Literature in the News: 100th Anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s Birth

March 25^th was not only the Feast Day of the Annunciation, but also the anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor.  And this year, 2025, marked the 100^th anniversary.  In another post I’m going to provide my analysis of a short story of hers I recently read, “The Displaced Person,” a story you may not have ever heard except if you’re a big devotee of her work.  Before I get to that, I’m going to do a commemoration of her life.  She remains a model for me as a Catholic writer.

 

The Smithsonian Magazine has a beautiful tribute to her life and work, with lots of pictures and a couple of embedded videos.  In her short life of thirty-nine years she produced 31 short stories, two published novels, another novel that was unfinished but posthumously published, letters, journals, essays, and other writings.  Apparently she sat down to write every day which is what a good writer needs to do.  She has been quite influential.  From the Smithsonian article titled, “Flannery O’Connor Wanted to Shake Her Readers Awake. Her Family Wanted Her to Write theNext ‘Gone With the Wind’” by Ellen Wexler:

 

March 25, 2025, would have been O’Connor’s 100th birthday. As the many events and exhibitions surrounding her centenary attest, interest in the author’s work has only deepened since her death in 1964 at age 39. In recent years, scholars have published her prayer journal and her unfinished novel; her life has been the subject of the award-winning documentary Flannery and a star-studded 2023 biographical drama. Her influence on American culture is unparalleled: O’Connor’s stories have inspired writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Alice McDermott and George Saunders; musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, Sufjan Stevens and Josh Ritter; and filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

To be frank, I only know her work from her short stories, of which I have read about ten.  I’ve posted detailed analysis of two of her short stories here on Ashes From Burnt Roses, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in three posts, (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and “Greenleaf” in two posts (Part 1, Part 2).  Feel free to peruse the posts.

There are some interesting insights in Ellen Wexler’s piece.  She really condenses O’Connor’s vision of fiction into this quote she takes from an O’Connor essay.

 

“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable,” she wrote in an essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” “The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. … I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.”

That essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” is an important read for writers, and more on that later.  Wexler continues on O’Connor’s philosophy of great fiction.

She relished in the unusual and the mysterious, arguing that the ability to understand good fiction belonged only to the “kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

Mystery deepened by reality, reality deepened by mystery.  That’s almost like looking into a mirror and the mirror looking into another mirror.  As a writer, O’Connor believed fiction should be brutally honest and avoid sentimentality. 

“Flannery saw in Catholicism and in her Southern culture a strong inclination to avoid honesty,” says Bruce Gentry, editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review at Georgia College & State University. “Her own unflinching honesty was a reaction against the extremities of Catholic piety and Southern niceness. She might not have gone so far with her honesty if she weren’t inclined to fix the groups she belonged to.”

Wexler concludes O’Connor’s vision of fiction with an understanding that the work needs to reach a moment of redemption.

O’Connor believed that redemption often came “at considerable cost,” an idea that’s “implicit in the Christian view of the world.” As such, her characters can’t reach their moments of reckoning on their own. Instead, they need a push. They need to be shaken awake. O’Connor’s job was to do the shaking.

O’Connor would wind up falling ill with Lupus, the genetic disease that killed her father, and thus ending her promising life in the literary centers of the country.  She was forced to move down to her mother’s house in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she would write her best work, all the while suffering from the debilitating disease.  Lupus would ultimately kill her too at the age of 39.  Wexler’s well-written article takes you through her life, her approach to writing, and through some of her work.

This is a great little TED-ED short video summing up why you should read Flannery O'Connor.

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In her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor highlights the various elements of what she conceptualizes as the art of fiction.   I’m not going to go through everything she says, but one of the most important elements is the ability of the writer to create an experience through the story and one does that by use of the five senses.  She gives an example from Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madam Bovary.

All the sentences in Madame Bo"Vary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

Why is this sentence so arresting?  O’Connor finds it amazing that the piano sound buzzes in the room while a clerk at the other end of town in his “list slippers” hears it.  A detail of sound, one of the five senses, in one room that we cannot visually see but can see pressing of the keys, incorporating both the auditory and visual senses, travels across town to a clerk that we can also visually see, across some distance of space hearing the auditory sound.  In addition, we don’t actually hear the piano, since it’s only an allusion with words on a page, but we imagine the sound as readers in our minds.  She sums this up with, “It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.”

It is this accumulation of detail—details selected for purpose—that creates the story.  She will go on to tell what kind of vision of details the story writer needs to have.  I don’t have the time and space for this but let me jump to her conclusion when it comes to details.

People have a habit of saying, "What is the theme of your story?" and they expect you to give them a statement: "The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class"—or some such absurdity. And when they've got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story. 

Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the wholes tory is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction. 

That is speaking of story by what it is not, but O’Connor feels that is the best way for a teacher to pass on the craft of storytelling.  She does finally explain that the art of any medium has been explained by St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Thomas called art "reason in making." This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single- minded respect for the truth.

It seems to suggest that the artist is trying to apply reason to human characters and situation to find what is truth in them and their fate.  It is not thematic but experiential.  I will show how she does this in my upcoming analysis of her short story, “The Displaced Person.”

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And so, after one hundred years of her birth, let us not saddened by her early death and the huge loss to literature, but let us be thankful for what she gave us in her short life, a wealth of fiction of the highest art.