I am the rare Covenant College English major who doesn’t like Flannery O’Connor.
I’ll admit I am sympathetic to her project; she is a Christian and aims to show grace in a dark world. This is noble; my problem is with her means, not her ends.
What’s her philosophy of how to write impactful Christian fiction? She explains it while discussing her most popular story, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’
O’Connor thinks that what makes her story powerful and true is the redeeming action taken by one of the characters at the very end.
“This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected,” O’Connor says. “The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it.”
What gesture is she talking about? Spoiler warning: the grandmother, a character who we have spent the entire story disliking, reaches out to touch the shoulder of The Misfit, a man who just had her entire family murdered.
This is a true moment of redemption. It would do O’Connor a disservice to pretend that this story is completely bleak without a single glimmer of light. The grandmother realizes that her mistakes brought her family to ruin and seems to repent of her hypocrisy.
Then she dies. The Misfit shoots her on the spot, rejecting her recognition of his humanity and spitting on her offer of forgiveness.
So, this gleam of light is snuffed out immediately.
We can infer that maybe the grandmother’s soul was saved in those last minutes. But the story leaves us in a nihilistic mindset, ending without a meaningful resolution for the surviving characters; in Flannery O’Connor’s ontology, transcendent grace exists, but evil quickly stamps it out.
In ‘The Fiction Writer and His Country,’ O’Connor writes, “… for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures,” and, “… to the hard of hearing you shout.” Her argument is that the brutality in her fiction is necessary to get through to those who are obstinate.
You could even argue that the Bible uses shock value for effect at times, such as the graphic sexual imagery in Ezekiel 23. But scripture uses it sparingly and ends in the consummation of the cosmos—a new Heaven and Earth that is wholly oriented toward worship of the Almighty.
Where the Bible only dips its toes in grotesque imagery when absolutely necessary (in its perfect and inspired wisdom), O’Connor dwells in a slough of perpetual doubt. Hers is an inaccurate picture of the world, one that does not reflect the way scripture calls us to view reality.
Philippians 4:8 says, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
There is a place for fiction that considers darkness and sin, and even for stories that point out hypocrisy in those who profess faith in Christ. But my conviction is that stories should not leave us in that headspace.
Think of the writings of C.S. Lewis; “Perelandra,” the second novel in The Space Trilogy, shows evil in its full grotesqueness: it is violent, disturbing and insidious. But it is defeated, and the eschatology of that series points toward Christ’s redemptive act.
Evil, when rightly depicted and balanced by hope, is like a sharp knife—it slices into the skin and causes a real awareness of pain, but the wound can heal without blemish.
Flannery O’Connor’s writing is too often a knife that is dull, jagged and rusty; it tears the skin wide open and leaves gruesome scarring. Is that really what should form us as Christians?