Angela Ailamo ODonnell - Flannery OConnor: fiction fired by faith

Introduction

Flannery OConnor is, perhaps, the most celebrated American Catholic writer of the twentieth centuryand justly so. The author of thirty-two short stories, two novels, insightful essays on the craft of fiction, and hundreds of splendid, literary letters, OConnor devoted herself to her vocation as artist and belongs to that unusual breed of writer who gains critical acclaim during her lifetime. That recognition is hard won for OConnor, as the literary establishment is generally suspicious of writers who claim allegiance to a particular faith. On more than one occasion, readers of her work remarked on her Catholicism, and not in a complimentary way. In 1972, when her publisher Robert Giroux was preparing himself to receive the National Book Award OConnor was posthumously awarded for her Collected Stories, an author startled him by inquiring whether he genuinely valued her work: Do you really think Flannery OConnor was a great writer? Shes such a Roman Catholic! The implication is clear: being a practicing Catholic somehow disqualifies a writer from serious consideration, as if ones art is marred by belief in God or ones mind is compromised by adherence to the teachings of the churchor both.

Despite this deep cultural prejudice against Catholicsa prejudice that has flourished in America from its early Puritan beginningsOConnor managed to write fiction that was so arresting and original that perceptive readers could not help but recognize her genius. During her brief lifetimecut sadly short by lupus, the disease she suffered with for thirteen years before her death at age thirty-nineshe won many awards for her fiction, including grants from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Ford Foundation, a fellowship from the Kenyon Review , and several O. Henry awards . As mentioned above, her posthumous collection, The Complete Stories, received the National Book Award in 1972. This extraordinary event marked a break with traditionthe award, usually given to a living writer, was granted to OConnors work by the judges to honor her lifetime achievement. Clearly, as both an American writer and as a Catholic writer, Flannery OConnor has achieved a rare distinction: recognition of the value of her work by the literary establishment as well as by readers in search of a voice and vision that can articulate the challenges of enacting belief in a culture of unbelief.

Finding Flannery

It seems some account of my own relationship to Flannery OConnors work is in orderand Im going to begin with a spoiler.

When I first encountered OConnors fiction as an undergraduate English major at a secular university, I didnt know she was Catholic. We read her signature story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in a literature course, along with works by other celebrated authors, including Henry James, William Faulkner, and Vladamir Nabokov. A strange tale, depicting a road trip that goes horribly wrong when the family encounters a serial killer along the back roads of Georgia, OConnors story is both humorous and terrifying. The main character, a garrulous old grandmother regarded as a nuisance and a busybody by her family, is slightly ridiculous. She is the kind of woman who sneaks her cat into the car (hidden in her hippopotamus-shaped suitcase) because she is afraid hell accidentally turn on the gas stove in her absence and asphyxiate himself, the kind of woman who wears a nice dress, gloves, and a fancy hat when she travels in case she should get into an accident so that anyone who might see her lying dead on the side of the road will know that she is a lady. At the end of the story, this absurd woman comes face-to-face with her own doom in the form of a bespectacled outlaw called The Misfit who is tortured by his inability to believe in God. Much to her grief and disbelief, the man has led her entire family into the woods and summarily executed each member. All of this is remarkable, to say the leastnot the kind of story one reads every day. But what is most remarkable is the grandmothers response to the Misfits near-tears expression of his spiritual agony. Amid her urgings that he must have faith in the God he doubts, she extends her hand in attempt to comfort him, referring to him as one of my own babies, whereupon he promptly shoots her three times in the chest. The last we see of the grandmother, she is lying dead in a ditch, her legs crossed beneath her and her face turned up towards the blue Georgia sky. She is smiling.

As a nineteen-year-old reader, relatively unschooled in the ways of literary criticism, I had no idea what to make of such a story. Was I supposed to feel sorry for the grandmother and her family? (Truth be told, they were foolish and annoying enough to stretch any readers patience.) Was I was supposed to despise the Misfit? (He was a terrible man, but he was also agonized by his unbelief.) Was I supposed to laugh at the comic touches that coexist side-by-side with the tragic reality of a serial killing? (The fact that the grandmothers son, Bailey, wears a ridiculous yellow shirt with large blue parakeets on it as he disappears into the woodsand that his killer emerges from the woods wearing that same shirtseemed grimly funny and horrible at the same time.) Was I supposed to think the grandmother deranged in her response to the Misfits spiritual crisis? (She was, in fact, traumatized by the days events.) Or was this a calculated, last-ditch effort to save herself? (The old woman could be cagey, selfish, and manipulative.) Finally, how was I supposed to make sense of these apparently senseless deaths?

OConnors story shocked us all, back then, and as a longtime professor of literature, I can attest that it still shocks students today. (Yes, even now, despite their exposure to many more images of brutality represented in film and on television than college-age students of my generation had ever seen.) I wanted to understand what this writer was up to, but my English professor at the time didnt provide very much help. We examined the story as one of many stories we read that semester, each of which contained unaccountable ambiguities. There were no satisfying answers to the questions we posed. Instead, we were to accept the strangeness and move on.

A few years later, when I encountered OConnors work again as a graduate student studying literature, I learned that she was Catholic. In addition, she was a Catholic born and raised in the (then) largely anti-Catholic South. Interestingly, I happened to be enrolled in a Southern university at the time and had witnessed, firsthand, how rare Catholics were in that part of the world. Having grown up in the Northeast in a region where the dominant religion was Catholicism, this sensation of not belonging was new to me. For the first time in my life, as a Catholic I was considered foreign and exotic. Suddenly, in my new environment, I was able to re-see Flannery OConnor as a fellow Catholic-in-exile (though perhaps I was being a shade dramatic) and to re-see her stories, including A Good Man Is Hard to Find, as the work of an unmistakably Catholic writer.

Viewed through the lens of OConnors faith, I came to understand the story in an entirely new light. In the simplest terms, what she had captured so powerfully and hauntingly in the conflict between the grandmother and the Misfit was the struggle between faith and doubt in the face of human suffering. The story was not an isolated tale of horror, but a universal moral drama, an externalized psychomachia representing the battle that goes on in every human soul. I recognized the grandmothers foolishness as garden variety human folly, the familys intolerance of her typical of intergenerational family dynamics, and the fate that befalls them all as the result of dumb, blind chanceevents terrible, undeserved, yet somehow inevitable. This was a representation of the human condition, though expressed in the most vivid and local terms. It was also an expression of the human plight: Evil exists in the world, in this case in the form of the Misfit, and it is often performed by people who dont seem particularly evil. Far from being consummate devils, readily recognizable by horns and hoofs, they are ordinary, awkward, foolish human beings, often more like us than not. This shared capacity for good and for evil is precisely what the grandmother in the story recognizes, what causes an upwelling of compassion in her, and what compels her to reach out to the Misfit. Seen in the context of Catholic theology, I understood the Grandmothers final actions not as a crazy womans delusional gesture, but as a sign of her conversion and transformation, the action of grace in her soul. The last gesture in the life of this selfish woman is a self-forgetful expression of love. Yes, it gets her killedbecause the world OConnor depicts is, after all, the real world, and serial killers are killers. But by her actions, her life is redeemed. Her death, therefore, is not a tragedyquite the contrary. (Hence the crossed legs and the smile.) The depiction of her at the end of the story indicates the peace of mind and heart she has found through her Christlike action. Here, too, is a reminder of both the real world and the ways in which it is a challenge to live ones faith in that world: Christ was crucified for his unaccountable gestures of lovewhy should his followers expect any different treatment? OConnor, herself, confirms this understanding of the story. In a letter to her friend Elizabeth Hester she writes: It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a characters changing.... All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal.... Clearly, OConnor sees hope in the actions of her characters where others (mistakenly) see despair.