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PAGE 8—The Georgia Bulletin, August 2,1984
After 20 Years, Flannery O'Connor's Gift Endures
BY SISTER JOAN
LEONARD, O.P.
Several years ago as I
sat watching the movie
version of Flannery
O ’Connor’s first novel,
“Wise Blood,” I was
reminded of my intiial
startled reaction to her
work, which was not
unusual. Many of her
readers find her works
unsettling and her
characters bizaare and
violent. During the movie
there was laughter as
Hazel Motes, the main
character, bought a junk
car and awkwardly
visited an obese
prostitute, and as Enoch
Emery, his bumbling
counterpart, stole a
mummy and donned a
gorilla suit.
But there was no
laughter when Haze
blinded himself near the
movie’s end. As the lights
went on, I saw people
shaking their heads in
bewilderment. One
woman gasped, “After a
long week, that certainly
wasn’t what I needed.”
It was a reaction that
would not have surprised
Flannery O’Connor. A
devout, believing
Catholic, O’Connor
explained her art in an
essay that has become a
classic:
“The novelist with
Christian concerns will
find in modern life
distortions which are
repugnant to him, and
his problem will be to
make these appear as
d i stortions to an
audience which is used to
seeing them as natural;
and he may well be
forced to take ever more
violent means to get his
vision across to this
hostile audience ... To
the hard of hearing you
shout, and for the
almost-blind you draw
large and startling
figures.”
Flannery O’Connor
graced these pages with
book reviews during her
brief career from 1950 to
1964. She lived with her
mother on the family
farm near Milledgeville
where she spent her life
writing, reading widely
(as reflected in the vast
range of books she
reviewed for this paper),
carrying on a lively
correspondence, and
raising peacocks. After a
courageous struggle with
lupus, the disease that
had previously killed her
father, she died in
Piedmont Hospital, Aug.
3, 1964. Twenty years
after her untimely death,
she is still jarring her
readers into trying to
understand the need for
redemption in a
secularized world.
Her large and startling
figures, notably Hazel
Motes and young
Tarwater in her second
novel, “The Violent Bear
It Away,” in fact,
struggle against an
acceptance of divine
reality in their lives. In
her works she skillfully
balances the view of a
broken world where
some are regarded as
freaks, against a
theological vision which
holds out the promise of
grace. Against this
background she adds the
struggle of her most
grotesque figures, her
prophets, who wrestle
with their vocation. Here
she focuses on the
paradoxes of inspiration
and frenzy, holy vision
and worldly folly. The
tension has been
accurately described by
one O’Connor critic:
‘‘One crucial
difference, however,
between O’Connor’s
prophets and freaks and
those of the Scripture is
that where the precursors
were seen by their
contemporaries as
inspired men, the
modern heirs are seen by
their contemporaries as
madmen.”
From one point of
view, they are men
caught between
alienation from the
contemporary world and
the values of the spiritual
realm. In the process of
resolving the inner
conflict that this
engenders, they
acknowledge what for
them is the insanity of
the “normal” world, a
world that is repellent
because of its alienation
from God. For them to
adjust to this world
would be the ultimate
madness. At the same
time, however, in their
divided, fragile state,
they recoil from the
reality of the redemption
and act on the
frustration arising from
their ambivalent attitude
to Christ. Despite some
of their dark obsessions
and mental quirks, they
are heralds of the
presence of the
transcendent in human
lives and embrace what
seems to be the most
understandable course of
action for them, that of
violence.
Because readers and
critics find it hard to
understand O’Connor’s
love for her prophets, she
found it necessary to
speak more directly for
them, as various letters
and interviews show.
Still, she must have been
reassured by such a
response as the one
Jacques Maritain wrote
her translator, M.E.
Coindreau, in 1960:
“It seems to me that
the critics have a poor
understanding of her.
Yes, doubtless, she hated
these wild prophets, but
they fascinated her. Am I
wrong in thinking that to
her they were like saints
of the devil stripped of
everything by him, as
real saints are stripped by
God and really poor
miserable men in whom
she saw a certain
greatness? It was the
devil she hated. As for
them, she pitied them
and I think that deep
down she loved them.”
O’Connor emphasizes
her positive affirmation
of the prophets in her
novels by placing their
violent actions at the
heart of the dramatic
action of the story.
Rooted in their tradition,
the prophets struggle
within it with the
message of redemption.
That is to say, they
struggle to understand
the extent to which it
can be said that God
forgives the world’s sin
because Christ made
satisfaction for
humankind by an act
that is, at once, an
example of extreme
violence and unselfish
love, his death on the
Cross. As Motes and
Tarwater seek to unravel
the message of
redemption for their
worlds, they speak
startling messages and, in
spite of their obsessions
and fanaticism, are
agents of conversion --
primarily their own.
Although violence and
force are essential
ingredients in O’Connor’s
work, the vision that
informs her work is
equally as significant for
our discussion. She had
an astonishing grasp of
the unique perspective of
the literary artist. As a
religious artist she once
said, “The fiction writer
should be characterized
by his vision. His kind of
vision is prophetic
vision.”
Prophets are not
merely called to foretell
the future or to moralize
and harangue their
hearers, but to evaluate
the contemporary human
situation from the divine
perspective. In his
authoritative study on
the prophets, Abraham
Heschel confirms this
point when he writes:
“The prophet’s eye is
directed to the
contemporary scene; the
society and its conduct
are the main theme of his
speeches. Yet his ear is
inclined to God ... his
true greatness is his
ability to hold God and
man in a single thought.”
The violence in
O’Connor’s vision has its
source in the turning of
God to the earth. This
divine movement burns
through the glaring suns
and fiery skies that
appear in many of her
stories and animates the
persistent rebellion and
powerful actions of her
characters. As her stories
bear out, suffering, too,
is the art of the
prophetic consciousness
that “holds God and man
in a single thought.”
Whether it is a case of
Haze’s burned out eyes
or Tarwater’s “scorched
eyes” that looked as if
“touched with a coal like
the lips of the prophet,
they would never be used
for ordinary sights
again.” Both are
purgatorial and lead to a
renewed vision at the
end. The agony and the
violence of their
transformation open up a
new horizon for them.
Flannery O’Connor
herself declared that “for
the Catholic novelist the
prophetic vision is not
simply a matter of his
personal imaginative gift;
it is also a matter of the
Church’s gift.” Her own
work remains a lasting
testimony to her
prophetic vision and the
directions it points for a
renewed vision of
Christian community -
all of which she so
generously shared.
(Sister Joan Leonard
received her Ph.D. in
Literature and Theology this
past May from Emory
University. The title of her
disseration was “Violence
and Community in the
Fiction of Flannery
O’Connor and Muriel
Spark. ” Presently she is a
staff associate for the
Christian Council of
Metropolitan Atlanta and an
adjunct faculty member at
Emory.)
Christian Council Opens New Doors In Atlanta
“I’m an expert ribbon
cutter. I do this all day,”
said Mayor Andrew
Young, as he lent a helping
hand to his wife, Jean, as
they cut up a bright red
ribbon at 465 Boulevard in
southeast Atlanta.
That officially opened
the doors to the new home
of the Christian Council of
Metropolitan Atlanta,
which had been located
downtown on Peachtree
Street for 14 years, but
moved to lovelier and
more spacious quarters
near Interstate 20 and
Boulevard in late July.
The old building had
been owned by the North
Avenue Presbyterian
Church, which explains
how the ecumenical
organization came to be at
848 Peachtree Street for
so many years. But three
years ago the building was
sold and the Christian
Council began searching
for a new home and one
which would provide more
space for the growing
staff.
The Rev. Don Newby,
executive director of the
Council, chuckled at the
description of the old
quarters as “spartan,”
saying that was perhaps a
kindness to the simply
furnished and often
crowded rooms. The new
Council offices take up
6,000 square feet on parts
of the first and second
floor of a storefront
building and are sparkling
with fresh paint, new
carpets and pictures that
are waiting to be hung on
the walls.
Archbishop Thomas
Donnellan, Bishop
Frederick Talbot of the
African Methodist
Episcopal Church, Bishop
L. Bevel Jones of the
United Methodist Church
and many others took part
in an ecumenical service
outside the Council offices
before Mayor and Mrs.
Young cut the ribbon.
The Christian Council
began 105 years ago as the
Atlanta Preachers Meeting
and has continuously
operated since then,
expanding from an
organization which
provided emergency
assistance and sponsored
an annual ecumenical
community breakfast into
a council with many
branches. The CCMA now
has a unit working with
refugees, a mental health
branch running two homes
for the mentally ill, a task
force for the homeless and
a day care center for
children of homeless
families. It also has other
independent extensions,
such as the airport
chaplaincy program at
Hartsfield International
Airport, the Christian
Employment Cooperative
and Atlanta Interfiath
Lawyers.
The council serves a
seven-county area, Newby
noted, so its new office
near 1-20 is a convenience
for those outside Atlanta.
“It is also just five minutes
from City Hall” and
downtown offices, he said.
‘It just is providential.”
