In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

99 CHAPTER 6 The Challenge of Flannery O’Connor The Scandal of Flannery O’Connor We began this journey with Leontius’s encounter with the corpses. We saw there that we both want and do not want to encounter reality at its deepest level. We long for it and dread it at the same time. We then widened our perspective through some reflections on language. Words, spelled out in her palm, opened up a glorious world for Helen Keller as a child. These same words, though, can also close off reality, rendering it nugatory. Neither the opportunity nor the danger can be avoided. Even a glance, held a moment too long, may bring the kind of encounter with reality that demands to be named. Philosophy, literature, theology, and the Scriptures can give us that name—that is, they can help to articulate the reality we are experiencing. But they also can become a block to that reality. Standing before the grave of Lazarus, Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again. Martha responds with a “textbook-perfect” formula of faith: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (Jn. 11:24). In spite of its literal perfection, it does not satisfy Jesus but calls forth something more. The true words Martha has spoken have to become rooted in the person of Christ to reveal their true meaning: “I am the resurrection and the life” (Jn. 11:25). The stumbling 100 Chapter 6 block, the stone, has to be removed. With the stone’s removal, with Lazarus’s resurrection the reality of Jesus’ life and death is revealed. This pattern where the “place” of misunderstanding or non-understanding gets transformed to the “place” of deeper understanding is familiar to literary theorists. Many of them suggest that in mediating the encounter between her reader and reality, an author will be forced to use all of her craft not only to present the real but also to overcome the reader’s built-in defenses against the encounter. The place of most resistance can, with skill and luck, become the place of deepest insight. This is often expressed by saying that the author has to create not only the work but also the reader. I think that this is especially true of Flannery O’Connor because she understood how much she had to overcome to get her vision across. In one of her famous critical statements about her own fiction, O’Connor wrote: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.”1 This sentiment helps to explain not only her use of the grotesque but also her deliberate use of scandal. Her short stories and novels deliver a salutary shock in the kind of prose that leaves one asking for more. This shock is not just that of an unexpected turn of events, nor do her stories have the uncanny quality of the corpses that Leontius both longed to look at yet dreaded to see. Instead, her work attracts the reader through its beauty, which gets manifested in and through some pretty gritty reality. A part of the beauty, I might add, is her humor, which is not gallows humor but laughter earned through the challenge to serious thought. All of this is a way of saying that one path for us to become more familiar with the way that scandal, as an obstacle to understanding, can become a bridge to deeper understanding is to look at the art of Flannery O’Connor. We need to exercise a certain amount of caution here. I do not believe that O’Connor’s ultimate goal in her stories was to cause scandal; we know from her correspondence that she struggled with this question.2 O’Connor was keenly aware that her intention not to cause scandal was not enough to prevent it from happening. “What leads the writer to his salvation [looking at the worst in the world as an exercise of trust in God] may lead the reader into The Challenge of Flannery O’Connor 101 sin,” she wrote, “and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks...

Share