Flannery O'Connor

Addendum #35

Recently, I have been reading letters, stories, and a novel of Flannery O’Connor’s, The Violent Bear It Away. Some of this was sparked by the movie Wildcat, which I have seen twice and the strange, marvelous feeling of seeing an intelligent cinematic presentation of a serious writer. For whatever reason, O’Connor has always felt very real to me as a person, maybe the simple fact of her sitting in her room in Milledgeville and doing the writing. The movie confirmed that sense of her, her commitment, her foibles, her sickness, and the pleasure she took in her art. Moreover, I have felt drawn to read her once again (since I have long lost track of how many times I have sat down with some writing of hers), because she speaks so clearly to the present nasty moment in the nation’s history. For me, O’Connor belongs to the tradition of the great American truth-tellers—Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, among others—writers who did not flinch. A lifetime of writing has taught me how easy it is to flinch, to say that love or will power or art will conquer all or at least make the unpalatable seem palatable and give assurance of a happy ending. Any of those entities may conquer something but, at least for me, none will conquer all. “All” is a very big category that many days feels it is getting even bigger.

O’Connor always had her mind on last things and a smidgen of eternity often illuminates her writing, that sense of someone who is above it all and looking down on the human fray, not serenely because O’Connor could get plenty riled, but aware of a long view that entailed mysteries such as mercy and grace. The human comedy was exactly that to her even as wretched events showed themselves time and again, events induced by humans and often trumpeted by them as beneficial: “This war or mania or tribal prejudice will be good for you. Just sign up.” Little wonder that O’Connor had a fondness for putting salesmen in her fiction since the United States was based (and is based) on a seemingly never-ending hustle, the basic endeavor of parting people with their money. Like children who wanted ice cream, Americans could not help themselves.. The contrast between Christ’s sacrifice and the grasping din was a stark one that gave her more than enough material to fill her short life.

A Buddhist teacher of mine was wont to say that “Human beings are number one bad animal.” O’Connor was, of course, a staunch Catholic, but she might have endorsed those words because most people in her fiction are piteous. I mean that not in a demeaning sense but rather in the sense that they deserve pity. They could have done better and they often have done worse. They have indulged one too many conceits. Harm plagues them yet they insist they know what they are doing. They are not hopeless because hope resides among the mysteries that God oversees, that margin where wishing and wanting lurch toward one another to perhaps overcome fear and perhaps not. At O’Connor’s back was Dante, a Catholic writer who knew something about fear: “The fear was quieted a little which had continued in the lake of my heart during the night I had spent so piteously.” (Sinclair translation). Meanwhile, as O’Connor (and Dante) testified, the number one bad animal kept stoking the evil to which Inferno testified. Thus, people amused her, appalled her, intrigued her, and perhaps saddened her. In any case, what they said they were going to do and what they actually did, who they believed they were and who they really were, the airs they habitually gave themselves and the miseries they pressed upon one another in the name of one notion or another, presented her with folly on a scale that was, at once, grand and minute, manic and absurd. Each one of her marvelous sentences ground the essence of that folly. Like an umpire, there was no getting around her.

The progress bruited at every turn by modern times did not enrapture her. The remark that she was the last medieval writer is apt. O’Connor seems a crucial writer because she refused to drink the Kool-Aid that came up in different flavors but had the same essence—progress. It could include endless economic growth, social adjustment, material improvements, better education, technological wizardry, and new model cars. This did not mean O’Connor was a reactionary or obstructionist. Rather, it meant that she had a strong sense of first things first. Her faith came first and her writing abetted that faith as she traced the ways of human duplicity time and again in her stories. Part of that duplicity was the refusal to believe there was such a thing, particularly among the educated such as Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away, a man who believes that good rational advice can sort out anyone, beginning with his seemingly deranged nephew, Tarwater. Faith in the mystery of life encompasses uncertainty and doubt and O’Connor enjoyed portraying that. What provoked her was the modern litany of certainty, as if some ultimate stage of human awareness had been reached, the know-it-all stage.

All the American energy, the endless making and unmaking, had to O’Connor an idle aspect, the unsanctified work of people who did not know what to do with themselves beyond gaining a purchase within a society that had little to no purchase on anything but had plenty of brags and boasts to fill up the machine-driven emptiness. Her eye was sardonic and steady but alert to those instances where people stepped outside of their certainties and came face to face with the confused depth of our being here. Stories are not theology and one of the beauties of O’Connor’s writing is that she was not out to prove anything. She was ever testing the waters. The present dictatorial viciousness stems from a heaping portion of contempt and is one more instance of the modern drive to fix life according to some very mean lights. No surprise there for anyone who has spent time with O’Connor’s fiction. Grace, however, as she would have been the first to say, may certainly not abound among human beings but, in any number of precious gestures, not the least of which is literature, it remains.