Ben Myers has just posted an interesting reflection on the theology of grace in the music of Tom Waits. What he points out is that when we take seriously the unconditional character of grace, we see it gracing the most ungracious sinners: whores, thieves, etc. In the comments, there was brought out the fact that Flannery O’Connor’s fiction was essentially done under the same premise – that when we are looking for grace we have to look in ugly places. So, in light of this, I figured I would post some reflections on Ms. O’Connor’s work that I originally composed last semester for a paper on the notion of the “regenerative descent.”
Despair is potentiated according to one’s awareness of one’s existence before God. To the extent that the image of the living God is revealed to us, we will accordingly participate in the grief over that which has departed from the glory that was shared before the creation of the world. For the Christian, in the setting of the church, this happens as we become objects of the Word’s address. As was mentioned above, the revelation of God through the Word in address accomplishes two functions: it reveals the true object of faith, and destroys all false objects of faith. Yet can this happen in reverse? Can sharing in the grief of the departed glory lead us to knowledge of the hidden God? I certainly do not feel as though I can offer a firm answer, but nevertheless, the question demands to be wrestled with. And so, as a test case I wish to exam-ine the works of Flannery O’Connor, who often portrays the descent of characters into a despair that leads only ever to the brink of accepting grace. Without fully engaging Ms. O’Connor’s sacramentalism, I tentatively assert the thesis that in her works we see an awakening to the pat-terns of grace in nature, but that this can only be so in a way that is proleptic or anticipatory of the ultimate grace that is revealed only in God’s particular Word spoken to us as the man Jesus Christ.
Ms. O’Connor is undoubtedly an artist of grace, whose central goal in writing stories is to awaken her readers to the movements of grace that pervade our world. As she understands things, though, this requires her simultaneously to be an artist of violence, whose ever-present task is to depict her characters at their worst, at the depths of their depravity with their gro-tesque features in full view. Why violence and grace are so inseparably paired in Ms. O’Connor’s writing is not matter of aesthetic choice, but for her grows out of a deap-rooted un-derstanding of the way grace works in a fallen world.
We could take any number of her stories as an example, but one, “The Enduring Chill,” will do well enough. In it we meet Asbury, a man coming home to spend what he assumes will be his last days with his family. O’Connor sketches his life as an utter failure in elitism. He had left their southern town some years before, disgusted with the backward culture there, in order to be a playwright in New York. He wrote two plays, neither of which were picked up, and lived out his time there in abject, unromantic poverty, in which he became sick (terminally so, he thought).
Having failed at his laughable attempt to have some “non-religious” sense of commun-ion with his mother’s negro servants, Asbury is beginning to distress the thought of his mean-ingless death. But then he remembers an encounter with an enlightened Jesuit in New York, with whom he had a conversation about Buddhism. And so, to the great ire of his Protestant mother, he calls for a local Jesuit to come visit him at his sick bed. Yet this Jesuit is something of a boor. Asbury asks him about Joyce, the “death of God,” etc., but all this priest is interested in is saving his soul. When Asbury responds to his catechitical questions with only his muddled intellectualism, the Priest finally asks, “how do you expect to get what you don’t ask for? God does not send the Holy Ghost to those who don’t ask for him.” Asbury replies that he isn’t in-terested in the Holy Ghost. To this, the priest replies, “the Holy Ghost will not come until you see yourself as you are – a lazy conceited youth!” (133).
Asbury’s mother breaks in at this point, and sends the priest away. From here on out, though, it just gets worse, as he is informed by the doctor that he isn’t terminal, and thus is no-body’s tragedy anymore. As he lays on his bed, alone, Ms. O’Connor narrates the rest:
“The old life in him was exhausted. He awaited the coming of the new. It was then that he felt the beginning of a chill…. Asbury blanched and the last film of illusion was torn as if by a whirlwind from his eyes. He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend” (139).
How is it that the Holy Ghost may come to us not in fire but in ice? Thankfully, Ms. O’Connor has left us numerous essays, most of them collected in the volume Mystery and Man-ners, in which she offers explanations of her perspective in composition, and how she views her vocation as a Christian author. Hopefully here we may find some answers there. These essays are not a series of interpretations of her stories, which she admits will legitimately vary; rather, they are an unveiling of the reasoning and motivation behind the way in which she does things. As such, they are infinitely valuable for our present discussion, which is concerned with the possibility of suffering redemptive even when it is not consciously understood in light of the gospel, not with Ms. O’Connor indeed does portray such an occurrence.
Intrinsic to Ms. O’Connor’s approach to her fiction is her perspective as a Catholic. Yet her stories would not often convey this if one weren’t aware of it beforehand. In the essay “The Catholic Novelists and their Readers,” she expresses frustration at how there seems to be a need for the majority of Catholic authors to proclaim their Catholicity on every page, to proclaim the teaching of the church on every page. Ms. O’Connor counters this with statements from Saints Augustine and Aquinas, showing that true, sacramental Catholic theology will back her up in saying that a work of art, solely by virtue of its excellency will glorify God, even if it doesn’t di-rectly mention his name or his church’s teaching. This includes novels that might depict blatant evil without offering an explicit, moral condemnation. She says,
“the pious argument against such novels goes something like this: if you believe in the Redemption, your ultimate vision is one of hope, so in what you see you must be true to this ultimate vision; you must pass over the evil you see and look for the good because the good is there ; the good is the ultimate reality.
The beginning of an answer to this is that though the good is the ultimate reality, the ul-timate reality has been weakened in human beings as a result of the Fall, and it is this weakened life that we see.” (179)
It is not an intact, pristine world which must be shown grace, but a broken fallen world. The kind and the gentle do not need to be taught such things, but the boorish and the prideful. As Ben Witherington once said of St. Paul, that he presents “grace intervening on existing struc-tures of brokenness,” so also can we say that Ms. O’Connor’s view of grace is such that it cannot shine appropriately until one sees a scoundrel desperately in need of it. Or as Another has said, “It is not the healthy, but the sick who need a doctor.”
She does not say it in as many words, but everything Ms. O’Connor writes presupposes as a reality that in order for one to receive grace, one must have one’s present reality violently interrupted. For grace is an intrusion into a world of sin to which we have grown accustomed. Hers was an age which had “domesticated despair and learned to live with it comfortably” (”Novelist and Believer” 159), and so her task is a very Kierkegaardian one: to intensify despair, to return it to the paradox which precedes grace, not as an end in itself. In “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” she says,
“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intru-sions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which pre-cede and follow them…. I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in mod-ern fiction that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace” (112).
It is her job as a novelist to re-educate her readers in the rhythms of grace.
And so, the use of the grotesque in her fiction is not for novelty’s sake, nor is it merely for the purpose of shocking. Since we have been deluded by inflated notions of our self-worth, we need to be shown ourselves. But if we are just shown ourselves, we will not recognize our perversion as such, since this perversion is our standard of measuring our existence. Perhaps her most famous summation of her work is in this quote, where describes the task of distorting reality in order to communicate reality:
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are re-pugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audi-ence 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. When you can as-sume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (“The Fiction Writer & His Coun-try,” 33-34).
It is essential here to recognize that Ms. O’Connor is a distinctly Christian creator of these sce-narios, the intentional surgeon administrating these violent incisions on our existence. And so, the redemptive effect may perhaps be real for her characters, but it is most evident for her read-ers.
Along with an affinity for painting the absurd (one story, for instance, has a one armed bible salesman luring a one-legged woman into the loft of a barn, only to steal her prosthesis and leave her stranded), Ms. O’Connor is also a master of revealing the brokenness of the seemingly unbroken. In order for her to portray brokenness, she states explicitly that there must be some prior knowledge of wholeness. And so, what we see here is that even where her stories do not show an explicit awareness of the Word, there is an implicit cognizance merely by virtue of the fact that these characters are seen as a distortion.
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the gen-eral conception of man is still, in the main, theological…. I think it is safe to say that while the south is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted…. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature” (44-45).
Any true function of the law carries with it the mystery of grace, for a condemnation must carry implicitly the promise of that from which the perverted departs. “The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated” (”Novelist and Believer,” 167).
And so the question: does Ms. O’Connor’s fiction, though it is not a Word spoken in the ecclesial setting, nevertheless carry the potential of ushering the willing reader down through a regenerative descent? Do her twisted distortions invite a longing for grace? My answer, is yes, undeniably her work accomplishes such a function. Yet why is she capable of this? Is she not like the banker, who through a constant handling of real money is rendered capable of recognizing the counterfeit? It was not through exposure to distortions, but the real, that has enabled Ms. O’Connor to paint such a lie that would inspire a longing for truth.
