, unforeseen moments of violence, profound observation of human motivations, an unmasking of the multiplicity of ways in which we deceive ourselves about ourselves, an earthy and sardonic sense of humor, and a splendid grasp of the rhythms of speech and dialect, particularly those accents one might hear in the Deep South.
O’Connor’s stories usually center on the shock of a revelation—a violent and unexpected experience or calamity that causes her characters to have to reevaluate who they are, what they believe, and how they should live. Their vain, artificial sense of self is thoroughly dismantled when they are brought face-to-face with the darker aspects within their own souls. And since it is difficult to get through to the hardened human heart, it sometimes takes the appearance of grace in a violent form to get our attention. “All my stories,” she wrote, “are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.”1 As the Misfit, a homicidal killer in her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” says about another character, the proud, selfish, and self-centered Grandmother, a woman who finally shows a spark of goodness when she is faced with being shot: “She would have been a good woman if it [sic] had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
In extreme situations we learn a lot about ourselves, and so it is for O’Connor’s characters. Moments of death, murder, betrayal, humiliation, and the unveiling of hypocrisy can be moments of searing revelation. O’Connor once explained why her stories were filled with such violence and calamity: “For the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”2 And what startling characters she drew: a Bible salesman who humiliates and steals the wooden artificial leg of a proud young woman, a renegade minister preaching “The Church Without Christ,” a hateful woman whose prejudice destroys the livelihood of her family and leads to her own demise, a young man who has a picture of God tattooed on his back to try to please his pious wife, and a 104-year-old ex-general who has lost all sense of reality and connection with life. These are just a few of the freakish people who inhabit the pages she has written. And because she brought them to life with such humor and believability, the reader is drawn into her strange world and confronted with their own sinful nature.
Who would have expected that such stories, largely centered on Southern Fundamentalist Protestants, would emerge from the pen of a woman of deep conviction and immense intellect? O’Connor was a lifelong Catholic who took her faith very seriously, and to tell her stories she drew on the world she knew so well, a world populated by earnest and simple religious faith, racism, and entrenched social divisions.
Born in Georgia in 1925, Mary Flannery O’Connor was an only child born into a devoutly Catholic family who described herself as a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.”3 Her family raised chickens, and the young girl received national notoriety when she was filmed by the Pathe News people with her trained chicken, who had the uncanny ability to walk backward. She later claimed this as the high point of her life. Most of her countless readers might take issue with that, but it did begin a lifelong fascination with birds. Later in life she raised peacocks, ducks, toucans, emus, chickens, and even a bedraggled one-eyed swan.
O’Connor graduated from Georgia State College for Women, and in 1948 was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she studied under such important writers as Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Andrew Lytle. While there she kept a prayer journal that has only recently been published and shows an intensely serious desire to please God with her life and her writing. “God must be in all my work,”4 she wrote.
In 1951 O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, a debilitating disease that had struck down her father at age forty-five, and which began to take a toll on her own life. Following the diagnosis she moved back to the family dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia—not an easy thing to do for a woman so fiercely independent. She was not expected to live long, but managed to survive another fourteen years, spending the remainder of her short life battling the disease, which left her weak and needing crutches to get around. In the midst of her suffering she found meaning and God’s strength, and it might be hard to imagine her work without taking into account the crucible of pain through which she daily passed.
During these years she penned two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), two volumes of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), numerous essays on writing, collected in Mystery and Manners (1962), book reviews, and theological reflections. She died in August 1964, at age thirty-nine, from the complications of lupus.
O’Connor considered herself a “Christian realist,” and by that she meant that she thought the doctrines of the Christian faith to be more than symbols. For her, they were realities that shaped the human heart and the human destiny. She had a great interest in theology, and read both modern and classic theologians. Her favorite was Thomas Aquinas, whom she read every evening before going to bed. She even laughingly referred to herself as a “Hillbilly Thomist.” Among the things she learned from Aquinas and other theologians was to take evil seriously. It could not be explained away by social forces or psychological malformations, but was a supernatural reality. For O’Connor, the devil was real, and prowling about seeking whom he may devour. She believed that when people were blind to the true nature of evil they were in grave danger of succumbing to its allure. One of the reasons she wrote was to unmask the evil hidden in our customs, our social niceties, and our carefully guarded self-deceptions. She saw her work as “invading territory largely held by the devil,” and a weapon in the battle against the nihilism of our age.
“My audience,” she wrote in a letter, “is the people who think God is dead.”5 Although a woman of wide reading, she did not trust that the unaided intellect could lead to truth. In fact, the intellect could be a tool of self-deception and create a pride that walled one off from the deepest truths about the world and about themselves. Most of the highly educated characters who appear in her stories, in fact, are prideful and vain; they are smart, but they have little understanding or wisdom about the deep things of existence. Without realizing it, she said, they are “feeling about in all experience for the lost God.”6
In a biographical essay, Richard Giannone describes the protagonist of one of O’Connor’s novels:
Unlike the liberal, rational, and enlightened persons in the novel who have had the moral and spiritual sense bred out of them, Motes regards sin, Jesus, and redemption as serious matters of life and death. Haunted by his sense of sin and terrified by a pursuing, soul-hungry Jesus, Hazel spends the rest of his life trying to avoid sin in order to avoid Jesus.7
When Motes attempts to follow the path of sin and nihilism to prove that sin does not exist, it inevitably leads to a violent collision with the truths he has wanted to avoid.
Flannery O’Connor’s stories are unblinking examinations of the mysteries of human existence and the way that God breaks through in unexpected ways. Mystery was, for O’Connor, the great concern of the fiction writer, whose vocation is to record the ways it becomes manifest in human lives. “I am only really interested in a fiction of miracles,” she said. But for these outbursts of mystery—these supernatural moments—to be convincing they must occur in the midst of a story that is believable. That is what O’Connor did so very well—use realism to meditate on the mystery of life. And mystery, she reminds us, “isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”8