Flannery O’Connor and Her Pithy Paragraphs

Flannery O’Connor and Her Pithy Paragraphs.

“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is a cross.” (Flannery O’Connor).

Brief Bio. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, and died from kidney failure in 1964 at 39 years of age. During her brief but productive life as a brilliant and unconventional author, she suffered from advancing stages of a fatal, incurable disease, lupus, which gradually breaks down all the major body systems until they no longer function. Despite this ongoing, painful sickness, she was able to become a highly celebrated writer who developed a completely unique vision of Christian fiction that resulted in her being named by many critics as the most important Christian writer this country has ever produced. Because of her “unorthodox orthodoxy” style of writing, she was often misunderstood, with her writings described as vulgar, hilarious, profane, sacred, blasphemous, ironic, outrageous, grotesque, profound, repulsive, racist, realistic, seedy, freakish, extreme and shocking. Flannery was born into an Irish Catholic family and remained a devout Catholic her whole life. She and her mother woke up every morning for their 6:00 a.m. prayers and proceeded directly to their daily Mass at church. She was noted for being quite a fascinating intellectual who considered herself a “hillbilly Thomist.” The main characters in her stories were false prophets and street preachers, prostitutes and juvenile delinquents, murderers and adulterers, sideshow freaks and tattoo artists, hardscrabble farmers and undereducated door-to-door Bible salesmen, hopeless amputees and the mentally impaired. Flannery refused to be sentimental in her faith or in her stories, unwilling to “tidy-up reality.” One biographer commented that “she wrote stories that are like literary thunderstorms, turning on sudden violence and flashes of revelation that crash down from the heavens, destroying even as they illuminate.” (Jonathon Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy). Because of her personal and professional complexity, and in her refusal to write what passed as “normal” fiction, perhaps the best way to begin to understand her is through her own words…

Flannery O’Connor’s Published Works: 

… three short story collections: “A Good Man Is Hard To Find;” “Everything That Rises Must Converge;” and “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor,” which won the U.S. National Book Award.

… two novels: “Wise Blood,” and “The Violent Bear It Away.”

… a collection of essays: “Mystery and Manners.”

… a collection of letters: “The Habit of Being.”

Some of Flannery’s Pithy Paragraphs: 

… “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax 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.” 

… “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.” 

… “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” 

… “In the absence of sacraments, Protestants have to trust their instincts. It is a sloppy way of getting to the truth, but it sometimes works.” 

… “Some Catholic writing is just propaganda, and it being propaganda for the side of the angels only makes it worse. The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it. If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is.” 

… “The moral basis of my fiction is the accurate naming of the things of God. You ask God to let you see straight and write straight, first seeing this world and from here learning to see another world.”

… “I write the way I do because and only because I am a Catholic. I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write. I have never had the sense that being a Catholic is a limit to the freedom of the writer, but just the reverse.” 

… “Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.” 

… “If Southern writers have a tendency to write about freaks, it is because we are still able to recognize one. If you’re a writer and the South is what you know, then that’s what you’ll write about and how you’ll judge yourself.” 

… “The violent bear it away, and more than ever now it seems that the kingdom of heaven has to be taken by violence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.” 

… “The good Catholic acts upon the beliefs that he receives from the Church. If you want to know what Catholic belief is, you will have to study what the Church teaches in terms of faith and morals. Since the doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom, the Church stands for and preserves always what is larger than human understanding.” 

… “I have got to the point now where I keep thinking more and more about the presentation of love and charity, or better call it grace, as love suggests tenderness, whereas grace can be violent or would have to be to compete with the kind of evil I can make concrete.” 

… “When we look at evil, we expect to see grotesquerie. But what of good? What does the face of good look like? Few have stared at good long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us good is something under construction.” 

… “The action by which charity grows invisibly among us, entwining the living and the dead, is called the Communion of Saints. It is a communion created upon human imperfection, created from what we make of our grotesque state.”

… “These modern people are all so busy explaining away the virgin birth and such things, reducing everything to human proportion, that in time they lose even the sense of the human itself.”