The Fight to be “Flannery”: A Good (Catholic) Woman (Writer) is Hard to Find

“Well, if [the Eucharist] is just a symbol, to hell with it.”
--Flannery O’Connor, when discussing Catholicism with writer Mary McCarthy

The above quote, blurted out at a dinner party with fellow writers McCarthy (a fallen away Catholic), Robert Lowell, and their two spouses, seems to perfectly sum up both O’Connor’s strong attachment to her faith and her irreverent (and often hilarious) way of expressing that devotion. Still, although the above statement is one of Flannery’s most popular quotes, it’s interesting to discover that really no critic, whether Christian or agnostic, has actually examined O’Connor’s fiction in regard to this “symbol.” In fact, when another noted Southern woman writer, Eudora Welty, took time off for her own fiction to teach college literature, and “reached a particularly dense and symbolic section of one of O’Connor’s stories, she would sigh and ask, ‘Is there a Catholic in the class?’” Well, there is a Catholic in your class, and, starting with "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and proceeding with some of O’Connor’s other famous short stories, this critic intends to do just that.

But before we proceed with her stories and an examination of the Eucharistic symbol itself, let’s take a look at a sample of the general criticism that O’Connor was up against. On the one side were non-believing critics like Philip Wylie, who claimed that “a Catholic, if he is devout … sold on the authority of his Church, is also brain-washed, whether he realizes it or not.” Of course, Wylie deserves the double whammy, for he does not even change the male pronoun when referring to O’Connor, but unfortunately, Flannery also had many (church-going) women critics--most notably those who wanted something that would uplift a soul after a hard day's work--something O’Connor’s fiction was decidedly not suited for. “I am to give a talk,” O’Connor wrote in a letter to University of Notre Dame professor John Lynch, “on the dizzying subject--‘What Is a Wholesome Novel?’ I intend to tell them that the reason they find nothing but obscenity in modern fiction is because that is all they know how to recognize.” Simply put, O’Connor couldn’t, in good faith, write classic sappy religious fiction, because she believed sentimentality was really the flipside of pornography. The latter, she wrote, “leaves off the connection of sex with its hard purposes, disconnects it from its meaning in life and makes it simply an experience for its own sake,” while the former “is a skipping of our slow participation … in Christ’s death to … a mock state of innocence.” Thus O’Connor could never please critics at either end of the spectrum, for neither side could grasp the Catholic concept of a symbol that was real.

But then, what exactly was this symbol, and why did it so captivate O’Connor? To get a better understanding of what the Eucharist (about which O’Connor, commenting on her famous quote, said, “It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable,”) is about, we should turn to the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher that O’Connor (who called herself a “hillbilly Thomist”) read every night for twenty minutes before she went to bed. To Aquinas, the Eucharist was “the perfect art,” for it was the only art that was exactly what it represented. Thus, although it was still a symbol, since the bread and wine did not (usually!) turn into Christ’s flesh and blood during the consecration, it somehow really becomes Jesus, and a devout Catholic believes that he (or she) receives Christ’s essence (His Grace, His Knowledge, His Love) when receiving the Eucharist. So to Thomas (and Flannery), while other art, whether words, picture, or performance, may, if it’s inspired, capture a part of a person, it pales in comparison to the Eucharist, which becomes Christ completely, “body, blood, soul and divinity,” at least according to the Catechism. Commenting on the opening quote, O‘Connor later concluded, “That was all the defense I was capable of then, and I realize now that was all I will ever say about it, outside of a story.” But where exactly are the Eucharistic images in her fiction, and how did these images succeed in capturing Christ--or Flannery?

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is probably the most popular of O’Connor’s short stories, and thus brings out all the critics’ usual suspects. Time Magazine’s 1955 summary, “Another talented Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike … Her instruments are a brutal irony, a slam-bang humor and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence,” caught most of the surface goodies but missed all the spiritual depth, while Andre Bleikasten’s atheistic expounding, “In a world both frozen and frantic, God is the intruder … the divine primarily experienced as an intolerable invasion of privacy … O’Connor’s religious experience comes pretty close to Freud’s definition: a variant of obsessional neurosis,” saw a surface spirituality but mistook it for his own mental illness. Still, the most bizarre interpretation (not to mention the one that most got O’Connor’s goat) came from a college English professor who wrote, “I am writing as spokesman for three members of our department and some ninety university students in three classes who for a week now have been discussing your story,  ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find.’ We have debated at length several interpretations … in general we believe that Bailey … identifies with The Misfit … imagines his appearance and … plays two roles in the imaginary second half of the story. But we cannot determine at what point reality fades into illusion or dream. We are convinced we are missing something important that you intended … we will all be grateful if you will give us further comments about your intention.” Well, if you know even a little bit about O’Connor, you can only “imagine” her reply: “The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is about as far from my intentions as it could get. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick, and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology … where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.”

Since it’s quite evident from the above passage that Ms. O’Connor had no patience for psychoanalytic criticism, and thought deconstructive critics more destructive than her fictional criminals, we will turn our attention back to the more religious criticism to see if we can get back on track. Two excellent contrasting views of the spiritual message in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" are supplied by literary critic Steven C. Band,y and English professor at Temple University, Miles Orwell. Bandy (literally) plays the devil’s advocate: “Much criticism of the story takes a sentimental view of the grandmother largely because she is a grandmother … her role as a grace-bringer is largely received, largely because the author said so.” Analyzing the two main characters, Bandy continues, “There is a fierce internal coherence to the character of the grandmother, and it has nothing to do with forgiveness.” As for The Misfit, “His inability to believe has destroyed his humanity. His nihilism is complete … to insist on this moment of mutual revelation that the grandmother is transformed into the agent of God’s grace is to do serious violence to the story.”

On the other hand, Orvell takes Flannery’s analysis of the endgame in "AGMIHTF" to heart. “I don’t want to equate The Misfit with the devil,” said O’Connor. “I prefer to think that … the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled dream in his heart … and will … turn him into the prophet he was meant to become.” Acknowledging that she is far from perfect, Orwell then states, “The grandmother is the only one in the family who expresses care; her personality moves outward toward others … and it is precisely this outward expression of care that will trigger The Misfit’s cold rage.” Thus to Orwell, “The old lady’s gesture, like Christ’s, throws everything off balance, and … The Misfit’s own act, that of shooting the woman, is conceived by him … as a reestablishment of the particular order of his own world.”

I believe Orwell’s view of the story has much merit to it, even hinting at the Eucharistic images in this tale. Miles describes the plantation house the grandmother had the family search for thusly; “What is barely concealed beneath the literal description of the mansion is its symbolic equivalence to a heavenly mansion, and the addition of the secret panel suggests its mysterious containment of the treasures of the past.” To the devout Catholic, this “heavenly mansion” is the Catholic Church, and this “secret panel” can be seen as the tabernacle, the sacred box where the consecrated hosts are stored 24/7. Not only does this perpetual Presence of Christ make a Catholic Church into a profoundly different space than any other place on earth for the believer, it sheds new light on The Misfit’s cryptic comment, “She would have been a good woman if it had been someone to shoot her every minute of her life.” For this Presence, combined with the fact that the Mass is being offered (and the Host is being consecrated) somewhere in the world every minute of the day, stands as a reminder of Christ’s continual offering of Himself--and a martyrdom the grandmother now shares in.

"Good Country People" is one of O’Connor’s more under-rated stories, but to me its Eucharistic allusions are every bit as profound. No doubt partly biographical, "GCP" stars the cynical Helga (formerly named Grace) who has a Ph.D., a wooden leg, and lives on a farm with her mother. Bored, she hopes to seduce a wide-eyed young Bible salesman named Pointer, only to have the tables turned as Pointer (which is also an assumed name) turns out to be a con man and steals her wooden leg, yelling as he goes to the helpless female atheist, “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing since I was born!” While most critics of "GCP" rightly focus on this comic turn of events (“She has learned a little more, now, about what it means to believe in ‘nothing’”) I think the Eucharistic symbolism (in this case Helga’s artificial leg) is crucial. At first, the Bible, which to most Protestants is the leading sacramental, seems the symbolic focus, but when Pointer’s Good Book is filled with whiskey, pornography, and rubbers, our attention quickly turns elsewhere. Pointer’s statement about Hulga’s artificial leg, “It’s what makes you different,” shows he knows it is the most sacramental part of her--which makes his theft of it (to add to his collection which includes another conquest’s glass eye) all the more devastating--and humorous.

It also brings to mind two opposing facets of Eucharistic history. The first, the miracle of Lanciano, involved a priest who doubted the Real Presence--only to watch the bread and wine turn into actual flesh and blood as he consecrated them that fateful day. The flesh (still preserved after 1200 years) was tested during O’Connor’s lifetime, and was found to be that of a human heart--making the false leg and eye theft all the more interesting. Secondly, it brings to mind that, even though a lot of Catholics don’t believe in the “Real Presence,” a lot of demons do (James 2:19). This is why, despite the abundance of Bibles and black cats, the consecrated Host is the preferred object of art for the black mass as well.

While many critics are quick to point out that both "The Artificial Nigger" and "The Displaced Person" deal with the problem of prejudice, they don’t really grasp the sacramental solution. After tackling the question of whether or not O’Connor was racist (based on the fact Flannery made some questionable remarks about blacks in her private letters) Baylor University English professor, Ralph C. Wood, absolves the author, claiming that "TAN" “works a miracle … by inverting a racist symbol into an emblem of antiracial redemption.” While this grace (“They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an act of mercy”) may have been temporary, the fact that this lawn ornament was so weather-beaten (“It was not possible to tell if [it] were meant to be young or old,”) gave the symbol a universal, or “catholic,” connotation.

Meanwhile, the racist as well as Catholic overtones in "The Displaced Person" are also quite evident. Unusual in the fact that "TDP" is one of the few O’Connor stories where several main characters are Catholic, Flannery once again starts with the racial dilemma and concluded with a Eucharistic solution. Although Mrs. McIntyre’s heavy prejudice against blacks is present throughout the story, it is Mr. Guizac’s mistaken belief that a black man can marry a white woman in the deep South that turns him from a “miracle” into a “monster.” Sister Kathleen Feeley is quite perceptive when she states “TDP” suggests man’s alienation from his true country--the supernatural realm … for to Mrs. McIntyre, ‘Christ is just another D.P.’” Noting “Only art can make such ‘terrible’ fiction beautiful,” she comments on the peacock/Transfiguration analogy in the story, but leaves the Eucharistic symbol alone. Of course, there is the actual Eucharistic reference; the priest “was slipping something into the crushed man’s mouth,” the final host a man receives in the Sacrament of the Sick. However, the story’s Eucharistic analogy, that of a martyr “crushed” and “broken,” goes back to the early second century and a saint named Ignatius of Antioch. “I am God's wheat,” wrote the soon to be martyred Ignatius, “and I shall be ground by the teeth of beasts, that I may become the pure bread of Christ.” Receiving Christ in the Eucharist, as powerful as it was, was one thing, but to be allowed to become Eucharist with Christ through martyrdom was quite another.

"Parker’s Back" is one of O’Connor’s final short stories, and thus the Eucharistic symbolism is even more evident. For in this story, we have an artistic form of Christ that, while not actually inside Parker’s body, is embedded into it, which is surely the next closest thing. Indeed, Richard Giannone, English professor at Fordham University, comes so close to the Eucharistic interpretation you can almost taste it; “Since Christianity is a material religion in proclaiming that the Word is made flesh, O’Connor finds no impediment to showing how Parker’s transcendence inheres in his body. Parker’s yearning to feel the activity of God in his flesh confesses the basic Christian hope.” Sadly, Parker has married a “Christian” (O’Connor made it clear she sided with Parker, commenting “The tattoos were not the heresy. Sarah Ruth was the heretic--the notion that you can worship in pure spirit”) who not only renounced Catholic art, but all Christian art, even the basic Protestant churches with the tall white steeples. Unbeknownst to her, Sara Ruth reenacted the Catholic Station of the Cross called “The Scourging at the Pillar” when she beats the image of Our Savior engraved in her husband’s back into a bloody pulp. Ironically, the Eucharistic Host is both the most powerful and the plainest form of Christian art--so plain that even Sara, with even a molecule of open-mindedness, should have been able to accept it.

And so, while a great majority of critics agree that O’Connor successfully defended the faith by depicting what it is not, we are still left with the question as to whether or not her Eucharistic imagery inspired readers to the Real thing. Or, more specifically, why didn’t Flannery just write about the Eucharist instead of alluding to it? One of her final letters, to Sister Mariella Gable, summarized her fictional quest by stating, “I’ve reached the point [in writing] where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing,” allows one to speculate that she would have attempted Catholic humor if she had only lived longer, but it also recalls the words of her hero Aquinas, who, after seeing a vision of God while praying before the Eucharist, stopped writing altogether, saying to those who wanted him to at least finish his Summa Theologica, “Compared to what I have seen, my writing is so much straw.” And yet, as an eternal fan of Flannery‘s, I’d like to think there’s another possibility …

While all the saints loved to laugh, they all seemed to have trouble putting the Lord’s own laughter into words. Thomas Merton, the prolific Catholic monk-mystic spoke of this dilemma when he said that O’Connor’s writing was “So funny you dared not laugh too loud for fear of demons.” Still, I think the question was best answered by Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton, in the conclusion of his classic apologetic Orthodoxy:  “Joy, the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. Christ’s pathos was natural, and … He never concealed His tears, never hid His anger. Yet He hid something …There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked our earth; and I have sometimes fancied it was His mirth.” So either Chesterton was right, or the Gospel writers, like Flannery, were too in awe of their Savior to capture His humor. When I go to heaven, I hope I have the honor to ask O’Connor if ... but that’s a far too sentimental sentiment to end an O’Connor commentary with! So how’s this; if there is a heaven, the first thing I’ll do is get the lowdown from the Lord and Flannery on whether Real Faith can also be funny. And if there’s not a heaven--then to hell with it!