The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction
The Dark Side of the Cross:
Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction
by Patrick Galloway
Introduction
To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.
In reality, her writing is filled with meaning and symbolism, hidden in plain sight beneath a seamless narrative style that breathes not a word of agenda, of dogma, or of personal belief. In this way, her writing is intrinsically esoteric, in that it contains knowledge that is hidden to all but those who have been instructed as to how and where to look for it, i.e. the initiated. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her. Nevertheless, she achieves what few Christian writers have ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both.
In this analysis, we will be looking at just how Flannery O'Connor accomplished this seemingly impossible task, non-didactic Christian fiction, by examining elements of faith, elements of style, and thematic elements in her writing. While secondary sources are included for perspective, I have focused primarily upon Miss O'Connor's own essays and speeches in my examination of the writer's motivations, attitudes, and technique, most of which are contained in the posthumous collection Mystery and Manners. Unlike some more cryptic writers, O'Connor was happy to discuss the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of her stories, and this candor is a godsend for the researcher that seeks to know what "makes the writer tick."
Before examining the various elements that make up the remarkable writing of Flannery O'Connor, a bit of biography is necessary. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia on March twenty-fifth, 1925 to Catholic parents Edward F. and Regina C. O'Connor, and spent her early childhood at 207 East Charlton Street. Young Flannery attended St. Vincent's Grammar School and Sacred Heart Parochial School. In 1938 her father got a position as appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, and the family moved to North East Atlanta, then Milledgeville, where, three years later, Ed died from complications arising from the chronic autoimmune disease lupus. Flannery attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) and State University of Iowa, receiving her MFA from the latter in 1947. In 1951, after complaining of a heaviness in her typing arms, she was diagnosed with the same lupus that had killed her father. She went on, despite the disease, to write two novels and thirty-two short stories, winning awards and acclaim, going on speaking tours when her health permitted, but spending most of her time on the family farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, with her mother. She died of lupus on August third, 1964 at the age of thirty-nine.
Flannery O'Connor remained a devout Catholic throughout, and this fact, coupled with the constant awareness of her own impending death, both filtered through an acute literary sensibility, gives us valuable insight into just what went into those thirty-two short stories and the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a force for good. At first it might seem that these aspects of her writing would detract from, distort or mar the fiction they are wrapped up in, but in fact they only serve to enhance it, to elevate the mundane, sometimes laughably pathetic events that move her plots into sublime anti-parables, stories that show the way by elucidating the worst of paths. What at first seem senseless deaths become powerful representations of the swift justice of God; the self-deluded, prideful characters that receive the unbearable revelation of their own shallow selves are being impaled upon the holy icicle of grace, even if they are too stupid or lost to understand the great boon God is providing them. Note these last lines from "The Enduring Chill": "...and the last film of illusion was torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes....But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued to descend." 1
Elements of Faith
Flannery O'Connor put much conscious thought into her dual role of Catholic and fiction writer, and reading her written reflections on the matter reveals that she had developed a whole literary philosophy devoted to reconciling the two, nay joining them into a single unified force to "prove the truth of the Faith." She was well aware of the pitfalls of preachiness, and warned the would-be Catholic novelist that "when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated." She advised the writer that "he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth," but assured him that he would "realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them." 2
One such limitation was the representation of nature. O'Connor observed a Manicheism in the mind of the average Catholic reader, resulting from a conceptual separation between nature and grace in considerations of the supernatural, thus rendering fictional experience of nature as either sentimental or obscene. "He would seem to prefer the former," she tells us, but he "...forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite." 3 In this way, pornography can be seen as ultimately sentimental, as it is sex extricated from its essential purpose, the pain of childbirth and the beginning of long, arduous life. Therefore O'Connor utilizes nature as a tool, a hard, sharp tool with which to hew and chisel her work from the living rock of the real world. Nature imagery is everywhere in O'Connor, and it is often used to reinforce the negativity of the lives and mental states of her characters. In "A View of the Woods" we read of trees that are described as "sullen" and "gaunt ," of "threadbare" clouds, and "indifferent" weather. Elsewhere, human beings are described by way of animal imagery such as "large bug," "wheezing horse," "hyena," "sheep," "crab," "goat," "dog," " buzzard," "monkey," and the like. 4 Nature in O'Connor's stories reflects mankind, in all his/its base nature, and it is by keeping nature constantly in view that the author avoids the sentimental, as well as its flipside, the obscene.
The novice reader of O'Connor may well wonder how her work, grotesque and violent as it is, would be considered "Christian" or "Catholic" writing. On first perusal, with its horrendous deaths, it's empty, cruel, narcissistic characters and depressing, seemingly unresolved endings, it seems rather the opposite. What confuses the reader at first is what Miss O'Connor referred to as her "reasonable use of the unreasonable," and the assumptions that underlie its use. "About this I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate." 5 As to the, at times, extreme use of violence in her writing, O'Connor's literary philosophy allowed for the use of it in the service of some greater vision of spiritual reality. According to this philosophy, the man in a violent situation reveals those aspects of his character that he will take with him into eternity; hence the reader should approach the story by looking to such moments as an opportunity to peer into the soul of the character.
This approach also borrows from German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) and his concept of Dasein, being-there, wherein death represents the moment when a man's existence becomes complete, for better or worse. Heideger was a definite influence on O'Connor, and ideas such as this, as well as his concept that essential truth is a mystery that pervades the whole of human existence, dovetail perfectly with the larger theological interpretation of reality seen in her writing. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was also an influence, with his "Concept of Dread" which examines the whole complex of sin and redemption. His theory, that man's attempt to replace the Absolute with himself makes him pathetic and comical but never tragic (as the tragic is reserved for loss of the religious dimension) is also influential. In O'Connor, the religious dimension is never far off, her stories being set in the Christ-haunted south where religion, whether one is a true believer of not, is a part of the very landscape. Her narrative treatment of this dimension is subtle, however, and therein lies the liability to overlook it and derive a strictly existential reading. Other philosophers who influenced the thought and writing of Flannery O'Connor include Sartre, Pascal, Merton, as well as theologians Saint Augustine, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. 6
Veering our critical analysis back to Christianity, let us examine how such fundamental concepts as compassion, mystery, and anagogy are handled in O'Connor.
At first glance, one might find O'Connor to be somewhat less than compassionate toward her characters, yet this, like so many first impressions, is mistaken; while considerations of authorial intent are often discounted or discouraged in literary study, with O'Connor awareness of such issues is a prerequisite for understanding her craft and, as mentioned earlier, we are fortunate to have plenty of her own candid discussions to help enlighten us in our attempts to interpret her writing. For instance:
It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult to be anti-anything. 7
O'Connor is compassionate to her characters in that she gives them the opportunity of receiving grace, however devastating that might be to their fragile self-images, as well as their fragile mortal frames, for in O'Connor, grace often comes at the moment of grisly death. Thus, as the bitter Mrs. May is impaled on the horn of the charging bull at the close of "Greenleaf," we are told that "...she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable" and that "...she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear." 8 Likewise the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," just before she is shot to death by the fugitive killer The Misfit: "...the grandmother's head cleared for an instant...she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!'" She attempts to touch The Misfit's shoulder and gets three bullets in the chest, along with his observation that "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." 9 This seems hard, but in fact it's true; the character of the grandmother is self-centered and morally platitudinous, completely unaware spiritually. O'Connor provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the characters that are allowed to live that are the more to be pitied, for they are confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted lives, which they can no longer deny. They are stripped bare and flogged by the Truth, much like O.E. Parker in "Parker's Back," a rural loser who attempts to regain his pious wife's love by tattooing a huge Byzantine Jesus on his back, only to have her whip it savagely with a broom. The last image we are given is that of O.E. "leaning against the tree, crying like a baby." 10
Unsympathetic characters are often revealed in an entirely different light at story's close. This is due to the transformation grace brings, however dubious the blessing might seem. For in fact, according to O'Connor, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, God's ways are essentially mysterious. The idea of mystery, not as literary genre but as spiritual principle, looms large in her writing, both in her fiction and her prose. For O'Connor, the purely secular novelist that strives after truth in fiction will ultimately come up with only a kind of tragic naturalism, having missed the overarching mystery of existence; the Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of life, that there are certain things we are simply not meant to know, certain workings of the cosmic machine that only God understands. O'Connor utilizes this as a plot option, this mysterious, unexpected turn. She is not satisfied with the limitations of purely realistic prose, being rather of the opinion that her kind of fiction "will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery." 11 For O'Connor, "the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted." 12 This is not to suggest a kind of Christian fantasy, with angels appearing before men and Satan around every corner; however, O'Connor's methodology "will use the concrete in a more drastic way...the way of distortion." 13 These distortions will most likely be of a sudden or explosive nature, as with the college freshman Mary Grace (note the name) who suddenly pounces on, and proceeds to strangle, the loud and house-proud Mrs. Turpin in the doctor's waiting room in "Revelation." Nothing supernatural, just pure mayhem, but it certainly comes out of nowhere and takes the story into a totally new direction, causing a dark and subtle realization within the mind of Mrs. Turpin that she may well be what Mary Grace called her during their brief encounter, a "wart hog from hell." This is the type of distortion O'Connor is talking about, unlikely occurrences, yet not wholly beyond the scope of possibility, realistic enough to be justified artistically.
As mentioned earlier, the triumph of Flannery O'Connor's writing lies in the balance between the realistic and the anagogical. When posed with the question of what makes a story work, Miss O'Connor replies, "it is probably some action or a gesture of a character...which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character." 14 Such an action, for O'Connor, must be significant both on a literary, as well as anagogical, level, the latter pertaining to some divine truth, while not being in itself allegorical. The key is to create a situation that defies "any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery." 15 And thus, we've come full circle to mystery. But O'Connor's brand of literary interpretation of Christian mystery is so stylistically water tight that one is often hard put to extrapolate the anagogical significance. Take for example the instance of the grandmother's gesture mentioned above from "A Good Man is Hard to Find." At the moment when she realizes that she is tied to the Misfit with a bond of mystery to which she has only ever paid lip service, she does the right thing, she utters the first honest words she has said to him in their brief encounter, and reaches out. However, the fact that this does nothing to save her, that she is immediately shot for her trouble, is where the reader is likely to be thrown off. This is Miss O'Connor's pride as a writer, for which she had been, in her day, criticized by the more orthodox elements in the church who would, no doubt, have wanted a clearer moral position to emerge from her work. This is a detail to keep in mind later in this thesis, when we go into our examination of her treatment of the sin of pride.
Elements of Style
Having looked somewhat at the morbidly Catholic mindset that is the essential infrastructure supporting the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, let us move on to those techniques and idiosyncrasies that make up her writing style.
It should be said at the outset that O'Connor is not as "colorful" or "lyrical" as other writers in the great Southern Gothic tradition, although she did share their fascination with the grotesque. Along with her more conservative Catholic detractors (mentioned above), who find, as critic Melvin J. Friedman puts it, "her brand of Catholicism not orthodox enough," there are also the more "'textual' literary critics who find her language too bare and her experiments with structure not eccentric enough." 16 This last comment points to what I would refer to as a Cult of Eccentricity in literary academia that obsesses on the obscure, the abstruse, the vague, and the confusing in literature in what is, by now, a reflexive effort to legitimize literature study by making it as difficult as possible to understand. It is reflexive, in that it is no longer necessary, as it once was, some 100 years ago, when the study of literature still sought legitimacy among the accepted academic disciplines. But nevertheless, the good news is that O'Connor's genius is recognized and accepted by the bulk of the intelligencia, proving the truth of the motto, "less is more." For this truly is the secret weapon in her stylistic arsenal: a stark, spartan, perhaps dour, possibly mundane regularity, a steadiness in the narrative that at times may seem plodding to the neophyte reader, yet all the while something is bubbling beneath the lid; at any moment, the pot is likely to boil over, even spew forth something unexpected and, usually, profoundly disturbing.
Also significant in the writing style of Flannery O'Connor is a tendency to take on the character point of view in the narrative. However, it is done in such a way that although the omniscient third-person narrator takes on the particular viewpoint of the character in question while describing this or that, the effect is more of a mirror than an advocate. For example:
He knew, of course, that his mother would not understand the letter at once. Her literal mind would require some time to discover the significance of it, but he thought she would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to him. 17
When people think they are smart--even when they are smart--there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. 18
In these quotes from "The Enduring Chill," the use of "of course" and "literal" are reflecting the point of view of the son, Asbury, in the first passage, and the business about being smart is clearly the mother's opinion in the second, but within the context of the story, as the description shifts democratically throughout, O'Connor's narrative maintains it's impartiality while emphasizing the viewpoint of it's various characters. This technique lends itself to greater economy of description and exposition, therefore making it perfectly suited to the short story genre.
One feature of O'Connor's writing which is none-too-subtle on the Christian fiction front is her use of character names. The worst offender seems to be the aforementioned Mary Grace, the overweight messenger of doom that hurls a book at the head of the pompous Mrs. Turpin and then proceeds to throttle her severely. Other such tell-tale names include O.E. Parker (for Obadiah Elihue, a prophet and a friend of Job respectively), Mr. Fortune, Mrs. Cope, Joy Hopewell (a 32-year-old embittered Ph.D. with a wooden leg who changes her name to Hulga because it sounds uglier), Sheppard, old Tanner, the list goes on. Most names are ironic rather than symbolic, such as Sheppard, a naive man whose lack of judgement leads to the suicide of his son, or Joy Hopewell, who is joyless, hopeless, and unwell. The fact that the names are most usually a mockery of the characters adds to the cryptic Christianity that characterizes O'Connor's work.
There is in O'Connor what I would term an exquisite gelidity, an icy quality that I cannot help but attribute in part to her awareness of her own encroaching mortality. From all accounts, her personality was laconic and droll, self-possessed. Her religion gave her strength, but little joy. For O'Connor, salvation was ice, not fire, as is made clear in "The Enduring Chill," a story that concerns a young intellectual named Asbury who is convinced that he is about to die. Perhaps I've read too much into this little story, but for me it resonates with a certain despair not present in the other works I've read, which I attribute to the author's own despair at watching what was really every writer's dream career (early recognition, critical acclaim, awards, speaking engagements, readings) rapidly waste away from the lupus she'd inherited from her father. For me, the most chilling aspect of the story is the description of a prophetic water stain above Asbury's bed:
Descending from the top molding, long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and, directly over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak and there were smaller icicles depending from its wings and tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always irritated him and sometimes had frightened him. He had often had the illusion that it was in motion and about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head. He closed his eyes and thought: I won't have to look at it for many more days. 19
As the reader will recall from the beginning of this thesis, the same ice bird is recalled at the end of the story, this time as the Holy Ghost, bearing down on Asbury in all its fierce icy wrath.
Thematic Elements
Of the various themes of the writing of Flannery O'Connor, perhaps the most fascinating and certainly one of the most discussed, it that of the grotesque. Critic Gilbert H. Muller compares the grotesque imagery of O'Connor with that of the Millennium triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, going on to state that "for these two artists, the grotesque does not function gratuitously, but in order to reveal underlying and essentially theological concepts." 20 Indeed, the various grotesque characters serve both as an example of the folly of denying the true religion and as, in some cases, Christ figures themselves. O'Connor rejoins with, "In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature." 21
This concept of "displacement" runs throughout O'Connor's work, and it is essentially a displacement from the world of the one true God, a theological displacement, although within the context of the story it is more social, based on the nature of the freak's position in the society. In the case of the Polish immigrant Guizac in "The Displaced Person," it is his foreignness, the fact that he is an outsider perceived as a threat by the various rural types in the story, that makes him a freak. Yet he winds up becoming a kind of Christ figure when he is crushed by a tractor that is "allowed" to roll over him, essentially crucifying him. Other freaks include the club-footed Rufus Johnson ("The Lame Shall Enter First), the wooden-legged Joy/Hulga Hopewell ("Good Country People"), the nymphomaniacal Sarah Ham ("The Comforts of Home), and the retarded and deaf Lucynell Crater ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own").
Very often, the grotesque elements of O'Connor's stories are balanced out by anagogical ones. Again, the latter are not specifically symbols, for symbols work contextually to represent interactive story elements, whereas O'Connor's anagogical elements are just there, they wander in and out of the action; they may have symbolic significance, but it never comes directly into play as a plot element. They are there as reminders of the presence of the unseen, mysterious God. "These liturgical objects," says Muller, "whether a peacock in 'The Displaced Person,' a water stain in 'The Enduring Chill,' or a tattoo in 'Parker's Back,' permit Flannery O'Connor to neutralize the world of the grotesque and to clarify those mysteries which serve as an antidote to it." 22
Facing death is another thematic element that recurs often in O'Connor, for obvious reasons, both personal and religious. Her "affliction, which she carried with her during the major part of her literary career, forced a certain austerity upon her fiction; inevitably she transferred personal agony and suffering to her work." 23 O'Connor admits as much herself, in an essay in which she discusses "A Good Man is Hard to Find": "The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death." 24 This last quote speaks volumes; it is probably the single most significant and telling remark the student of Flannery O'Connor can have in his attempt to understand her work. Clearly facing death as a Christian was the motivational engine that drove her writing, and the theme that emerged from it often, as is common in O'Connor, got turned on its head, becoming stories in which people are facing death not as Christians. Perhaps this was O'Connor's catharsis, her solace, that however terrified she was at the prospect of her own looming death, at least she was prepared, at least she wouldn't wind up like the grotesque wretches that peopled her stories.
In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor writes, "There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment." 25 We touched briefly on the concept of grace earlier, and a more in-depth discussion is necessary here, when considering thematic elements, because just as the idea of grace figures prominently in Catholicism, so it does in O'Connor. Critic Carter W. Martin notes, "Most of the short stories are constructed in such a way as to dramatize the sinfulness and the need for grace..." and goes on to delineate two different kinds of grace normally received by the characters, "prevenient grace- which moves the will spontaneously, making it incline to God--and illuminating grace, by which God enlightens men to bring them nearer to eternal life." That is to say either a kind of spark that ignites a low smolder of realization, or full-blown revelation. Usually the character "recognizes his need for repentance and either accepts or ignores the opportunity. In a few stories there is no indication as to the response of the character to his new insight." 26 The latter is the case in "Parker's Back," "The Enduring Chill," and "Good Country People" among others.
O'Connor is willing to go to draconian lengths to mete out her particular brand of divine grace, utilizing such techniques as matricide, strangulation, suicide, impaling, beating, shooting, and whipping, to name a few. "I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace," she tells us. She goes on to explain that "This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world." 27 To sum up, "I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." 28
Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction
by Patrick Galloway
Introduction
To the uninitiated, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly stark and violent. Her short stories routinely end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. Working his way through "Greenleaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader feels an existential hollowness reminiscent of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's imagination appears a barren, godless plane of meaninglessness, punctuated by pockets of random, mindless cruelty.
In reality, her writing is filled with meaning and symbolism, hidden in plain sight beneath a seamless narrative style that breathes not a word of agenda, of dogma, or of personal belief. In this way, her writing is intrinsically esoteric, in that it contains knowledge that is hidden to all but those who have been instructed as to how and where to look for it, i.e. the initiated. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand; like all good writers, crass didacticism is abhorrent to her. Nevertheless, she achieves what few Christian writers have ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both.
In this analysis, we will be looking at just how Flannery O'Connor accomplished this seemingly impossible task, non-didactic Christian fiction, by examining elements of faith, elements of style, and thematic elements in her writing. While secondary sources are included for perspective, I have focused primarily upon Miss O'Connor's own essays and speeches in my examination of the writer's motivations, attitudes, and technique, most of which are contained in the posthumous collection Mystery and Manners. Unlike some more cryptic writers, O'Connor was happy to discuss the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of her stories, and this candor is a godsend for the researcher that seeks to know what "makes the writer tick."
Before examining the various elements that make up the remarkable writing of Flannery O'Connor, a bit of biography is necessary. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia on March twenty-fifth, 1925 to Catholic parents Edward F. and Regina C. O'Connor, and spent her early childhood at 207 East Charlton Street. Young Flannery attended St. Vincent's Grammar School and Sacred Heart Parochial School. In 1938 her father got a position as appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, and the family moved to North East Atlanta, then Milledgeville, where, three years later, Ed died from complications arising from the chronic autoimmune disease lupus. Flannery attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) and State University of Iowa, receiving her MFA from the latter in 1947. In 1951, after complaining of a heaviness in her typing arms, she was diagnosed with the same lupus that had killed her father. She went on, despite the disease, to write two novels and thirty-two short stories, winning awards and acclaim, going on speaking tours when her health permitted, but spending most of her time on the family farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, with her mother. She died of lupus on August third, 1964 at the age of thirty-nine.
Flannery O'Connor remained a devout Catholic throughout, and this fact, coupled with the constant awareness of her own impending death, both filtered through an acute literary sensibility, gives us valuable insight into just what went into those thirty-two short stories and the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a force for good. At first it might seem that these aspects of her writing would detract from, distort or mar the fiction they are wrapped up in, but in fact they only serve to enhance it, to elevate the mundane, sometimes laughably pathetic events that move her plots into sublime anti-parables, stories that show the way by elucidating the worst of paths. What at first seem senseless deaths become powerful representations of the swift justice of God; the self-deluded, prideful characters that receive the unbearable revelation of their own shallow selves are being impaled upon the holy icicle of grace, even if they are too stupid or lost to understand the great boon God is providing them. Note these last lines from "The Enduring Chill": "...and the last film of illusion was torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes....But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued to descend." 1
Elements of Faith
Flannery O'Connor put much conscious thought into her dual role of Catholic and fiction writer, and reading her written reflections on the matter reveals that she had developed a whole literary philosophy devoted to reconciling the two, nay joining them into a single unified force to "prove the truth of the Faith." She was well aware of the pitfalls of preachiness, and warned the would-be Catholic novelist that "when the finished work suggests that pertinent actions have been fraudulently manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever purposes the writer started out with have already been defeated." She advised the writer that "he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth," but assured him that he would "realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them." 2
One such limitation was the representation of nature. O'Connor observed a Manicheism in the mind of the average Catholic reader, resulting from a conceptual separation between nature and grace in considerations of the supernatural, thus rendering fictional experience of nature as either sentimental or obscene. "He would seem to prefer the former," she tells us, but he "...forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite." 3 In this way, pornography can be seen as ultimately sentimental, as it is sex extricated from its essential purpose, the pain of childbirth and the beginning of long, arduous life. Therefore O'Connor utilizes nature as a tool, a hard, sharp tool with which to hew and chisel her work from the living rock of the real world. Nature imagery is everywhere in O'Connor, and it is often used to reinforce the negativity of the lives and mental states of her characters. In "A View of the Woods" we read of trees that are described as "sullen" and "gaunt ," of "threadbare" clouds, and "indifferent" weather. Elsewhere, human beings are described by way of animal imagery such as "large bug," "wheezing horse," "hyena," "sheep," "crab," "goat," "dog," " buzzard," "monkey," and the like. 4 Nature in O'Connor's stories reflects mankind, in all his/its base nature, and it is by keeping nature constantly in view that the author avoids the sentimental, as well as its flipside, the obscene.
The novice reader of O'Connor may well wonder how her work, grotesque and violent as it is, would be considered "Christian" or "Catholic" writing. On first perusal, with its horrendous deaths, it's empty, cruel, narcissistic characters and depressing, seemingly unresolved endings, it seems rather the opposite. What confuses the reader at first is what Miss O'Connor referred to as her "reasonable use of the unreasonable," and the assumptions that underlie its use. "About this I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read, but none other by which it could have been written. Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate." 5 As to the, at times, extreme use of violence in her writing, O'Connor's literary philosophy allowed for the use of it in the service of some greater vision of spiritual reality. According to this philosophy, the man in a violent situation reveals those aspects of his character that he will take with him into eternity; hence the reader should approach the story by looking to such moments as an opportunity to peer into the soul of the character.
This approach also borrows from German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1899-1976) and his concept of Dasein, being-there, wherein death represents the moment when a man's existence becomes complete, for better or worse. Heideger was a definite influence on O'Connor, and ideas such as this, as well as his concept that essential truth is a mystery that pervades the whole of human existence, dovetail perfectly with the larger theological interpretation of reality seen in her writing. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was also an influence, with his "Concept of Dread" which examines the whole complex of sin and redemption. His theory, that man's attempt to replace the Absolute with himself makes him pathetic and comical but never tragic (as the tragic is reserved for loss of the religious dimension) is also influential. In O'Connor, the religious dimension is never far off, her stories being set in the Christ-haunted south where religion, whether one is a true believer of not, is a part of the very landscape. Her narrative treatment of this dimension is subtle, however, and therein lies the liability to overlook it and derive a strictly existential reading. Other philosophers who influenced the thought and writing of Flannery O'Connor include Sartre, Pascal, Merton, as well as theologians Saint Augustine, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. 6
Veering our critical analysis back to Christianity, let us examine how such fundamental concepts as compassion, mystery, and anagogy are handled in O'Connor.
At first glance, one might find O'Connor to be somewhat less than compassionate toward her characters, yet this, like so many first impressions, is mistaken; while considerations of authorial intent are often discounted or discouraged in literary study, with O'Connor awareness of such issues is a prerequisite for understanding her craft and, as mentioned earlier, we are fortunate to have plenty of her own candid discussions to help enlighten us in our attempts to interpret her writing. For instance:
It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth and which no book jacket can do without. It is a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so it is always safe for anybody to use. Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult to be anti-anything. 7
O'Connor is compassionate to her characters in that she gives them the opportunity of receiving grace, however devastating that might be to their fragile self-images, as well as their fragile mortal frames, for in O'Connor, grace often comes at the moment of grisly death. Thus, as the bitter Mrs. May is impaled on the horn of the charging bull at the close of "Greenleaf," we are told that "...she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable" and that "...she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear." 8 Likewise the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," just before she is shot to death by the fugitive killer The Misfit: "...the grandmother's head cleared for an instant...she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!'" She attempts to touch The Misfit's shoulder and gets three bullets in the chest, along with his observation that "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." 9 This seems hard, but in fact it's true; the character of the grandmother is self-centered and morally platitudinous, completely unaware spiritually. O'Connor provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the characters that are allowed to live that are the more to be pitied, for they are confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted lives, which they can no longer deny. They are stripped bare and flogged by the Truth, much like O.E. Parker in "Parker's Back," a rural loser who attempts to regain his pious wife's love by tattooing a huge Byzantine Jesus on his back, only to have her whip it savagely with a broom. The last image we are given is that of O.E. "leaning against the tree, crying like a baby." 10
Unsympathetic characters are often revealed in an entirely different light at story's close. This is due to the transformation grace brings, however dubious the blessing might seem. For in fact, according to O'Connor, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, God's ways are essentially mysterious. The idea of mystery, not as literary genre but as spiritual principle, looms large in her writing, both in her fiction and her prose. For O'Connor, the purely secular novelist that strives after truth in fiction will ultimately come up with only a kind of tragic naturalism, having missed the overarching mystery of existence; the Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of life, that there are certain things we are simply not meant to know, certain workings of the cosmic machine that only God understands. O'Connor utilizes this as a plot option, this mysterious, unexpected turn. She is not satisfied with the limitations of purely realistic prose, being rather of the opinion that her kind of fiction "will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery." 11 For O'Connor, "the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted." 12 This is not to suggest a kind of Christian fantasy, with angels appearing before men and Satan around every corner; however, O'Connor's methodology "will use the concrete in a more drastic way...the way of distortion." 13 These distortions will most likely be of a sudden or explosive nature, as with the college freshman Mary Grace (note the name) who suddenly pounces on, and proceeds to strangle, the loud and house-proud Mrs. Turpin in the doctor's waiting room in "Revelation." Nothing supernatural, just pure mayhem, but it certainly comes out of nowhere and takes the story into a totally new direction, causing a dark and subtle realization within the mind of Mrs. Turpin that she may well be what Mary Grace called her during their brief encounter, a "wart hog from hell." This is the type of distortion O'Connor is talking about, unlikely occurrences, yet not wholly beyond the scope of possibility, realistic enough to be justified artistically.
As mentioned earlier, the triumph of Flannery O'Connor's writing lies in the balance between the realistic and the anagogical. When posed with the question of what makes a story work, Miss O'Connor replies, "it is probably some action or a gesture of a character...which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character." 14 Such an action, for O'Connor, must be significant both on a literary, as well as anagogical, level, the latter pertaining to some divine truth, while not being in itself allegorical. The key is to create a situation that defies "any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery." 15 And thus, we've come full circle to mystery. But O'Connor's brand of literary interpretation of Christian mystery is so stylistically water tight that one is often hard put to extrapolate the anagogical significance. Take for example the instance of the grandmother's gesture mentioned above from "A Good Man is Hard to Find." At the moment when she realizes that she is tied to the Misfit with a bond of mystery to which she has only ever paid lip service, she does the right thing, she utters the first honest words she has said to him in their brief encounter, and reaches out. However, the fact that this does nothing to save her, that she is immediately shot for her trouble, is where the reader is likely to be thrown off. This is Miss O'Connor's pride as a writer, for which she had been, in her day, criticized by the more orthodox elements in the church who would, no doubt, have wanted a clearer moral position to emerge from her work. This is a detail to keep in mind later in this thesis, when we go into our examination of her treatment of the sin of pride.
Elements of Style
Having looked somewhat at the morbidly Catholic mindset that is the essential infrastructure supporting the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, let us move on to those techniques and idiosyncrasies that make up her writing style.
It should be said at the outset that O'Connor is not as "colorful" or "lyrical" as other writers in the great Southern Gothic tradition, although she did share their fascination with the grotesque. Along with her more conservative Catholic detractors (mentioned above), who find, as critic Melvin J. Friedman puts it, "her brand of Catholicism not orthodox enough," there are also the more "'textual' literary critics who find her language too bare and her experiments with structure not eccentric enough." 16 This last comment points to what I would refer to as a Cult of Eccentricity in literary academia that obsesses on the obscure, the abstruse, the vague, and the confusing in literature in what is, by now, a reflexive effort to legitimize literature study by making it as difficult as possible to understand. It is reflexive, in that it is no longer necessary, as it once was, some 100 years ago, when the study of literature still sought legitimacy among the accepted academic disciplines. But nevertheless, the good news is that O'Connor's genius is recognized and accepted by the bulk of the intelligencia, proving the truth of the motto, "less is more." For this truly is the secret weapon in her stylistic arsenal: a stark, spartan, perhaps dour, possibly mundane regularity, a steadiness in the narrative that at times may seem plodding to the neophyte reader, yet all the while something is bubbling beneath the lid; at any moment, the pot is likely to boil over, even spew forth something unexpected and, usually, profoundly disturbing.
Also significant in the writing style of Flannery O'Connor is a tendency to take on the character point of view in the narrative. However, it is done in such a way that although the omniscient third-person narrator takes on the particular viewpoint of the character in question while describing this or that, the effect is more of a mirror than an advocate. For example:
He knew, of course, that his mother would not understand the letter at once. Her literal mind would require some time to discover the significance of it, but he thought she would be able to see that he forgave her for all she had done to him. 17
When people think they are smart--even when they are smart--there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see things straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. 18
In these quotes from "The Enduring Chill," the use of "of course" and "literal" are reflecting the point of view of the son, Asbury, in the first passage, and the business about being smart is clearly the mother's opinion in the second, but within the context of the story, as the description shifts democratically throughout, O'Connor's narrative maintains it's impartiality while emphasizing the viewpoint of it's various characters. This technique lends itself to greater economy of description and exposition, therefore making it perfectly suited to the short story genre.
One feature of O'Connor's writing which is none-too-subtle on the Christian fiction front is her use of character names. The worst offender seems to be the aforementioned Mary Grace, the overweight messenger of doom that hurls a book at the head of the pompous Mrs. Turpin and then proceeds to throttle her severely. Other such tell-tale names include O.E. Parker (for Obadiah Elihue, a prophet and a friend of Job respectively), Mr. Fortune, Mrs. Cope, Joy Hopewell (a 32-year-old embittered Ph.D. with a wooden leg who changes her name to Hulga because it sounds uglier), Sheppard, old Tanner, the list goes on. Most names are ironic rather than symbolic, such as Sheppard, a naive man whose lack of judgement leads to the suicide of his son, or Joy Hopewell, who is joyless, hopeless, and unwell. The fact that the names are most usually a mockery of the characters adds to the cryptic Christianity that characterizes O'Connor's work.
There is in O'Connor what I would term an exquisite gelidity, an icy quality that I cannot help but attribute in part to her awareness of her own encroaching mortality. From all accounts, her personality was laconic and droll, self-possessed. Her religion gave her strength, but little joy. For O'Connor, salvation was ice, not fire, as is made clear in "The Enduring Chill," a story that concerns a young intellectual named Asbury who is convinced that he is about to die. Perhaps I've read too much into this little story, but for me it resonates with a certain despair not present in the other works I've read, which I attribute to the author's own despair at watching what was really every writer's dream career (early recognition, critical acclaim, awards, speaking engagements, readings) rapidly waste away from the lupus she'd inherited from her father. For me, the most chilling aspect of the story is the description of a prophetic water stain above Asbury's bed:
Descending from the top molding, long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and, directly over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak and there were smaller icicles depending from its wings and tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always irritated him and sometimes had frightened him. He had often had the illusion that it was in motion and about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head. He closed his eyes and thought: I won't have to look at it for many more days. 19
As the reader will recall from the beginning of this thesis, the same ice bird is recalled at the end of the story, this time as the Holy Ghost, bearing down on Asbury in all its fierce icy wrath.
Thematic Elements
Of the various themes of the writing of Flannery O'Connor, perhaps the most fascinating and certainly one of the most discussed, it that of the grotesque. Critic Gilbert H. Muller compares the grotesque imagery of O'Connor with that of the Millennium triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, going on to state that "for these two artists, the grotesque does not function gratuitously, but in order to reveal underlying and essentially theological concepts." 20 Indeed, the various grotesque characters serve both as an example of the folly of denying the true religion and as, in some cases, Christ figures themselves. O'Connor rejoins with, "In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature." 21
This concept of "displacement" runs throughout O'Connor's work, and it is essentially a displacement from the world of the one true God, a theological displacement, although within the context of the story it is more social, based on the nature of the freak's position in the society. In the case of the Polish immigrant Guizac in "The Displaced Person," it is his foreignness, the fact that he is an outsider perceived as a threat by the various rural types in the story, that makes him a freak. Yet he winds up becoming a kind of Christ figure when he is crushed by a tractor that is "allowed" to roll over him, essentially crucifying him. Other freaks include the club-footed Rufus Johnson ("The Lame Shall Enter First), the wooden-legged Joy/Hulga Hopewell ("Good Country People"), the nymphomaniacal Sarah Ham ("The Comforts of Home), and the retarded and deaf Lucynell Crater ("The Life You Save May Be Your Own").
Very often, the grotesque elements of O'Connor's stories are balanced out by anagogical ones. Again, the latter are not specifically symbols, for symbols work contextually to represent interactive story elements, whereas O'Connor's anagogical elements are just there, they wander in and out of the action; they may have symbolic significance, but it never comes directly into play as a plot element. They are there as reminders of the presence of the unseen, mysterious God. "These liturgical objects," says Muller, "whether a peacock in 'The Displaced Person,' a water stain in 'The Enduring Chill,' or a tattoo in 'Parker's Back,' permit Flannery O'Connor to neutralize the world of the grotesque and to clarify those mysteries which serve as an antidote to it." 22
Facing death is another thematic element that recurs often in O'Connor, for obvious reasons, both personal and religious. Her "affliction, which she carried with her during the major part of her literary career, forced a certain austerity upon her fiction; inevitably she transferred personal agony and suffering to her work." 23 O'Connor admits as much herself, in an essay in which she discusses "A Good Man is Hard to Find": "The heroine of the story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death." 24 This last quote speaks volumes; it is probably the single most significant and telling remark the student of Flannery O'Connor can have in his attempt to understand her work. Clearly facing death as a Christian was the motivational engine that drove her writing, and the theme that emerged from it often, as is common in O'Connor, got turned on its head, becoming stories in which people are facing death not as Christians. Perhaps this was O'Connor's catharsis, her solace, that however terrified she was at the prospect of her own looming death, at least she was prepared, at least she wouldn't wind up like the grotesque wretches that peopled her stories.
In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor writes, "There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment." 25 We touched briefly on the concept of grace earlier, and a more in-depth discussion is necessary here, when considering thematic elements, because just as the idea of grace figures prominently in Catholicism, so it does in O'Connor. Critic Carter W. Martin notes, "Most of the short stories are constructed in such a way as to dramatize the sinfulness and the need for grace..." and goes on to delineate two different kinds of grace normally received by the characters, "prevenient grace- which moves the will spontaneously, making it incline to God--and illuminating grace, by which God enlightens men to bring them nearer to eternal life." That is to say either a kind of spark that ignites a low smolder of realization, or full-blown revelation. Usually the character "recognizes his need for repentance and either accepts or ignores the opportunity. In a few stories there is no indication as to the response of the character to his new insight." 26 The latter is the case in "Parker's Back," "The Enduring Chill," and "Good Country People" among others.
O'Connor is willing to go to draconian lengths to mete out her particular brand of divine grace, utilizing such techniques as matricide, strangulation, suicide, impaling, beating, shooting, and whipping, to name a few. "I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace," she tells us. She goes on to explain that "This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world." 27 To sum up, "I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." 28
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