Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace

Author(s): Thelma J. Shinn

Source: Contemporary Literature , Winter, 1968, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter, 1968), pp. 58-73
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207391

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FLANNERY O'CONNOR AND THE
VIOLENCE OF GRACE

Thelma J. Shinn

In the Spring 1964 issue of Studies in Short F

suggested that "Flannery O'Connor has at la
"Miss O'Connor has rounded out her view of life." A few months
later, on August 3, Flannery O'Connor died. Then, in the October-
December 1964 issue of Sewanee Review, Brainard Cheney with
the help of hindsight echoed Spivey's view: "The shock of Flannery
O'Connor's death came not in its unexpectedness but in the startling
realization that her work was done."
I have neither the courage nor the medical knowledge to suggest
that Miss O'Connor died because she had nothing left to live for-
that her body simply stopped fighting the crippling lupus, which had
attacked her when she was typing the first draft of her first novel,
because it no longer needed to fight. But I do agree with Spivey and
Cheney that her work was done. Miss O'Connor had a mission. She
had something to say, and she had an audience who-she felt-
needed desperately to hear and to heed her message. Like Tarwater
in The Violent Bear It Away, she set out to wake the sleeping
children of God. And she succeeded.
Miss O'Connor used violence to convey her vision because she
knew that the violence of rejection in the modern world demands
an equal violence of redemption-man needs to be "struck" by mercy;
God must overpower him.1 And man must reach God through an
equal violence: "In a corrupt world," Miss O'Connor is saying,

1 Rainulf A. Stelzmann, "Shock and Orthodoxy: An Interpretation of

Flannery O'Connor's Novels and Short Stories," XUS, II (March 1963), 13-14.

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"redemption is possible only through an extreme act, an act of abso-
lute, irrevocable sacrifice."2 Thus Miss O'Connor asserted in 1957
that "the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life
distortions which are repugnant to him; and his problem will be to
make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to see-
ing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take even more
violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience."
That Miss O'Connor faced a hostile audience seems to be sup-
ported by early critical reactions to her work. Time in its inimitable
alliterations labelled her "Ferocious Flannery," while William Esty
placed her in "a cult of the Gratuitous Grotesque." She was accused of
nihilism and of determinism. That she converted the critics is equally
apparent as both Cheney and Spivey trace that circle of her vision to
a positive manifestation-for Cheney "the blessed corollary of the
Woe with which we begin" and for Spivey a definite hope, albeit
a "hope of paradox and prophecy," which he notes is a rare assertion
in a modern artist.
Granted then that at least part of Miss O'Connor's mission has
been accomplished: she has reached her audience. People are read-
ing her fiction as a serious expression of a significant vision; whether
or not they can comprehend it is beyond her control. Within her con-
trol, however, is whether or not she has convincingly and completely
expressed the vision in her fiction. If she has succeeded in doing this,
she has completed her mission.
There is no doubt that Miss O'Connor is a "novelist with Chris-
tian concerns," so her statement must apply to herself and she must
see the distortions in modern life which she mentions. Consequently,
she uses distortions in her writing. "In these times," she argues, "the
most reliable path to reality . . . is by way of the grotesque." It is
"more real than the real." Thus, it is immediately apparent that her
writing is based upon at least two traditions-the Roman Catholic
and the Southern Gothic. The blending of these might seem in some
ways ludicrous if not impossible, and indeed it is this combination
set against the secular world of today that provides the basis for Miss
O'Connor's unique humor.
However, these traditions as they apply to Miss O'Connor are
not as far apart as they might seem to be. Miss O'Connor has this to
say about her Roman Catholicism: "I see from the standpoint of

2 Jonathan Baumbach, "The Acid of God's Grace: The Fiction of Flan-

nery O'Connor," Georgia Review, XVII (Fall 1963), 345.

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Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is
centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the
world I see in relation to that. I don't think that this is a position that
can be taken half-way or one that is particularly easy in these times to
make transparent in fiction." The Southern Gothic tradition, on the
other hand, stems from a "sense of Being," according to LeRoy
Leatherman. He defines this as a sense "scarcely to be gained without
the suffering of what Heinrich Zimmer called the 'redemptive catas-
trophe.' It may be taking too high a position on the slopes of Olym-
pus to suggest that the War and Reconstruction be regarded this way,
but I don't think so.... We know that the catastrophe, the knowing-
unique in America-of war and devastation and human brutality on
the modern scale, set the region at an infinite distance from the rest
of the nation. That the catastrophe was redemptive ... the Southern
writers have already proved."3
If this view can be applied to Miss O'Connor, and I think it can,
then it would seem that her heritage as a Christian and as a South-
erner both stem from a redemption achieved through suffering. This
heritage greatly influences the vision in her fiction and the method
she uses to express it.
One aspect of Miss O'Connor's method of expression-the use
of the grotesque-relates her to other Southern writers such as Carson
McCullers. She has managed to accumulate quite a gallery of freaks
in her two novels and two collections of short stories. Overtly gro-
tesque are the idiots, such as the daughter in "The Life You Save
May Be Your Own" and the son Bishop in The Violent Bear It Away;
the hermaphrodite in "Temple of the Holy Ghost" and Hulga-Joy
of "Good Country People" with her Ph.D. and her artificial leg in
the first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find; and
the club-footed Rufus Johnson in "The Lame Shall Enter First"
and the tattooed Obadiah Elihue Parker of "Parker's Back" in the
posthumous collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. But
these characters are the physical grotesques, and "physical afflictions
have their place in art, particularly when they point to privation of
the mind, ignorance, or prejudice, or, even deeper, to the need of
redemption of souls out-of-joint with reality."4 This qualification ap-
plies to some of Miss O'Connor's grotesques-Parker and Hulga seem

3 "The Artist as Southerner," Sewanee Review, LXX (Winter 1962), p.

166.
4 Robert McCown, S.J., "Flannery O'Connor and the Reality of Sin,"
Catholic World, CLXXXVIII (January 1959), 286.

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"out-of-joint with reality." However, in most of these characters, their
physical afflictions serve to protect them from a spiritual affliction,
an inverted grotesqueness which characterizes many of Miss O'Con-
nor's other creations. The idiots are protected from the corrupting in-
fluences of the modern world simply because they cannot reach them;
they remain in the innocent realm of childhood. Johnson's mischief
wasn't, as the perverted vision of Sheppard saw it, "the compensation
for the foot"; rather, the foot was his compensation for the mischief.
Although the Devil was controlling his deeds, Johnson's burden of
belief was still with him symbolized by the foot-it was his conscious-
ness of possible redemption: "The lame shall enter first! The halt'll
be gathered together. When I get ready to be saved, Jesus'll save
me . . ." That Johnson realized its redemptive promise is evident:
"Johnson was as touchy about the foot as if it were a sacred object."
The suffering it demands of him is his penance, his possible martyr-
dom, and Miss O'Connor's description of it brings to mind the mar-
tyrdom of another prophet as "the leather parted from it in one place
and the end of an empty sock protruded like a grey tongue from a
severed head." Sheppard realizes that, if Johnson is to be converted
to his secular view of mental health, he must first attack the foot:
"First he would have him fitted for a new orthopedic shoe. His back
was thrown out of line every time he took a step." Sheppard recog-
nized the importance of not getting "out of line." Thus, Johnson's
eyes betray a "glint of triumph" when he rejects the new shoe and
preserves his burden of belief, and Sheppard's hatred instinctively set-
tles on the deformity when he feels that he is failing to convert the
boy: "The boy's clubfoot was set within the circle of his vision. The
pieced-together shoe appeared to grin at him with Johnson's own
face.... A chill of hatred shook him. He hated the shoe, hated the
foot, hated the boy."
The hermaphrodite also proves himself to be a fit "temple of the
Holy Ghost" in the story of that title through his acceptance of his
affliction and his realization of its divine origin: "God made me this-
away. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I'm
making the best of it. I don't dispute hit."5
Miss O'Connor's spiritual grotesques, on the other hand, seem
to consider God "a physical affliction, to be 'gotten rid of,' as fast as
possible."6 Her backwoods prophets are propelled on their missions

5Maurice Bassan, "Flannery O'Connor's Way: Shock With Moral In-

tent," Renascence, XV (Summer 1963), 211.
6 Stelzmann, p. 7.

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by Jesus lodged in their heads "like a stinger." Their grotesqueness
leads them to violence: Haze moves from murder to self-chastisement
and immolation; Tarwater burns his way out of and then back into
God's presence by way of a murder in baptismal waters which drown
the Satanic fire so that he can be burned clean by the fire of the Holy
Ghost. Thus it becomes apparent that these spiritual grotesques are
also on the path to salvation. Their violence is directed toward the
physical world; they are destroying the body to save the soul.
Not so with Miss O'Connor's secular grotesques. If a physical
affliction is the presence of God for the physical grotesques and God
is Himself a physical affliction for the spiritual grotesques, the secular
grotesques on the other hand suffer from a spiritual affliction. Their
violence is directed toward the spirit rather than the body; and, as
the spiritual grotesques at least sometimes are able to reach spiritual
salvation through physical destruction, the secular grotesques destroy
the spirit in their attempts to save the body.
The most obvious secular grotesques are those who have deliber-
ately rejected God in preference to the gods of the modern world.
Thus Rayber and Sheppard turn to Freudian psychology and IQ tests
and try to ease the soul by comforting the body. But, as we have seen,
it is only through suffering that redemption can be achieved, and the
secular denial of pain is a denial of salvation.
But equally grotesque are those characters who seem to be en-
tirely oblivious to God. Or, more specifically, they are so completely
a part of the physical world that they simply cannot comprehend
the spiritual world-they either ignore its existence or misinterpret
its meaning. Most of Miss O'Connor's female characters fall into
this category, usually in the former connotation. The cabbage-faced
mother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the parents of the boy in
"The River," and Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell in "Good Coun-
try People" are a few examples of this obliviousness. Hulga in the
last story, however, harks back to the deliberate deniers ("her eyes
icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by
an act of will and means to keep it") despite her physical handicap,
which might have been sufficient to protect her from the secular
pressures of a B.A. but was not enough to combat a Ph.D. Mrs.
MacIntyre in "The Displaced Person" is for the most part oblivious
to the spiritual world in her pursuit of the material security, but
when faced with a choice she too denies salvation: "'As far as I'm
concerned,' she said and glared at him fiercely, 'Christ was just
another D.P."'

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 The character who most forcefully exemplifies the latter conno-
tation of the secularly grotesque is Enoch Emery in Wise Blood.
Enoch is a grotesque parody of Hazel Motes. As Haze moves toward
a spiritual rebirth-as he goes "backwards to Bethlehem"-Enoch,
the wholly physical creature, in a "satiric inversion of the evolution-
ary process,"7 becomes a gorilla.
Perhaps Miss O'Connor's Roman Catholic heritage is equally
well illustrated in her gallery of grotesques. Her similarity in this
respect to Graham Greene, who shares her religious convictions but
not her Southern location, is striking. Although Greene does not pre-
sent many physical grotesques, his lepers in A Burnt-Out Case also
seem to achieve a measure of salvation through their physical afflic-
tion. Their suffering is a protection against mutilation, Doctor Colin
tells Querry, who is spiritually mutilated because of his inability to
suffer. Greene parallels Miss O'Connor's secular grotesques in such
characters as Ida Arnold in Brighton Rock, who has substituted Right
and Wrong for Good and Evil, and the lieutenant in The Power and
the Glory, who is anxious to rob the people of their God and of their
suffering and to replace them with his modern gods of sanitation
and justice.
Greene's counterparts to Miss O'Connor's spiritual grotesques
are also assigned the leading roles in his novels. These characters are
what Miss O'Connor would call "religious individuals." They are
concerned-they are often obsessed-with their relationship to God.
Their concern is expressed through denial as well as through affirma-
tion in the works of both of these novelists. Miss O'Connor and
Greene are preoccupied with the words of the Apocalypse: "Would
that you were hot or cold, but because you are lukewarm I will begin
to vomit you out of my mouth." These spiritual grotesques are the
hot and the cold-the saints and the sinners. However, in Greene as
well as in Miss O'Connor, the manifestation of this concern in the
modern world tends to produce the demon rather than the demi-
god, the violent rather than the passive. Greene asserted that perfect
good (i.e., Christ) could no longer be found on earth, but that there
was the possibility of a personification of perfect evil. Thus, he cre-
ated Pinkie Brown in Brighton Rock, a demonic character who takes
on tragic dimensions in his determination to be damned. Pinkie's
inverted Credo, expressing his belief in "one Satan," seems prophetic
of Hazel Motes' promotion of the Church Without Christ. Greene's

Baumbach, p. 338.

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preoccupation with perfect evil seems also to be echoed in Miss
O'Connor's search for the "perfect deformity": "The ideal figure, it
seems, would be a saint who disbelieved, that is, one who was actively
searching for religious meaning . . . but who did not find it in the
established beliefs."8
Thus it would seem that these grotesques, couched in the lan-
guage and the pattern of her Southern heritage, are vehicles to express
Miss O'Connor's religious convictions. The appropriateness of her
grotesquerie-the presentation of warped characters in what her vision
shows her to be a warped world-would alone contradict Esty's "cult
of the Gratuitous Grotesque," and the religious and symbolic signifi-
cance with which she endows the deformities attests to her artistic
control of her medium.
This artistic control is further apparent in Miss O'Connor's style
and setting. The grotesqueness of her characters and the violence of
their actions are set against a starkly realistic background and related
objectively and with a disciplined restraint of sentimentality in a
simple and realistic prose. Through a remarkable rendering of their
speech, Miss O'Connor endows her characters each with "an indi-
vidual voice which, while personal and idiosyncratic, yet expresses the
attitude of a class in the dialect appropriate to that class."9 Her char-
acters and setting are admittedly, even blatantly, narrow, placing her
with the Southern regionalists like Eudora Welty and producing the
"strong sense of rich red-clay reality underlying and reinforcing all
her work."'0 In fact, Walter Elder would argue that Miss O'Connor
surpasses Miss Welty in this respect because "Miss Welty deals with
a South that never was; Miss O'Connor with a South that is."'l
Whether or not one agrees with Elder's judgment of Miss Welty,
it does seem apparent that Miss O'Connor has convinced her readers
of the reality of her characters, and this conviction gives credence to
the grotesque features and the violent actions. And just as this reality
of character and setting supports Miss O'Connor's vision, a corre-
sponding reality is discernible in her style. In defining the fiction
writer, she says: "he himself cannot move or mold reality in the inter-

8 Lewis A. Lawson, "Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque: Wise Blood,"

Renascence, XVII (Spring 1965), 145.
9 Sister Jeremy, C.S.J., "The Violent Bear It Away: A Linguistic Educa-
tion," Renascence, XVII (Fall 1964), 11.
10 Jane Hart, "Strange Earth: The Stories of Flannery O'Connor," Georgia
Review, XII (Summer 1958), 216.
11 "That Region," Kenyon Review, XVII (Autumn 1955), 670.

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est of abstract truth." "''Vhat is is all he has to do with; the concrete is
his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend
its limitations only by staying within them." It is in precisely this way
that Miss O'Connor "transcends its limitations." She does not preach;
she tells stories. The stories are entertaining whether or not one
attempts to consider their religious implications. The simplicity of her
style-"Her chaste, unimposing sentences, her refusal to temper with
consciousness, her fairly strict chronological narrations"12-combines
with her realism to emphasize the violence of the actions and, by
implication at least, of the underlying spiritual struggle.
Miss O'Connor's humor, as mentioned earlier, is produced by
these contrasting elements of realism and violence and their use to
express spiritual values. Although Sister Rose Alice denies any humor
to these stories13-she apparently considers humor incompatible with
Miss O'Connor's solemn moral concerns-most of the critics recog-
nize and admire these "comic incongruities" which tend to "rather
add to than detract from her seriousness."14 I find it hard to believe
that anyone could-or would want to-ignore the rich vein of humor
which begins on the first page of Miss O'Connor's first novel, Wise
Blood, when the curious Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock examined Hazel
Motes and noted that "The suit had cost him $11.98. She felt that
that placed him and looked at his face again as if she were fortified
against it now." It would be hard to read more than a page anywhere
in Miss O'Connor's works without finding more examples. Yet even
her humor operates on different levels. First, it provides a comic relief
even in the most tense and most solemn scenes, such as when Tar-
water first sees the lake where simultaneously he is going to drown
and to baptize Bishop and he thinks: "It looked so unused that it
might only the moment before have been set down by four strapping
angels for him to baptize the child in." The humor produced by the
use of the incongruous adjective eases the tension of the vision without
compromising the intention.
Her satirical humor even more clearly illustrates the dichotomy
of spiritual awareness and secular blindness in the modem world. That
this humor is brutal, as Time asserts, is debatable. John Hawkes defines

12 Melvin J. Friedman, "Flannery O'Connor: Another Legend in Southern

Fiction," English Journal, LI (April 1962), 240.
13 "Flannery O'Connor: Poet to the Outcast," Renascence, XVI (Spring
1964), 128.
14 Sumner J. Ferris, "The Outside and the Inside: Flannery O'Connor's
The Violent Bear It Away," Critique, III (Winter 1960), 12.

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her satire as "centralizing a dominant ideal by means of irony and
analogy" and as a form "which demolishes man's image of himself
as a rational creature."15 This, then, would seem to fit in both with
Miss O'Connor's vision and with her election to use violent means to
express it. Man's rationalism will not save him-perhaps the image
must be demolished so that he can see beyond it to salvation.
It is here that we encounter the crux of Miss O'Connor's vision:
the rational world, that is-the world man can perceive through
human reason-has replaced the spiritual world, that is-the Body of
Christ which can only be perceived through the Grace and Mercy
of God. Once again Miss O'Connor is reminiscent of Graham Greene
and Brighton Rock, where Right and Wrong replace Good and Evil.
And her criminals, her misfits and prophets, are closer to salvation
because they are in the spiritual realm: they are Evil and are fighting
a religious battle within themselves-their belief or disbelief in Christ
is to them a matter of life and death. Her secular grotesques, on the
other hand, may be Right, but they are a world away from moral
Good. Although this terminology is Greene's, the religious vision is
shared by Miss O'Connor. Reversing the terms, she nevertheless
retains the meaning in this exchange between Norton and Johnson
about Sheppard in "The Lame Shall Enter First": "The child's face
began to have a wary look of belligerence. He backed away slightly as
if he were prepared to retreat instantly. 'He's good,' he mumbled. 'He
helps people.' 'Good!' Johnson said savagely. He thrust his head for-
ward. 'Listen here,' he hissed, 'I don't care if he's good or not. He
ain't right!'"
Just as Greene expressed this theme through a type of morality
play, a medieval allegory where Rose and Pinkie respectively personi-
fied Good and Evil, so the critics have detected allegory in Miss
O'Connor's work. Lewis Lawson gives an allegorical interpretation to
Wise Blood and explains why he feels allegorical personifications
would be more appropriate for the minor characters in this novel than
more well-rounded characters: "If any of these figures were rounded
and involved in a meaningful struggle with Haze, the emphasis in the
book would be upon man's relation to man; whereas in Miss O'Con-
nor's view, the only reason for writing a novel is to explore man's
dependence upon Christ."'6

15 "Flannery O'Connor's Devil," Sewanee Review, LXX (Summer 1962),

396.
6'Lawson, p. 143.

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 Although this explanation and the allegorical interpretation seem
at first to apply to Wise Blood, I do not think they can be extended
to her other works and I think the allegory is not intentional even in
Wise Blood. The flatness of some of the characters should be attrib-
uted rather to the fact that this is Miss O'Connor's first novel. To
assume that she is striving to express her ideas in allegorical abstrac-
tions is to ignore her own assertion that the fiction writer is limited
to the use of the concrete. Miss O'Connor frequently uses symbolic
names, even symbolic actions, but her characters are well-rooted in
the "rich red-clay reality" noted earlier and her stories are not tightly
confined within an allegorical framework. Stanley Hyman's attempt
to interpret her writings allegorically, for instance, has forced him to
consider Enoch's transformation in Wise Blood as "unrelated to Haze,
and Enoch simply falls out of the book dressed as a gorilla"17 because
it doesn't fit what he sees as Haze's "pilgrim's progress." Likewise,
Hyman dismisses many of the short stories because they have not
clearly conformed to the allegorical framework he tries to impose.
Miss O'Connor is more influenced by the Biblical parables than
the medieval morality plays. Each of the parables, couched in the
violence Miss O'Connor sees necessary to wake the "sleeping children
of God," expresses a variation of her vision-a vision that demands that
man look beyond the secular to the spiritual, that he turn away from
the "comforts of home" to the pain of penance-to what Greene
calls "the appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God."
One of the themes which Miss O'Connor uses to express her
vision is apparent when we turn to her first novel, Wise Blood. This
theme of sight versus blindness has been traced admirably in Law-
son's article,18 so I will only say here that Miss O'Connor uses it to
reinforce her central idea-to emphasize that Haze gained spiritual
sight through his self-inflicted physical blindness, while the "unen-
lightened" characters like his landlady, Mrs. Flood, were the truly
blind ones.
As the novel opens, Hazel Motes is on a train, a suitable setting
for a "displaced person" who came home from the Army to find that
his home no longer existed, and we are immediately introduced to
another facet of Miss O'Connor's vision. For, as Caroline Gordon

'17Hyman, Flannery O'Connor, Univ. of Minn. Pamphlet of American

Writers, No. 54 (Minneapolis, 1966), p. 14.
18 Lawson, pp. 140-142.

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points out, "all her characters are 'displaced persons,' not merely
the people in the story of that name. They are 'off-center,' 'out-of-
place. "19 Friedman sees in this dislocation a transplantation-prophecy-
return motif which he applies to the rest of Miss O'Connor's work as
well, postulating that the "characters often leave their native sur-
roundings with a prophetic urge to renew themselves; they either
return unsuccessfully . . . or die horribly."20 But I cannot accept this
analysis at all, especially when Friedman compares the characters to
Peyton Loftis in Styron's Lie Down In Darkness. His thesis would
seem to apply to Peyton, but Styron is dealing with a lost heritage
and the dissolution of belief while Miss O'Connor emphasizes an
ignored but vitally alive heritage and the ever-present possibility of
redemption. Her characters are not transplanted-they are displaced,
uprooted; they do not choose to leave their homes-they are forced to.
The characters do not leave for the purpose of renewal-in fact,
they generally resist the "wild ragged figure" of Christ as long as they
can. Miss O'Connor gives the Devil his due-he fights a good fight
for the souls of her religious individuals. But finally the relentless
mercy and grace of God overpowers them, and, far from either return-
ing unsuccessfully or dying horribly, they commit themselves to God
and recognize suffering as the preliminary to salvation-they have
moved from their hell on earth to a purgatory which prepares them
for Paradise. Miss O'Connor's vision is, therefore, an affirmation, and
though suffering is intensified rather than relieved, those characters
who have finally recognized the absurdity of disbelief can now act
purposefully, can perhaps even see the "pinpoint of light" at the end
of the tunnel-the survival of hope in a hopeless world.
The displacement theme seems rather, therefore, to empha-
size the fact that man has lost contact with Christ. The spiritual
grotesques like Haze Motes and Tarwater have the advantage of
recognizing their displacement, a recognition which was given to
Mrs. Shortley in "The Displaced Person" the moment before she
died, which is frequently a moment in which God's grace seems to
enlighten Miss O'Connor's characters.
A further characteristic of this displacement is that it seems to
reverse the "westering" and "wilderness" themes of American litera-
ture. Instead of going to the redeeming country, Haze and later
Tarwater are drawn to the destructive city. The city is almost a per-

19 "Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood," Critique, II (Fall 1958), 9.

20 Friedman, p. 237.

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sonification of Miss O'Connor's Devil-in it can be found all the
creations of man which stand between him and salvation. Christ went
into the wilderness to be tempted; modern man goes into the city.
He comes to the city wanting to be converted to secularism-begging
for relief from the necessity of suffering.
And it is in the city where Miss O'Connor faces her most crucial
test; it is in the handling of this test that she proves her true stature
as an artist. For here Miss O'Connor faces up to her Devil. It would
be so easy to assert her beliefs here dogmatically-to present the
secular world in as ludicrous a light as Cozzens allowed for liberalism
in the character of Lieutenant Edsell in Guard of Honor. This would
seem to be a particularly dangerous pitfall for a Catholic writer, since
her beliefs are so well formulated. But Miss O'Connor escapes it
neatly and even her critics will have to admit that she "gives the
Devil his due." In fact, she presents the Devil's case so convincingly
that some critics were confused as to which side she was advocating.
But Miss O'Connor does not for one moment stray from her
vision. Rather, like Saul Bellow, she is illustrating that her affirmation
is won with a complete understanding of the arguments against it.
She has chosen the perfect vehicle for this-a religious individual
who wants desperately to accept the secular view-to find something
in it that warrants acceptance. Like Haze, he recognizes the difficulty
of being a Christian, the suffering it entails and the recognition of
Original Sin and acceptance of guilt. Haze tries to reject it in favor
of the "Church Without Christ": "I'm going to preach there was no
Fall because there was nothing to Fall from and no Redemption
because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the
first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar."
No one states the Devil's case for him better than Haze himself.
If he had been able to find anything to support his arguments, he
would have. But instead he found nothing to fulfill his need for com-
mitment. Neither sin nor good works was rewarding in a world where
the prayers to the Virgin Mary were replaced by letters to Mary Brit-
tle: "I says, 'Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter
the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality
that makes the boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not?
I shall not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway so I don't see what
difference it makes."' Here was perhaps an opportunity for the Devil
to assert himself, to show that morality could have a meaning even in
a purely secular context. The answer, though admittedly exaggerated,
is in many ways uncomfortably accurate and shows some of the

SHINN: FLANNERY O'CONNOR | 69

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cliches of the modern world to be as distorted as Miss O'Connor has
claimed they were: "Dear Sabbath, Light necking is acceptable, but
I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world.
Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they
meet your needs in Life. A religious experience can be a beautiful
addition to living if you put it in the proper perspective and do not
let it warp you. Read some books on Ethical Culture."
Haze encountered many versions of the shallowness and purpose-
lessness of secularism until he was driven back to redemption. Again
Miss O'Connor has reversed the pattern. Stories like Mark Twain's
"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" argue that faith is not valid
unless it has been tested by temptation; Miss O'Connor seems to
apply the same test to rejection of faith. To deny one's religious con-
sciousness, as Rayber does in The Violent Bear It Away, is to choose
emptiness.
But it is in her second novel that Miss O'Connor really gives the
Devil a fair-even an apparently favorable-hearing. Yet, interest-
ingly enough, no one questioned whose side she was on in this novel.
Of course, her collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to
Find, had appeared in the interval to reinforce the vision she had
expressed in Wise Blood, so her vision was becoming more clear. And
The Violent Bear It Away was in many ways a much better novel-
the self-confident expression of a mature and talented author. No flat
characters here, tempting critics to apply an allegorical interpretation
and to deny her ability to express her abstract vision through very
concrete situations and very real characters.
Miss O'Connor illustrates her complete control of her material
in her presentation of no less than three Devils in this novel. The
vague representation of the Devil as secularism is given more concrete
form in her portrayal of the good-intentioned Rayber paving Tar-
water's-and his own-path to Hell; Tarwater's personal devil speaks
up frequently in such blatantly obvious fashion that we can almost
see him sitting on Tarwater's shoulder scratching his head with a
pitchfork; then he shows up in person with a lavender and cream-
colored car and a lavender handkerchief to introduce Tarwater to his
substitution for the Body, the Blood, and the Charity of Christ:
cigarettes, liquor, and perverted sex.
The displacement theme is also more violently realized in this
novel. Tarwater, with the counsel of his devil, forcefully displaces
himself by burning his home and heading for the city. He has rejected
his heritage by not burying his grandfather-but it has not rejected

70 i CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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him. God's grace pursues him to the city and he learns-as Rayber
has already learned-that rejection is a full-time job. Whenever he
happened to drop his guard, he found himself trying to baptize
Bishop-the mission his grandfather had assigned him.
Tarwater's heritage from his grandfather was paralleled but not
as fully developed in Wise Blood. Haze had inherited both his grand-
father's religious consciousness and the old preacher's physical appear-
ance. This inheritance from the very old to the very young is a recur-
rent motif in Miss O'Connor's stories. The backwoods prophets
instinctively know that they must communicate their vision to a
child, for, as Rayber points out, "A grown person could have resisted.
A child couldn't. Children are cursed with believing."
In the conclusion of the second novel, Miss O'Connor brings
her religious individual one step further than she did in Wise Blood.
Tarwater has followed the same course as Haze, with minor variations,
and he has come with Haze to a realization of the emptiness of secu-
larism. Where Miss O'Connor echoed Haze's progress in her theme of
sight versus blindness, she parallels Tarwater's growing awareness of
the absurdity of disbelief with his inability to eat or to be nourished
by the food of the world because he was hungering for the Body and
Blood of Christ, for the Bread of Life. He was either refused or he
rejected the substitutes provided by the secular world-the purple
soda pop and the trucker's sandwich-and his acceptance of the
Devil's substitute-"It's better than the Bread of Life!"-was his last
and in some ways most violent rejection of Grace.
When Tarwater woke up after the Devil's last violent assertion
of his power, "His eyes looked small and seedlike as if while he was
asleep, they had been lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his
head." The line recalls the prediction his grandfather had made to
Rayber: "THE PROPHET I RAISE UP OUT OF THIS BOY
WILL BURN YOUR EYES CLEAN."
But it is Tarwater's eyes that have been burned clean,
ber's. With the new, purifying fire of the Holy Ghost he
away the remains of the Devil's visit and the "friend" he
nizes as the "adversary." He has gained Haze's spiritual si
own "singed eyes, black in their deep sockets," but he is not
He must now return to the "dark city where the children
sleeping," to fulfill his mission and to "WARN THE C
OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY."
In her posthumous collection of short stories, Everyth
Rises Must Converge, Miss O'Connor does indeed round

SHINN: FLANNERY O'CONNOR 1

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view of life as Spivey suggested. Here in the novella "The Lame Shall
Enter First," with Rufus Johnson, Sheppard, and Norton parallel-
ing respectively Tarwater, Rayber, and Bishop, Miss O'Connor takes
the last step toward salvation, and her vision of redemption finally
includes all three of her character types. Norton, although not an
idiot, is accorded the same relatively easy route to salvation because
he is a child and "children are cursed with believing." Innocence
naturally finds its way to Jesus-"Suffer the little children to come
unto me"-in Miss O'Connor's stories. Let me just add here that
innocence is not synonymous with ignorance with Miss O'Connor-
the latter as we have seen is a secular deformity-but it is rather a
spontaneous acceptance of Christ.
Johnson, like Tarwater and his predecessors, is a religiously-
conscious individual who recognizes that Jesus will eventually save
him. He does not reject his belief-perhaps he doesn't have to,
because he already carries his burden of belief in his clubfoot.
And Sheppard, like Rayber, is once again what Miss O'Con-
nor seems to see as the most positive product of secularism. He is
good, but he still isn't right. Even the best forms of disbelief cannot
approach the most deformed forms of belief-just as Greene's Pinkie
and Rose knew that the secular, justice-seeking Ida Arnold was "as
far from either of them as she was from Hell-or Heaven."
But Miss O'Connor in this story has finally extended God's grace
to her secular grotesque. Rayber had had the opportunity to be saved
when he realized that Bishop was dead, but he had already made his
decision to reject grace before that: "He knew that he was the stuff
of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his
destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very nar-
row line between madness and emptiness, and when the time came
for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness
and fall on the side of his choice." Our last view of him confirms this
choice: "He stood waiting for the raging pain, the intolerable hurt
that was his due, to begin, so that he could ignore it, but he con-
tinued to feel nothing. He stood light-headed at the window and it
was not until he realized that there would be no pain that he col-
lapsed." So it would seem that for once Miss O'Connor did not give
the Devil "his due," but as we have seen earlier, suffering leads to
salvation. Rayber's lack of pain illustrates his severance from God;
he is confined to the painless emptiness of Limbo and denied the
purifying pain of Purgatory.
Sheppard, however, is saved from the emptiness. He is granted

72 1 CONTEMPOR-ARY LITERATURE

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a revelation and a chance to suffer for his sins and thus to attain
redemption and spiritual life. As he realizes he has neglected his son,
he "saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts." To see the
Devil is just one step removed from seeing God, and that vision can
only be reached through redemptive suffering. But with his view of
the Devil Sheppard enters the spiritual world. He recognizes his own
sin and insignificance: "His image of himself shrivelled until every-
thing was black before him. He sat there paralyzed, aghast."
Now that he is once more spiritually alive, Sheppard is able to
love: "A rush of agonizing love for the child rushed over him like a
transfusion of life. The little boy's face appeared to him transformed;
the image of his salvation; all light."
But when Sheppard reaches the child, he finds him dead. This
is not a meaningless violence in Miss O'Connor's vision. It is the essen-
tial unifying element. Sheppard's vision of Norton was correct-the
boy was transformed; he was all light. He had gone to find his mother.
Likewise, he was also the image of Sheppard's salvation. Now
that Sheppard had recognized both his love for his son and his own
guilt, he was prepared to suffer, to purge his soul for possible redemp-
tion. In him, the prophecy of Tarwater's grandfather had finally
reached its fulfillment. His eyes had been burned clean. Miss O'Con-
nor's violence had conveyed her vision and her vision had revealed
its violence. That the vision was of a redemptive violence is best ex-
pressed in the Biblical verse from which she named her second novel:
"From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of Heaven
suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away" (Matt. xi, 12).

Hunter College

SHINN: FLANNERY O CONNOR I 73

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