A Subversive Gospel

Flannery O'Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

Michael Mears Bruner

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780830890361
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Conference on Christianity and Literature (CCL) Book of the Year - Literary CriticismThe good news of Jesus Christ is a subversive gospel, and following Jesus is a subversive act.These notions were embodied in the literary work of American author Flannery O'Connor, whose writing was deeply informed by both her Southern context and her Christian faith. In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, theologian Michael Bruner explores O'Connor's theological aesthetic and argues that she reveals what discipleship to Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness through her fiction. In addition, Bruner challenges recent scholarship by exploring the little-known influence of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian, on her work.Bruner's study thus serves as a guide for those who enjoy reading O'Connor and—even more so—those who, like O'Connor herself, follow the subversive path of the crucified and risen one.The Studies in Theology and the Arts? series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

1

The Baron

O’Connor’s Theological Turn

Baron von Hügel, one of the great modern Catholic scholars, wrote that “the Supernatural experience always appears as the transfiguration of Natural conditions, acts, states . . . ,” that “the Spiritual generally is always preceded, or occasioned, accompanied or followed, by the Sensible. . . . The highest realities and deepest responses are experienced by us within, or in contact with, the lower and lowliest.” This means for the novelist that if he is going to show the supernatural taking place, he has nowhere to do it except on the literal level of human events, and that if he doesn’t make these natural things believable in themselves, he can’t make them believable in any of their spiritual extensions.

FLANNERY O’CONNOR, MYSTERY AND MANNERS

I see, as a mysterious but most real, most undeniable fact—that it is precisely the deepest, the keenest sufferings, not only of body but of mind, not only of mind but of heart, which have occasioned the firmest, the most living, the most tender faith.

BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL,
ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

When I first read a story of O’Connor’s in college, I was immediately intrigued. Who was this maniacal writer who also claimed to be a serious Christian? Since when was Christianity, and since when were Christians, so freakish, so violent, so foolish? After deciding many years later to do my PhD on her work, I read reviews of her work, and the earlier ones, in particular, confirmed my initial suspicions and were virtually unanimous on one count: O’Connor’s stories, and especially her characters, were a strange combination—indeed, many argued, a contradiction—of the holy and the grotesque, of faith and violence, of divine wisdom mixed with hillbilly superstition.1 Beyond this consent, however, the unanimity fell apart. Though most reviewers agreed that her stories were odd, some found them disturbing and offensive to the point that they either dismissed her as a hack or castigated her for being such a misanthrope, while others found in them a profound and beautiful truth creatively wrought by a budding genius. All agreed that this writing was audacious stuff, heady and esoteric material for a young Catholic girl from the Deep South. Evelyn Waugh remarked that “if this is the unaided work of a young lady it is a remarkable product.”2

The divergent and even contradictory reactions to O’Connor’s stories reminded me of G. K. Chesterton’s paradoxical quip about the “tremendous figure which fills the gospels”:

Suppose we heard [of] an unknown man spoken [of] by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.3

Maybe O’Connor’s stories were “the right shape” in that they told—or rather, showed—the truth embodied in that towering—even paradoxical—gospel figure. Perhaps both sides of the debate, in other words, were right about O’Connor’s stories. Maybe the truth of things was both disturbing and profound, offensive but beautiful. Maybe her stories were compelling because they reflected not only the paradoxical nature of Christ but also the paradoxical nature of life. As a believer myself, I was familiar with such paradoxes in Scripture: of the minor prophet Nahum’s jealous and avenging God, on the one hand, who was also Jesus’ loving and gracious Father, on the other; of the profound purpose of life reflected in the Genesis accounts of creation tempered by the equally profound meaninglessness of life echoed in the pages of Ecclesiastes.4 But I sensed also something else in this unity of opposites so prevalent in O’Connor’s stories (especially the later ones): a theological influence, perhaps, that gave O’Connor the language to embody such paradoxes.

As I continued to read and study O’Connor’s work, I also began to notice a subtle but noticeable shift from her earlier to her later work. Though I couldn’t quite name it at first, it became clear that her later stories had a theological depth that her earlier stories lacked, and I couldn’t help but wonder if her proclivity for a “unity of opposites” was somehow related to this shift in depth. This impulse to place O’Connor somewhere and to pin down the reason(s) for this change in her work gave the whole question of the provenance of her paradoxical vision an even greater urgency. Where on earth did she come up with this kind of material? Who gave her the permission to write like this? Whence the vision?

The search would eventually lead me to a name I did not recognize, nor was it one I had run across in O’Connor scholarship. I would come to find that a relatively obscure figure, especially in American theological circles, had helped to lay the foundation for O’Connor’s radical vision. It had begun, I suspected, with O’Connor’s acquiring an English translation of Saint Catherine of Genoa’s Treatise on Purgatory in 1949.5 But before we examine this figure, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, and his influence on O’Connor, we need first to establish that a shift in theological depth did, indeed, occur between O’Connor’s early and later stories.

A SHIFT IN TONE, A CHANGE OF DEPTH

A shift in both theological depth and moral seriousness from O’Connor’s early to her later stories is evident to many of her critics, but the event, idea, or influence that led to such a change continues to be debated.6 Of course, there is nothing morally fatuous about the murder of an entire family (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”) or the drowning of a small child (“The River”), both of which are found in O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, but in the main, O’Connor’s later fiction exhibits a theological and spiritual weightiness that her earlier fiction lacks. Robert Golden and Mary Sullivan suggest that the body of early criticism largely rejects—or at least does not see the centrality of—a religious foundation in O’Connor’s work.7 In discussing the “four schools of thought” that predominate in O’Connor studies, Golden and Sullivan observe that the fourth school

denies the religious intent completely, preferring to read her work in various other ways: as another example of “southern gothic” and its interest in private neurosis and public degeneracy, as a humanistic cry against the evils of the American South, as O’Connor’s way of working out the frustrations of her inner life, or as a closed fictional world, a world in which questions of ideology or belief are not relevant. Much of the early criticism of O’Connor belongs in the fourth school; religious readings of her work increased as her fiction became more familiar and as she increasingly made clear her religious intent, but the fourth school is not silent, occasionally sallying forth against the other schools, especially the first and the second.8

The reason why much of the early criticism largely ignored O’Connor’s religious intentions is that her early stories (pre-1954) are not primarily religious—and by this I mean they are not primarily theological. The six stories O’Connor submitted for her master’s thesis tend to content themselves with societal and psychological questions and concerns, with race relations, for example, and familial turmoil and dysfunction—with “manners” more than “mystery.” “The Turkey” is an exception, but even here its “spiritual” elements fall more squarely into the category of adolescent religious recalcitrance than genuine religious curiosity.

EXCURSUS: THE “THING”

“The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “The Crop,” “The Turkey,” and “The Train,” the six short stories that O’Connor submitted for her master’s thesis at the Iowa Workshop in 1947 under the title “The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories,” essentially limit their theological reflection to what would become a signature literary device for O’Connor: the mysterious “thing” that haunts her fiction, which her characters can never name but that symbolizes their abiding fears. In “The Geranium,” it is referred to as that “thing inside him [that] had sneaked up on him for just one instant”; in “The Barber,” the main character has “a blind moment when he felt as if something that wasn’t there was bashing him to the ground”; the entire premise of “Wildcat” centers on an unseen and foreboding “thing” (a wildcat for the purposes of the story) that never actually shows up; “The Crop” mentions a character’s “thinking about something big way off—”;9 and in “The Train,” the main character (Haze) is terrified to get into the sleeping berth of a train—it reminds him of the coffin his mother was put in—and then, when he finally does go in, “He lay there for a while not moving. There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste.” The darkness itself takes on the objective materiality of death in the story so that, after he’s been lying in the berth for some time,

from inside he saw it closing, coming closer, closer down and cutting off the light and the room and the trees seen through the window through the crack faster and darker and closing down. He opened his eyes and saw it closing down and he sprang up between the crack and wedged his body through it and hung there moving, dizzy, with the dim light of the train slowly showing the rug below, moving, dizzy.10

Even “The Turkey,” the most explicitly “theological” of her first stories, ends with a reference to “Something Awful [that] was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch.”11

It would be too convenient—and incorrect—to reduce every reference of this “thing” in O’Connor’s earliest stories to something divine or evil, but there are clearly spiritual undertones to its presence. It seems plausible to consider that in each of these stories, the anonymity of this “thing” signals an ambivalence on O’Connor’s part regarding the paradoxical nature of God’s good but terrible character, and it is an ambivalence she appears to only begin to come to terms with in her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, where the mysterious thing is introduced to us as a character in the story, first named the “Stranger” and then, eventually, the “Friend.”

As a counter to the suggestion that O’Connor’s earliest stories are not theological, one might argue that the sociological and psychological elements of the South can hardly be separated from their cultural religious expressions, in which case all of O’Connor’s early stories are theological to one degree or another. Caroline Gordon touches on this inescapable blending of southern culture and its religion, and of O’Connor’s fascination with this blending, in a book review she wrote in 1955 of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, where she suggests that many of O’Connor’s critics “misunderstand her because they do not see her characters as symbols for spiritual and social aspects of southern life.”12 Gordon...