Flannery O'Connor Revisited

She was strictly and devoutly Catholic in word and deed, and she considered this the defining quality of her work. By all accounts, the woman was parochial, provincial, a reactionary of sorts, one whose gaze was--against the grain--retrospective at the dawn of the postmodern era. In short, it seems that she was the kind of person whose insight into the lives of others must of necessity be circumscribed by the limitations of her own experience and attitudes. How remarkable, then, that Flannery O'Connor produced a body of work that is so powerful, so compelling to a broad literary audience, so recognizably full of grace in so many ways.

With the publication of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, the details of O'Connor's life and work have been thrust into the spotlight. What's going on is not so much a reassessment as it is a pronouncement in the popular press of O'Connor's status as a canonical figure. Joy Williams and Joyce Carol Oates have both written reviews of Gooch's book, in The New York Times Book Review and in The New York Review of Books, respectively, and though each takes a different tack in approaching the subject, their common admiration for O'Connor overtakes in each case what the reviewer has to say about Gooch's work.

For me, there is no doubt of O'Connor's greatness. The question is, what makes her great? How to qualify that greatness in the face of her many limitations?

To some extent, O'Connor boasts the appeal of the idiosyncratic. Hers was a vision complete in and of itself, reliant on no one else's. There is the quirkiness of her prose, of her characters. Consider, for instance, this description of Hazel Motes, the protagonist of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, as he sits perched behind the wheel of his beat-up fifty-dollar car:

"His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth."

The three-part visual description grows increasingly complex as it goes along, ending on a less-certain note than the one with which it begins. The last part seems a little clumsy at first--a face being compared with a door and not with the face behind the door--but in the context of O'Connor's writing it works somehow. The phrasing resembles something one of her characters might have said, especially the colloquial "where" instead of the more formal "in which." This last description also follows through on the notion of "closed up," and it is striking for the way it adds a notion of powerlessness to our understanding of Hazel Motes' character. There is a sense that there is someone else tied up inside of Hazel Motes, trying to get out. Here's a guy who is struggling to control himself, struggling to shake the ragged, bumming Christ that rattles around in the back of his head. He can't do it, though. In this particular instance, the Jesus that Hazel Motes sees is less stubborn revenant (as described as elsewhere in the novel) than he is two-bit gangster thug. Not that O'Connor would have agreed.

An offhand-seeming description of some roadside trees early on in O'Connor's famous short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" provides, for me, the most memorable example of O'Connor's skill as a writer: "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." This line takes on a powerful resonance later on, when we find out that this story is precisely about how the meanest of things bears the hope of redemption.

This last point demands some further consideration along thematic lines. O'Connor ought, on the surface, to appeal only to her fellow Catholics. What about those of us who do not subscribe to O'Connor's narrowly-defined but pervasive notion of spiritual salvation? What redeems O'Connor as a writer is the ability of her stories and novels-and even some of her nonfiction--to withstand secular readings. The finely-honed details of her prose are perhaps the primary component here, along with the saving grace that, though the stories develop Catholic spiritual themes, O'Connor's characters are almost exclusively Protestant--specifically, God-haunted borderline-lunatic Southern Protestants. There is in her writing always a certain distance between the keenly perceptive but far-away third-person objective narrator O'Connor typically employed and the characters themselves.* Together, these factors create enough gaps--between the author's attitude and the story itself, between the story and the characters--that one can creep into the reading with another perspective. Based on the growing critical response to her work (Oates cites statistics such as the number of dissertations on O'Connor registered by the Library of Congress), the consensus seems to be that O'Connor's work does withstand a secular approach. O'Connor transcends herself. She would, it seems, based on her nonfiction writings and her biography, not be so happy herself to know that. When she talked Jesus, she meant it; she aimed at a narrow readership.

Beyond all of this, there is something else at work, something about the notion of salvation that bears a strong inherent appeal to a broad audience, religious and secular alike. Just as early strains of evangelicalism in America morphed into Transcendentalism, the notion of personal salvation--an inward transformation to a better self--has writ large become a deeply entrenched component of modern culture (cf. Oprah and Tyra Banks for the latest pop-culture incarnations of this phenomenon). I think it safe to say that it requires a jaded and cynical person to take no stock in any concept of redemption or salvation at any level--not even a wholly secular conception of these notions. O'Connor's idea of grace, represented most effectively in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by the grandmother in her final moments, bears with it a semi-universal appeal that O'Connor herself did not quite intend. Who would not like to believe that in the last seconds of your life, you could be transformed into a figure of goodness? Don't we imperfect humans deserve such a chance? O'Connor's stories give this chance to us.

The other category of limitations that falls on O'Connor has to do with her intense Southern-ness. It is disappointing to find out that O'Connor was no more progressive in her racial attitudes than most other Southerners of her time--but then again, it may well be the gravest of mistakes to look to writers and artists for lessons in morality, and the fact of O'Connor's unsurprising racial insensitivity has little bearing on what we see in her writing. Her characters prove to be almost without exception racist, but what else would we expect of characters whose primary feature is most often their mean-spiritedness--"mean" in every sense: not just cruel, full of anger and outrage, but little and weak, in need of a moment of grace.

Unlike William Faulkner, whose shadow she self-consciously labored in, O'Connor never seemed to espouse a sense of the mythic qualities of the Southern Gothic--her native postage stamp of soil was to her precisely that, and not some ahistorical microcosm of the larger world--not, like Shakespeare's stage, a timeless place that speaks of the universal. Her vision was precise and wedded to the soil. And yet we have as a culture always identified with the South as a bedrock of American culture, especially in terms of popular music, most all American forms of which originate in the South. Perhaps the South, in O'Connor and in American culture at large, serves as a kind of exaggeration of the landscape the rest of us live in. The South is America, only more so. It's problems are our own problems amplified: poverty, racism, a struggle to overcome the past, a complicated religious heritage.

Finally, we must consider O'Connor's deliberate use of caricature and the grotesque. O'Connor's most famous statement about her own work is on the nature of the grotesque: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Thus the sometimes stunning violence and depravity of her writing, and thus Oates' description of O'Connor as most-gifted of cartoon artists. For O'Connor, the modern audience is hard of hearing to the Word and nearly blind to the truth--she would do anything to catch our eyes. Seeing and blindness, in fact, figure prominently as symbols in Wise Blood. Sabbath Hawks, the daughter of a preacher who pretends to be blind in order to establish ethos with his audience, says of Hazel Motes, "I like his eyes ... They don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking." Hazel Motes (whose very name evokes the image of eyes, hazel being an eye color and a mote being something that, according to Hamlet, troubles "the mind's eye") seeks to look beyond, and to do so is to recognize the paucity of literal sight; in effect it means to have an inward-looking eye. Motes seeks to establish the truth in his own mind, and he literally blinds himself in an attempt to achieve this.

Ultimately, these stories and novels work because O'Connor was, perhaps without her realizing it herself, a kind of neo-Platonist. By calling her a neo-Platonist, I mean specifically that she believed that the truth--for O'Connor, a religious truth--exists somewhere beyond the grasp of our senses, and that it is only through an inward experience that one comes to know somehow of this truth. For Plato, this inward experience was the true philosopher's use of reason; for O'Connor, as for Jonathan Edwards and every evangelical since, it was the spiritual transfiguration--to be inhabited by grace, to be born again.

O'Connor also believed in mystery in the Catholic sense, though, which is epistemological uncertainty in the philosophical sense, and which many American Protestants don't seem to be especially susceptible to today. What any Platonist gives us, in the end, is images--appearances--and not reality, for it is only through applying the power of the mind to these images that we can establish the truths that lie beyond them; it is only through the imperfections that surround us that we can come to understand these same things elsewhere in their perfect form. No one can give us truth; we must find it ourselves. Thus images are the essence of artistry. The reality that O'Connor believed in contains moral truths, but these are not what she gives us in her writing because art--despite every contrary intention of the artist--will continue to have nothing to do with such things.

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*O'Connor herself claimed a bit of powerlessness here, speaking of how her characters were always off and getting themselves killed as though she could do nothing about it.