The American Century: Literature since 1945 591essays, Mystery and Manners (1969), “have been those of being Southern and
being Catholic”; and it was the mixture of these two, in the crucible of her own
eccentric personality, that helped produce the strangely intoxicating atmosphere of
her work – at once brutal and farcical, like somebody else’s bad dream. A devout if
highly unorthodox Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant region,
O’Connor interpreted experience according to her own reading of Christian
eschatology – a reading that was, on her admission, tough, uncompromising, and
without any of “the hazy compassion” that “excuses all human weakness” on the
ground that “human weakness is human.” “For me,” she declared, “the meaning of
life is centered in our Redemption by Christ”; and to this she might well have added
that she neither saw humankind as worthy of being redeemed, nor Redemption
itself as anything other than a painful act of divorce from this world. With rare
exceptions, the world she explores in her work – in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and
The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her stories gathered in A Good Man is Hard to
Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) – is one of corrosion
and decay. It is a world invested with evil, apparently forsaken by God and
saved only in the last analysis by His incalculable grace. It is a netherworld, in fact,
a place of nightmare, comic because absurd, and (as in early Christian allegory) the
one path by which its inhabitants can travel beyond it is that of renunciation,
penance, and extreme suffering.
O’Connor herself was inclined to talk in a distinctly equivocal way about the
relationship between the two circumstances that shaped her life, her region and
her faith. Sometimes, she suggested, it was her “contact with mystery” that saved her
from being stereotypically Southern and “just doing badly what has already been
done to completion.” In the Bible Belt, after all, Roman Catholics were and still are
in a distinct, occasionally distrusted minority. Other times, she argued that there was
a perfect confluence, or at least congruity. “To know oneself,” she said once, “is to
know one’s region.” And her region, in particular, enabled her to know herself as a
Catholic writer precisely because it was “a good place for Catholic literature.” It had,
she pointed out, “a sacramental view of life”: belief there could “still be made
believable and in relation to a large part of society”; and, “the Bible being generally
known and revered in the section,” it provided the writer with “that broad mythical
base to refer to that he needs to extend his meaning in depth.” Whatever the truth
here – and it probably has something to do with a creative tension between her
education in Southern manners and her absorption in Catholic mystery – there is
no doubt that, out of this potent mixture, O’Connor produced a fictional world the
significance of which lies precisely in its apparent aberrations, its Gothic deviance
from the norm. Her South is in many ways the same one other writers have been
interested in – a wasteland, savage and empty, full of decaying towns and villages,
crisscrossed by endless tobacco roads. And, like Twain, she borrows from the
Southwestern humorists, showing a bizarre comic inventiveness in describing it.
Her characters – the protagonist Haze Motes in Wise Blood, for example – are not so
much human beings as grotesque parodies of humanity. As O’Connor herself has
suggested, they are “literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal”: peopleGGray_c05.indd 591ray_c 05 .indd 591 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM