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“God May Strike You Thisaway”: Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy
- The University of Tennessee Press
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“God May Strike You Thisaway”: Flannery O’Connor and Simone Weil on Affliction and Joy Ralph C. Wood I have never been anywhere but sick. —Flannery O’Connor in a letter to Betty Hester, 28 June 1956 It doesn’t finally matter whether we get Faulkner right, for no one’s salvation depends on it. But it matters absolutely whether we get O’Connor right. —John Millis, personal conversation, December 1996 There is a persistent misgiving that Flannery O’Connor delighted in death, that she nurtured an incurable malignancy of the imagination, that a fundamental malevolence pervades her fiction, and thus that she reveled in the destruction of bodies if not also souls. Yet the discerning reader will concede that in both her personal life and her literary work few other writers have enabled us to name so clearly the nature of both the violence that wracks our terror-stricken world and the grace that might redirect such violence to nondestructive ends. Professor William Sessions’s forthcoming biography will amply demonstrate that the young Mary Flannery O’Connor had an outsized ego. She did not like for others to cross her. She often conspired with her father against the domineering Regina Cline O’Connor. She had little patience for classmates whose wits were not as keen as hers. Nor could she abide the assurance of her schoolteacher nuns that guardian angels surrounded and protected her. Instead, she often flailed her fists at such ghostly familiars, shadowboxing at such invisible presences, in This chapter was originally published in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 59.3 (Spring 2007): 179–94. Ralph C. Wood 42 the conviction that she needed no such shielding. The young O’Connor was also defiant in her determination not to become the southern belle that her mother desired, nor to conform to the conventional female expectations of her maledominated society. When required to make a dress for a high school sewing class, for example, she brought one of her chickens to school, having first clothed it in the garment she had been told to make. Even as an adult, O’Connor often chafed at the pusillanimity of small-town existence. Though immensely grateful that her imagination had been chastened by the limits of intimate life in rural Georgia—as it would not if she had lived anonymously in the Deep North—O’Connor often found such provincialism irksome. A good deal of this abiding anger and frustration finds its way into her two most vivid fictional self-portraits: the eponymous Mary Grace of “Revelation ” and, still more, in the joy-scorning, name-changing Hulga Hopewell of “Good Country People.” O’Connor gives us other fictional versions of herself, of course, especially Sally Virginia Cope in “A Circle in the Fire” and the nameless girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Yet what remains most remarkable about these renderings of her own persona is the utter effacing of all self-pity. Instead, we find O’Connor exhibiting a steely eyed honesty about these selfabsorbed creatures that she could easily have become. I believe that we make a fundamental misprision of O’Connor’s life and work, therefore, by characterizing it as mean in spirit and violent in implication. Only a wooden literalism of the interpretive faculty, a bankruptcy of the imagination , could prompt the counting of dead bodies in her work as if one were counting beans. No one is castrated in her fiction, as is Joe Christmas in the climactic scene of Faulkner’s Light in August. No one is raped with a corncob, as is Temple Drake in Sanctuary. Not a single bed-wetting child is made to spend a subzero Russian night in an outdoor privy, weeping and pleading for mercy from “dear kind God,” as in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. And compared to the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, O’Connor’s novels and stories are hardly sanguinary at all. So must it also be observed that almost no one in her work goes to death unwillingly. Only one major and one minor character face their final demise ungraciously—namely, the insufferable Mary Fortune Pitts in “A View of the Woods” and the spiteful June Star in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Instead, nearly all of O’Connor’s dying characters validate her own witty saying: “A lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt.” O’Connor herself, by contrast, did “get hurt.” And...