Today is Flannery O’Connor’s 100th birthday. She was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. In the firmament of twentieth-century American letters, her star was one of the brightest, and it burned all too briefly. She died at the age of 39, of lupus, a disease that had caused her pain and debility since she was twenty-five.
by Jonathan Rogers
This celebratory essay is abridged from a longer essay I read for this week’s episode of The Habit Podcast.
O’Connor’s short stories and novels are often shocking in their violence and horror. They are also hilarious; when I teach her stories, I spend a lot of my time pointing out how funny they are, and convincing students that it’s ok to laugh. O’Connor once wrote, “In general, the Devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy one way or another. I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own.”
Perhaps the most shocking thing about O’Connor’s fiction is the fact that it is shaped by a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also the place where grace makes itself known. “My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the Devil,” she wrote. O’Connor’s broken world—our world—is the stage where the divine comedy is acted out.
“Everybody who has read Wise Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist,” O’Connor complained in a letter to a friend. In fact, she wrote, she was “a hillbilly Thomist.” The raw material of her fiction was the lowest common denominator of American culture, but the sensibility that shaped the hillbilly raw material into art shared more in common with Thomas Aquinas and the other great minds of the Catholic tradition than with any practitioner of American letters, high or low. Nobody was doing what she was doing.
While O’Connor was working on Wise Blood, she got sideways with an editor named John Selby at Reinhardt, the publisher that originally planned to publish the book. Selby recommended that she make huge changes to Wise Blood in order to make it more palatable to readers. In response to his suggestions, O’Connor wrote,
I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. … In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise.
This is a remarkable communication, for two reasons at least:
First, Flannery O’Connor was twenty-three years old and unpublished. She was writing to a man who would seem to have the power of life and death over her debut novel. Even at that point in her career, O’Connor was so committed to her peculiar vision that she could not be swayed by anyone who would ask her to compromise for the sake of the market.
Second, consider that phrase, “the peculiarity or aloneness…of the experience I write from.” Don’t picture her writing from the dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived with her mother and a flock of peacocks. She wrote this letter from the storied Yaddo artists’ colony, where she was working alongside such literary lights as Robert Lowell and Malcolm Cowley. She was fresh off three years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then as now one of the most-respected MFA programs in the country. Certain tastemakers in the literary establishment were already welcoming her and recognizing her as one of the great talents. When she wrote to Selby of her aloneness, she was writing from a place very near the epicenter of American letters. From very early in her career, she jealously guarded her aloneness, her peculiarity, for her peculiarity was the peculiarity of a prophet. Her voice was the voice of one crying in the wilderness.
Perhaps the surest measure of O’Connor’s sense of calling was her willingness to be misunderstood. She didn’t expect her literary audience to understand what she was up to. She wrote, “Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.”
Nor was she especially bothered when her co-religionists misunderstood her—which was just as well, for almost all of the Christians who knew her work misunderstood it. A “real ugly” letter from a woman in Boston was typical: “She said she was a Catholic and so she couldn’t understand how anybody could even have such thoughts.”
O’Connor made it clear in her letters and essays, however, that she wrote such shocking fiction not in spite of her Christian faith, but because of it. She wrote what she saw, and she saw a world that was broken beyond self-help or “Instant Uplift”—but a world also in which transcendence was forever threatening to break through, welcome or not. O’Connor set herself, therefore, against not only the religious skeptic, but also against the religious believer who thinks that “the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him.”
O’Connor’s challenge, her calling, was to offer up the truths of the faith to a world that, to her way of thinking, had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths. She wrote,
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—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
To smugness and self-reliance and self-satisfaction in all its forms—from pseudo-intellectualism to pharisaism to fundamentalism to the false gospel of post-war optimism, with its positive thinking gurus and its can-do advice columnists and its faith in modern science—O’Connor’s fiction shouts, “Thus saith the Lord!”
The violence, the sudden death, the ugliness in O’Connor’s fiction are large figures drawn for the almost-blind. If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers.
In O’Connor’s unique vision, the physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a place where grace still does its work. In fact, it is exactly the place where grace does its work. Truth tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout.
Biographer Brad Gooch has pointed out that the phrase “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” has entered the vernacular as a kind of shorthand to describe “a funny, dark, askew moment.” He might have added that the phrase is also used to describe a wide range of phenomena around the edges of American culture, from religious manias to violent crimes to family dysfunction and reality-TV freakishness of every stripe.
“Like something out of Flannery O'Connor” is a wave of the hand and a wink that says, We already know what to think about this person, about this situation, don’t we? We already know what to think about Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists and trailer-park criminals and Florida Man, just as we already know what to think about serial killers and backwater racists and ignorant Bible salesmen who stump from country town to country town.
Except that, in O’Connor’s fiction, it turns out that we don’t know what to think about them after all. Her fanatics and freaks can never safely be ignored or dismissed, for they have the unsettling habit of telling the truth. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit understands things about Jesus that the grandmother never has. The freak-show hermaphrodite in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has a grasp on theological truths that have eluded the good Catholics in the story. Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes may or may not be crazy in the head, but his heart pumps a “wise blood” that finally brings him back to the ultimate truth that he tries so strenuously to escape.
In common usage, “like something out of Flannery O’Connor” is a license not to take a person or situation very seriously. But O’Connor DID take her grotesque characters seriously. “They seem to carry an invisible burden,” she wrote; “their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity.” When we gawk at O’Connor’s characters and mock them, it is easy to assume that O’Connor must be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however, that O’Connor is mocking US. In The Violent Bear It Away, Old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for baptizing children without their parents’ or guardians’ approval. His nephew, the enlightened schoolteacher Rayber, is convinced that the old man is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O’Connor, not so much. “The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher,” she wrote, “but it is the old man who speaks for me.”
In Flannery O'Connor’s body of work, there are as many kinds of misfit and maimed soul as there are stories—the street preacher, the prostitute, the moonshiner, the serial killer, the hermaphrodite, the idiot, the bumpkin, the false prophet, the reluctant prophet, the refugee, the amputee, the con man, the monomaniac, the juvenile delinquent. Perhaps the phrase “like something out of Flannery O'Connor” is so widely applicable because there is such a wide range of characters in her fiction.
But there is one other character type that appears in O’Connor’s short stories at least as often as the freak. Most of her stories involve a figure who is convinced that he or she already knows what to think, whose certainty and self-righteousness have been a shield against the looming reality of sin and judgment and redemption. Joy-Hulga, the one-legged philosopher in “Good Country People.” Julian, the social justice warrior in “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Asbury, the invalid and failed artist in “The Enduring Chill.” Throughout O’Connor’s body of work, the complacent and self-reliant are confronted with a choice: they can clutch at their own righteousness like a drowning man clutching at a cinder block, or they can let it go, admit that they have been fools, and so enter into life.
So the central figure in O’Connor’s fiction, as it turns out, is neither the freak nor the fanatic nor the felon, but the Pharisee. If we cannot see ourselves in the lunatics and deviants, surely we can see ourselves in the upright and the self-assured who turn out to be so wrong about themselves and the people around them.
Which is to say, we have all been, one way or another, like something out of Flannery O'Connor.
O’Connor speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She’s like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to “Comfort ye my people.” Except for this: there is a kind of comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That’s what happens in every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories: in moments of extremity, self-satisfied, self-sufficient characters finally come to see the truth of their situation. They are accountable to a great God who is the source of all. They inhabit mysteries that are too great for them. And for the first time, there is hope, even if they don’t understand it yet.
Jonathan Rogers is the host of The Habit Membership and The Habit Podcast: Conversations with Writers About Writing. Every Tuesday he sends out The Habit Weekly, a letter for writers. (Find out more at TheHabit.co.) He is the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor, as well as the Wilderking Trilogy, The Charlatan’s Boy, and other books. He has contributed to the Rabbit Room since its inception.