illustrated portrait of American author Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

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Achievements

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The fiction of Flannery O’Connor has been highly praised for its unrelenting irony, its symbolism, and its unique comedy. O’Connor is considered one of the most important American writers of the short story, and she is frequently compared with William Faulkner as a writer of short fiction.

For an author with a relatively small literary output, O’Connor has received an enormous amount of attention. More than twenty-five books devoted to her have appeared beginning in the early 1960’s, when significant critics worldwide began to recognize O’Connor’s gifts as a fiction writer. Almost all critical works have emphasized the bizarre effects of reading O’Connor’s fiction, which, at its best, powerfully blends the elements of southwestern humor, the southern grotesque, Catholic and Christian theology and philosophy, atheistic and Christian existentialism, realism, and romance. Most critics have praised and interpreted O’Connor from a theological perspective and noted how unusual her fiction is, as it unites the banal, the inane, and the trivial with Christian, though fundamentally humorous, tales of proud Georgians fighting battles with imaginary or real agents of God sent out to shake some sense into the heads of the protagonists.

As an ironist with a satirical bent, O’Connor may be compared with some of the best in the English language, such as Jonathan Swift and George Gordon, Lord Byron. It is the comic irony of her stories that probably attracts most readers—from the orthodox and religious to the atheistic humanists whom she loves to ridicule in some of her best fiction. Thus, as a comedian, O’Connor’s achievements are phenomenal, since through her largely Christian stories, she is able to attract readers who consider her beliefs outdated and quaint.

In her lifetime, O’Connor won recognition, but she would be surprised at the overwhelming response from literary critics that her fiction has received since her death. O’Connor won O. Henry Awards for her stories “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf,” “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” and “Revelation.” The Complete Stories, published posthumously in 1971, won the National Book Award for Fiction. O’Connor received many other honors, including several grants and two honorary degrees.

Flannery O’Connor’s art was best suited to the medium of the short story, where her sharp, shocking, and grotesque characterizations could have full impact on the reader. Nevertheless, her depiction of the Christ-haunted Hazel Motes in Wise Blood ranks as the most memorable and piercing postmodern delineation of Western society’s anxiety over God’s absence. O’Connor’s ability to create supernatural tension, to provoke the potentially hostile reader into considering the possibility of divine invasion of the human sphere, is unparalleled by any postwar writer. Seeing “by the light of Christian orthodoxy,” O’Connor refused to chisel away or compromise her convictions to make them more congenial to her readers. She knew that it is difficult to place the Christian faith in front of the contemporary reader with any credibility, but her resolve was firm. She understood, in the words of John Gardner (On Moral Fiction, 1978), that “art which tries to tell the truth unretouched is difficult and often offensive,” since it “violates our canons of politeness and humane compromise.” O’Connor succeeded not in making Christianity more palatable but in making its claims unavoidable.

O’Connor was committed not only to telling the “truth unretouched” but also to telling a good story. This meant rejecting predetermined morals—homilies tacked onto stories and processed uncritically by her readers: “When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a...

(This entire section contains 763 words.)

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very good one.” Instead of literary proselytizing, she offered a literature of evangelism, of incarnation, a fusing of literary form with authorial vision. Her evangelistic mode was not proselytizing, but proclaiming, the ancient and more honorable practice of declaring news, of heralding its goodness to a usually indifferent, sometimes hostile audience. O’Connor had a keen perception of her audience’s mind-set and cultural milieu; her proclamation was calculated to subvert the habitualization of faith and to make such notions as redemption, resurrection, and eternal life seem new and strange to a Western society that had reduced them to commonplaces empty of significance. Readers and critics continue to respond to O’Connor’s clear spiritual vision and piercingnarrative style, a style uncluttered by a false pluralism or sectarian debate. O’Connor, the devout Catholic, neither preached nor compelled; she simply proclaimed.

Discussion Topics

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What evidence is there in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that its author was a devout Roman Catholic?

According to the title of one of O’Connor’s stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Can you find any good men in her work? What makes them “good”?

How does violence function in O’Connor’s work?

O’Connor’s fiction is often said to be characterized by “black humor.” How does O’Connor create humor in her work?

How does O’Connor use the motif of a journey to organize her fictions?

In what ways does racism show up in O’Connor’s work?

How does O’Connor use the names of characters (for example, Hazel Motes, Francis Marion Tarwater, Mr. Head) to develop themes in her fiction?

O’Connor’s work is often described as “grotesque.” In what ways can her characters and plot be considered grotesque?

Other Literary Forms

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In addition to writing thirty-one short stories, Flannery O’Connor wrote two short novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). A collection of her essays and occasional prose entitled Mystery and Manners (1969) was edited by Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, and a collection of letters entitled The Habit of Being (1979) was edited by Sally Fitzgerald. More correspondence is collected in The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and Brainard Cheneys (1986), edited by C. Ralph Stephens. O’Connor also wrote book reviews, largely for the Catholic press; these are collected in The Presence of Grace (1983), which was compiled by Leo J. Zuber and edited by Carter W. Martin.

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