Flannery O'Connor. Naked.

In the world of the English major, there is a famous (and fairly old) debate regarding whether or not to allow the author of a work special critical preference when discussing said author's work. That is to say, if the author claims to have written a work with a specific intention (or from a specific perspective), should it matter to a reader? Generally, literary critics prefer to see the author as just another critic, and allow him/her no special preference. And, long story short, they have good reason for doing so. [For more regarding this debate, Google "wimsatt beardsley intentional fallacy."]

While most critics do not privilege the author's perspective, others find it helpful (though not necessary) if the reader is wanting to understand the work sympathetically. The author wrote this text for some reason, or so the idea goes, and it should be possible (even beneficial) to keep this in mind as we try to make sense of the work. Of course, we should also keep in mind the fact that the author may have various reasons to keep the secret of their literary offspring's origins covered up. And they will curse you with the ferocity of old Noah if you stumble across it and tell others what you saw.

I guess what I'm saying is, leave now if you don't want to see Flannery O'Connor naked. (And yes, I really just wrote that hoping someone, someday Googles "Flannery O'Connor naked.")

Recently I have been re-reading several of Flannery O'Connor's short stories for a Grammar/Composition class that I teach. We were getting ready to discuss "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the oft-anthologized story of the family vacation gone horribly wrong, when I revisited O'Connor's discussion of the work. (The following quotes are taken from Flannery O'Connor's "On Her Own Work," in Mystery and Manners.)

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.
[...]
This story has been called grotesque, but I prefer to call it literal. A good story is literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul, and not for the dead bodies.

Admittedly, there are all sorts of ways to read O'Connor's works. O'Connor, herself, was canny enough to admit as much. But I think her description of the possibility of anagogical readings within her own work is something that I, quite frankly, want to steal and use for myself. Use it not just on O'Connor's works, but on anything I read that seems to admit this perspective. The working title for this post was "Flannery O'Connor Was Here," because I don't know if anything I write about the possibilities of "Christian readings" (whatever that means) will come close to the lucidity and power of the O'Connor passages cited above. But I think we're really saying the same thing (or at least suggesting that such readings are possible and beneficial).

I've been wrestling with intention throughout this piece, so let me close with a few comments of my own regarding O'Connor's use of violence.

When you read several of her short stories back-to-back, I think it inevitably dawns on you that O'Connor is really only writing one story. The characters and settings and even levels of violence change, but the moment (or moments) of grace are all rendered in a strikingly similar way. My 9th-grade class even pointed this out. But when I asked this class what the point of re-telling this story was, they hesitated. They weren't sure what I wanted, and they weren't sure what they knew. So I asked it again in a different way. "What is the point of these acts of violence and moments of grace repeated over and over? Who benefits from it?" (I mean, these fictional characters do, of course, but they're fictional.)

In the same text cited above, O'Connor gives her readers an explanation of why she was writing scenes of such disruptive violence:

I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories 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 do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considered cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

In short, O'Connor uses violence because it suits her fictional aims and her spiritual perspective. And while it benefits her fictive characters that are in need of grace, it's main purpose is to suggest to the reader that such grace is possible.

It is usually hard to remember (and impossible to recreate) the emotions you experience the first time you read something. A friend of mine once told me he yelled "NO!" and threw Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude across the room when he finished reading it the first time, as though it were possessed. But unless your reading is marked by something so memorable as this, time passes and you tend to forget, or remember imperfectly. That said, I still feel like reading O'Connor is disruptive for most first-time readers, as I remember (imperfectly) it being for me. (I chose the word "disruptive" intentionally before. There is the sense of a violent breaking loaded into the word from its Latin root and Old English cognate.)

Which leads me to the answer I gave to my 9th-grade class: O'Connor's stories seem to enact in the reader's mind (dare we say soul) the very violence they depict on the page.

So the disruptive violence that happens on the page in order to bring grace to a needy character is mirrored by the disruption that the reader experiences (and doesn't know what to do with at first). I think the disruption in the reader is caused by difficulty interpreting the gesture that we can't quite account for, the one that "makes contact with mystery."

For what it's worth, O'Connor admits in various places that I am not the only reader who has stumbled over these moments of disruption (or ambiguity) in her stories. You can read about at least one of them (and get the full context of the O'Connor quotes littered throughout this post) here. Note the first few paragraphs, especially (concerning the confusion surrounding the Grandmother's character).

Of course I realize that even if you admit that reading O'Connor brings disruption to the reader, it does not necessarily bring grace. But that doesn't mean she isn't trying.