Remembering Flannery O'Connor

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 6/16/05)

"She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true."

It's hard to imagine anybody writing that sentence, with its splendid mixture of dead-pan humor and barely suppressed indignation, except Flannery O'Connor. It occurs in "Greenleaf," one of the stories in the collection of O'Connor tales called Everything That Rises Must Converge, first published in 1965, the year after her death.

The 40th anniversary of a book may not strike everyone as a highly noteworthy event, but for admirers of O'Connor this anniversary is. Four decades have not dimmed but enhanced the luster of the nine stories in Everything That Rises — as indeed they have the totality of their author's slender literary output: two novels (Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away) and another book of short fiction (A Good Man Is Hard to Find).

Flannery O'Connor was a Southerner and a Catholic, and both of those things served her well as a writer. Catholicism provided her with a theological vision of life. The South supplied a cultural setting in which the acting-out of such a vision by people ill-equipped to grasp it was a believable, if not exactly normal, occurrence. "All of my stories," she explained in one of her remarkable letters, "are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it."

Some people find reading O'Connor an upsetting experience, and it's easy to see why. Brutal, shocking violence often is central to the stories she tells. So, in Everything That Rises, a 9-year-old girl attacks her grandfather and he kills her, an elderly farm woman is gored to death by a bull belonging to her hired man's sons, a small boy mourning his dead mother hangs himself. This isn't light entertainment for the beach.

Why did she write about such disturbing things? The answer, she once explained, lay in the peculiar problem that today confronts "the novelist with Christian concerns."

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways 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."

There's no comprehending O'Connor without reference to the fact that she was a committed Catholic. "I write the way I do because and only because I am a Catholic," she said. "I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything … . Being a Catholic has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning to write."

O'Connor was 39 when she died. It's tempting to speculate on what she might have written had she lived. As it is, her achievement was enormous. She was, quite simply, one of the very finest writers of her generation and with Walker Percy, who died in 1990, one of two world-class American Catholic fiction writers of the last half-century.

O'Connor and Percy have had no successors so far, and none is currently in sight. Literature is the product of a culture as well as individual genius, and the collapse of the American Catholic subculture that set in around the time of Flannery O'Connor's death appears to have been inimical to literature as well as to faith.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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