Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination (review)

In Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination, Sarah Gordon studies O’Connor’s anagogical vision, her evolving aesthetic as an incarnational artist, the question of her “fierce” narrators, and her position on the Manichaean heresy. Gordon views the “obedient imagination” as “something of an oxymoron—the paradox by which the devout Catholic writer creates and explores fictive worlds and yet works within the limits of faithful obedience to the hierarchical Church. I have meant,” she explains, “to suggest a kind of tension that necessarily comes from that paradox; the imagination, by definition free-ranging and risk-taking, is reined in by the teaching and guidance of the Church” (245). In her own words, O’Connor explains the center of her literary quest: “Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. . . . I write with the solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. I find that this in no way limits my freedom as a writer and that it increases rather than decreases my vision” (quoted in Gordon, 246).

Grappling with the death of her father and subsequently with terminal illness, O’Connor found personal and literary direction in the Catholic doctrine of how the soul must prepare itself for grace. Gordon cautions: “[W]hatever credit we give O’Connor for a stylistic audacity not characteristic of female writers in general, and especially not those with Christian purpose, we must remember that she writes out of a closed system, a closed worldview, whether we like that fact or not” (45). Scholars troubled by grotesque women can observe that O’Connor attacked a legion of arrogant men and only a precious few “smug, narrow-minded, ignorant” female protagonists (60). And rather than challenging the subordination of women, Gordon writes, O’Conner “found in the idea of woman’s dependent status a compelling metaphor for the soul’s necessary dependence on God” (193).

Despite the myriad canonical influences on O’Connor’s imagination, no writer in literary history comes to fiction with a more definite voice. The challenge O’Connor faced was how to write with a sense of “spiritual purpose,” responsibly using her talents to “shake the shoulders of a spiritually drowsy (if not sleeping) humanity,” and at the same time, to create “respected fiction that is not merely a covering for dogma” (94). Although O’Connor evokes shocking, consistently ugly perceptions of human life, she recognizes in the mystery of an incarnate God, “in whatever unlikely form that grace may come” (184), the divine shattering and wounding that can penetrate spiritual malaise and the tough and often violent love that can call to individuals stubborn in their lack of humility and alien to community and communication.

Gordon qualifies as a solid curator of O’Connor’s life and literature, having conducted research on O’Connor for thirty years, taught at O’Connor’s alma mater in Milledgeville, chaired international symposia, and edited the Flannery O’Connor Bulletin since 1983. First-time readers as well as life-long scholars of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction will discover bold and urgent commentary in Gordon’s The Obedient Imagination, and this archival study—this water table of biography and literary criticism—should be a welcome addition both to personal and to university libraries.