A Threefold Preparation for Death: Approaching the Heart of Flannery O’Connor’s Anagogical Vision

Introduction: Matters of Life and Death

In the fall of 1947, at the age of twenty-two, Flannery O’Connor wrote in a private prayer journal:

Writing is dead. Art is dead, dead by nature, not killed by unkindness. I bring my dead want into the place[,] the dead place it shows up most easily, into writing. This has its purpose if by God’s grace it will wake another soul; but it does me no good. The “life” it receives in writing is dead to me, the more so in that it looks alive—a horrible deception. But not to me who knows this. Oh Lord please make this dead desire living, living in life, living as it will probably have to live in suffering. I feel too mediocre to suffer. If suffering came to me I would not even recognize it.¹

A few lines earlier, at the outset of the entry, O’Connor beseeches her addressee: “Dear Lord please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss.” In begging that her desire for God be made living, vivified in her literary work, she conceives her own passionate spiritual journey as virtually inseparable from the task of writing, which she firmly believed to be her vocation. Moreover, in employing the language of life, death, and suffering, at the same time richly philosophical and excruciatingly intimate, she anticipates her lifelong engagement with the dialectic inevitably generated by the fiction-making enterprise: a dialectic restlessly traversing the space between art and reality, the concrete and the transcendent, and for O’Connor, between nature and grace. During the year and a half in which she wrote the twenty-four entries composing the journal, she published several stories, began work in earnest on the novel that would become Wise Blood, and became professionally engaged with Rinehart & Company: her writing career was taking off. ² Though it would be more than three years before she would be diagnosed with disseminated lupus erythematosus, already O’Connor envisaged for herself—in terms more matter-of-fact than morbid—a life of suffering. Already she was probing the mysterious parallels between the “life” of her fiction and her own life, and between these and the spiritually moribund life of the reader she sought to reach.³

Thirteen years later, in “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” O’Connor wrote, “The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ.”⁴ It is in connection to this theme that we may begin to perceive a strengthening of the analogous relationship between O’Connor, her stories, and her readers, when we consider the centrality of preparation for death in her fiction.⁵ Indeed, in both of O’Connor’s novels and arguably in every one of the stories in her two published collections, the preparation for death or, more often than not, the lack thereof, figures significantly in the plot, insofar as that plot tracks the spiritual development of one or more major characters. Thus, in Wise Blood Hazel Motes spends his last days “paying” while Mrs. Flood tries desperately, fruitlessly, to see the pinpoint of light at the bottom of his bottomless eye-sockets. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, it is not difficult to make the case that all ten of the stories in O’Connor’s first published collection deal with the topic, a few less immediately or explicitly, but no less certainly upon close reading. To cite only the most iconic example, consider O’Connor’s own reflection on the title story: “The heroine of this story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely.”⁶ In The Violent Bear it Away, O’Connor probes the biological, spiritual, and sacramental dimensions of the journey from life to death to life again that dominate the thoughts...