Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Flannery O’Connor’s Tales of Evil and Grace, by (Jennifer Frey (Dean, Tulsa)):
Flannery O’Connor, arguably the best Catholic writer this country ever produced, was born 100 years ago March 25 in Savannah, Ga. Her short life was marked by profound suffering: She was 15 when her father died of lupus and 25 when she was diagnosed with the same disease, which would end her life at 39. Her grief gave her an insight into the power of God’s grace—that it could be violent but also revelatory and redemptive. Her experience with the mystery of suffering would become the enduring theme of her fiction.
O’Connor’s work can’t be understood apart from her imaginative Catholic vision. She attended Mass daily and read St. Thomas Aquinas before bed every evening. Because of the violence O’Connor made her outlandish Southern characters endure, a critic once described her as a hillbilly nihilist. She protested that “hillbilly Thomist” was more apt, because she wrote happy stories thick with the promise of God’s mercy. O’Connor believed that although we are fallen, we are still good, and if we freely cooperate with God’s grace, our nature can be perfected in union with him. …
O’Connor aimed to shock her reader every bit as much as she was shocked by grace at an early age. She wrote “grotesque Southern fiction” because she thought her characters needed to confront the mysteries of evil and grace, and she believed this confrontation must be violent and comic to her secular and “Christ haunted” audience. One of her most famous characters, the Misfit, is a criminal on the run, haunted by the idea that Christ “did what He said.” Before the man kills a grandmother and her family, he complains to her that “it ain’t right I wasn’t there” at Calvary, because belief in Christ would have made him a good man. In this unexpected moment of confession, the grandmother is able to see the Misfit as “one of her own children” and worthy of an infinite love. …
In all her fiction, there are moments of profound change, of grace breaking through the defenses people have put up against it. That divine influence often works to purify people in cruel, violent ways. O’Connor thought this revealed a deep truth about human nature—that we “vigorously” resist grace because it “changes us and the change is painful.” There is no way to clarity in her writing except through the painful transfiguration of suffering. Thus her characters are, for example, gored by bulls, shot, humiliated, attacked, abandoned or murdered. …
The key to understanding and appreciating her fiction is to see that it engages with a deep mystery: that the suffering on Calvary, and all human suffering, is redemptive. For her, the problem of evil doesn’t admit of tidy philosophical or theological solutions; it is a mystery that must be endured. As a fiction writer, O’Connor believed it necessary to have her readers confront “mystery as it is incarnated in human life” through an imaginative vision that pays careful attention to our sensed experience. If we approach her writing with this in mind, we will have a deeper appreciation of the large and startling figures she so memorably drew.
The Dispatch, A Century of Flannery O’Connor:
The flattening of Jesus to suit the topical is emblematic of the flattening of much of life to suit the political. Only a few years ago, one of the most influential artists of our time, Lin-Manuel Miranda argued that “All art is political. In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political.” I don’t have to imagine what O’Connor would say to that, because she actually already responded, back in 1963: “The topical is poison…. A plague on everybody’s house.” Indeed, perhaps in this age of topical overdose, we should get back to reading Flannery O’Connor.
When O’Connor was in her early 20s, studying writing at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, she began jotting down her prayers in a journal. A cradle Catholic who was literally born in the shadow of a church in Savannah, O’Connor had been saying prayers all her life. But she admits in this journal to a new endeavor: that she wants “Christian principles [to] permeate [her] writing.” In one prescient line of vulnerability, she begs God, “Please help me get down under things and find where you are.” O’Connor wrote about her particular time and place—the deep South in the 1950s and ‘60s—but she did so by digging under things and pulling to the surface the truest, most lasting reality.
In this way, O’Connor’s fiction has more in common with the great artists of the past like Aeschylus or Shakespeare than her contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway or Truman Capote. Whereas these popular writers mostly wrote about politics and current events with skepticism about the human condition, her writing turns the gaze on the reader and says, “Who are you—good or evil? Human or demon? Selfless or Selfish? What have you got to say for yourself?” As the voice of her character Ruby Turpin echoes across the field in her short story “Revelation” and returns to her like the voice of God, “Who do you think you are?” It is the central question of O’Connor’s stories—and the one we all must answer.
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