Reading Flannery O'Connor on Good Friday

I've been meaning to write something about Flannery O'Connor for a while and yesterday gave me occasion to do just that. Part of what prevented me from writing on her sooner was that I felt overwhelmed by the volume and variety of issues that her writing helped to recast. I considered using O'Connor's work as a pointed critique of the misguided moral concern that seems to have befallen the conservative Mennonites of southern Manitoba; I also considered placing her in a larger tradition of theological aesthetics. Perhaps those projects will resurface at some other point in time. For now, here are some Easter-themed reflections on O'Connor's best known short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." I should also mention that this was largely initiated by reading O'Connor's posthumous collection of non-fiction writing, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. This was originally posted at A Catholic Commons.

In order to arrive at the joy and affirmation of Easter Sunday, we encounter the suffering and despair of Good Friday. It's not a pleasant thing to acknowledge, but grace and violence appear bound together at Easter.

Few writers are as astute at recognizing this relationship as Flannery O'Connor. Rather than a world of neutral surfaces, O'Connor's fiction presents us with a world that is irreducibly "grotesque." For her, the history of the South has made for an environment that is "hardly Christ-centered, [but] is most certainly Christ-haunted" (M&M 44). Her characters may not act like Christians, but theirs is a world which is divinely given, a world in which grace regularly emerges and disrupts. For this reason, O'Connor's fiction adopts what she has called, "prophetic vision," a way of seeing that paradoxically understands near things at a distance and far things up close. As she puts it, "The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque."  This has everything to do with her view that art is incarnational. It is, in other words, ultimately about embodiment rather than abstraction, and its particular kind of embodiment is a deeply mysterious and troubling one.

update & book review

A brief update: I passed my thesis defense with relative ease and have begun a program in design studies and illustration. The blog will, of course, continue in some form or another.

In other news, I've had a book review published for a web-based comparative literature journal that's being run out of the U of A. The theme of this issue is "Literary Violence." Here's a link to the review: Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence.