The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence: Flannery O’Connor (A Personal Reflection)
He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him. ~Flannery O’Connor, “The River”
I found her while crawling around on my hands and knees in a bookshop in Raleigh, North Carolina. The little Bible college I was attending didn’t have much by way of a library, so I spent most of my free time rummaging through the dusty stacks of cheap books at Steven’s. Steven was a crotchety old bookseller who used to work for Southeastern Seminary until the conservatives began purging the institutions of moderates and liberals. Though I was a “Bible-thumping fundamentalist,” the old man took a shine to me and would let me in early and allowed me to stay late whether I had the money to buy anything or not. Much of the time I contented myself with just plopping down in a corner and surrounding myself with piles of his smyth-sewn treasures. It was there that I met John Donne, Karl Barth, and her.
Sitting atop of a stack of books on bird watching was a pale, worn volume festooned with peacock plumage. It must have been thrown haphazardly into the lot set aside for amateur ornithologists based purely on the artwork because it was clearly not a book about birds at all. The title read The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor.
At first I didn’t even know she was a she. What kind of name is “Flannery” anyhow? But since my curiosity was piqued and I had several hours to kill, I gathered it under my arm with Yeats and The Pickwick Papers and headed to my hollowed out hole in the back corner. And I sat there, sometimes laughing out loud, until Steven started turning the lights off and telling me it was time to go.
“Do you know anything about this fella,” I said, showing him the book adorned with peacock feathers.
He snickered. “Of course I do. But that fella was a lady from Georgia. And she is one of the most famous writers the South has produced. Don’t you know anything?”
But the truth was that I didn’t know much about literature. I had memorized half of the book of Psalms in high school, but there was not much emphasis placed on extra-biblical literature.
“Well, how much will you take for it?” I asked.
“You can have it for fifty cents if you take the Dickens book along with it. That’d be two-fifty, total.”
It was a good deal. I left Steven’s two bucks lighter, but a whole heap richer for my purchase.
Though her initial claim to fame was that she was on tv for having taught a chicken how to walk backwards, it is her writing that has sealed her lasting legacy. Now, I am not among those who say that O’Connor was a literary genius who wrote the most spectacular prose the world has ever known. But I will say that she appealed to me. She spoke to me. Given my present situation at a religious institution that seemed to always know just how God would operate, and the types of people He would be willing to use or to redeem, she disconcerted me. Her stories hit me like buckshot in the face. I was blind, but now I see.
In a lecture at Sweetbriar College she once remarked, “Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental." For O’Connor, most folks, especially those from the South, were too at ease in Zion with our notions of “good people” and “grace” and “salvation.” These were saccharine categories whose sweetness left us fast asleep in a sugar coma. What we needed was to be shaken back to consciousness, and struck hard with a vision of violent mercy. Miss O’ Conner explained, “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will work.”
Flannery O’Connor took our preconceived ideas about righteousness and decency and turned them on their heads. Blind prophets from the “Church without Christ” made incarnate truth visible, “good country people” were shown to be the true grotesques, and murderers became emissaries for the Divine. For instance, one will scarcely find a more thorough explication of the gospel than on the lips of the murderous “Misfit” in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit
continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything
off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do
but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then
it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the
best way you can? By killing somebody or burning down his house
or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,"
he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
While it is true that some of her fiction is a bit over the top (for instance, I’m not sure she ever wrote a story in which some poor soul didn’t lose a body part), sometimes that is exactly what is needed by a person overly confident about the parameters of grace. It was certainly what I needed those many years ago.
Flannery O’Connor died on August 3, 1964 after a fourteen year fight against lupus. She only left us two novels and a few dozen short stories. But she did her best to write in such a startling way as to make them count. Like Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away, she set out to wake the sleeping children of God. And in this singular task she succeeded, or at least she succeeded with me.
