What I’m Reading: Flannery O’Connor

Last updated on: May 7, 2010 at 8:31 am by Amy Julia Becker

What I’m Reading: Flannery O’Connor 2010-05-07T08:31:00-04:00 Amy Julia Becker

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I turned in my thesis last Friday night. Well, kind of. I finished my thesis last Friday night and submitted it by email only to discover on Monday that I had submitted a draft from twelve hours earlier. A draft complete with notes like “INSERT QUOTE HERE,” no title page, no footnotes. Thankfully, my gracious professor didn’t seem to care as I sent the final version.

It’s done. It’s in. And I will graduate from Seminary seven years after I first enrolled.

I can critique my thesis already–not enough reference to literary criticism, not enough understanding of Catholic theology. But the joy of it for me was that I was able to read the vast majority of Flannery O’Connor’s published writing–stories, essays, novels, and letters. So in keeping with Friday’s “What I’m Reading” theme, here is an abridged version of the introduction to my thesis, which discusses the novel The Violent Bear It Away as well as the stories “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Good Country People,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” I was particularly interested in The Violent Bear It Away because one of the main characters is a little boy who is an “idiot.” It is not a stretch to imagine that this boy, who never speaks and who is described as having peculiar facial features, has Down syndrome. At the end of the novel, the boy (whose name is Bishop) is drowned by his older cousin. The story has haunted me for years, and I wrote the thesis to try to come to terms with his death, which was also his baptism.

Flannery O’Connor’s writing is nothing if not memorable. The vividness of her imagery, the violence of her characters’ actions and fates, her uncompromising insistence on the jarring presence of both evil and grace in the world—all combine to create stories and characters that live on in the imagination. O’Connor understood her own work as an attempt to shout at the world. In light of the presumed unbelief of her audience, she explained, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (from Mystery and Manners). And yet O’Connor’s writing does not move in the direction of the fantastical or magical. She shocks the reader with her realism, with the idea that the devil is real, that death is brutal, and that life without God is even worse. O’Connor employs characters with cognitive and physical disabilities throughout her stories and novels as a part of this project of shouting at her readers. These characters—with their obvious abnormalities of body and mind—are central to O’Connor’s literary and theological imagination. They draw the reader’s attention at first because they are different, but O’Connor employs them that the reader might find herself in them…

O’Connor’s fiction employs the typical Catholic rites of baptism and the Eucharist as sacramental acts. But for her, sacramental reality extends beyond the rites of the Church. She recognizes God’s grace mediated through created things everywhere. As Ralph Wood explains, “The theological key to Flannery O’Connor’s comedy lies in her thoroughly Catholic (and specifically Thomistic) conviction that grace does not destroy but completes and perfects nature. She seeks to recover, amidst the secular absence of God, the divine presence that is sacramentally at work in every living thing” (from The Comedy of Redemption). In other words, within O’Connor’s fiction physical reality, be it aspects of creation or human creatures themselves, always retains the possibility of functioning sacramentally. Physical reality (outside of the Sacraments of the Church) may remain merely symbolic, but the physical always has the potential to bring about the spiritual. Created things—nature, human beings, even objects—can serve as a conduit of God’s grace, not just a symbol of it. Many of O’Connor’s characters function on a merely symbolic level. The physical aspect of their existence points towards a spiritual reality without ensuring the reader that God’s grace will be recognized or received. But Bishop, the child in The Violent Bear It Away, functions sacramentally. His very being, his physical presence, effects God’s grace.

In employing characters with disabilities, O’Connor not only points the reader toward a sacramental understanding of reality but also a Biblical one. She does not single out disabled bodies for her fiction simply because they are unusual. Nor does she understand them as particularly broken or unworthy of God’s grace. On the contrary, these characters’ bodies are a conduit of grace for the “temporarily able-bodied” among us, because in the disabled body we are able to see ourselves, broken and beloved. O’Connor’s approach to disability is reminiscent of John 9. In this passage, Jesus and his disciples encounter a “man born blind,” at which point the disciples ask for explanations: “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” The disciples’ question distances them from the man. They reduce him to a theological problem, and they assume that his disability is an indication of sin. In the story that follows, Jesus surprises and confounds the disciples. He overturns their assumptions about the relationship between sin and disability: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” And yet the blind man is not reduced to a prop on the stage of God’s glory. The blind man is not only healed of his blindness and thus restored to the community; he personally encounters Jesus. The glory of God transforms his life. We, the reader, might be fortunate enough to see the spiritual reality that the blind man’s life demonstrates. But he not only sees it. He experiences it.

Moreover, by the end of the encounter with this blind man, Jesus has demonstrated that physical blindness is nothing compared to the spiritual blindness of most people. The physically blind man is healed of his physical condition, which only reveals a deeper ability to see. The blind sees Jesus for who he is. The Pharisees cannot see the same. Perhaps the disciples cannot either. And perhaps we, the readers of the story, can only hope to be like the blind man, able to see Jesus for who he is.

O’Connor’s approach to characters with disabilities echoes the themes in John 9. She refuses to conflate sin and disability. In fact, she suggests that characters with disabilities may have been singled out by God in a positive way. Physical and mental disability may well be a special indication of God’s grace, an opportunity to understand our true nature. And by true nature, O’Connor does not only want to point out the broken and sinful aspects of humanity. She also wants us to understand our necessary creatureliness, the limitations that are inherent to being human, the limitations that prompt reliance upon one another and ultimately upon God. O’Connor follows Jesus in her nuanced understanding of disabilities. Readers may initially encounter her characters with disabilities as “freaks,” as individuals who are so different that they do not seem to bear any relation to “normal” people. But O’Connor intends for us to see ourselves in these characters. In O’Connor’s theological anthropology, all of us are broken and needy. The visible limitations, brokenness and need of individuals with disabilities, however, allows the reader to glimpse the invisible spiritual neediness that characterizes us all. People with disabilities have been singled out to show us who we are, that we might recognize our need, turn to God, and receive God’s grace.

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