Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism Edited by R. Neil Scott Timberlane Books. $127.95, 1,086 pp.

Flannery O'Connor died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. During her lifetime she published two novellas, a short-story collection, and some scattered essays (posthumously collected) and reviews. After her death there came another collection of short stories and a brilliant edition of her letters, compiled by Sally Fitzgerald. I am hard pressed to think of any fiction writer who gives me greater pleasure, and no modern writer who so dazzles me with the power of her prose, the sharpness of her wit, and the depth of her grasp of the sacramental imagery of the Catholic tradition. O'Connor's stories have frequently held pride of place in my syllabi. Having lived a goodly portion of my life on the border between North Florida and South Georgia, I can also attest that what is often described by some as her penchant for the grotesque is, in fact, simply a matter of close observation. Still, there is a puzzle as one pages through this Brobdingnagian compilation of book-length criticism, literary essays, M.A. theses, more than three hundred doctoral dissertations, and nearly two hundred foreign-language essays (a surprisingly large number in Japanese) so comprehensively assembled by the librarian who keeps order in the O'Connor archives at the Georgia College and State University in O'Connor's native Milledgeville. Why should the rather modest output of a woman who died from lupus before she was forty command so much attention and such intense scrutiny? Commonweal itself has published more than twenty reviews and appreciations of her works dating back to 1952. My own sense is that many readers do not take seriously O'Connor's conviction that she was speaking in contemporary terms about the Incarnation, using a language that was analogical and allusive and that moved, as she once famously said, from manners into mystery. Others take her claims seriously but insist on reading her stories as allegories when, in fact, they are not. Nor is it easy to grasp that she wrote comedy, in Dante's sense of the term (a work that has a happy ending), when the work is filled with violence and terror. Finally, O'Connor was a very careful writer whose sentences, densely worked over and pruned to avoid cliches, each carried more than the usual amount of freight. The endings of her stories (look at the final paragraphs of "Revelation") were almost symphonic in their intensity. This bibliography came to me unrequested--one of those over-the-transom volumes that appear in my mail now and again (an unexpected beneficence to a reviewer). It is too valuable a work to stay on one's own shelf if one is not an O'Connor scholar, which I am not. So, after browsing through its pages, reacquainting myself with authors whom I know or have read, and after immodestly checking the index to see if my own name appears (it does), I will see that it gets to a worthy library. Every college and university library needs this great labor of love on its shelves. n

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.