By Sister Joan Leonard, O.P.

Several years ago as I sat watching the movie version of Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, “Wise Blood,” I was reminded of my initial startled reaction to her work, which was not unusual. Many of her readers find her works unsettling and her characters bizarre and violent. During the movie there was laughter as Hazel Motes, the main character, bought a junk car and awkwardly visited an obese prostitute, and as Enoch Emery, his bumbling counterpart, stole a mummy and donned a gorilla suit.

But there was no laughter when Haze blinded himself near the movie’s end. As the lights went on, I saw people shaking their heads in bewilderment. One woman gasped, “After a long week, that certainly wasn’t what I needed.”

It was a reaction that would not have surprised Flannery O’Connor. A devout, believing Catholic, O’Connor explained her art in an essay that has become a classic:

“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 seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take even more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience…To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Flannery O’Connor graced these pages with book reviews during her brief career from 1950 to 1964. She lived with her mother on the family farm near Milledgeville where she spent her life writing, reading widely (as reflected in the vast range of books she reviewed for this paper), carrying on a lively correspondence, and raising peacocks. After a courageous struggle with lupus, the disease that had previously killed her father, she died in Piedmont Hospital, Aug. 3, 1964. Twenty years after her untimely death, she is still jarring her readers into trying to understand the need for redemption in a secularized world.

Her large and startling figures, notably Hazel Motes and young Tarwater in her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” in fact, struggle against an acceptance of divine reality in their lives. In her works she skillfully balances the view of a broken world where some are regarded as freaks, against a theological vision which holds out the promise of grace. Against this background she adds the struggle of her most grotesque figures, her prophets, who wrestle with their vocation. Here she focuses on the paradoxes of inspiration and frenzy, holy vision and worldly folly. The tension has been accurately described by one O’Connor critic:

“One crucial difference, however, between O’Connor’s prophets and freaks and those of the Scripture is that where the precursors were seen by their contemporaries as inspired men, the modern heirs are seen by their contemporaries as madmen.”

From one point of view, they are men caught between alienation from the contemporary world and the values of the spiritual realm. In the process of resolving the inner conflict that this engenders, they acknowledge what for them is the insanity of the “normal” world, a world that is repellent because of its alienation from God. For them to adjust to this world would be the ultimate madness. At the same time, however, in their divided, fragile state, they recoil from the reality of the redemption and act on the frustration arising from their ambivalent attitude to Christ. Despite some of their dark obsessions and mental quirks, they are heralds of the presence of the transcendent in human lives and embrace what seems to be the most understandable course of action for them, that of violence.

Because readers and critics find it hard to understand O’Connor’s love for her prophets, she found it necessary to speak more directly for them, as various letters and interviews shows. Still, she must have been reassured by such a response as the one Jacques Maritain wrote her translator, M.E. Coindreau, in 1960:

“It seems to me that the critics have a poor understanding of her. Yes, doubtless, she hated these wild prophets, but they fascinated her. Am I wrong in thinking that to her they were like saints of the devil stripped of everything by him, as real saints are stripped by God and really poor miserable men in whom she saw a certain greatness? It was the devil she hated. As for them, she pitied them and I think that deep down she loved them.”

O’Connor emphasized her positive affirmation of the prophets in her novels by placing their violent actions at the heart of the dramatic action of the story. Rooted in their tradition, the prophets struggle within it with the message of redemption. That is to say, they struggle to understand the extent to which it can be said that God forgives the world’s sin because Christ made satisfaction for humankind by an act that is, at once, an example of extreme violence and unselfish love, his death on the Cross. As Motes and Tarwater seek to unravel the message of redemption for their worlds, they speak startling messages and, in spite of their obsessions and fanaticism, are agents of conversion – primarily their own.

Although violence and force are essential ingredients in O’Connor’s work, the vision that informs her work is equally as significant for our discussion. She had an astonishing grasp of the unique perspective of the literary artist. As a religious artist she once said, “The fiction writer should be characterized by his vision. His kind of vision is prophetic vision.”

Prophets are not merely called to foretell the future or to moralize and harangue their hearers, but to evaluate the contemporary human situation from the divine perspective. In his authoritative study on the prophets, Abraham Heschel confirms this point when he writes: “The prophet’s eye is directed to the contemporary scene; the society and its conduct are the main theme of his speeches. Yet his ear is inclined to God…his true greatness is his ability to hold God and man in a single thought.”

The violence in O’Connor’s vision has its source in the turning of God to the earth. This divine movement burns through the glaring suns and fiery skies that appear in many of her stories and animates the persistent rebellion and powerful actions of her characters. As her stories bear out, suffering, too, is the art of the prophetic consciousness that “holds God and man in a single thought.” Whether it is a case of Haze’s burned out eyes or Tarwater’s “scorched eyes” that looked as if “touched with a coal like the lips of the prophet, they would never be used for ordinary sights again.” Both are purgatorial and lead to a renewed vision at the end. The agony and the violence of their transformation open up a new horizon for them.

Flannery O’Connor herself declared that “for the Catholic novelist the prophetic vision is not simply a matter of his personal imaginative gift; it is also a matter of the Church’s gift.” Her own work remains a lasting testimony to her prophetic vision and the directions it points for a renewed vision of Christian community – all of which she so generously shared.

(Sister Joan Leonard received her Ph.D. in Literature and Theology this past May from Emory University. The title of her dissertation was “Violence and Community in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Muriel Spark.” Presently she is a staff associate for the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta and an adjunct faculty member at Emory.)