592 The American Century: Literature since 1945seen with an untamed and alien eye. Where she parts company with most other
writers, however, is in what she intends by all this, and in the subtle changes wrought
in her work by this difference of intention.
O’Connor herself explained that difference by saying that “the novelist with
Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him.”
His or her audience, though, will find those distortions “natural.” So such a novelist
has to make his or her vision “apparent by shock.” “To the hard of hearing you
shout,” she said, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Her figures are grotesque, in other words, because she wants us to see them as spir-
itual primitives. In order to describe to us a society that is unnatural by her own
Christian standards – and to make us feel its unnaturalness – she creates a fictional
world that is unnatural by almost any accepted standards at all. O’Connor’s charac-
ters are distorted in some way, social or physical, mental or material, because their
distortions are intended to mirror their guilt, original sin, and the spiritual poverty
of the times and places they inhabit. That is only half the story, though. From close-
up, these characters may seem stubbornly foolish and perverse, ignorant witnesses
to the power of evil. But ultimately against their will, they reveal the workings of
eternal redemption as well. They are the children of God, O’Connor believes, as well
as the children of Adam; and through their lives shines dimly the possibility that
they may, after all, be saved. So an extra twist of irony is added to everything that
happens in O’Connor’s stories. Absurd as her people are, their absurdity serves, as
much as it does anything else, as a measure of God’s mercy in caring for them.
Corrupt and violent as their behavior may be, its very corruption can act as a proof,
a way of suggesting the scope of His extraordinary forgiveness and love. As, for
instance, O’Connor shows us Haze Motes preaching “the Church Without Christ”
and declaring “Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar,” she practices a comedy of
savage paradox. Motes, after all, relies on belief for the power of his blasphemy:
Christ-haunted, he perversely admits the sway over him of the very faith he struggles
to deny. Every incident in Wise Blood, and all O’Connor’s fiction, acquires a double
edge because it reminds us, at one and the same time, that man is worthless and yet
the favored of God – negligible but the instrument of Divine Will. The irremediable
wickedness of humanity and the undeniable grace of God are opposites that meet
head on in her writing, and it is in the humor, finally, that they find their issue, or
appropriate point of release. What we are offered on the surface is a broken world,
the truth of a fractured picture. But the finely edged character of O’Connor’s
approach offers an “act of seeing” (to use her own phrase) that goes beyond that
surface: turning what would otherwise be a comedy of the absurd into the laughter
of the saints.
A writer whose fictional world was as strange yet instantly recognizable as
O’Connor’s was Carson McCullers (1917–1967). “I have my own reality,” McCullers
said once toward the end of her life, “of language and voices and foliage.” And it was
this reality, her ghostly private world that she tried to reproduce in her stories
(collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971)), her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café
(1951), and her four novels: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in aGGray_c05.indd 592ray_c 05 .indd 592 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM