The Georgia fiction writer Flannery O’Connor is more relevant to the turmoil of today’s American culture than she was in a life cut short by lupus in 1964. This idea is apparent in a just-released documentary about her short 39-year life, titled Flannery, which now is available online.
In her day, the two novels and just over 30 short stories she wrote before her untimely death were thought puzzling and odd. Much of her work was published in the 1950s and early 1960s in a culture trained by Hollywood to expect fiction to be distracting entertainment.
O’Connor never saw distraction as her mission. Writing, she famously said, should be a plunge into reality that shocks the system.
And shock she did. Her biting parody of embittered American racists and religious zealots at first alienated some newspaper critics in the 1950s. They recoiled from O’Connor’s frank realism at a time when McCarthyism had turned the aping of official fantasy into a daily survival skill. Even O’Connor’s own mother wondered aloud why her daughter didn’t write about “nice people.”
At first, only academic literary scholars and experienced publishers recognized her status as one of the most gifted American writers of the Twentieth Century. Time would prove them right.
O’Connor’s stories were disquieting because they challenged a widespread preference for psychological denial that gripped Americans in the post-World War II era and has never fully lifted. O’Connor was writing in a day when Americans largely agreed it was a civic duty to look the other way whenever obvious race- and religion-based bigotry became impossible to square with national ideals of equality and fairness.
If there is any progress from that day to now, it is in the fact that this act of denial has itself become controversial. Perhaps that is why the torn landscape of current American politics makes O’Connor’s fiction look eerily prophetic.
Her keen insight into persistent trends in American life is even more compelling because her fiction is based on a deep but understated sense of Christian tradition. It is a tradition at odds with much of what constitutes the more severe forms of today’s American religious zealotry. And it is the source of much of the remaining criticism still leveled at O’Connor.
One of the most telling and false criticisms of O’Connor is that her work was anti-religious and nihilistic. Some of her fictional characters certainly are that way, but she herself never was. In fact, she was a devout Catholic who attended mass faithfully. And her stories themselves are nearly all expositions of the ancient Christian concept of grace with its implications of surrender, forgiveness, and redemption.
What confuses many readers is the intensity of O’Connor’s realism and her outright refusal to frame her stories as step-by-step morality tales. She is not didactic. She shows but does not tell. It is up to the reader to draw conclusions about the way grace finds its way into the crabbed lives of her characters, to explode their bigotry and the religious zealotry they often use to conceal base impulses like narcissism.
Strict realism leads O’Connor to tell her stories from within the shortsighted biases of the world her characters inhabit. Hasty readers may view this approach as an approval of these biases. But O’Connor actually is leading the reader to see how these biases have brought the characters into a fallen state that requires the redemptive power of grace.
Some still continue to criticize O’Connor for her realistic portrayals of racist terminology and thought from the 1950s and 1960s, which today are no longer tolerated. But as one of the commentators says in the documentary, O’Connor’s stories show in a vivid way how racism hurts racists and how pride leads to a fall that requires the intervention of grace.
Her characters only find grace when they are at long last able to realize their kinship even with the downtrodden, the outcast, and the despised. In O’Connor’s world, grace is not a happily-ever-after moment. It is a confrontation with the need for redemption as throttling as Christianity’s ultimate image of grace in action. And that is the crucifixion of Jesus.
You can access the video online: https://www.flanneryfilm.com/
Robert Craig Waters 