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3. Flannery O’Connor’s Prophets
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3 Flannery O’Connor’s Prophets These critics . . . see no connection between God’s grace and Africanist “othering” in Flannery O’Connor. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark Flannery O’Connor famously insisted that the subject of her fiction “is the action of grace in territories largely held by the devil” (Mystery 118). While, as James Mellard notes, O’Connor largely has “had her way with critics” (“O’Connor’s Others” 625), her interpreters have been hardpressed to reconcile the signature violence in her fiction with traditional religious beliefs. When called on to explain the violence in her fiction, O’Connor always insisted that violence enables the action of God’s grace: “I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work” (Mystery 112). The operative word here is “strangely,” and scholars have found very strange, even inexplicable, the redemptive properties of murder, rape, and mutilation.1 Claire Katz writes that O’Connor “unleashes a whirlwind of destructive forces more profound than her Christian theme would seem to justify” (55); and Preston Browning observes that O’Connor’s enigmatic fiction calls for interpretations that go beyond religious orthodoxy: “If it was Christian orthodoxy to which she subscribed, her work is manifest proof that it was orthodoxy with a difference. For her persistent habit of finding the human reality in the extreme, the perverse, the violent calls for closer examination” (56). My project is to interpret the violent action of grace in O’Connor’s fiction by aligning the theological with the psychological and the social. As scholars Robert Brinkmeyer and John Duvall have noted, the language Fowler, final pages.indd 72 Fowler, final pages.indd 72 2/21/13 10:31 AM 2/21/13 10:31 AM Flannery O’Connor’s Prophets 73 that O’Connor uses to describe the relation between violence and grace points us in the direction of ego construction or, more accurately, ego destructuring.2 O’Connor writes that “violence is a force which can be used for good or evil,” and, “for the serious writer, [it] is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially ” (Mystery 113). Violence reveals “what we are essentially”; that is, it takes violence to break through to the “I” and reveal the true nature of identity. But what is the “I,” and how does this violent destructuring and self-recognition move us closer to God? O’Connor’s definition of grace, which foregrounds the idea of an encounter between the human and the divine, suggests an answer. Grace, she says, is the mystery of “the Divine life and our participation in it” (Mystery 111). It is always a violent “intrusion ” (112) that enables a moment of “contact” (111) with the divine. For O’Connor, then, grace is an experience at the border of the self, the borderline place that is dual, where self and other or human and divine make “contact.” In Kristeva’s terms, the borderline is the abject, the place where self-identity is threatened and where we recognize the self’s own hybridity —that is, that the self owes its existence to and is bound up with others. For O’Connor, it is at this borderline place, the edge of our existence as an I, where we are faced with “what we are essentially,” that the human can access the divine. The almost obsessively recurring pattern in O’Connor’s stories is a shattering of alterity, which Kristeva calls abjection. To begin with, Kristeva describes abjection in terms that evoke the destruction endemic in O’Connor’s world. Abjection, Kristeva writes, “pulverizes the subject” (Powers 5); it is “death infecting life,” “the edge of non-existence” (Powers 3). Such terms aptly describe the deadly and near-death experiences that leave O’Connor’s protagonists helpless, stunned, and altered at the end of each story. And both Kristeva and O’Connor insist that these deadly encounters are salutary. As Katz astutely notes, early and late in O’Connor’s works: “Paradoxically, to be destroyed is to be saved” (61), while Kristeva describes abjection as “productive” violence (Revolution 16), and even applies to abjection terms...