Flannery O'Connor: Faith's Stepchild
[In the following review, Schott discusses O'Connor's Catholicism and asserts that "in Flannery O'Connor's stories evil is man's inevitable fate."]
After reading Flannery O'Connor's final stories I ended the night listening to the mathematical music of the baroque. Order had to be restored, the monsters exorcised from the imagination and pressed back into her fiction.
Losers all, her characters act out the Gothic rituals of defeat and destruction in the nightmare American South. And if Miss O'Connor's god was ever aware of them (a problem to return to eventually), he is now obliviously sawing logs in heaven, as Pär Lagerkvist suggested in The Eternal Smile. Let them kill and be killed or grind their teeth in anticipation.
There are nine stories here, all episodes of fatal error and ironic retribution—modern Old Testament scenes in eschatology as the earth binds winding sheets around her failures. First a fat white woman, beaten to the pavement for offering a Negro boy a penny at the end of a bus ride, dies of a stroke or heart attack. Next a farm spinster is gored to death by the bull she commanded her hired man to shoot. A progress-crazed old farmer in "A View of the Woods" pounds his 9-year-old granddaughter's skull against rocks until her "eyes were fixed in a glare that did not take him in"; then he staggers suicidally into a lake as immense as his guilt. In "The Comforts of Home" a son accidentally shoots his mother; he was aiming at their slut boarder. In "The Lame Shall Enter First" a child hangs himself after seeing his dead mother waving from a distant star. In "Judgment Day," the only story placed in the North, an ancient Southern D.P. headed home to die gets as far as the stairs and expires; the Negro in the next apartment shoves the corpse's head, arms and legs through the spokes of a stair-case as if in a stock. The last three stories settle for purgatory: an invalid intellectual returns to Georgia and waits for the water-stain holy ghost to descend from the ceiling above his bed. A maniacal ex-sailor, with a Byzantine Jesus tattooed on his back, wails against a tree, unrecognized, like Christ crucified. A self-righteous hog raiser, deranged by accusation and assault, sees a vision of herself at the very end of a heavenly procession led by white trash, bands of "black niggers in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs."
Flannery O'Connor ventured into the world. She was born and reared in Georgia, and died there a year ago at the age of 38. But she lived as an adult in New York City, Connecticut and Iowa City, where she studied in Paul Engle's Writer's Workshop. She lectured and read in at least five states and visited France and Italy. Yet all her fiction—these stories; her first collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find; her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away—rise out of the Baptist South. Their recurring ethos is that hereditary conflict of wills one imagines warring behind closed doors as he drives lost at twilight on a back road near the battle-field at Vicksburg. Like an expert on one function of the spleen, she chose a small territory of soil and soul and treated it as though nothing else really existed. Human behavior beyond distorted Christianity, outside the lower social orders of the rural South and the domestic arrangements of widowed parents and their children, is perceived as if by accident.
She had only a few ideas, but messianic feelings about them. Children and parents, rarely husbands and wives or brothers and sisters, strike at one another. The family unit—not society as a whole—opens the trap to dysfunction and cataclysm. Only the land, trees and sky possess beauty. Her adults look like mistakes; even her children are ugly. Love enters her stories as the comprehension of loss after death of a child or parent.
Her chief characters belong to the genus Southern Neanderthal. Their minds are pre-Darwinian and post-Christian. The only belief that might make a difference in their lives is Baptist literalism. Like astrology, it's nonfunctional, but provides a defensive reflex system against thought. Miss O'Connor's Negroes are "niggers," endowed with physical strength, great fears and animal survival powers. Her intellectuals—a college professor, schoolteacher, social worker, three failed writers and a Wellesley girl—create special hells. They know about paperback books, psychic compensation, electric blankets, racial equality, but nothing about themselves. Educated atheists, they can claim no more stability than the red-necked semi-literates they loathe. Flannery O'Connor's reality is destiny out of control, choices made after alternatives have been frozen. To begin one of her stories is to anticipate its end. The only questions are how the dreadful punishment for living will be delivered and in what manner her savage sense of humor will delay the agony.
"If nothing happened, there's no story," Flannery O'Connor once said to Robert Fitzgerald. Events take place, words are spoken in her stories for reasons her characters would not understand. Buried in their psychic histories, black flowers of chaos bloom because Miss O'Connor creates them. The tattooed Parker marries a woman he does not love. The social worker, Sheppard, persists at rehabilitating a psychopathic youth even though the boy is destroying his own son. Her characters aspire to the impossible out of mysterious inner needs. We believe in them because Flannery O'Connor's visionary logic descends on us like a clamp. Intelligence says wait. But the emotions follow her to exhaustion. She had the fictionalist's only requisite gift—a genius for deception.
"I think the first thing you need to realize about fiction," she wrote to one of her nun correspondents, "is … the writer [tries] to see an action, or a series of actions, clearly. To make anyone see a thing, you have to say straight out what it is, you have to describe it with the greatest accuracy. The fiction writer is concerned with the way the world looks first of all."
The phenomena of sight obsessed her. Events and revelations come in strings of optical epiphanies. What her characters see and how they see it, the colors of their eyes and the reflections in them, their visions in crisis or at the instant of death, the play of hues and shadows in trees and sky, reinforce what we feel about the core-man inside the shell.
Before the reducing class at the Y, the fat woman's sky-blue eyes in the title story are "as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten." Crumpled like a blimp after the handbag blitzkreig, she seeps into death. "One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him [her son], raked his face again, found nothing and closed." Lights drift farther away the faster the youth runs for help. Darkness and his sins sweep him back to her.
Windows to the soul, eyes signal preludes and clues to action and meaning. Visions and vistas serve as codas. The "same pale slate color as the ocean," O.E. Parker's eyes "reflected the innocent spaces around him as if they were a microcosm of the mysterious sea." The Jesus tattooed on his back as a desperate gesture to make contact with his wife has "eyes to be obeyed." His wife cannot recognize the Jesus. "He don't look…. No man shall see his face." She watches Parker, crying like a baby against the pecan tree, welts forming on the face of his tattooed Christ, and "her eyes hardened still more." As the horns pierce her body, Mrs. May in "Greenleaf" had "the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable." Smell, sound, kinesthesis orient Miss O'Connor's characters. Vision directs them; emotional stimuli enter through their eyes. Their frustrating pasts, obliquely bared, turn their responses into acts of hostility, hatred, violence. Curiously, all are denied the sensuality of sex. To introduce the erotic would have taken Miss O'Connor outside the psychophysical graveyard. She was, apparently, never in love.
Flannery O'Connor is everywhere in her stories. She entered fiction by way of painting and cartooning, which partly accounts for the visual intensity. Many of her characters struggle to walk or move in their states of shock; she herself used crutches when these stories were written. Like most of her characters, the continuous personal presence in her life was one parent—her widowed mother. One sees the spinster author sitting in bed, paring her fingernails and watching the peacocks on her farm, tolerating the ministrations, wandering through visions of violence in the distances surrounding her. Along with physical pain, sight was the most intense sensual experience available to her. Enlarged by a medieval religious attraction to the manifestations of evil, sight gave her art its phantasmagorial reality.
The most imaginatively endowed Roman Catholic writer the United States has developed, Flannery O'Connor once said of the eucharistic symbol, "If it were only a symbol, I'd say to hell with it." She received the last sacraments before her death in Milledgeville. She went to mass every day when she lived with Robert Fitzgerald and his wife in Connecticut in 1949 and 1950. When lupus (the disease that eventually killed her) got worse in 1957, she went to Lourdes and then to Rome for an audience with Pius XII. At Notre Dame that year she had said: "The Catholic sacramental view of life is one that maintains and supports at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth." She chose the title of this book from Teilhard de Chardin, the evolutionist Jesuit theologian who theorized that matter and spirit would eventually converge at "point omega." Judging from Fitzgerald's introduction and the evidence of the stories, she did it for ironic effect. Flannery O'Connor must have viewed Chardin as another "interleckchul" and Vatican II an "Eyetalian" conspiracy against the blood of Christ and the one true faith.
Her Catholicism belongs, it seems to me, somewhere near the time of the Inquisition. The village priest in "The Enduring Chill" is a hard-of-hearing country bumpkin. "You will never learn to be good unless you pray regularly," he says when Asbury Fox asks him what he thinks of James Joyce. Ignatius Vogle, S.J., appears briefly in the same story to suggest the "real probability of the New Man, assisted, of course, by the Third Person of the Trinity." Very cool, he has the same trouble as Asbury and looks beyond the cross. He's too damned smart.
On three occasions in the Gospel according to John, Jesus calls the devil "the ruler of this world," and in Flannery O'Connor's stories evil is man's inevitable fate. Helplessly enveloped by satanic emanations, her characters sense the poisons, breathe deeper and sink. "Pride is the queen and mother of all vices," Thomas Aquinas said with rhetorical affection. The loss of Paradise was the price Adam and Eve paid for their pride. In every story, Flannery O'Connor's characters aspire beyond their capabilities. Asbury tries to write and can't. He attempts to liberate Negroes and instead gets undulant fever and his mother's banalities. Sheppard, in "The Lame Shall Enter First," cannot possibly rehabilitate a monster who has the intelligence of a near-genius and the will to destroy his child. Thomas, another would-be writer living on his vanity and his mother, in "The Comforts of Home," stumbles into matricide when he exceeds his psychological potentialities. O.E. Parker tries to have himself tattooed out of anxiety—his solitary fate—and into love. He goes down the emotional drain with Jesus on his back.
Vanity corrupts Christian belief, selfless intention, personal sacrifice. "To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy in life," Mrs. Turpin tells herself in "Revelation." In the doctor's waiting room as she says, "Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is," she gets socked in the eye and thrown to the floor. Grandpa Fortune tries for wealth and progress and succeeds at murder. The boy Norton acquires a belief in God and hangs himself over it; the delinquent Johnson believes so strongly in the Bible that he tears out a page, eats it and goes on in his life of crime.
According to Christian orthodoxy, everything is inverted in Flannery O'Connor's stories. No one can find happiness or salvation. No one acquires the grace she speaks of. Her South is Salem metamorphosed; it would take a Second Coming to give her people hope.
In one of her letters to the novelist, Richard G. Stern, Flannery O'Connor said to look up John Hawkes in Providence because he was a good writer. Despite her attacks on existentialists, she saw the world in the same distorted and sinister form as did Hawkes. She dramatized Sartre's hell of other people. She confirmed James Purdy's conviction that love is impossible in the present. Pagan Christian symbols and practices frame her work. Ignorant fundamentalism, not Catholic pageantry and transubstantiation, haunts the preachers and believers in her stories and novels. Why, one wonders, could she not write at length about Catholics? Why did she choose as her larger models the misshapen Oral Robertses of the South? She selected those properties of Christianity that served to justify her black reality. The emerging Catholic theology that implies the visitation of Christ may have regenerated matter and dignified all of life was anti-art and personally intolerable. It denied her particular vision of hell on earth. She talked about free will, the sacramental view, redemption by Christ. But her characters have no real choice—only faint glimmers of possibilities lost.
Flannery O'Connor's work is filled with irony—small hope turned to great despair, rewards transformed into punishments, seriousness mocked by comedy, vanity in modesty, hate in place of love, grotesquery disguised as simplicity. But the delicious irony probably escaped her.
Based on the most depressing features of Christianity, the consignment of man to the evil forces within him and the denial of an evolving intelligence to help himself, her stories created a small universe. As patterns of thought her work suggests the absolute theological dead end enlightened Catholicism is struggling to escape. Artistically her fiction is the most extraordinary thing to happen to the American short story since Ernest Hemingway.
Reality is fantastic. Violence does bear life away. Sometimes. Myopic in her vision, Flannery O'Connor was among those few writers who raise the questions worth thinking about after the lights are out and the children are safely in bed: What is reality? What are the possibilities for hope? How much can man endure?
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Flannery O'Connor, Sin, and Grace: Everything That Rises Must Converge
Flannery O'Connor's Stories