In light of
Mother Theresa’s recent canonization, I am compelled to think of Flannery O’Connor,
whose Complete Stories I’ve been poring over for about a month now, as the
great saint of Southern letters. Unlike Theresa, however, O’Connor is a saint
we can all get behind, no matter how God-fearing or God-doubting or even godless
we may be. Her brief writing career, which began at the age of twenty-two* and
ended with her tragic death at the age of thirty-nine, yielded about fifteen of
the South’s finest short stories and two of its best and most criminally
under-read novels. And while her canonization seems to rest mainly on a handful
of small wonders, O’Connor is one of the most expansive American writers I can
think of - a wicked comedian, a despairing moralist, and an engineer of miraculous,
unlikely redemptions.
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| Self-portrait with peafowl (1953) |
You can’t go
through high school or college English classes in the South without
encountering O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Good Country People.”
Both stories are Gothic slug-fests that begin quaintly enough, in local-color
sketches of dysfunctional families, and end in shocking acts of violation and
violence (“Country People” ends in the rape-like theft of a prosthetic leg; “Good
Man” ends in the wholesale slaughter of one very unlucky family). I’ve read
both stories countless times, both in and outside classrooms, and I still can’t
quite wrap my head around either one. I suspect this is due to O’Connor’s
explicit Catholic imagery and themes. “What the hell is she going on about with
all this Jesus stuff?” I find myself wondering as I read. “How could a woman so
smart, so judicious, so clear-sighted be wrapped up in all that goddamned,
no-good, stinking-high-to-hell religion?”
This is
something I still don’t quite get, but I think I’m beginning to see that my own
staunch agnosticism, which I’ve tended right along the fence-line of atheism since
an adolescence spent in the Methodist church, isn’t the only field worth planting. O’Connor’s
Catholicism is so surprising and grotesque that I almost want to follow her
into the confessional, if only to understand her stories better. That’s
impossible of course, but from my doubter’s perspective I can at least
appreciate the fact that her Catholicism, if you’ll pardon the tedious
expression, is a feature and not a bug.
Anyway, you can’t
miss “A Good Man” or “Good Country People,” but there are other stories that I
think are even better. For instance, check out “The Lame Shall Enter First,” a
story that lampoons well-intentioned but shallow liberals, or “The Partridge
Festival,” a twisted Adam and Eve story in which a pretentious young writer,
blind to his own limitations, stumbles toward the Fall. Both stories feature intellectuals at their worst, and I find in them some of
the more frightening and shameful aspects of my own character. In that sense, I
guess I’m kind of a glutton for punishment. How very Catholic of me.
*See her first
published stories, written when she was a graduate student at the University of
Iowa; they’ll strike fear and jealousy in the heart of any writer, no matter
what age.
