[In the following essay, Oliver analyzes O'Connor's unique sense of compassion in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgment Day.”]

Compassion is the quality O'Connor's fiction is supposed to lack. John Hawkes, in an early and still influential essay, said that her characters “are judged, victimized, made to appear only as absurd entities of flesh” (399). Jesse Hill Ford suspected that she hated human kind. “Her fiction,” he said, “has an axe-murder feel to it” (Martin 216). More recently, the French critic André Bleikasten asserts that between O'Connor and her characters “lies all the distance of contempt, disgust, and derision” (56). Not even O'Connor's many apologists make great claims for her tenderness; by emphasizing her role as an embattled Christian calling for repentance in the wilderness of American secularism, they imply that she could not afford much compassion.

O'Connor claimed it was not human kind she hated but the spiritual obtuseness of the age in which she lived: “My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have in these times the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable” (Mystery and Manners 33-34). Her sharp eye saw much that was grotesque, perverse, unacceptable-and she did not hesitate to judge these aberrations harshly. She scorned “hazy compassion,” which she said encouraged the writer to excuse all human weakness “because human weakness is human” (Mystery and Manners 43).

She believed, however, in another kind of compassion:

There is a better sense in which the word can be used but seldom is—the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity. This is a sense which implies the recognition of sin; this is a suffering-with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses.

(Mystery and Manners 165-66)

Compassion, she held, does not deny the facts of sin and guilt. It grows out of the conviction that all men, though fashioned in God's image, are sinners and therefore need the aid and comfort of their fellows. But is this type of compassion—the kind bestowed upon one sinful mortal by another—really to be found in O'Connor's stories? More particularly, is it to be found in her treatment of her own characters?

What one misses in O'Connor's fiction, says W. S. Marks, is “‘the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust’” (27). If O'Connor sometimes regarded the human dust she wrote about with more disdain than sympathy, it is because she found the pride and presumption of her characters intolerable. Her fellow Catholic Walker Percy once observed that man in the twentieth century “could not take account of God, the devil, and the angels if they were standing before him, because he has already peopled the universe with his own hierarchies” (The Message in the Bottle 113). The statement certainly applies to O'Connor's falsely pious characters, who not only set themselves above the “niggers” and the “white-trash” but above God himself. They claim to believe in God, but they do not really think they need him. They feel they are saved simply by being themselves—clean, honest, and hardworking. The pharisaic Ruby Turpin (“Revelation”) may stand for them all:

Her heart rose. God had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you! Whenever she counted her blessings she felt as buoyant as if she weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds instead of one hundred and eighty.

(Complete Stories 497)

O'Connor wants her characters to feel their true weight, especially the weight of their sin and guilt. Time and again, she deprives them of their buoyancy, returning their dust to dust. She called this humbling process a “modest achievement” for the fiction writer “but perhaps a necessary one” (Mystery and Manners 168)—necessary lest her audience, failing to appreciate the effects of original sin, also fail to comprehend the need for grace.

There is no doubt that O'Connor was particularly well suited by talent and temperament for the job of exposing human folly and wickedness. Even if the task had not been, in her view, “necessary,” one suspects she would have done it anyway. She did it so well and took such pleasure in it. She does not, however, lack compassion. True, her compassion is often obscured by her satiric wit, but it is there. Some of her best short fiction is remarkable precisely for its quality of mercy. Four such stories are “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgement Day.”

O'Connor said that writers must understand their limitations, work within them, and try to make virtues of them (Mystery and Manners 27, 152). Believing her most serious limitation to be an audience largely unsympathetic or indifferent to her Christian theme, she honed a narrative voice capable of shocking readers with its austere accounts of sinners in the hands of an angry God. But she did more than turn aesthetic constraints into virtues; sometimes, as in the four stories I have mentioned, her fiction entirely transcends those constraints, particularly the ones imposed upon her by the adversary role she felt she must adopt in relation to her readers and characters.

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgement Day” are not “typical” O'Connor stories. On the contrary, they deserve our attention partly because they are exceptional. O'Connor managed in these stories to temper satire with sympathy, to speak in a voice at once disapproving and gentle, and thus to convey a viewpoint more complex and humane than we sometimes associate with her. These stories epitomize the special brand of compassion that she described, the kind that blunts no edges and makes no excuses. It is a compassion that emerges most clearly from her handling of character. In each of these stories, O'Connor allows one of the characters to express sentiments akin to her own; she allows the protagonist to experience an epiphany and have the chance to react to it; and she grants him the capacity to view the world with an almost childlike sense of wonder. Through these means, O'Connor not only extends her aesthetic landscape but creates in her own work the possibility of compassion.

II

O'Connor spoke frequently of her urge to “write against” the current of secularism that she felt all around her. She vented that urge, for the most part indirectly, through satire. A common feature of the four stories under consideration, however, is that each contains a character who openly and adamantly voices anti-secular sentiments. These characters are too unsophisticated to be called spokesmen for the author, but they do air opinions that appear to approximate O'Connor's own.

The twelve-year-old girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” regards with undisguised suspicion and dislike the antics of her more worldly cousins:

All weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly. … They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off their uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child.

(Complete Stories 236)

In their eagerness to shed their convent uniforms and to parade themselves in “red skirts and loud blouses” (and thus, in the terms of the story, to profane the temples of their bodies), the two teenage girls reflect the usual indifference of O'Connor's characters to their spirituality. What is unusual about the scene is that the author's disapproval of the girls is shared by one of her characters—the child, on whom none of the teenagers' ways are lost. After a few hours of observing her cousins, the twelve-year-old decides that they are “practically morons.” Her opinion is partly the result of her pride and her bad temper at being left out of the girls' activities. But also the child is honestly offended by the teenagers, who joke about what she takes seriously—the Church's teaching that confirmed Christians are temples of the Holy Ghost.

Impiety also arouses the ire of Tanner (“Judgement Day”) and of Mr. Head (“The Artificial Nigger”), who share with their author a particular distrust of that apex of secularism, the big city. Tanner would rather die than live in New York; he suffers a fatal heart attack trying to escape his exile there. Mr. Head's nine-year-old grandson, on the other hand, is proud that he was born in the city and years to see it again. Mr. Head, in agreeing to take the boy there for a day, thinks of the trip as a “moral mission,” a way to cure the child of his infatuation:

Mr. Head had been thinking about this trip for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in the city. He was to find out that the city was not a great place.

(251)

Far from being a “great place,” the city, in Mr. Head's imagination, is fraught with temptation and peril. But he believes the journey there is worth the risk, if it will teach the boy once and for all where his true country lies.

Sarah Ruth Cates, who marries O. E. Parker in “Parker's Back,” does not have to look as far as the city to discover profanities that anger her. Parker first feels her wrath when he tries to attract her attention by pretending to hurt his finger while working on a truck engine—he begins swearing loudly from the imagined injury. The next thing he knows, Sarah Ruth has attacked him with a broom: “Parker's vision was so blurred that for an instant he thought he had been attacked by some creature from above, a giant hawk-eyed angel wielding a hoary weapon” (511-512). This avenging angel does not relax her vigilance after marriage: “Parker did nothing much when he was home but listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for him if he didn't change his ways” (519).

An interesting thing happens in these stories in which O'Connor permits one of the characters to share some of her own antagonism toward the secular world. Although she grants the character the strength of his opinions, she reveals those opinions to be narrow ones. It is as if, by giving the role of Christian polemicist to a twelve-year-old child, or to Tanner or Mr. Head, or to Sarah Ruth, O'Connor frees herself to examine that role objectively and to explore its shortcomings. Those readers who have criticized her for a lack of compassion, for the harshness of her attacks on human nature and the things of this world, have sometimes overlooked the fact that her fiction comments negatively on these very tendencies.

In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the twelve-year-old's reasons for disliking her cousins accord more or less with the author's. At the same time, the story shows that the child's readiness to scoff at her shallow teenage relatives and at every sort of human folly threatens to dim her perception that holiness may dwell within all people and things, even the apparently inane. Similarly, Tanner's hatred of the city obscures from him its variety and nuances and completely alienates him from his daughter, who has chosen New York as her home. As for Mr. Head, who views the city merely as a backdrop for the moral lesson he proposes to teach his grandson, O'Connor throws him upon the mercy of the urban complex, thus forcing him to confront its mysterious reality and the possibility that it contains moral lessons of its own. Sarah Ruth, who is oblivious to all lessons but those she herself imparts, is so insistent on the spiritual nature of God and on the corruption of the physical world that she fails to recognize the spiritual promptings that underlie her husband's admittedly crude attempts to gratify his sense of wonder about life.

Because all these characters are suspicious of the world, they miss much of its beauty and mystery. They do not have a sacramental view of life, which holds that grace comes to man not in direct infusions from on high but through the things of earth. It was the sacramental view that informed O'Connor's own writing, or so she said in her essays. Critics have often disagreed with her on this point. And indeed, her laughter, like that of the young girl in “Temple,” so belittles its objects at times that it seems on the verge of denying them the intrinsic value a sacramental perspective would claim for them. This is not the case in the four stories we are studying. One reason may be that O'Connor, by giving some of her polemical impulses to a character, feels less constrained herself to write against the world and is thus free to adopt a more tolerant, one might say a more compassionate, attitude toward her material.

III

Our four stories have something else in common. They end differently from most of O'Connor's short fiction. Her work is renowned for its violent conclusions. A foolishly prim and self-righteous grandmother is shot to death in a ditch by an escaped convict, but not before she realizes her spiritual kinship with the killer. A high-school counselor who prides himself on helping an underprivileged delinquent but who neglects his own son confronts the extent of his iniquity when he discovers his child hanging from a rafter in the attic, a suicide. A young man who dreams of a life of genteel leisure is forced instead to the threshold of a “world of guilt and sorrow” by the sudden death of his mother whom he has mistreated.

Such endings, though dramatically powerful, no doubt contribute to O'Connor's image as a writer more interested in punishing her characters than in reforming them, a writer, in other words, more vindictive than merciful. This is the impression of her that persists among many readers despite her attempts to explain the purpose behind her apocalyptic endings. “I have found,” she wrote, “that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work” (Mystery and Manners 112). Certainly, there is nothing flattering or even comforting to human nature in O'Connor's observation that violence is often necessary to penetrate the hardheadedness of her characters. But there is a kind of rough compassion in her willingness to administer the shock treatments that she believed must precede conversion. The endings of her stories do not merely punish her characters; they hint at the possibility of redemption for those who accept their initiation into suffering.

Most of O'Connor's stories, however, show us nothing of this redemptive process, nothing of the lasting effects on the individual of his epiphany. The stories leave out such experience, quite simply, because O'Connor usually concludes each of them just at the moment when the protagonist's old self has been devastated and the new self has yet to emerge.

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgement Day” depart from this pattern. In each, the epiphany occurs prior to the ending. The main character experiences a sudden spiritual insight, and he has a chance to react to it. Even when the revelation involves substantial physical or psychic violence, the shock is not catastrophic. It does not destroy the protagonist but initiates in him a process of reflection and maturation. O'Connor, in turn, is free at the end of each story to explore the positive effects of the experience upon the character.¹

In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” the twelve-year-old child's epiphany comes on the last night of a local carnival. She has not been allowed to go to the carnival, but her older cousins attend, and when they return, they tell her about a freak they saw in a tent—a human with male and female organs. Fascinated by their account, the child lies in bed, suspended between sleep and waking, trying to picture the hermaphrodite. She makes a surprising discovery. “I am a temple of the Holy Ghost,” she imagines the hermaphrodite saying to those who have paid to come and stare (246). The twelve-year-old's intuition, at this moment, builds upon her earlier sense that she, and all Christians, are temples of God. In her dream-like state, she divines that even scandalously grotesque creatures, like the carnival freak, are potentially holy vessels.

The story does not end there. The next day, the child and her mother take the cousins back to their convent school, where they all attend mass. When the priest elevates the host, the child remembers the carnival freak and its words to the crowd as reported by her cousins: “I don't dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be” (248). Intuitively, the child perceives, in the freak and in its words, a parallel to Christ as embodied in the Eucharist—Christ the man-god, the spirit-become-flesh, a kind of “freak” himself. Furthermore, she begins to see, through the examples of Christ and the hermaphrodite, that wonder, humility, and resignation are the fitting human responses to a God who works in mysterious and even shocking ways.

Although O'Connor's characters seldom reach such depths of understanding, the child in “Temple” is not unique in her penetration. One thinks of Ruby Turpin, for example, or of Hazel Motes and Francis Marion Tarwater in the novels; they also attain (though more reluctantly than the child) a profound knowledge of themselves and their relation to God.

The same is true of the protagonists in “The Artificial Nigger” and “Judgement Day.” After Mr. Head becomes frightened and betrays his grandson during their trip to the city, his pride is destroyed and the would-be moral guide is forced to recognize his own weakness. It is then that he feels God's saving mercy: “He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as he forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise” (270). Tanner is another who grows through humiliation. Rather than “lower” himself by working for the black doctor who has bought the land where he is a squatter, he goes to live with his daughter in New York. But as he is made to endure the indignities and brutalities of the city, his longing for home and friends overcomes his pride. He prays for deliverance, imagining his return to Alabama as a triumphant day of judgment, an occasion for emotional and spiritual rejuvenation.

Vanity is also assailed with positive results in “Parker's Back,” although in this story it is not the self-righteous Christian, Sarah Ruth, who forsakes pride, but her hedonistic husband. O. E. flatters himself that he is his own man; the tattoos that adorn his body reflect his self-infatuation. But, at the same time, he feels vaguely dissatisfied with his life and is driven, by instincts he does not understand, to search for something outside himself. When a lightning bolt knocks him off his tractor, he goes to visit the tattoo artist once more—to have the face of Christ etched upon his back. He senses that his life is no longer his own: “The eyes that were now forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed” (527).

We are used to distinguishing the presence of grace in O'Connor's stories by its destructive and even fatal consequences. But for O. E. Parker, Tanner, Mr. Head, and the twelve-year-old child in “Temple,” there is life after revelation. These characters recognize their failings, suffer for them, and gain a new perspective that betokens continued growth. By portraying the redemptive process, O'Connor makes more explicit the effects of grace that she only hints at in other stories. More importantly, she gives us a sense of God working through human nature, not against it. Grace, in these stories, is manifest less by sudden violence than by the soul's halting progress through time. Consequently, the characters are granted the dignity of cooperating in their regeneration instead of simply capitulating before an inexorable Lord.

O'Connor sympathizes with the desires and failings of these characters. She feels compassion for them. But it is her brand of compassion, and few readers will mistake it for sentimentality, the word she applied to much of what passed for compassion in contemporary fiction. “Sentimentality,” she wrote, “is the skipping of the process of the Fall and Redemption in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence” (Mystery and Manners 148). However kindly she may feel toward a character, O'Connor never loves him for his faults, never overlooks his faults, never excuses them. It is not enough for her that a person “just be himself,” for there is no self-justification in her world. Her compassion “blunts no edges” because it has been sharpened by the knowledge that human beings are terribly imperfect and that grace, whatever its powers, necessarily works through a fallen world. Innocence, therefore, is a state arrived at, if at all, only after much backsliding and struggle. The twelve-year-old in “Temple” begins to see the world in a mysterious and holy way, but this new vision does not immediately transform her sour personality. On the trip back to the convent with her mother and cousins, she sticks her head out the car window rather than listen to the insipid conversation or breathe the air made foul by Alonzo, the perspiring fat boy who drives them. When a “big, moon-faced nun” at the convent tries to hug her, she fixes the woman with a frigid frown. Later, however, the nun swoops down and hugs the child anyway, “mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt” (248). Although the twelve-year-old refuses to be implicated in the “stupidity” of those around her and sometimes dreams of being transfigured by a quick and glorious martyrdom, O'Connor implies that it is the slow and ignominious way of the cross that awaits her, and most of us.

IV

Mr. Head, Tanner, and O. E. Parker, like the twelve-year-old child, retain faults that O'Connor refuses to ignore. Why is it, then, they evoke in her an unaccustomed sympathy? Surely one reason must be that, despite their limitations, they have the capacity to respond with childlike wonder to the mystery of things. They differ radically from most of O'Connor's characters, who fear and try to suppress what they cannot grasp immediately through reason.

Few of O'Connor's characters possess the sort of imagination she described in an early draft of “The Fiction Writer and His Country”:

The fiction writer's true country is … the world of uncorrupted imagination. … Of course, we have all been expelled from the Garden of Eden … and this is why the world of imagination is so hard for us to enter. … It demands a pull against gravity.

(Asals 127)

The “uncorrupted imagination”—O'Connor sometimes called it “anagogical vision”—confers the ability to see beyond the surfaces of life to a spiritual dimension (Mystery and Manners 72). Such vision is essential to the Christian as well as to the fiction writer; both need to see hidden meanings in reality. But, as O'Connor implies, the imagination is not uncorrupted. Human perceptions, she would argue, have been dulled by sin, and the fallen world seems at times devoid of spiritual content. The protagonists in our four stories, nevertheless, manage to inhabit the world of imagination. They do so by disregarding sharp distinctions between matter and spirit, between the visible and the invisible. Their vision is characterized by a literalness that discovers improbable truths normally obscured from all but the very young, who have the innocence and daring to see them.² The twelve-year-old in “Temple” can see Christ in a carnival freak because she takes church doctrine at its word, vividly imagining that God dwells within his creatures. Mr. Head can imagine that sewer openings are portals of hell and that beams of light are blessings from on high because, for him, a trip to the city is a great spiritual trial. Tanner can envision himself literally bursting forth from his coffin because the fact of his approaching death pales beside his anticipation of judgment day.

The distinctive nature of the uncorrupted imagination is perhaps best observed in “Parker's Back,” in which the “motion of wonder” imparted to O. E.'s life by the color, variety, and sheer vastness of the world contrasts sharply with the pious complacency of his wife, who judges the world to be nothing but a “heap of vanity.” Sarah Ruth has “icepick eyes” that probe reality only deep enough to detect occasions of sin. But Parker's eyes are “the same pale slate-gray color as the ocean”; they reflect “the immense spaces around him as if they were a microcosm of the mysterious sea” (514). Parker senses the mystery of things, including the mystery of his own existence. When, as a teenager, he sees a tattooed man at the fair, with an “arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin,” he is “filled with emotion” (513). Later, when he meets Sarah Ruth and is inexplicably attracted to her, he feels as if he has been “conjured.” And finally, when he encounters the face of Christ in a tattoo artist's book of designs, he is enthralled by the picture's “subtle power.”

Though puzzled and frightened by the pull these things exert on him, Parker cannot deny the urgency of his feelings. He must find a way to express them and typically does so, as a child might, by acting them out. Moved by the “intricate design of brilliant color” that adorns the man at the fair, he sets about having his own body decorated. Parker, however, derives little more than immediate gratification from the tattoos; eventually, they only deepen his impression that he is somehow incomplete, half-created:

Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study his overall look. The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would come over him and he would go off and find another tattooist and have another space filled up. … As the space … for tattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew and became general.

(514)

Parker begins to look for fulfillment in ways that are less egocentric and harder for him to understand. He marries Sarah Ruth against his better judgment. She is skinny and poor. She cannot cook. Worst of all, she claims to hate his tattoos. Parker is ashamed that he stays with her. But the fact is, her inexorableness, her demands, appeal to him. She helps to answer his need for something outside himself, something to which he can sacrifice himself in opposition to common sense.

Thinking to please Sarah Ruth and make his marriage go more smoothly, Parker decides to have a picture of God tattooed on his back. He has no particular image of God in mind—“just so it's God.” “She can't say she don't like the looks of God,” he reasons (525). But once again Parker's imagination gets the better of his reason, as he becomes mesmerized by “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ” (522). The Christ's “all-demanding eyes,” which make Sarah Ruth's eyes appear “soft and dilatory” by comparison, hint at an authority more compelling than any Parker has known, and he feels that he must submit to it. It seems that he cannot permit himself even the uneasy repose he has found in his wife. Against self-interest and common sense, his imagination keeps trying to answer his feelings of incompleteness by launching him into a “worse unknown.”

Parker's unusual spiritual quest makes him feel like a fool, and he wishes “that he would return to doing things according to his own sound judgement” (524). Desperately, he hopes that Sarah Ruth will be able to put his actions in perspective and tell him what he should do. But she only adds to his distress. Instead of liking the tattoo, she considers it idolatrous:

“Don't you know who it is?” he cried in anguish.

“No, who is it?” Sarah Ruth said. “It ain't anybody I know.”

“It's him,” Parker said.

“Him who?”

“God? God don't look like that!

“What do you know how he looks?” Parker moaned. “You ain't seen him.”

“He don't look,” Sarah Ruth said. “He's a spirit. No man shall see his face.”

(529)

Sarah Ruth, the avowed Christian, cannot recognize God in the picture on Parker's back because her imagination fails to see him reflected in any aspect of the material world. She is guilty, O'Connor once noted, of believing “that you can worship in pure spirit” (Habit of Being 594). Parker, more nearly a Christian than his wife, suffers her persecution, as she beats him and drives him from the house. The last we see of him he is leaning against a tree, “crying like a baby.”

We are invited, in this final scene, to laugh at O. E.'s simplicity and his confusion over the unexpected turns his life has taken. But our laughter is sympathetic. It does not diminish O. E.'s worth; it enhances it. O'Connor, who worried about getting the right tone in this story (Habit of Being 427), tempers satire with compassion in her portrayal of the conceited bumpkin who, though comically stupid and bungling, possesses a large soul and an irresistible “attraction to the Holy.” We often laugh at O'Connor's characters for their grotesque deficiencies; we laugh at Parker because he has a strong and resourceful imagination that he does not understand and cannot control. In other words, we laugh at him for what he is in a positive sense as well as for what he is not. We feel, moreover, that we understand Parker, not because we have studied him from a superior height, but because we know what it is to experience ineffable longings and to be ashamed of our clumsy attempts to express them. Even as we laugh at Parker, we are “suffering with” him.

O'Connor did not apologize if her beliefs offended humanistic sensibilities. Her God, like Pascal's, was not the God of the philosophers and scholars but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. “This is an unlimited God,” she said,

and one who has revealed himself specifically. It is one who became man and rose from the dead. It is one who confounds the sense and sensibilities, one known early on as a stumbling block. There is no way to gloss over this specification or to make it more acceptable to modern thought.

(Mystery and Manners 161)

Far from wanting to gloss over the less appealing aspects of her faith, she seemed at times determined to emphasize them. She did not believe that the truth of religion depended on how emotionally satisfying it was to its followers:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of us all … when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive.

(Habit of Being 100)

In addressing an audience that she felt had made truth subservient to personal desires, she tried to force her readers to confront the disturbing essence of her message by stressing those immutable and imponderable elements of religious truth least flattering to human vanity. Such an approach has led some readers to conclude that she lacks compassion, that her God is actually the enemy of man.

The stories we have been examining help to temper the impression of O'Connor as a human scourge. They help us to see that her religion was not an excuse for her to vent “fury of a very irreligious kind” (Hendin 26), that her statements about anagogical vision and the sacramental view of reality were not a smoke screen for her essential misanthropy. These stories support her claim that in a world less hostile to her beliefs, one peopled by characters with even a rudimentary religious sensibility, a world, in other words, not unlike the one she creates in these stories, she might have relaxed and used “more normal means of talking” to her readers (Mystery and Manners 34).

It is when she modulates her voice in this way that we detect the compassion in it. It is in these few stories, moreover, that we glimpse the direction her growth as a writer might have taken. We know from her letters that she was interested in trying a different kind of story, in exploring the possibilities of understatement as opposed to exaggeration and distortion:

I keep thinking more and more about the presentation of love and charity. … I keep seeing Elias in that cave, waiting to hear the voice of the Lord in the thunder and lightning and wind, and only hearing it finally in the gentle breeze, and I feel that I'll have to be able to do that sooner or later, or anyway keep trying.

(Habit of Being 373)

O'Connor's stories are so remarkable for their thunder and lightning and wind that the occasional gentle breeze passes almost unnoticed. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” “The Artificial Nigger,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgement Day” help to remind us of that sometimes forgotten element in her work.

Notes

1. Diane Tolomeo (336) makes this point about the last three stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge: “Revelation,” “Parker's Back,” and “Judgement Day.”

2. O'Connor said of her own work that it is “literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal.” This feature of her writing has been commented upon by Asals (126-27), by Claire Katz (58), and also by Joyce Carol Oates (97).

Works Cited

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: U. of Georgia Press, 1982.

Bleikasten, André. “The Heresy of Flannery O'Connor.” Les Americanistes: New French Criticism on Modern American Fiction. Eds. Ira D. Johnson and Christiane Johnson. Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat, 1978.

Hawkes, John. “Flannery O'Connor's Devil.” Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 395-407.

Hendin, Josephine. The World of Flannery O'Connor. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970.

Katz, Claire. “Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision.” American Literature 46 (1974): 54-67.

Marks, W. S. “Advertisements for Grace: Flannery O'Connor's ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1966): 19-27.

Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1969.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor.” Fiction by American Women. Ed. Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua. Port Washington, N. Y.: Associated Faculty P, 1983.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

———. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

———. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Tolomeo, Diane. “Home to the True Country: The Final Trilogy of Flannery O'Connor.” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 335-40.