SOURCE: Byars, John. “Prophecy and Apocalyptic in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor.” Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 16 (1987): 34-42.

[In the following essay, Byars underscores the importance of prophecy in O'Connor's work and asserts that “in a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment.”]

Critics have often noticed the crucial role prophets and false prophets play in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor. She names characters Enoch and Obadiah; she transforms three adolescent vandals into “prophets dancing in the fiery furnace”; she assigns important revelatory roles to those as diverse as the enormous Mrs. Shortley, an ugly Wellesley student, a young criminal, and a Bible salesman; and finally she makes the struggle against their vocations as prophets the major action that envelops the protagonists of her two novels. In a real sense her fiction is a form of prophecy, both revelatory and admonitory, telling a modern secularized world of the presence of grace and the imminence of judgment. It is less easy, however, to establish two important facts about her fiction as prophecy: the precise direction it takes and the manner, within the fictional process, by which it arrives at such a point.

The nature of her vision and the shape it takes are not now regarded as they were once by some critics as mutually contradictory, Christian by intention and nihilist-existentialist in realization. At the same time some critics like Miles Orvell do recognize a certain ambiguity in her work. Orvell asks:

Are we dealing with a world where matter is penetrated by spirit and evolves towards spirit or a world where the flesh is burned clear by divine reality? With a balance of grace and nature, reason and faith, or with an all-devouring Lord who divides the spirit?

(22)

While Orvell sees the answer to these questions embodied in the mystery of Christ's incarnation and crucifixion, a paradox that provides the central theme and symbolism of O'Connor's work and her source of strength as an artist, it is instructive to ask the same questions about the nature of man that Orvell addresses to the representation of the Divine in her work. She presents two contradictory images of society in most of her fiction: one in which the power and prevalence of evil seem so deeply embedded that only total destruction may root it out, and another in which the community or even an aggregate of individuals, though radically flawed, may discover within itself the potential for regeneration. From this perspective the fictional process evolves as a tension between the imminence of total destruction and the possibility of restoration.

These two different directions may be illuminated by the distinction between the prophetic and apocalyptic modes of vision. In his Dark Conceit Edwin Honig cites the traditional definitions for the two:

Prophecy and apocalyptic both claim to be a communication through the Divine Spirit of the character and purposes of God and his Kingdom. Prophecy believes that God's goodness will be justified in this world; apocalyptic almost wholly despairs of the present and its main interests are supermundane.

(105-106)

Recent biblical scholarship, though recognizing certain elements in apocalyptic's form and subject matter that make them less distinct from prophecy, still accepts this basic difference. Most of these scholars agree that what distinguishes prophecy is its attempt to relate the divine plans which the prophet witnesses into terms of “plain history, real politics, and human instrumentality” (Hanson 11). The assumption is that “the historical realm [is] a suitable context for divine activity”; hence it was the prophet's function to act as translator, mediator, transferring “the vision of divine activity from the cosmic level to the level of everyday life” (Hanson 12). It was, then, the duty of prophets, as Honig affirms, to remind men who had strayed to return to their “higher social and religious duties” (107).

O'Connor's knowledge of the Bible, increased by her study of modern theologians and biblical scholars, reflects a similar understanding of the Old Testament prophets. In a review of William Lynch's Christ and Apollo, O'Connor extols the Hebraic imagination in its devotion to the concrete, everyday world. Out of such a source O'Connor sees not only meaningful prophecy but “genuine tragedy and comedy” coming from where “the definite is explored to its extremity” (94). She recognizes not only prophecy's link to the concrete but its essential conservative role. In her review of Bruce Vawter's The Conscience of Israel, she remarks: “Twentieth-century biblical criticism has returned the prophets to their genuine mission which was not to innovate but to recall people to truths they were already well aware of but chose to ignore” (Zuber 141). In her personal copy of this book she underlined the link between such a role for the prophets and the people: “We must see them [the prophets] for what they considered themselves to be and were, devoted Israelites, believers in the destiny of their people, looking for a regeneration of Israel that it might continue to be what Yahweh had planned for it” (Kinney 42).

Apocalyptic, on the other hand, moves quite dramatically from a belief in the destiny of a chosen people, its claim to the New Jerusalem “Yahweh had planned for it,” to an awareness that shatters such certainty and poses another, the sense of a people who through excess of evil have lost such claims on God and can only be assured of the terrible power and finality of His judgment upon them. Apocalyptic vision springs from a sense of crisis, appearing when a well-ordered society is obviously disintegrating, and though prophecy shares such a sense of crisis, apocalyptic spokesmen do not share with prophets the need to translate vision into everyday life, since these visionaries hold that the institutions and people are too corrupt or weak or both to be restored. The focus in apocalyptic is another world or its impingement upon the present. The drama enacted there is cosmic in scope: the forces of light and darkness, pictured as dreadful monstrous beasts, are engaged in a battle whose end will be nothing less than total destruction of the created universe. A leading figure in this battle is the Antichrist, conceived as the complete antithesis of Christ but one who may claim that identity, who works miracles and tempts and destroys many, including the faithful and witnessing prophets Enoch and Elias. So desperate, so complete in apocalyptic vision is the “collapse of a well-ordered world-view which defines values and orders the universe” (Hanson 2) that nothing less than “the imminent cataclysmic eruption of divine power into this world to bring about its destruction” (Rowland 24) will come to pass. O'Connor's writings outside her fiction testify to little interest in such a vision. When asked by a friend apparently for the names of Catholic apocalyptic writers, she replied, “I can't think of any really apocalyptic writers to offer you. … It's the nature of the church to survive all crises” (HB [The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor], 299). Such a comment betrays a peculiar lack of comprehension of (or sympathy for) apocalyptic, for if the friend were asking for all Catholic writers, not just twentieth-century ones, then O'Connor is ignoring a whole body of medieval writers, including Aquinas, who devoted considerable study to apocalyptic. We can only speculate about the lack of references to this tradition in her letters, lectures, and book reviews: the possibility that she associates such a view with Protestant fundamentalist emphasis on the parousia (the imminence of the day of Judgment), that she may associate such a view with the tendency in the Renaissance by Protestant apologetics to identify the Antichrist of apocalyptic with the Catholic Church, or more likely, that she holds the tradition as a misdirected and distorted form of true prophecy that should be bound to the concrete world and a faith in the survival of God's people.

Whatever reasons she may have entertained for not commenting on apocalyptic, the omission is all the more striking in light of the fact that her fictional world is dominated by such a vision. The cities in this world, a network of sewers or alleys “fit for cats and garbage,” represent the mother image of civilization transformed into the Whore of Babylon. The first “sign” the prophet-protagonist of Wise Blood reads in the city is an address of a prostitute in the railway-station toilet, and this becomes his first destination. The protagonist of her other novel, The Violent Bear It Away, gets his first real vision of the city as a blaze of electric lights which he associates with the fire of destruction. On the farm, so often the setting and world of O'Connor's stories, destruction seems no less imminent, for there in the unit of civilization man imposes on wilderness and forest O'Connor shows no pastoral refuge but rather a place where authority is disintegrating, weak, or illusory. In both locations, urban or rural, impending destruction threatens from heaven, foreboding in its immensity, “a blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space” or featuring a sun threatening “to burn through any second.” Posted also like signs of doom are reminders of recent holocaust: boxcars loaded with people bound for gas chambers, heaps of naked dead bodies piled on top of each other, and the cryptic understatement about a veteran's experience that “the war had done something to his insides.”

It is a world where the devil is busily and successfully at work, often assuming the role of his agent the Antichrist, depicted as the grotesque parody of Christ metaphorically rendered in Hazel Motes' sermons in Wise Blood as the “new Christ” and appropriately realized as a shrunken mummy, or as the protagonist in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” a one-armed tramp whose figure forms a “crooked cross” and betrays other characteristics of the type. There are other more subtle representations of the type in the fiction, such as The Misfit of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” denier of Christ and agent of destruction. In addition, O'Connor peoples her world with terrible apocalyptic beasts, an “old wart hog from hell,” a colossal false prophetess who “stood on two tremendous legs [like] a mountain, and rose up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy-blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything” or an ugly old man who mocks a true prophet and sits like “an old boulder half-hidden in the bushes” to appear later to a drowning child “as a giant pig with a red and white club.” The whole panorama of evil seems infused with the warning cry of one of its prophets: “Who will remain whole? Who?” (This is a close parallel to Revelation 6:17: “For the day of its wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand?”)

It is difficult in such a world to find much faith in the institutions or laws of civilization. The authority of the law seems most often brutal, ineffectual, or simply irrelevant to the situations confronting the characters. Those who regard themselves as acting on humanitarian impulses like Mrs. Cope or who pride themselves on being responsible citizens—among them, Ruby Turpin and Mrs. May—as well as the more “enlightened” intellectuals like the schoolmen of “The Lame Shall Enter First” and The Violent Bear It Away are the most dangerously self-deceived of O'Connor's characters, representing those who, as one of her prophets observed, “may be good … but ain't right.” The ties that bind society in this world seem more those of mutual weaknesses or antipathy than anything more positive, and loyalty to family or community seems to promote distrust, suspicion, and hatred rather than trust and love.

On the other hand, there is also present in the fiction another spirit, less dramatic and notable, one that implies, in terms of prophetic vision, “that God's goodness will be justified in this world” (Honig 105). An unsentimental respect for human nature is expressed through characters who display sound common sense and the capacity to resist tyranny, to endure suffering, to recognize and reverence the holy, even in its grotesque forms. In “The Enduring Chill” Dr. Block's ability to diagnose the protagonist's supposedly fatal disease exactly corresponds to the no-nonsense assessment of the state of the young man's soul by the priest; Mrs. Connin of “The River” refuses to accept babysitting wages from the cynical, godless parents of her charge, and Mary Fortune Pitts puts up a fierce battle to prevent her grandfather's unjust treatment. The impact of the symbol of black suffering, the lawn ornament in “The Artificial Nigger,” provides one of the most positive revelations in all O'Connor's fiction; and a similar recognition on the part of minor characters in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and The Violent Bear It Away of the presence of the sacred in the retarded Lucynell Crater and Bishop also offers a sense of community quite different from apocalyptic vision.

Though the presence of such a community or aggregate of individuals testifies to a different direction from apocalyptic vision, the shape of the stories might seem to confirm such vision. At least the closures suggest such. The kind of force that concludes an O'Connor story seems distinct from institutional, communal, or familial agencies or ties, one that seems most often cosmic in dimension, descending from above in a storm or from an expanding vista where “gaunt trees … thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away in the distance” or again as a “tree line … a dark wound in a world that had nothing but sky” or as a “tide of darkness” that “sweep[s]” over the protagonist. It may appear most obviously otherworldly, as a “purple streak” that opens to a “visionary light” from which comes “a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.” Or the force can appear more obviously purgatorial: “rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it could consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame.” In each instance, whether it represents the fiery devastation of the farm belonging to the protagonist or a reminder of loss, guilt, or impending punishment, the force literally or figuratively expresses the destruction of the protagonist's world as he or she has known it.

The dramatic value of such closures can scarcely be criticized since they move the reader from the constricted world of the protagonist to a sense of cosmic grandeur and immensity. As apocalyptic visions the endings seem perfectly satisfactory: devastatingly final, terrible and awesome. At the same time they raise certain important questions involving the relationship between judgment and revelation. In the first place the suddenness by which destruction moves into the protagonists' consciousness leaves revelation in its human dimension rather dubious. The grandmother's “head” clears only for “an instant” in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” before she has a chance to voice her compassionate awareness and be shot; Julian of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” scarcely has time to move emotionally from satisfaction at his mother's humiliation to grief at her death; Mrs. Cope's shocked expression in “A Circle in the Fire” testifies to her lack of comprehension of what the fire destroying her woods and fields is doing to her way of life or view of herself. Yet the character who apparently absorbs the least at the conclusion is Mrs. May of “Greenleaf,” whose destruction by the bull allows no moment of consciousness. Certainly by shifting the point of view, O'Connor renders most ambiguous the degree of the protaganist's consciousness of what has taken place, for we are told that, after she has been gored by the bull, the dead person might seem to have assumed only the “look of a person whose sight has been restored but who finds the light unbearable” (emphasis mine). What underlines the problematic state of Mrs. May's awareness is that, after Mr. Greenleaf has shot the bull and Mrs. May is obviously dead, O'Connor arranges a gesture by which the woman is lifted upon the bull's horns, assuming the posture of one “whispering” a secret just learned. The gesture seems almost a parody of anyone communicating an awareness of the mystery of grace.

In the second place, these conclusions pose a destruction so annihilating that we are left with nothing, at least nothing human, on which to see the possibility of regeneration. The classic instance of such is the conclusion of Wise Blood when Mrs. Flood, suitably apocalyptically named, shuts her eyes to “see” into the eyes of a blind man who is dead and comes to the conclusion that “she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn't begin.” In “The Displaced Person,” O'Connor's longest short story, the world of the farm, the only one we inhabit in the story, simply disintegrates and is abandoned, and we are left with a protagonist paralyzed and bereft of the power of speech.

In the third place, these endings most often depict the destructive force as limitless sky or a line of trees or a river so that we seem in the presence of something of much more than human dimension. It has the same effect as other symbols in her work, the peacock's spread tail or the sun as “a huge red ball like an elevated host.” These images certainly express divine mystery, yet, placed within the fictional context of modern life, with its holocaustal pile of naked bodies or hermaphrodite circus freak, seem rather to express a violent contradiction or separation between the two worlds, the divine and human, rather than an ideal fusion or connectedness. In this sense they come close to what Yeats deliberately chose to do with his symbols of Unity of Being in “Among School Children,” images that are “Self-born mockers of man's enterprise.” Of course, such was not O'Connor's intention.

Considering these characteristics of her closures, we could conclude that O'Connor is deliberately diminishing the human role in the focus of her fiction, regeneration through grace. Such diminishment would represent her own failure as prophet as she defines that role to “explore the definite … to its extremity,” granting primacy to consciousness, which contains man's potential to be reawakened to essential truths that have been forgotten, to reassume the role as God's chosen in the domain of everyday reality. Other elements in her fiction, however, do point towards such a domain and indicate a pattern at odds, or seemingly at odds, with the apocalyptic frame of opening and closing in the narrative structure.

An example of such a pattern occurs in the otherwise apocalyptic “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” O'Connor does carefully establish and develop the meaning of the grandmother's revelation, a development that gives some scope to human consciousness and will. First, by a series of incidents O'Connor “places” the grandmother's gesture of reconciliation towards The Misfit. The grandmother first warns Bailey of the Misfit, then ironically, though unintentionally, leads the family to him, recognizes him, thus ensuring their destruction, and then pleads with him not to be an agent of evil but to be the Good Man. This pattern of incidents magnifies the drama of her final understanding and acceptance of The Misfit that begins in an awareness of evil as an alien presence and moves to her gradual sense of her own involvement in evil as she, through the shock of the encounter with him, strips away every vestige of comfortable pseudo-Christianity with which she has shielded herself from knowledge. A second means by which O'Connor expresses the meaning of the grandmother's revelation is by the parallel the author draws between protagonist and antagonist. The good manners of The Misfit are a grotesque parody of the grandmother's, revealing the inadequacy of this behavior by the incongruity between his politeness and brutal actions. The childlike fantasies of the grandmother further provide an ironic reflection on The Misfit's nursing his sense of alienation as a refuge from belief and moral responsibility. The grandmother's mentally misplacing the mansion in Georgia when it was in Tennessee (an expression of her wishful thinking), together with the description of the “secret panel” hiding the family treasure there, parallels The Misfit's explanation of his own inability to “place” the nature of his crime; his search for the answer in prison not only expresses his baffled sense of frustration but also reads like directions to a secret panel of sorts: “Turn to the right, it was a wall. Look up, it was a ceiling, look down, it was a floor.” In addition, both characters perceive something awry in the world and at the same time deny complicity or responsibility for such a state. Most important, what binds them, their mutual need for the Good Man, gives point to the title of the story. The Misfit's anguished denial of his desperate need ironically “triggers” the grandmother's recognition of her own need and willingness to share in his. In the final description of both, O'Connor seals the parallel that links the two in the similar effect that their encounter has on them. In death the grandmother's face of smiling innocence suggests the state to which she has been restored, and the “defenseless” appearance of The Misfit without his glasses reveals similarly how his grim denial of Christ is no longer a secure one.

Though such a pattern is part of the structure of the story, other features, besides the apocalyptic framework of the narrative, point in another direction. These include the focus on the inevitability of destruction, a realization that comes after the accident occurs but is foreshadowed much earlier. In fact, one of the ironies of the story is the family's reiteration of what has happened to them as an “ACCIDENT” when the context, including the “cloudless” sky, reflects instead an inexorable judgment on those whose very ordinary American typicality reflects something more seriously wrong than folly and ignorance. In the grandmother's dramatic story-telling, in the exhibition of June Starr's tap-dancing skills, we see a tendency towards mimicry, while the children's exchange of similar comic books on the trip, the identical daily outfits and innocuous expression of the daughter-in-law, Bailey's constant irritability, and the iteration of stock phrases particularly by the grandmother mark a mechanical sameness of language and behavior. O'Connor uses animals in the story to illuminate this way of life, animals most associated with mimicry, a monkey and parrots. At Red Sammy's the monkey's delighted biting of his own fleas provides an emblem showing the self-satisfaction of those who feed on their own parasitic existence and culture and seem thus immune to growth or change. The transfer of Bailey's shirt with its bright blue parrots from Bailey to The Misfit marks the story's reversal: the family is removed from its ordinary context to face ultimate judgment by which its parody of human nature becomes no longer ludicrous but woefully inadequate. Finally, if Christ is the Good Man so hard to find, then The Misfit who finds the family becomes, as Christ-denier and agent of destruction and judgment, the Antichrist, the embodiment of a terrifying vision in a world in which even nature becomes devouring monster, appearing as a “line of trees [that] gaped like a dark open mouth.”

Examining the story from the perspective of these contrasting elements uncovers two forms of irony at work. One points to the disparity between “all sanguine expressions of hope in social ideals and in benevolent intentions and the unregenerate condition of human actuality” (Honig 130). The other represents unexpected potential for regeneration uncovered there. That these ironies are contradictory and distinct is an abstract truth we derive from naming and analyzing apocalyptic features; yet in the flow of the narrative the ironies seem to merge, just as the exposure of the emptiness and selfishness of the family and of the grandmother, as its matriarch and representative, moves concurrently with the preparation and definition of the meaning of her revelation. But that very simultaneous movement and apparent fusion of perspectives on man really heightens the tension between the two truths so that one ultimately must be seen to prevail finally, or at least some sort of reconciliation between the two has to be reached. In this instance, despite the evidence of corruption and the apocalyptic carnage that has pronounced terrible judgment on it, the validity of the grandmother's gesture of reconciliation, even based on so fleeting or instantaneous a glimpse of the truth of grace, gives primacy to the prophetic mode of vision and the ironic truth it expresses. Yet the apparent tenuousness of her “victory” hardly renders meaningless the claims of the other mode of vision and form of irony.

Works Cited

Hanson, Paul D. The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979.

Honig, Edwin. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1972.

Kinney, Arthur F. Flannery O'Connor's Library: Resources of Being. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

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

———. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1980.

———. Three by Flannery O'Connor. New York: Signet, 1962.

———. The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, 1960.

Orvell, Miles. Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1972.

Rowland, Christopher. The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity. New York: Crossroads, 1982.

Zuber, Leo J., and Carter W. Martin. The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O'Connor. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983.