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 Flannery O’Connor: Grace ExtendedBy Alissa Wilkinson My list of heroes is short, but Flannery O’Connor joined that list when I encountered her strange and entrancing stories in a high-school American literature course. An unapologetic believer in the supernatural in the thick of a society turning to modernism, an excellent writer in the midst of the mediocre and a devout Catholic unafraid to stand up for her beliefs, O’Connor embodies the grace-filled contradiction I want to be. Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925 and raised in Georgia, and after earning her bachelor’s degree, she attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her works of fiction include two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) and two collections of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and Everything That Rises Must Converge); her writing is distinct for its Southern gothic style and underlying understanding of a God-permeated world. After reading her most famous short pieces, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (a foolish grandmother, a family vacation and a serial killer on the loose) and Good Country People (the jaded and judgmental Ph.D. with a wooden leg and a traveling Bible salesman tangle in a lurid barn episode), I dove into her Complete Stories and read about children desiring baptism, blind people, hired help and the silliness of their bosses, dying geraniums on windowsills and strange street preachers. These aren’t always entertaining stories, despite her dark sense of humor; O’Connor portrayed humanity in its fullness and didn’t shrink from the difficult or the absurd. For that, her work is often described as “grotesque”—she later stated that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Perhaps her characters are grotesque, but it turns out, they’re authentic. Recently I picked up the posthumously published Mystery and Manners, and was astonished at her lucid, spot-on analysis of writers, the Church and their country. Rather than apologizing for fiction that transgressed the social norms of the Church and the culture, she used her platform to encourage her audience to embrace their identity and trust God to work through their words. O’Connor inspires me, as she has others, in the attitudes that marked her life. She embraced her culture with cautious optimism. O’Connor recognized her heritage as an American from the South, a highly educated woman of faith in the dawn of the doubt-ridden age of modernity, and encouraged her counterparts to embrace both their geographical and religious identity in portraying truth through their fiction. In The Church and the Fiction Writer, O’Connor postulates that “it is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.” She demanded excellence. In Catholic Novelists and Their Readers, O’Connor says, “There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does … to the same middling audience. But the writer … has to write at his own intellectual level. For him to do anything else is to bury his talents … he must not lower his standards to do so.” In resisting the “apologetic fiction” of her day, often mediocre, she insisted that the novelist’s meaning should show in the work without moralizing and preaching. She also spurred writers to pursue excellence in their work, exploring their gifts to their fullest extent, regardless of the reception their work might encounter. To her, the most important thing was to work to the glory of God, to tell His stories and write about the world He had made with honesty. She extended grace. To her listeners, to her readers and in her stories, she showed how to not only pursue excellence, but extend grace to all. Every one of her stories, at its core, was a story of humans encountering divine grace in unexpected ways. She wrote that “grace changes us, and change is painful.” In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the grandmother suddenly sees her assailant as a creature Jesus loves, a realization that comes too late for her but hopefully not for the reader. Her stories can cause the thoughtful reader to see beauty where the casual observer sees destruction. In her stories as well as her life, Flannery O’Connor inspires me with a pattern for loving the culture I’m placed in without surrendering in the struggle toward excellence, to write honestly and see the grotesqueness of living in a fallen world, yet see the grace of God in the brokenness. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, TNIV). Alissa Wilkinson is a writer living in New York City with her husband. Read their blog at www.tomandalissa.com. Have comments or feedback about this article? Send your thoughts to feedback@radiantmag.com. Unless otherwise requested, your comments and name may be published. Back to Top |
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