Flannery O'Connor and the Vision of Grace

Jen is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina soon associate I believe and she was previously here as a collegiate assistant professor of humanities at the University of Chicago where she was a member of the Society of fellows in the liberal arts and affiliated faculty in the philosophy department little-known fact she also was assistant director for the lumen christi institute so for those of us were working as associate and assistant directors here we can only be so lucky if we are going to be as successful as she has been both as a scholar and a public intellectual I think unfortunately for Austin and I jen is far more talented than we are she holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA from Indiana University Bloomington she was recently the co-principal investigator on a major three-year research project titled virtue happiness and meaning of life jen is also a rising sort of public scholar public catholic scholar one of the the reasons we're so excited to have her here last night for example she as a part of an ecumenical initiative that when Christie was a part of was the sort of co-panelists for a dialogue on what good is happiness the dialogue between economics and philosophy that had a hundred and eighty-five undergrads there just to sort of soak this in and see sort of you know these two pitted perspectives as well as the cynical kids who are coming answer asking that question what good is happiness anyways Jen also has her own philosophy and literature podcast entitled sacred and profane love that can be found anywhere podcasts are listed otherwise please join me in welcoming to the stage today Jennifer [Applause] hi thank you so much Michael for the introduction so I'm gonna be talking to you about Flannery O'Connor and the vision of grapes I'm not going to presuppose any knowledge of Flannery O'Connor if you know a lot about her you'll just have to bear with me I'm gonna talk about who she was her life that's the first part of my talk the second part of my talk I'm gonna discuss her vision as an artist and the relationship between her vision and the writing of Thomas Aquinas and then for the third part of my talk I'm going to work through one of her stories I think that she's a wonderful writer but she's a demanding writer she's demanding of her readers and so I just kind of want to give you a sense of how you ought to be reading her and also how we can see Thomas Catholic views about grace at work in her fiction so first I wouldn't say who she was so Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25th in 1925 in Savannah Georgia she was born right in the heart of the city's Irish Catholic Enclave and a hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy she was named after Mary Ellen Flannery wife of John Flannery who was a Confederate officer in Savannah's Irish military Corps who became a wealthy banker in the post war years so the hospital that she was born in and also the Catholic cathedral that she worshipped in was built with his money Mary Flannery was the only child to Regina and Edward O'Connor who both doted on her in very different ways Regina desperately wanted her daughter to become a traditional southern belle gracious well-mannered and well manicured a consummate hostess where's her father was content to let his daughter pursue her intense passions for drawing and her writing and he was not in the least concerned by her wholesale rejection her sort of wholesale rejection of the trappings of southern girlhood she was extremely precocious and she was an intense child she was painfully shy and antisocial but she also enjoyed a rich interior life through her letters we know that she was engaged in intense battles with her guardian angel whom she pictured as a bird she resented like I said traditional southern expectations on her one sign of this was that she called her parents by her first name even as a small girl and she was basically closer to birds than to other children Mary Flannery did not impress the strict pious nuns who taught her at st. Vincent's Grammar School in Savannah but the feelings were mutual she wants complain to a friend that the sisters had taught her to measure her sins with a slide rule as an adult she complained of merry processions and of other nun inspired doings so she was a very devout Catholic but she really kind of accord traditional Catholic piety so later in her life her mother really wanted her to go to Lourdes and she desperately did not want to go in 1937 her father with whom she was especially close with diagnosed with lupus she was 12 years old she later wrote of herself at this time I was a very ancient 12 my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran I am much younger now than I was at 12 for at any rate less burdened so at 13 she leaves Savannah and she moves to Milledgeville this is the site of her mother's family's stately antebellum mansion a space that she shared with other members of her mother's family she spent countless hours and this mansion drawing writing and tending to the birds at this point she goes from a very strict Catholic environment to the Peabody model school this is actually a laboratory school that's moderate uh it's it's sort of like the laboratory school actually down in Hyde Park so it's modeled on the kradic theories of the philosopher John Dewey and on the one hand you know young Mary O'Connor is very happy to be free from the nuns but she also finds that she's equally disdainful of the free thinkers at her new school and she's particularly unimpressed that they don't demand that everyone be reading literature so one thing that's interesting about Milledgeville for young Mary is that the entire city is designated a bird sanctuary and so it was a place that seemed to suit her especially well and while she was at her mother's family's mansion in the town she would also often wander out to her uncle's farm her uncle's farm had a nickname de Lucia it was a 550 acre farm and there were hundreds of birds there and so she liked being there very much in 1941 her father succumbed to lupus this was a very very difficult loss for her her father was the most close intimate relationship she had and she described the loss of her father in the following way this is from her letters the reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side a sense of the dramatic of the tragic of the infinite has descended upon us filling us with grief but even above grief Wonder and her father's death again the person with whom she felt the deepest kinship and affection she was still able to see the work of grace but in a way that hurt her rather than comforted her and so I think at a young age she had this insight that God's grace can be violent it can be that it can shock you out of a kind of spiritual complacency and comfort in your life and this really would be the enduring theme of her fiction maybe not surprisingly in high school Mary began to stand out for her writing a classmate of her once attested that being in creative writing with Mary Flannery was sheer torture I remember she wrote a very strange story with impossibly weird characters so in 1942 she goes to the Georgia State College for Women which is still in Milledgeville it's a progressive College on campus she actually distinguishes herself for her sense of humor so she is a cartoonist she still loved to draw she's a cartoonist for the campus newspaper one thing that I find really interesting about her college years is that the most important course the most formative course that she took in college was in philosophy it was a survey of modern philosophy the hero of the course was Renee decart if you don't know anything about Descartes he thinks of the world as purely material so he thinks that we can understand the world just in terms of math and science and the perspective of the teacher of the course is a secular humanist now young Mary Flannery is very unimpressed with this perspective so she begins to argue regularly with her professor even going so far as to diagram on the board for her professors and her fellow students sort of like tome ism on one side and modernism on the other side and trying to show that tome ISM would on top but basically her perspective was that it was modernism that had blinded the Western mind to the most central features of reality and it did this by narrowing its focus on what's material and quantifiable and she thinks well actually the most salient aspects of reality are neither material nor modifiable so she's obviously really disagreeing with her professor but at the same time she very much empresas her professor both with her talents as a writer and with her abilities as a thinker and her professor desperately doesn't want to see her just become I don't know maybe a teacher in Milledgeville so he strongly encourages her to apply to graduate work at the University of Iowa and O'Connor is accepted into the University of Iowa but she's accepted into the School of Journalism but basically as soon as she arrives on campus she realizes she doesn't fit there she wants to go over to the Writers Workshop the Writers Workshop was run at the time by Paul ankle so she goes to try to talk to angle however her Georgia accent is so thick that he cannot understand a word she says to him so eventually after sort of nicely asking her to repeat herself several times he doesn't get anywhere so he gives her a pad of paper and he says please just write down what you're saying and she writes down three sentences my name is Flannery O'Connor I am NOT a journalist can I please come to the Writers Workshop so he says okay well send me some of your stories she sent someone she's immediately accepted and it was around this time it was when she moved to Iowa and she enrolls in the Iowa Writers Workshop that she starts to stop referring to herself as Marian Flannery she just goes by Flannery and when she was later asked about this change of name like why did you stop going by Flannery O'Connor she wrote well who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washer woman so she thought maybe it would a typecast her um and I think also it wasn't lost on her that Flannery was a sort of a gender-neutral name it didn't necessarily pick her out as a woman and she would actually sometimes brag that she would receive desk for ejections from journals addressed to mr. Flannery O'Connor so it's also around this time I mean I think you can really describe her time at the Writers Workshop in terms of really perfecting her craft as a writer in particular the formal aspects of her craft and it's at this time really the first time that she reads the great European novels so again and she's still painfully shy she's still a bit of a recluse she spends the entire time you know reading Dostoevsky and flow there and the great novelists and she's also becoming acquainted with all of the famous writers who are passing through the Writers Workshop in Iowa it was sort of a Hughes who's who of famous contemporary writers and this is really good for her because it connects her to the kind of broader literary scene and so once she graduates from Iowa she takes up an incredibly prestigious summer residency at yato so this is this famous artists Colony and Saratoga Springs New York and this is just a time for her to focus on her writing to be fully supported and funded and a place of of isolation and it's at yato that she meets and becomes friends with Robert Lowell the poet so he later joins her there Lowell ends up being a really interesting figure in her life but I think one of the primary things he does for her is he connects her to prominent literary Catholics so there was like this brief span of time where Lowell was a Catholic it didn't last but it lasted long enough to connect her to people like Robert Sherrow at Harcourt brace and Robert and Sally Fitzgerald and these are people who really helped her once she left yato so she leaves yato and she goes like any aspiring writer she goes to live in New York City to try to advance her career Flannery hated New York so her friends were very generous to her they were they were very happy to kind of talk her up at fancy cocktail parties and talk about you know what is serious up-and-coming writer she was but this was not an environment that she felt well-suited to and there's a really hilarious story and one of her letters about one evening at one of these cocktail parties with a big intellectual who sort of identified herself to Flannery as a lapsed Catholic so here's what Flannery writes towards morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist which I mean the Catholic was obviously supposed to defend mrs. bragge Waters said that when she was a child and received the host she thought of it as the Holy Ghost he being the most potable person of the Trinity now she thought a bit of a son and she implied it was a pretty good one but I then said in a very shaky voice well if it's a symbol to hell with it that was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now this is all I will ever be able to say about it outside of a story except that is the center of my existence all the rest of life is expendable so she only actually has a really short time in New York City she has an even shorter time living with the Fitzgeralds in Connecticut and eventually she has to return to Georgia for good and the reason is that she herself is diagnosed with lupus after her diagnosis she goes back to the farm in Milledgeville she becomes incredibly dependent on her mother and she devotes herself to her writing to her painting and also to caring for the hundreds of birds on the farm especially 70p fowl and this is where she writes her first novel wise blood it's published in 1952 she's 27 years old and to just give you some literary context this is the same year that Hemingway's the Old Man and the sea is published and Steinbeck's East of Eden is published critical reactions to O'Connor's first novel are very mixed critics I think really couldn't understand why her characters were so darkly comic and freakish or why her work contained so much violence her publisher remarked that they all recognized the power of her writing but they missed her point and I think that's true I think this is still largely true of a critical reaction to Flannery O'Connor I think they largely missed the point so it really so her first novel is a somewhat limited success but it's the publication of a is hard to find so this is her first short story that really secures her status as one of the greatest writers of her generation her publisher Robert Cheruiyot compared the story to the best of Hemingway and Melville so in the end O'Conner ends up publishing two novels and 32 short stories but she dies of complications related to her lupus in August of 1964 where she was busy at work on her third novel and actually there's a there's a young scholar in Arkansas Arkansas her name is Jessica Hooton Wilson who is currently trying to get this third novel published so we'll see what comes of that so that's so that planner II O'Connor that's her story um I want to go through it because I think in understanding who she was we can better understand her fiction but now I want to talk about what I take her vision of grace to be and how I take her vision of grace to be related to the thought of Thomas Aquinas so we know that Flannery had the habit of reading Thomas Aquinas every evening before bed she wants claim that she read a lot of theology because it made her writing bolder she was also once described by critics as a hillbilly nihilist but she protested that in fact she's a hillbilly Thomas that she wrote happy stories that centered on the work of grace upon and in us thick with the promise of God's mercy and redemption so why would she say that because her stories are very novel they were they are very violent and dark well if you think about it - this vision of the human person he thinks that were created in the image of God and we're naturally ordained to our own or happiness like this is what we want by our nature but we're not obviously going to get it and the work of our pilgrimage here on earth is to freely cooperate with God's grace so that we can attain this and which does transcend this life and will be a defy us so she's taking that idea that we're sort of born for happiness but she's also taking from a client as a kind of realism a kind of Christian realism so for Thomas what it means to live well as a human person he understands the human person as a rational kind of animal is fundamentally to know and to love reality and that means that you seek to conform yourself to what is true so that you can have loving communion with what is good and you can take the light and what is beautiful the true the good and the beautiful for Thomas are just different ways that a person can relate to being or reality and of course Thomas understands God as the ultimate reality because his essence is his being and that also means that for Thomas God is truth and goodness and beauty itself in its totality now reality includes both God's creation as communicative of and ordered to his own goodness but also God's activity in sustaining his creation in being and also working to bring it back to himself and that means that the Christian must never try to hide from reality but always try to live in conformity with it this is often did for us reality can be a tough master and O'Conner saw this very clearly so she sees the temptation to resist or ignore or distract himself from reality that this is a constant temptation for us and it's central to her vision of grace that it works to kind of pierce the veil of perception right to help us to see the world as it actually is it sort of forces us to confront things most especially the unpleasant things like the effects of sin in our own souls right grace can work to show that to you so of her Christian Thomas realism O'Connor West wrote the following the term Christian realism realism has become necessary for me perhaps in a purely academic way because I find myself in a world where everybody has his compartment they will put you in yours shut the door and leave one of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the incarnation the present reality is the incarnation the whole reality is the incarnation but nobody believes in the incarnation at least nobody in your audience so this idea that God's grace can help us to really see reality including most especially the reality of the Incarnation as our redemption and our salvation this is the theme of O'Connor's fiction but it's also fundamentally tied to our own understanding of what fiction is of what it's doing of its enduring value and also to that of the artist as having and relating a kind of feda vision through her art so she writes that the novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of the audience will very definitively affect the way he is able to show what he sees there are ages when it is possible to woo the reader she does not think she lives in one of those ages and there are others when something more drastic is necessary so she thinks her readers are coarsened she thinks it's gonna take something pretty dramatic and drastic to get them to see the realities that she wants to point them to so she really feels she needs to shock her audience she once wrote that she was always irritated by people who implied that writing fiction is an escape from reality it is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking so she insists that morality for an artist lies in her vision not in a lesson so I think she would actually completely agree with somebody like Nabokov but great literature isn't didactic okay it's point isn't to teach you a lesson you could come to a moral theory class with me if you wanted something like that or maybe you could go to Sunday school what is it for fiction she says if the writer is a successful artist his moral judgment will coincide with his dramatic judgment it will be inseparable from the very act of his seeing so this is a really interesting claim to me I think that the idea that moral vision is related to character and good judgment also something that she's getting from Aquinas so if you look at what a pinus says about prudence that's practical reason that's perfected practical reason or good practical judgment it's like a it's like a habit of knowing what to pursue and avoid not just generally but in the actual concrete particular circumstances that you find yourself in and he describes the prudent man as one whose sight is keen and he identifies it with a kind of interior sense because it also involves memory and imagination prudence is basically applying your general reason to action action is the realm of particulars which are constantly changing so what the prudent man can do is they can see in the ever-changing circumstances what is necessary what is salient what is going to guide his choice he also says that the prudent man can see what is far away close up so you can see how the particular situation relates to some general vision that he has of how to live well and this is necessary for his happiness it's also a claim that a point us has that you cannot have this kind of vision without perfected appetites because fear and anger and other disordered passions blind you they literally prevent you from seeing what's right in front of your face a great example that Aquinas often gives is st. Peter when he denies Christ right st. Peter is blinded by his fear and cannot see Christ as his best friend in that he denies him so without virtue without properly regulated passions we don't know where to look we don't know where to direct our attention and so we cannot see the appropriate features of the circumstances to guide our choices and I think what's interesting about her stories is that they're full of characters whose vision is narrowed by their sin and by the effects of sin on their soul and characters who need to rely on God's grace in order to broaden their vision so that they can see the fullness of reality again it's also important to O'Connor that an artist vision is inseparable from her moral vision I think when we look back on her life we can see her time in Iowa as really perfecting the kind of formal elements of her art her stories are masterfully crafted and this is this is this is a part of her art but this isn't what is so powerful about her stories they are masterfully crafted but what's powerful about her stories is their moral vision and that vision is aimed at communicating the truth through her art and that moral vision is the vision of the church and in particular the vision of the theology of Thomas Aquinas and so she thinks that her moral judgment can't be separated from her artistic vision any more than nature can be separated from grace they're one in the same I also think it's interesting that she's obviously very well aware of her southern as' especially during her in Iowa and in New York City but she's very aware of her southern Asst as a writer as an artist and she thinks of it as an aide not a hindrance why was it an aide she says the South is struggling mightily to retain her identity against great odds and without knowing always quite and what her identity lies and identity is not made from what passes it's not from slavery or from segregation but from those qualities that endure because they are related to the truth what are these qualities that the South possesses those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation a distrust of the abstract a sense of human dependence on the grace of God and the knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved but a mystery that must be endured I think that the southern sense of defeat I mean this is very close actually to some things that Walker Percy says about being a southern Catholic writer that it was sort of like a benefit that they have lost the war because the southerner has a sense of the tragic and a sense of his own fallenness but another thing that i want to say about o'connor as a southern catholic writer as that her vision isn't simply moral but it's also prophetic what does that mean well if you look at what a point says about prophecy the Prophet has a peculiar insight into the enduring mysteries of human existence he has a kind of knowledge that comes from God through God's grace acting in us but also a kind of participation a broader participation and the complete truth that is God so prophetic knowing or revelation is a matter of seeing how ordinary things relate to God how the visible relates to the invisible how the material relates to the spiritual how the temporal relates to the eternal and how the general relates to the particular and I think all of this for her is very sacramental so you also think about it her artistic vision it's incredibly sacramental and its Incarnation all so in her work if you look at the symbols you see that the spiritual is always materially realized and this is really important for her because for her the truth that fiction can uniquely give us it's not the same as the truth of philosophy or theology the truth of fiction is not given to us in abstract principles or arguments it's given in the experiencial context of the material of the particular story right the way that race unfolds in a particular person in a particular unrepeatable situation and this is incarnational because in the art in the Incarnation divine spirit becomes in mattered in particular human flesh and likewise in fiction divine truths become in and the specific circumstances and materials of the story so if we think that vision is of the perceptual realm as Aquinas teaches it always pertains to the particular and I think that's why for her this guiding metaphor of vision is essential to her conception of herself as an artist of fiction in particular because it's so related to a particular story the story of a particular soul okay so I want to take all of this now and apply it to a specific story and this is a good man is hard to find it's a good story to pick because it has all the elements and it's also short but this is the story that led her to be compared to Melville and Hemingway this is a story of God's grace extended to someone outside the sacraments its usual vehicle in order to perfect a profound change in a person it's a comically dark story it's a story of mishaps and misfits and violence but also merciful redemption and the triumph of God's grace and a human soul so what's the story about well we're introduced to a family a southern family and they're preparing to go out on a road trip so you have the central character of the story is this kind of genteel grandmother she has one son Bailey she calls Bailey boy and he has a wife and three young children and they're headed to Florida the grandmother is really desperate not to go to Florida I'm so she spends a lot of time trying to convince them we should really be going to Tennessee it's much better she starts to make her case against going to Florida by pointing out that there's this fella that calls himself misfit and he's loosed from the federal pen and headed toward Florida and you can read here what it says he did to people just you read it I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that I loosen it I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did so this sets up the central irony this conversation right at the beginning of the story it sets up the central irony of the story because of course it will be the grandmother that leads the children straight into the misfit not her son's daily so the grandmother pretends she wants to stay at home but everyone knows especially the children that of course she's gonna go with them and sure enough the next morning the grandmother is the very first person dressed up and ready to go in the car she has snuck her cat into her big black suitcase she has to sneak her cat on as a stowaway because her son forbids her to bring him um she's you know O'Connor spends a lot of time talking about the way the grandmother is dressed she's wearing her white cotton gloves a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of violets on the brim and a navy blue dress that's very neatly pressed and has small polka dots on it her colors and cuffs were white burgundy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet what's the point of all this detail well the grandmother is thinking to herself in case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway we'll know at once that she was a true lady there she this is also ironic because things will end up slightly that way so in the car ride she's busy being the consummate annoying passenger she's chastising the children she's speaking very wistfully of the Old South now Gone with the Wind she speaks of neatly groomed plantations respect for the soil and gentle manners they stop for barbecue where the grandmother and the owner of the barbecue joint continue to reminisce about the glory days of the old south a place that they all knew was safe at least for white people and the owner of the barbecue says a good man is hard to find everything is getting terrible I remember the day it could go off and leave your screen door unlatched not no more and they discussed the misfit once again then they get back on the road and the grandmother gets it into her head that they are close to a plantation that she visited as a child and the more she reminisces about this plantation the stronger her desire is to see it again and she begins to tell the children of a secret panel in the house where the family had hid their silver from Sherman and his troops during the war a feature that she wished were true as it clearly excited the children even though it was not she convinces Bailey to travel down a dirt road to this plantation but along the road a horrible thought occurs to her that is so upsetting she knocks over her suitcase and her cat leaps out and attacks Bailey who subsequently wrecks the car the grandmothers horrible thought was that the plantation she so vividly recalled was not in Georgia at all but in East Tennessee but the car is now inoperable you know her her daughter-in-law has a broken shoulder and the baby is hurt now in a few minutes a car comes down the and the grandmother begins frantically to wave it down there are three men inside the driver looks down upon them with a steady expressionless gaze he is shirtless wearing glasses and also ill-fitting and mismatched clothes the grandmother immediately identifies him as he approaches you're the misfit I recognized you at once yes'm the man says smiling but it would have been better for all you lady if you hadn't recognized me so now we know for certain that the grandmother has sealed their doom but the grandmother doesn't quite get it yet so she's attempting to appeal to his sense of propriety you wouldn't shoot a lady would you the grandmother asked I would hate to have to the misfit replies the grandmother keeps them flooring him you're a good man what does this mean for the grandmother this means he does not have common blood she assures him repeatedly that she knows he comes from nice people and asks him comically whether he wouldn't prefer to settle down and live a nice comfortable life the entire scene here is very darkly comic you can't help but be amused by the grandmother's behavior even as you are utterly áfourá fide by the reality of the situation and then this fit is well-mannered even as he is clearly the Angel of Death come to take them he is respectful about it he even chastises Bailey for swearing at his mother but in a gentle and patient way Bailey is taken to the woods along with his two sons to be shot by the misfits men upon their disappearance the grandmother asks the misfit if he ever prays and she assures him that Jesus would help him if he did but the misfit replies I ain't want no hope I'm doing all right by myself so the misfits men come out of the woods with Bailey's shirt for the to put on the grandmother is in such a state of confusion that she can't even remember what that shirt reminds her of she like the misfit confesses she cannot remember what she has done the misfit politely asks Bailey's wife if she and her daughter would like to join her husband in the woods leaving the grandmother and the misfit alone together at this point the grandmother is no longer able to speak at all except to say the name of Jesus over and over again the misfit explains to the ground although that he calls himself the misfit because I can't make what all I done wrong fit with all I gone through and punishment and he asks her does it seem right to you lady that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all to this theological query about guilt in retribution the grandmother continues to insist that he surely wouldn't shoot a lady that he comes from nice people and for good measures she adds that she'll give him all the money she has if he spares her life and then she hears two more gunshots coming from the woods and now I'm just gonna read you the final bit of the story because I couldn't possibly do it justice on my own this is what the misfit says to the grandmother Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead the misfit continued and he shouldn't have done it he thrown everything off balance if he did what he said and if nothing for you to do but throw everything away and follow him and if he didn't then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him no pleasure but meanness he said and his voice had become almost a snarl maybe he didn't raise the dead lady mumbled not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down into the ditch with her legs twisted under her I wasn't there so I can't say he didn't the misfit said I wished I hadn't been there he said hitting the ground with his fist it ain't right I wasn't there because if I'd have been there I would have known listen lady he said in a high voice if I'd have been there that I would have known and I wouldn't be like I am now his voice seemed about to crack and the grandmothers head cleared for an instant she saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured to him why you're one of my babies you're one of my own children she reached out and touched him on the shoulder the misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them hiraman Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch looking down at the grandmother who have sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky without his glasses The Misfits eyes were red rimmed and pale and defenseless looking take her off and throw her where he thrown the others he said picking up the cat that was rubbing itself against his leg she was a talker weren't she puppy Lee said laying down the ditch with a yodel she would have been a good woman the misfit said if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life some fun Bobby Lee said shut up Bobby Lee the misfit said it's no real pleasure in life so there's a sense in which the story ends exactly as we've known all along it would the grandmother is murdered by the misfit on account of her own lack of good sense but what we didn't expect and what the misfit clearly didn't expect was for the misfit to make himself vulnerable to her to express his own desire for faith and his despair and the fact of its absence and what the lack of faith has done to him and in that moment of vulnerability we didn't expect for the grandmother to see him as one of her own children to recognize his wounded humanity and to respond with the tenderness of a mother's love and that revelation the moment of seeing him in his essence and responding appropriately makes him lash out and violence he feels attacked by this expression of love towards him and he kills her in this moment the moment of her death the grandmother is utterly transformed by God's grace she is died with a smile on her face and the posture of an innocent child the misfit has in this moment become an unwitting instrument of God's grace redeeming the grandmother in spite of herself and just as the grandmother has seen the misfit for the first time for who he really is likewise he takes off his glasses and his eyes too have changed they are no longer steady and expressionless and intent on murder but red robed and pale and defenseless he too seemingly has changed and as he cleanses the grandmother's blood from his glasses we are meant to wonder the extent to which he too sees things differently now and perhaps more clearly we are led to wonder whether her blood is the first step of his own and so that it is no surprise that he expresses disgust that one of his men would take pleasure in their murderous afternoon it's no pleasure in life he chastises them here we see a vision of grace that displays the power of God to work changes in us in spite of our sins and our dispositions to sin the God's love has the power to break us out of our complacency in the grandmother's case her self-image as a southern lady which narrows her vision of other people as they fit within a class structure of an Old South she longs to bring back and in the misfits case hitch his image of himself as cut off from God's love and providential care as someone whose main goal is to escape the structure of judgment and punishment in order to live freely to pursue the pleasures of meanness so in the final moments of the story the action of grace does give us a sense of the dramatic the tragic in the infinite it does fill us with grief but above grief wonder at the goodness of God and of His infinite love and mercy for human beings I think in all of Flannery O'Connor's stories there are these moments of profound change moments of grace at work outside the sacraments usually and grace often works and her stories to clarify the vision of her characters it works to pierce this veil of self-deception it works on people who are humorously ignorant of their own defects of soul making those defects manifests to themselves in very extraordinary ways Flannery O'Connor once wrote I am mighty tired of reading reviews that a good man is hard to find brutal and sarcastic these stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism the truth is my stories have been watered and fed by dogma I am a Catholic and at some point in my life I realized that not only was I a Catholic but this was all I was that I was a Catholic not like somebody else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like somebody else would be an atheist if my stories are complete it is because I see everything as beginning with original sin taken in the redemption and reckoning on a final judgment thanks for your attention yeah that's a great question so um Flannery early on even back in her Iowa days there were attempts to censor her so I forget which luminary kept trying to change it and she said she she said no she said no my characters wouldn't call them Negroes right and I have to be I have to be truthful in my fiction and I think she she thought it was very important to relay these characters and and the fullness of in their fullness and and they were racist I mean they were racist this was the way they talked and this was the way sometimes to be honest that that Flannery O'Connor would speak as well I mean Flannery O'Connor we know was a supporter of civil rights but you know she she also was a was someone who grew up and in the segregated south his uncle's were Confederate officers and she didn't like northerners Talon southerners what to do yeah and I think for me as a as a professor it comes up in the classroom and I think you know I I I always try to talk to my students about dealing with figures from the past and not being so hasty and judgment it's easy to judge people in the past it's a little too easy I think it's like shooting fish in a barrel and so I think I just think it's something that we that we have to to navigate it was of the people on the time that she was writing about I do not think that she was I I do not think there's no evidence that she herself was a committed racist so I think maybe there are some enough right actually by some people in this room to turn it into film but I think I think it's always a challenge to translate fiction into film because writing it's just a different it's just a different medium and there's something always gets lost in translation I think in this case the particular challenge would be to remain faithful to the to the rich symbolism of her stories her stories are full of symbols that have a lot of meaning a lot of those symbols are animals I'm like I'm trying to think of how you would film Greenlee I have no idea there's someone gored by a bull at the end the bull is Christ so I you know I think I think these things I think these things are difficult but I think not impossible and and I could imagine it being done very very well but you know I'm I'm also I'm a bit cautious just because I've seen I myself have been disappointed and it attempts to do this not with her in particular but with other literature that I'm you know devoted to well I think that she meant it theologically so you know she meant that when God became a man right in order to enact the cross and our atonement and allow for our reconciliation with God and in light of our sins it didn't I mean if that the fact that what is absolutely transcendent can become incarnate can take on matter I think for her you know it's it's so fundamental to Christianity and so fundamental to her sacramental vision of things right that the material can be infused with the spiritual that the imminent can also be transcendent these things sound paradoxical but I think one of the reasons why she was so impressed with the theology of Thomas Aquinas is that he's able to make some rational sense of this right he has an account of God's action in which the imminent and the transcendent are cooperative the spiritual and the material come together but the Incarnation right it's when eternity enters into time right enters into flesh and so for her that changes everything that changes that changes the texture of reality and and it remains the case especially for her as a Catholic especially for her as a Catholic and a very Protestant environment she saw that we still needed God's grace right that we still there was still a lot of purifying work to be done and our souls in order for us to attain our beatitude and for her the sacraments are key to that right and so one of the things that you can see in her fiction I think is trying to present a very sacramental account of reality

Channel: Lumen Christi Institute

Views: 5,594

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find, Jenn Frey, Jennifer Frey, Lumen Christi, Catholic Literature, Catholic Writers, Literature and Philosophy

Id: zY-QjVHIVpo

Length: 54min 22sec (3262 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020