SOURCE: Kinney, Arthur F. “Flannery O'Connor and the Fiction of Grace.” Massachusetts Review 27, no. 1 (spring 1986): 71-96.

[In the following essay, Kinney considers the role of grace in O'Connor's fiction.]

Flannery O'Connor claimed always to be writing fiction about the extraordinary moments of God's grace, when it touches even the most maimed, deformed, or unregenerate of people—especially those; proper Christian literature, she remarked, is always “an invitation to deeper and stranger visions.” Yet however willingly the most devoted and admiring reader might listen to her talk about her art, precisely those extraordinary moments have always been, at the least, troubling. Even Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk for whom she sustained great respect and whose books she bought and read, had his difficulties. He could say of one of her finest stories, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” that her fiction often seemed to him “strangely scrambled.”

The good people are bad and the bad people tend to be less bad than they seem. … Her crazy people while remaining as crazy as they can possibly be, turn out to be governed by a strange kind of sanity. In the end, it is the sane ones who are incurable lunatics. The “good,” the “right” and the “kind” do all the harm.

She was herself perpetually disturbed by what she jokingly, pointedly called her “monstrous reader,” the one “who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don't get it, I don't see it, I don't want it.’” As early in her abbreviated career as 1955 she was writing her good friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, “I just read another review from a Kansas City paper that ended with the sentence: ‘These stories are technically excellent; spiritually empty.’”

But there are reasons for such confusion. In O'Connor's fictional world God seems to us to spend his grace on the unlikeliest of people. Often they do not appear to deserve His blessing; almost as often they appear to learn nothing from it (or, if they do, we are not told about it). Nor is grace dramatized as a dazzling joy, a sweep of awareness. Rather, it can come in an act of random violence, a forceful accident, a blinding pain. It can be unexpected, intrusive, unwanted, ignored, baffling, misidentified, forgotten. It can bring suffering, wretchedness, even annihilation. Walter Sullivan, in a study aptly titled Death by Melancholy, has calculated its awesome price: “Of the nineteen stories [she revised and preserved in her two collections] nine end in the violent death of one or more persons. Three others end in, or present near the end, physical assaults that result in bodily injury. Of the remaining seven, one ends in arson, another in the theft of a wooden leg, another in car theft and wife abandonment.” Two other works—the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away—involve murder; the “mature novel” adds arson and rape as well. Frederick Asals has recently attempted to rescue O'Connor's reputation by saying that the fiction catches us unawares by being anthropotropic rather than (as we have every right to expect) theotropic. But surely many of us refuse, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” to believe that the grandmother, in a sudden wrench of compassion for a mad killer, is deservedly shot; or that young Harry Ashfield/Bevel in “The River,” in seeking the Kingdom of Christ, joyously drowns himself in an act the Catholic Church would condemn; or that Joy/Hulga of “Good Country People,” left helpless in a barnloft, robbed of her artificial leg some distance from her home and stranded, invalid, no longer whole, by a Bible salesman with pornographic playing cards and a box of contraceptives, is justly treated.

“Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards [with obscene pictures] and the blue box [of contraceptives] into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself.

When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I've gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman's glass eye this way. And you needn't to think you'll catch me because Pointer ain't really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don't stay nowhere long. And I'll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn't think much of it, “you ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.

This is the last we see of Joy, who had named herself Hulga out of spiteful self-hatred and shame. Her gaze is fixed on her betrayer from whom she has just learned that she cannot escape the name Joy. It is an ironic birthright for a girl whose sensitivity has yet to understand its depths of meaning just as her vision of a man walking on water—but now a devilish “blue figure” on a snakelike lake—suggests that Hulga still senses the awful gap between perfection and her own shortcomings. But (perhaps surprisingly) this is not the end of the story. That concludes (at this point) by returning to Joy/Hulga's mother and her friend.

Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway. “Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”

Mrs. Freeman's gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can't be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”

We can smile (with condescension?) at Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman whose armor of self-complacency protects them from recognizing the devil in their midst and whose staunch pride produces conversation both ignorant and (therefore) banal. If we are accustomed to O'Connor's fiction, we can also accept the devil contributing to the work of the Lord by providing Joy/Hulga with her moment of grace—the moment when she must confront herself and take true measure—without himself being aware of it. But how, we must think or demand, can anyone with any compassion, including O'Connor, have anything but sympathy for this crippled woman (she is 32) who is humbled in a way that is comic, desperate, and even more grotesque than her fumbling joys at being courted? Perhaps it is O'Connor who has herself made grace grotesque, who has got the notion of grace all wrong.

2

It seems preposterous, even on the surface, to think of Flannery O'Connor seriously warping a fundamental doctrine of the Church to which she ardently dedicated her life. She grew up in Savannah living in the shadow of the great spire of the Catholic cathedral and attending its convent school. When she later moved to Milledgeville, in central Georgia, she watched an equally devout family actively support the Catholic parish and contribute to the building of the parish church. Her library, now at Georgia College, is jammed with books on theology, on Church history, on interpretations of Catholic dogma; her letters (collected as The Habit of Being) display everywhere a concern with her faith even more passionate than a concern for her fiction. In the gospels, the book parodied by the salesman's bottle, O'Connor writes to Sister Mariella Gable in a letter dated May 4, 1963, we have testimony that “it was the devils who first recognized Christ and the evangelists didn't censor this information. They apparently thought it was pretty good witness. It scandalizes us when we see the same thing in modern dress only because we have this defensive attitude toward the faith.” Such pronouncements were not uncommon for her: the oddness she felt compelled to write about (she was too humble to think herself inspired) is odd from our perspective, but not from God's. Nor can we think her lacking in sympathy for those invalided by handicap or disease: from the age of 25 until her death at 39, she was increasingly debilitated by the rare and progressive lupus erythematosus, a disease that caused her bones to decay, forced her onto crutches, and finally ate its pain into her hands so that she found it agony to continue writing. The only treatment—there was then no known cure—was by drugs that caused her face to puff up and so disfigured her. Where there is no vengeance wreaked on Joy/Hulga in creating her, then, there may be a kind of awful, wrenching self-projection.

But there is also in the case of Joy/Hulga, and she is representative of most of O'Connor's protagonists, the enactment of a good deal of Augustinian and Thomistic thought; the Confessions and the Summa Theologica (which O'Connor owned) were among her favorite patristic writings. So she knew that for those authors, at least one of them a literary saint of her church, God often visits man in mysterious ways, testing the firmness of strength through unexpected temptation. She knows too that the devil can only appeal to us by encouraging us in the disguise of something good, someone good—such as the fumbling courtship of an itinerant Bible salesman. This pseudonymous tempter could get nowhere if Hulga did not find his caresses attractive, if she did not feel (sinfully) that she deserved and even earned his attention. Reality flees her understanding despite the lofty intelligence she insists best characterizes her. She is, essentially, foolish, as all sinners are foolish for O'Connor. Joy/Hulga's own pride and passion seduce her—as they seduced Augustine in his Confessions—into a compromising situation of her own fashioning: she chooses the barnloft as a place of adoration and sexual advance (in a pointed mockery of the stable where the Immaculate Mother found adoration at the visit of strangers); she willingly gives up her leg to the fondling of this boyish stranger (as the sinner would give up his soul at the slightest provocation). By depriving her in turn of what she has already willingly surrendered—her good intentions, her purity of thought, her stiff pride, her hope to be adored—the Bible salesman with the false name has been only an accomplice in taking from her all the crutches she has used for self-sufficiency. He leaves her, vulnerable and alone, before the Lord. Isn't this, then, the story of the disdain of grace, of grace offered, stoutly denied and perhaps, at the end, ruefully confronted?

“To insure our sense of mystery,” O'Connor once said when visiting Hollins College, “we need a sense of evil which sees the devil as a real spirit who must be made to name himself, and not simply to name himself as vague evil, but to name himself with his specific personality for every occasion,” just as Pointer—the allegory of that name is surely obvious for us—does in the delight of his conquest before departing. His collection of glass eyes and artificial legs are of no functional use to him at all; their utter uselessness are stark tokens of mere sin and pride and they mock him much as Hulga's sudden awareness of her dependence on an artificial limb mocks her sense of superiority. The story of “Good Country People,” like all of O'Connor's stories—following deliberately the model in Hawthorne, whom she admired—are parables of sin and grace, or the absence of grace. If we fail to understand them, it is because we are not finely tuned to the various temptations of an ingenious and pervasive evil which O'Connor would teach us, nor equal to the lessons and significations of God in a material and mundane world that has forgotten or dismissed Him.

Precisely not to let us forget or dismiss—not to let us off the hook of the rugged demands of a faith to which we may only pay lip service—was for O'Connor the challenging, exacting, almost insurmountable cause for her fiction. Even at her most depressed, her most exhausted, and her most anguished moments she never stopped trying to say this, and she never stopped saying it in public lecture and private letter. “The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with this God is how he shall make the experience, which is both natural and supernatural, understandable and credible to his reader,” she said once at Sweetbriar College. “In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well-nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.” In an essay on “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” she added that “the Catholic writer often finds himself writing in and for a world that is unprepared and unwilling to see the meaning of life as he sees it. This means frequently that he may resort to violent literary means to get his vision across … the images and actions he creates may seem distorted and exaggerated.” But if we find the exaggeration of Hulga's final circumstance—in its unusualness, its absurdity—to be funny, then we laugh at an occasion of holy truth which makes us as culpable, as sinful for O'Connor as Hulga. To get away with condemning her readers—to get her readers, even more, to know enough to see themselves in her faltering characters and so condemn themselves: this is the persistent function of her fiction.

3

The function of O'Connor's fiction is to recognize sin for what it is, to get the reader to recognize and condemn sin. But the subject of her fiction, she persistently said, was the action of grace and the manifestation of that was conversion. The painful exposure and surrender of her armored characters comes because the defensive layers of protection helped them get by with a human vulnerability that has already proven painful. There are dozens of comments she left us that make this clear, but here is an earlier one, written in a letter in 1958 to her close but still-anonymous friend “A.”

It seems to me that all good stories are about conversion, about a character's changing. If it is the Church he's converted to, the Church remains stable and he has to change as you say—so why do you also say the character has to remain stable? The action of grace changes a character. Grace can't be experienced in itself. An example: when you go to Communion, you receive grace but you experience nothing; or if you do experience something, what you experience is not the grace but an emotion caused by it … Part of the difficulty of all this is that you write for an audience who doesn't know what grace is and don't recognize it when they see it. 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, etc.

These are the clear, forceful words of a devout believer; throughout her adult life, O'Connor attended Mass whenever she was able, daily said the prayers in her missal, and nightly spent a quarter-hour or more reading the writings of Aquinas before retiring.

O'Connor's chief problem, her primary difficulty, is that, having sensed the meaning of grace herself, she wrote for those who would recognize the discriminating faith at work in her fiction, when the brutal fact is that most of them, as non-Catholic, did not. Worse, the sharp and substantial discrepancies between, say, the Protestant view of grace and the Catholic view actually have prevented her fiction from functioning as she intended. From the days of Calvin and Luther, in fact—from the dawn of the Reformation—Protestants have believed that grace is earned, either through good works or through testimony. For them, grace is God's reciprocal act. By the same token, Calvin especially argued that God's grace is not only a reward which puts Him at the behest of an inferior creature He has created, but more, a free gift which He acknowledges as a kind of Election to be among the sheep and not the goats, the saved and not the damned, at the Day of Judgment. Grace therefore is all-decisive, all-powerful—and irresistible. Its power overwhelms man; we are “showered in grace,” “bathed in grace,” “overcome with grace.” It is never in the devil's power to awaken such a moment (as the Bible salesman is meant to do for Joy/Hulga) or even for human beings or human events to serve as “occasions for grace,” as with Catholic doctrine, but only for God Himself to provide such “occasions.” This can, moreover, occur at any time, since time is a human convenience of understanding which is unknown, or at least immaterial, to God. For the true Protestant, then, no human agent can offer grace without blaspheming; by the same understanding, no person can effectively deny grace once it is offered by God because God is all-powerful. In that sense, then, our reaction would be immaterial. In the first instance, where Protestants merit grace, such an act would “make sense”—it would appear logical. In the second instance, where Protestants would be elected to salvation, it would “feel sense”—it would appear visible to others.

But neither sense of grace is that held to and instructed by the Catholic church, and neither sense of grace is what actually informs O'Connor's fiction. For her grace is an early stage of cognizance—what Augustine calls the “divine imprint” on the soul that is a kind of homing instinct, a sense of vocation whether accepted or not; it is the sort of instinct that Hazel Motes tries to deny by blaspheming in his mocking street gospel, or that young Tarwater tries desperately to escape as too heavy a burden, too awesome and too complete a responsibility. It is God's free and unmerited gift, awarded in later stages of life, suddenly, perhaps unexpectedly, and (at least to human vision) randomly, according to the teachings of Augustine. Paul writing to the Romans talks of God's grace in just this way even in reference to the patriarchy in O'Connor's Vulgate text: “For he saith to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; and I will shew mercy to whom I will shew mercy’” (9:15). For Augustine, called by the Church the Doctor of Grace, such an act of God may come in mysterious and unexpected ways and forms, too, through unanticipated and even surprising means and agents, even the unlikeliest of men like Pointer or The Misfit, and does not necessarily cause action: it may only alter vision, change perception, evoke new desires, prompt new patterns of behavior. It may be gradual, developmental; it may be striking; it may even be ignored or unacknowledged or even totally unseen. But in every event, Augustine told Flannery O'Connor and tells us too, man must choose to cooperate with grace; it follows, then, that he can also refuse to accept or acknowledge grace. (For Calvin the elected would always know their election; for other Reformers, earning grace permitted man always to be aware of it.) Aquinas adds to Augustine that grace is the favor of God, not an arbitrary decision nor a reward, by which He gives Himself to humanity by reason of a vital creative act of Himself, a kind of second creative act, having already created the soul, the creature. “For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will,” as Paul writes to the young church at Philippi (2:13). From His infinite treasury of grace and good will, God bestows. For O'Connor, then, it is meant to be deliberately surprising, even shocking, but not impossible, that the devil posing as a Bible salesman can offer to Joy/Hulga that moment when, called Hulga, she could realize a deeper Joy than the acceptance and passion of this itinerant boy if (but only if) she is prepared, or has the inclination, to do so. And it is enough that she is given that chance. That we do not know the outcome is not the point for O'Connor. Indeed, it may even be irrelevant, because what we are to learn from the story and what Hulga is to learn, what in fact the story means to make impossible to forget, is that God does allow even those whose selfishness is most rigid a moment in which they can convert their direction and their perspective, a moment in which they can be transformed, if they so choose.

These are, then, the critical, crucial, most dramatic moments when everything is at risk, at stake. The right choice has to be made, willingly, freely, spontaneously, cooperatively, or all is lost. But since God's unmerited grace, like His unmerited love, is forever available, the state of mind regarding it at the moment of death is, for the unregenerate, the most crucial because it is the last possible moment of cooperation. Death is prominent in O'Connor's stories, too, because it is the final telling moment. Everything may rest on that split second in time. It does, of course, for young Bishop who thinks he is saved when Tarwater drowns him in The Violent Bear It Away, and for old Mr. Fortune in “A View of the Woods”; it may or may not for the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” to whom we shall return. But it can also come over a longer period of time, too, as it does with young Harry Ashfield/Bevel in “The River.”

He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him.

Bevel's death is often seen as wasteful, the loss of an innocent child. But it is glorious for O'Connor. Bevel has been spurned by his family and friends; he has been led to a conventional (therefore unmeaningful, insignificant) baptism by the preacher; but he has felt a longing, a yearning for the Lord that is the true awareness of grace. The river as a river spits him out, mocks him. But the river as an agent of God catches him with “a long gentle hand” and then, with the totality of conversion, pulls him “swiftly forward and down,” taking him with it. This birth—or rebirth—is of course merely an “instant” in which the one who is overcome with the power and love of grace is also “overcome with surprise,” but it is the surprise of joy. The alien world which does not know grace, where even men misnamed Mr. Paradise (as the devil could sell Bibles) must look like “a giant pig,” remains behind, unredeemed.

O'Connor's persistent, repeated, language makes the point: “long gentle hand,” “pulled him,” “overcome with surprise”; “knew that he was getting somewhere”; “all his fury and fear left him.” But her recalcitrant readers, she knew from aching experience, would need all she could supply to understand. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means 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.” So, just as she tried to secure Hulga's sudden “surprise” by contrasting her with the uninterrupted blindness of Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, so she validates Bevel's true triumph over the self with the contrast of an unregenerate Mr. Paradise who knows neither joy nor grace despite the self-delusion of his name, and she does so in unmistakable, reiterated language.

Mr. Paradise's head appeared from time to time on the surface of the water. Finally, far downstream, the old man rose like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his full eyes as far down the river line as he could see.

In his very antithesis, this “old” man, “dull” with his limited vision, can also teach us the lesson of grace—and the salvation of Bevel. With grace, Paul writes, this time to the new church at Corinth, “the old are passed away, behold all things are made new” (II, 5:17). All things are made new.

4

In the brief compass of the story, then, O'Connor portrays the sudden, abbreviated occasion of the presence of grace. In the longer novel, she concentrates instead on the prolonged, agonizing avoidance of grace over a necessarily longer period, as in young Tarwater's fear, rebellion, reluctance, and finally his resignation to follow the preaching of his grandfather, his destiny as a prophet in The Violent Bear It Away. In Wise Blood the same avoidance, rebellion, and resignation is seen in Hazel Motes.

Ralph C. Wood has written recently that Hazel “is the single character in whom O'Connor's Augustinian theology is most fully realized” because “He is a vivid embodiment of her conviction that—even after the Fall—humanity possesses an indelible divine imprint, a homing instinct for God that makes the heart restless until it finds its peace in His will.” Again, O'Connor has proven her own best teacher of her work (in the 1963 letter to Sister Mariella): “The writer has to make the corruption believable before he can make the grace meaningful.” We first see Hazel sitting “at a forward angle on the green plush train seat”; he is wearing a new suit—“His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it”—and has “a stiff, black broad-brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear.” He is already restless, looking anxiously about the train, trying to get his bearing. He is (also obviously) homeless, unaccustomed to new clothes, avoiding identification with preaching. We learn in time that he is returning home from military service and, aside from the suit, he has little more than this hat. “The only things from Eastrod he took into the army with him were a black Bible and a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles that had belonged to his mother.” They are all symbolic for him—vital and resonant—yet he presently ignores them. Instead he thinks of his deprivation, solitude, and alienation that link him, as we shall presently see, with The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Yet Haze is not altogether successful in ignoring these personal mementoes, these tokens that will become implements for his salvation.

After a few weeks in the camp, when he had some friends—they were not actually friends but he had to live with them—he was offered the chance he had been waiting for; the invitation. He took his mother's glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he told them he wouldn't go with them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie on; he said he was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he was not going to have his soul damned by the government or any foreign place they … but his voice cracked and he didn't finish. He only stared at them, trying to steel his face. His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for their brothel.

He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw the opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil.

The responsibility of faith and of preaching that faith is too much for him to bear. That cross is too heavy; he is yet too young. So he dismisses it wholesale. Or he thinks he does: he goes to war to kill his fellow men. But the shrapnel, like his conscience, cannot be dug out of him (or so he believes); he even holds firmly to the family Bible, and to his mother's glasses should he ever need them again to read it. “Longing for home,” as he thinks of it during those early days in the Army, is clearly more than wanting to return to Eastrod. From the outset of his biography in Wise Blood Hazel Motes (hazed by the mote in his vision) is torn in mind, body, and soul, between the denial of the Lord and his need to find a home (presumably, in Him).

But “finding a home” for Hazel takes some doing because at first he desires to make the home within easier reach by making it literal.

He was in Melsy at five o'clock in the afternoon and he caught a ride on a cotton-seed truck that took him more than half the distance to Eastrod. He walked the rest of the way and got there at nine o'clock at night, when it had just got dark. The house was as dark as the night and open to it and though he saw that the fence around it had partly fallen and that weeds were growing through the porch floor, he didn't realize all at once that it was only a shell, that there was nothing here but the skeleton of a house. He twisted an envelope and struck a match to it and went through all the empty rooms, upstairs and down. When the envelope burnt out, he lit another one and went through them all again. That night he slept on the floor in the kitchen, and a board fell on his head out of the roof and cut his face.

So Hazel Motes struggles to make this hollow but more easily accessible legacy sufficient; grimly, he will not be played with. He will be superior to such loss, such hardship, as he was superior to the dangerous overseas mission on which the army earlier tested him. In the morning, he arises and takes inventory of his house—that is, of himself.

There was nothing left in the house but the chifforobe in the kitchen. … He opened all the drawers. There were two lengths of wrapping cord in the top one and nothing in the others. He was surprised nobody had come and stolen a chifforobe like that. He took the wrapping cord and tied it around the legs and through the floor boards and left a piece of paper in each of the drawers: this shiffer-robe belongs to hazel motes. do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.

The chest, like the house, like himself, is an empty husk. But in his deliberate avoidance of grace, of self-confrontation, Hazel makes extreme his attention and devotion to the chifforobe.

The one remaining piece of good furniture in the deserted home of Haze's childhood is perpetuated as the only furniture in his mind, his soul. Haze's first means of avoiding the call of Christ, Who asks man to give up all that he has in order to follow Him, is to cling to the material objects of this world, to surround himself with as many of them as he can. Simultaneously, he will destroy the Lord Who mocks and Who humiliates him by exposing Him as fraudulent because He asks too much and He doesn't prove merciful to the likes of Hazel Motes. So he deliberately challenges God by blaspheming Him. He preaches from the materialism of a ratty old Essex a Church Without Christ, fulfilling the family's design for him by burlesquing it. He even makes the car his pulpit.

“Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's about the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption.”

He develops his own gospel, too, which he can summarize handily: “‘there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two.’” He takes on a disciple in Enoch Emery and attempts to seduce the daughter of the fake blind preacher Asa named Sabbath Lily Hawks. He brutally murders Solace Layfield, the hired “prophet” of the competitive Holy Church of Christ Without Christ, because he thinks Solace believes in redemption and he must crush (he literally runs over him with the Essex) any sign of conscience in this apparently self-willed alter-ego.

At once Hazel decides to leave Taulkinham, where he spent so much time and energy escaping the duty the Lord calls him to, and converted no one save Enoch. He gets in the possession that has become the center of his world, the ratty Essex, and heads out of town when a policeman stops him and makes strange demands after learning he has no license to drive.

“Listen,” the patrolman said, taking another tone, “would you mind driving your car up to the top of the next hill? I want you to see the view from up there, puttiest view you ever did see.”

Haze shrugged but he started the car up. He didn't mind fighting the patrolman if that was what he wanted. He drove to the top of the hill, with the patrol car following close behind him. “Now you turn it facing the embankment,” the patrolman called. “You'll be able to see better thataway.” Haze turned it facing the embankment. “Now maybe you better had get out,” the cop said. “I think you could see better if you was out.”

Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle. Over in the middle distance there was a one-room shack with a buzzard standing hunch-shouldered on the roof.

The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and the cow stumbled up and galloped across the field and into the woods; the buzzard flapped off to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The car landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on, spinning. The motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and various odd pieces scattered this way and that.

“Them that don't have a car, don't need a license,” the patrolman said, dusting his hands on his pants.

The climax of Wise Blood is pure O'Connor: it is sudden, unexpected, funny, and unavoidably significant. Like Pointer with Joy/Hulga, the patrolman strips Haze of everything but himself. He is forced, at this point, to confess to the patrolman that he has nowhere to go; he is directionless. Yet the patrolman also provides the means of a new direction—by forcing him to view in the relatively empty field a house such as Haze left behind in Eastrod as something he must now witness—a new sense of self-projection that will totally displace Haze's own initial, and tempting, vision of Taulkinham.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky. The stores in Taulkinham stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.

In Haze's eyes, the open stores and the habit of buying overcame the self-confrontation of the habit of being. His sudden sense of loss, his humiliation, and his emptiness are the result of leaving home—leaving the Lord—for Taulkinham with its interest in a materiality that might find a Church Without Christ especially appealing. That Haze understands this is made clear—once we understand O'Connor, her fictions always seem transparent—by the conclusion of this scene.

After a while Haze got up and started walking back to town. It took him three hours to get inside the city again. He stopped at a supply store and bought a tin bucket and a sack of quicklime and then he went on to where he lived, carrying these. When he reached the house, he stopped outside on the sidewalk and opened the sack of lime and poured the bucket half full of it. Then he went to a water spigot by the front steps and filled up the rest of the bucket with water and started up the steps. His landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat. “What you going to do with that, Mr. Motes?” she asked.

“Blind myself,” he said and went on in the house.

Instead of using his mother's glasses to concentrate on the material world around him, Haze will (after his conversion) blind himself so as to concentrate on the vision of Christ that lies within—that has been within him all along. His act so surprises his landlady, Mrs. Flood, that he comes to act as her intercessor to finding her own faith: at first the subject of God's grace, Haze is also made an agent of it. We should, in the end, no more feel sorry for Hazel Motes than we do for Bevel, for both are instructive occasions of joy. But unlike the single point of conversion in “The River,” there is no way even O'Connor's highly compressed style could have traced the agony of a lifelong quest such as Haze's in a short story, in anything less than a novel. Wise Blood, and the later novel, The Violent Bear It Away, are not merely about that point in time when total transformation takes place but biographies of those who would avoid the relentless hound of heaven and of how, at last, they merged victorious when beaten at their own selfish designs.

5

What O'Connor's stories and novels of grace share is the toughened sense that if we can manage to locate our own fate in the bleakest of situations—in the greatest trials of conscience—then we have shouldered successfully the true burdens of a Christian life. O'Connor's library housed as much secular as sacred writing, and one of her favorite poets, her letters tell us, was Gerard Manley Hopkins, who shared her understanding of grace. In the last months, bedridden forever, with death near, she wrote to her grieving companion Janet McKane,

“I like Hopkins … particularly a sonnet [sic] beginning

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving? …”

citing from memory, and then the letter stops in mid-thought, all her energy spent. Had she gone on, this is what she would have written:

Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
A´h! aś the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Through worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs aŕe the same,
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

What consoled her was that to feel grief is the universal nature of the human condition. Why should any man—even a little girl like Margaret—grieve when she had known, and would always know, Goldengrove, when she would come to a far lovelier place than the sacramental loveliness she would leave behind her? And how could she help but grieve, knowing Goldengrove, knowing life? The death of trees in golden leaf marks autumn, the curse of man, the fall/Fall; but it also points the way to spring, to rebirth, to regeneration. In both ways, this recognition doubly epitomizes grace.

For O'Connor, caught up as she was in the violent mysteries of grace, The Wreck of the Deutschland must also have seemed kindred, brother to her spirit, a poetic analogy to all her fictions short and long. The scene of stark terror in that poem would sound, unknown and unidentified, like something fictional, like something by O'Connor herself. The grotesque death of the headless sailor and the body with slit wrists; the vision—symbol, really—of nuns with hands clasped found drowned together in their private chamber; the tall nun crying to her husband to be reunited with Him at last—all display how grace can come suddenly, violently, leaving in its wreckage for us only grotesquerie unless we are willing to learn, to understand, to respect, even to love the mysterious ways of the Lord.

The striking significance of this event was patently clear to Hopkins, but as with O'Connor's monstrous readers it was not clear to his friend Robert Bridges. Hopkins had instead patiently to instruct him.

Granted that it needs study and is obscure. … You might, without the effort that to make it all out would seem to have required, have nevertheless read it so that lines and stanzas should be left in the memory and superficial impressions deepened, and have liked some without exhausting all. … [You can get] more weathered to the style and its features. …

The inescapable riddle of the tall nun's cry of bewilderment and yearning must, Hopkins thought, lead to the inescapable comfort of recognizing the power and the triumph of her faith. But what he actually wrote to Bridges in mid-January 1879 is this: “You understand … that I desire to see you a Catholic, or, if not that, a Christian or, if not that, at least a believer in the true God.” The Wreck of the Deutschland was meant to encourage, perhaps to establish, perhaps even to guarantee that end, as it had taxed Hopkins' own faith, since first learning of this dreadful accident that occurred when he slept in his bed in peace, until he had struggled to win his own way to understanding and accepting.

What both poet and fiction writer mean to do is to wrench our fallen way of seeing (and our blindness) into the candid enlightenment of Christ's perspective. Her best critic, O'Connor said, would be Christ: she wrote with Him in mind. But she also wrote for us, in our despicable, fallen state. “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature,” like the displaced Mrs. McIntyre, of “The Displaced Person,” complicit in the “accidental” murder of the Polish refugee she had encouraged to work her farm so long as he made more money for her and didn't fill her farmland with other Poles from the Old Country, some marrying American Negroes to enter the Promised Land of America. Her desire to improve her status, her greed, seem to make her normal, even conventional, yet O'Connor makes it clear by the end that the “displaced person” of the title is not the refugee Mr. Guizac but Mrs. McIntyre herself.

In “The Artificial Nigger,” where a plaster statue of a Negro—which, an old man and young boy agree, has no right, privilege, or occasion to be happy (“He was meant to look happy” but has “a wild look of misery instead”)—suddenly destroys the shallow sanctimony and self-satisfied pride of the old man and the boy. Each had once felt superior to the other, but now before such clear depiction of human agony they merge into each other: “Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man,” and in this community of releasing their repressed guilt they learn compassion, learn grace. Or in “Parker's Back,” the last story O'Connor wrote, thinking she would not live to finish, much less perfect it, consider the tattoo of a Byzantine Christ which Parker has put on his back so as to carry the Cross himself. Such an act of subject humiliation is not only misunderstood but condemned by his wife, whose ignorance gives rise to the sin of wrath.

“Idolatry!” Sarah Ruth screamed. “Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don't want no idolator in this house!” and she grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders with it.

Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there and let her beat him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ. Then he staggered up and made for the door.

She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of him off it. Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still more. There he was—who called himself Obadiah Elihue—leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.

The flagellation here of the wicked and the cursed is simultaneously an act of mortification of the flesh; Parker at least has learned to submit to his two Old Testament names, Obadiah (“the Lord's servant”) and Elihu (the man of suffering in the Book of Job). The child that comes out (“crying like a baby”) is the father to the man but Sarah Ruth remains hardened in her own rigid pride: “her eyes hardened still more.” As A. R. Coulthard notes, “‘Parker's Back’ is both touchingly human and theologically profound in its testimony to the terrible price of grace.”

6

What is true of these stories and novels is true of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in some ways still the most difficult, if the most popular, of her works of fiction. The story begins with Bailey's mother, who places as much attention on manners as Hazel Motes places on material goods.

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.

She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either side of her. Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.

Like everything else O'Connor writes, this is exactingly worded. When we reread it, we note two other things about the grandmother: she is sneaky (she is deliberately deceiving Bailey about the cat, which will cause the accident that brings about the deaths of all the family) and she is proud (everything she does is centered about her own satisfaction—such as protecting the cat that loves her—or her future pleasures—taking mileage so as to center later conversation on herself and on her special knowledge). Both her deceit and pride continue unabated. Following a brief nap she awakes to recall

an old plantation house that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it.

Her inner gaze once more is fixed, this time on the sort of environment with which her son has provided neither herself nor his family, but one where she can relive her own pride in her past and point out Bailey's shortcomings for all his family to see. But to do so she must once again be deceitful—a small price to pay.

She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. “There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found …”

“Hey!” John Wesley said. “Let's go see it! We'll find it! We'll poke all the woodwork and find it! Who lives there? Where do you turn off at? Hey Pop, can't we turn off there?”

It is credible corruption again: the grandmother had corrupted John Wesley and she will ultimately corrupt the entire family because she knows they love the mystery of secret panels and share greedy hopes of finding silver. If we fail to see this at first, it is our own easy collusion with the same conventionality—and the same corrupt values of pride and greed—that the grandmother represents in us.

Next to her repeated acts of pride and wrongdoing, the stockpiling of venial sins without care or caution—although at first we are not prepared for this because grace comes in unexpected ways, especially for the uninitiated—we are given The Misfit, pointedly one who was “‘a gospel singer for a while,’” who is theologically alert and religiously wise. This knowledge, however, seems only to have betrayed him.

“I never was a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, “but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.

“That's when you should have started to pray,” she said. “What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?”

“Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”

“Maybe they put in by mistake,” the old lady said vaguely.

“Nome,” he said. “It wasn't no mistake. They had the papers on me.”

“You must have stolen something,” she said.

The Misfit sneered slightly. “Nobody had nothing I wanted,” he said. “It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nineteen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never had a thing to do with it. He was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard and you can go there and see for yourself.”

“If you would pray,” the old lady said, “Jesus would help you.”

We do not know for certain if The Misfit was originally innocent of crime as of sin; what seems clear is that in simply being human he naturally did “‘something wrong’” and so felt trapped in this life as in a narrow room with walls right and left. His own feelings may be abstractly or symbolically put, but they are urgent and real. Next to them the grandmother's more conventional manners seem selfish and superficial. The Misfit seems to sense this too, and, consciously or not, he condemns her greed by his own lack of it. “‘Nobody had nothing I wanted,’” he tells her, although she has wanted knowledge of the trip and recollections of her Godless past. Giving herself an occasion for sin she has given her grandchildren, perhaps her whole family, one too. But she fails to see any of this; she is too concerned to have her way to see what this occasion as an occasion of grace might teach her. The criminal's thoughts wander off to the human conditions of incarceration and alienation; her thoughts impose themselves on the situation rather than grow out of it. In their lack of communication lies O'Connor's whole sense of religion.

The grandmother's willful blindness to the fate of others, even (and especially) as it reflects on her own, is repeated when she proudly announces The Misfit's identity and so causes her family to be shot lest they serve as witnesses against him. When she, like Haze, is stripped of the protection of her son she is at first baffled, frightened, resourceless.

Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out. Finally she found herself saying, “Jesus, Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing.

“Yes'm,” The Misfit said as if he agreed. “Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me.”

His twinship, rightly, is with Jesus, not with her. Like Tarwater in O'Connor's longer novel, his vocation is to be a prophet but his “wild misery” comes because he is hounded by a Christ he cannot, will not, understand. Like Jesus he is unfit for a conventional, mannered society of greedy and selfish persons. He is also misfit because his sophisticated theological sense of man's condition makes no sense to those around him. He tries once more to make his sense of kinship with Jesus clear by turning on Him, just as Hazel Motes had done.

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for your to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

Because Jesus threw things off balance for mankind, tormenting him with the knowledge of his cupidity and culpability, The Misfit will seek revenge by killing God's children. If the grandmother took up the challenge, as the patrolman does with Haze, by pointing out the theological fallacy in his argument, she might save herself. But she is not one who sees deeply. She retreats to conventional Christian solace that does not begin to approach his agonized bewilderment.

Never in O'Connor's fiction is the offer of grace put more clearly—“‘If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him’”—and never are the rewards of sin more evident: “‘No pleasure but meanness,’ he said and his voice had become almost a snarl”—but the grandmother's reply is even more shocking (and more revealing): “‘Maybe He didn't raise the dead,’ the old lady mumbled.” Given the opportunity to confess her own sins and die in a state of grace at the hands of a man who makes his role stunningly clear, she instead denies the divinity of Christ Himself. She abandons all hope for them both. She sinks down, in effect kneeling not to Jesus but to this self-confessed sinner whose own struggle against the gospel, whose adamant resistance to find his home in Christ, resembles the young Augustine and the unrepentant Hazel Motes.

The old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her [as in a religious trance].

“I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now.”

He is a sinner but not totally unregenerate: he is agonizing over the Mystery of the true Christ. What he asks for, demands, is revelation. And he gets it.

His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.

And so he has led her to enact grace perhaps without knowing it. But The Misfit is doubly shocked. He cannot accept grace for himself—he is much too honest about his criminal misfitted, sinning nature and much too aggrieved with his own state, like Obidiah Elihue Parker, for that. He cannot face the nakedness of pure grace when it is offered to his undeserving self, either—and he senses God's mockery in offering grace at the hands of a stupid and shallow sinner like the grandmother.

The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him [for the temptation of grace seems to him to have a tainted source] and shot her three times [echoing Peter's triple denial of Christ] through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

But it is important to note, as O'Connor does, that “Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.” He is shaken. Perhaps he recalls that Christ came too, according to Matthew, not to send peace but a sword (10:34); perhaps he recalls that Christ asked the lesser ones to carry forth His message. Or perhaps he finds himself, in his references to imprisonment and false arrest irretrievably mirrored in the Christ he has tried to deny. Or perhaps he finds himself mocked in the mirroring grandmother, a sinner like her. Most likely, it is all of these: he cannot run from the hound of God's grace no matter how insistently he tries. No one can.

Still O'Connor's pointed parable continues.

“She was a talker, wasn't she?” Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.

“She would of been a good woman” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life.”

It is another astonishing moment in a whole series of surprising moments of recognition. For this theologically perceptive criminal has also recognized that when endangered the grandmother has (for the first time?) suggested grace herself—“‘you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children,’” just as Christ did, but that even if her sense of reaching out first arose because he was wearing her son's shirt and because she was deeply distressed she has found the spirit of Christ in her last moments. At the crucial time for faith she has achieved salvation. Thus she not only brought The Misfit face to face with the occasion of grace; she made him into the agent of her own sense of grace. She saved both of them in spite of both of them. So did he.

The difference is that she worked by instinct once she threw off convention. The Misfit's instincts always betray him, until he works out their deeper meanings. She reaches out. He recoils. Now he has learned from her that reaching out is the only way. Earlier he had told the grandmother this, too, when he invited her to pray, but he had refused that counsel for himself. “‘I don't want no hep,’ he said. ‘I'm doing all right by myself.’” Now he knows that is not true. He is not doing all right by himself. He needs someone to help him; he needs to help someone; he needs to help himself.

“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.

“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It's no real pleasure in life.”

He has told us just moments ago that there is real pleasure in life, and he has told us what it is. Meanness. If there is, now, no real pleasure left it can only mean that there is no meanness left. Just as a selfish grandmother dies selflessly thinking of another in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” so The Misfit's mean pleasures have, at this striking moment of grace, come to an end. Grace comes, it would appear, randomly—The Misfit reaches for the grandson's shirt and puts it on—and unexpectedly—at the hands of a selfish old woman and a reckless criminal—and surprisingly—“‘She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life’”—and surely—“‘Shut up, Bobby Lee. … It's no real pleasure in [this] life’”—in the fictions, long and short, of Flannery O'Connor.

7

In The Violent Bear It Away, Rayber remarks that “Children are cursed with believing.” Often in O'Connor the child is father to the man. Even blinded Hazel teaches Mrs. Flood; perhaps Bevel's joy will teach old, dull Mr. Paradise; the grandmother, at the point of death, returns to childlike prayer. They have, all of them, become children of God when grace steals on them, as Tarwater sets out for “the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping,” unawares. O'Connor's monstrous readers did not always get the point—and precisely because they did not always want the point, because too they were the point. But she kept on warning them even when paralysis spread upward and outward through her body. She might have found some consolation in a fellow sufferer, a fellow poet, a fellow reader of Hopkins, John Berryman. “Oil all my turbulence,” he writes in “Eleven Addresses to the Lord,”

Oil all my turbulence as at Thy dictation
I sweat out my wayward works.
Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ.
Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.

The reference is to a letter Hopkins wrote in June 1878 to Canon Dixon. “Fame,” he remarks,

whether won or lost is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude, The only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.

It is, really, another way to interpret Augustine's dictum that the heart is restless until it abides with the Lord.

Flannery O'Connor's last writing, scrawled six days before her death on August 3, 1964, is to her friend Maryat Lee and concerned with an anonymous telephone call. The note was found on O'Connor's bedside table by her mother after her death, and she dutifully mailed it.

28 July 64

Dear Raybat,

Cowards can be just as vicious as those who declare themselves—more so. Dont take any romantic attitude toward that call. Be properly scared and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. And call the police. That might be a lead for them.

Dont know when I'll send those stories. I've felt too bad to type them.

Cheers,

Tarfunk

If not stories, then perhaps a letter; if not a typewriter, then a crippled hand. Reaching out, in whatever fashion, can also be construed an act of grace.