Flannery O'Connor's writing: a guide for the perplexed

Modern Age, Wntr, 2005 by Michael M. Jordan

MANY READERS HAVE BEEN fascinated with Flannery O'Connor as a person and author, perhaps for some of the same reasons I find her so engaging. I wish to mention briefly four minor but not insignificant features that attract me and then focus on three main reasons for her enduring stature among readers, teachers, and critics.

O'Connor had a very sharp eye and ear for the sights and sounds of her native land. And for me, a native of western North Carolina living in exile in the Midwest, it is a joy to encounter the "Southernness" in her fictional world, despite the fact that this world she presents is often not at all lovely. She did not wear rose-colored glasses, and her eye seized upon the depraved, the vulgar, and the grotesque. But there is no doubt that she captured the Southernness of her region. I think of the ubiquitous "Jesus Saves" and "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" messages printed on billboards, painted on barns, or scrawled on boulders. I think of the way her characters talk. Their idioms, diction, pronunciation, and grammar reveal O'Connor's masterly use of regional dialect: "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust." "Hep that lady up, Hirum." "Lady, there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip"--a few memorable sentences from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." "Ain't there somewheres we can sit down sometime?" "I just want to know if you love me or don'tcher." "One time I got a woman's glass eye this way. And you needn't to think you'll catch me because Pointer ain't really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don't stay nowhere long. And I'll tell you another thing, Hulga, you ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!"--from Manley Pointer's comments to Hulga Hopewell in "Good Country People."

I think O'Connor is as good as Mark Twain when it comes to realistically rendering both the comic and the tragic vision in a distinctively Southern idiom. About 120 years before O'Connor wrote her fiction, Georgia writer Augustus Baldwin Longstreet said he hoped his Georgia Scenes (1835) would accurately capture the scenes, manners, and speechways of his rapidly changing region. O'Connor has certainly done that for us in our time.

O'Connor is also attractive to me because she has a manageable body of literature. One can easily read all of her published work: her fiction (31 short stories and 2 novels); a one-volume collection of occasional lectures and prose writings (on her own fiction and on the art of fiction in general); and two collections of her letters. Her literary output is small for two reasons: first, she was a slow writer, and a painstaking one. She worked five years on Wise Blood, at 232 pages a relatively short novel. Secondly, at the age of 26 she was stricken with lupus, an incurable disease that limited her writing time and energy and shortened her life. She died young--in 1964, only 39 years old.

Her prose style is yet another reason she's one of my favorite authors. When asked by students which authors I recommend as prose stylists (for in reading a good author we can pick up some of his virtues), I recommend three: Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, and Flannery O'Connor. What she writes is clear, pungent, and memorable. She can effectively say more in a few sentences than most of us can ineptly say in several pages.

I also like her and recommend her because of her very sensible advice concerning teaching literature to middle- and high-school students. This advice, found in Mystery and Manners, has been of value to me as a teacher of college students. Here are a few of her convictions that should interest all literature teachers. O'Connor believed that parents should exercise some control over the content of their children's education. She thought that both parents' consent and students' preparation should determine whether high school seniors read questionable modern novels. O'Connor recommends that students should read the older writers before dipping into modern works: they should read eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists before reading nineteenth-century American novelists. And they should read Hawthorne before reading Steinbeck, or her own work, for that matter. Much modern literature is more complicated as well as more scandalous than literature from earlier times, so O'Connor very sensibly recommends that students should be prepared for the modern by reading in the tradition out of which modern writing comes. (1)

O'Connor did not believe in student-centered education; that is to say, she did not believe teachers should ask students what they would like to read. I quote her on this point:

  The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility
  if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best
  writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best
  writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies
  or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

  And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is
  regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it
  is being formed. (2)