Flannery O'Connor's Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance (review)

Flannery O'Conor's Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance. By George A. Kilcourse, Jr. New York: Paulist Press, 2001. 328 pp. $24.95.

Subtle signs of renewed interest in the intimate relationship between theology and literature—long a staple of Catholic higher education—are beginning to emerge. The use of literary texts in graduate dissertations and theses and increasing numbers of novels and short stories on college reading lists for theology and spirituality courses give evidence of the academy's reawakening to the power of the religious imagination. For such academic readers and for many others as well, Kilcourse's work on Flannery O'Connor will be a welcome contribution.

Kilcourse's book is both lucid and illuminating, straightforward and comprehensive in its approach to the whole O'Connor corpus. In a brief, important Preface, Kilcourse exposes his intent for the book, but he does so within a narrative framework that demonstrates that, for him, admiration for O'Connor has led to imitation of her storytelling. His express purpose is both pedagogical and pastoral and he particularly invites those who minister to teenagers to explore O'Connor's fiction with the young, so often disenchanted with traditional catechesis. There follow six chapters, four of which deal specifically with O'Connor's major volumes: Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear it Away and Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The first chapter, however, is something of an introduction to her fiction as a whole, set up under the rubric of "Discovering the Audience" and encompassing familiar O'Connor's themes such as "grace" and the "grotesque." The chapter ends with a brief, pithy exposition of O'Connor's vision. Kilcourse carefully considers the way in which O'Connor thought about the potential audience for her fiction and, in some instances, articulated an "apology" (in the classic not contemporary sense of the word) for her fiction vis-à-vis that audience. Citing her own letters and essays, he demonstrates that while she perceived the majority of her contemporaries to be spiritually insensitive, she refused to indulge their superficial appetites for happy endings and saccharine spiritual nosegays. He quotes O'Connor abundantly on this point, of which one example will here suffice: "The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality" (31). In exploring O'Connor's relationship with her audience, Kilcourse also exposes her own well-honed understanding of how fiction "works" and how she worked at her fiction.

The other chapter that is not directly an analysis of specific works is Chapter Three, entitled "The Christic Imagination: Creative Gestures of a Humble God." In this, Kilcourse takes a close look at O'Connor's Christology, formed as it seems to have been by such pre-Vatican II masters as Karl Adam and Romano Guardini, as well as by the American theologian known for his exploration of the literary imagination, William F. Lynch, S.J. Her Christology, more specifically her soteriology, is at the heart of O'Connor's work; she herself finds a myriad of ways of affirming this in her letters and essays. The story of redemption is at the heart of the Divine Mystery as It engages Itself with humankind. It is also, therefore, at the heart of every great human story insofar as it is the story of human corruption and of the desire for goodness and liberation that will not die no matter how we twist its innate teleology. A Catholic narrative of redemption, however, will bear the specific marks of Christ's Incarnation and salvific death; it will tell how redemption comes from the divine condescension working within the human situation but with a transcendence that ultimately cracks open the human subject and unknots twisted desire. Good Catholic fiction, Flannery O'Connor's fiction, is nourished by this story...