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

Modern Age, Wntr, 2005 by Michael M. Jordan

Much of O'Connor's humor, in her stories as well as in her letters, has a point to it. It makes us wince even while we laugh. Here are a few examples from her letters. After reviewing a book of rather sentimental short stories from the American Catholic Press for The Bulletin, O'Connor wrote the Cheneys: "I have decided the motto for fiction in the Catholic press should be: 'We guarantee to corrupt nothing but your taste.'" In another letter, she related to the Cheneys her lecture comments to a group of ladies at a Catholic Parish Council: "I did tell them that the average Catholic reader was a Militant Moron. They sat there like a band of genteel desperadoes and never moved a face muscle. I might have been saying the rosary to them." (9)

O'Connor did not think much of the learning and acumen of the Protestant groups to whom she lectured, either. She observed to the Cheneys: "At all the Methodist and Baptist institutions that I normally talk at around here, I quote St. Thomas prodigiously and as the audience is never too sure who he is, it is always much impressed." (10) O'Connor's opinion of the average reader, Catholic or otherwise, was not high, nor was she pleased with what "the devil of Educationism" (her phrase in Mystery and Manners) (11) was accomplishing in American schools and colleges, religious or secular.

Christian Vision and Literary Technique

In discussing O'Connor's Christian vision it is best to include a discussion of her literary techniques, for the two are clearly connected. On many occasions O'Connor commented on the relationship between her Christian vision and her literary art. She did so because her readers (initially myself included) either did not detect a Christian vision in her work or misunderstood it. When I first read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," I found it disturbing, not at all comic. The only spiritual purpose I detected was negative: the Misfit's nihilism easily overpowering the Grandmother's shallow, sentimental Christianity. But after reading more of O'Connor's fiction, her own writings on the subject, and what a few critics had written, I began to see the rich comedy in her stories and the spiritual vision which makes the comedy possible and puts it in perspective. If read in the right spirit and with spiritual perception, her stories are terribly funny and spiritually vivid. It is terribly funny when the Misfit tells Bobby Lee and Hirum, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." (12) The Misfit's comment reveals spiritual purpose as well: threatened with a violent death, on the brink of eternity, the Grandmother becomes a "good woman," recognizes her kinship with the Misfit, and receives grace from heaven.

In "The Fiction Writer and His Country," written in 1957, O'Connor discussed the Christian vision implicit in her fiction. Noting that many modern readers complained of a lack of spiritual purpose and the absence of the joy of life in modern fiction (her own fiction included), she made this declaration regarding her beliefs: "I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that." (13) If this is true, why did so many early readers fail to see the spiritual purpose in her work?