Flannery
O’Connor
(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro
All Rights Reserved.
Greatly admiring Joseph Conrad, Flannery O’Connor adopted his definition of art as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.” For her, the invisible universe, or the reality of divinity, penetrated every facet of the visible universe and gave each facet its meaning. According to O’Connor, fiction “should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete observable reality.”
This central purpose of her writing has at least two consequences. It explains her rendition in her brilliant short stories of a constantly recurring divine comedy: most of her characters, when challenged to grow beyond their limited and self-centered perspectives, fail to respond to grace and, indeed, actively reject its moral imperative. Dramatizing this rejection of the divine imperative, O’Connor’s sledgehammer prose style bludgeons the reader, who emerges from her stories both highly amused and deeply shocked. No one can quickly forget stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Parker’s Back,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Enduring Chill,” or the utterly stunning “The Displaced Person.”
However, her reputation as a Roman Catholic author may seem to form a barrier between O’Connor and many readers. So far from being naïve about this barrier, she knowingly and intentionally wrote, not primarily for a Catholic audience, but instead for a public that scorned her beliefs. I myself think that a reader’s acceptance or rejection of Roman Catholic dogma is irrelevant to an enjoyment and appreciation of O’Connor’s stories. Anyone—atheist, agnostic, Christian, Jew, or other believer—who believes in a moral imperative and understands the moral struggles of human beings can understand O’Connor’s vivid dramatization of moral challenges.
Most of these characters who fail to respond to grace are Southern whites, usually evangelical Protestants but sometimes unbelievers. Mrs. Turpin, a saved Christian in “Revelation,” is an exception. She accepts the point of her own shattering experience: that the spiritual pride of the righteous and the saved blinds them to their human puniness and inadequacy in the divine gaze. In her vision of the saved on Judgment Day, “she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” For anyone seeking to interpret O’Connor, “Revelation” provides a touchstone by portraying Mrs. Turpin’s brave and admirable self-encounter.
