August 3, 1984, marked the twentieth anniversary of the death of Flannery O’Connor. As a modest commemorative gesture, I offer the following few reflections on the life and work of this most extraordinary woman.
As an enraptured veteran of all the O’Connor stories, I am most frequently asked, i.e., by people I am anxious to enlist in the same enthusiasm: Well, what manner of woman was she? Who was this passionately committed soul for whom everything in this world was to be centered on Christ, including—you say—the terrible illness of her own body? Just what sort of character had she, this child of our century who managed, despite all of its dissociated sensibility, actually to “feel life,” as she put it, “from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for”? This pious child, if you please, of the institutional and hierarchical Church, who yet could advance arguments on behalf of its paradoxical mystery as brilliant as anything out of Bossuet? This thoroughly modern woman, no less, her life and work riveted not upon gestures of neurotic feminist defiance against an alleged patriarchy oppressing her spirit, but upon a sacramental vision everywhere validated by its teachings? “The Catholic sacramental view of life,” she wrote, “is one that sustains at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth.” And like Jean Cardinal Danielou—who loved best of all that Church “mud-splashed from history,” because finally it was Christ Himself covered with its mud—Flannery O’Connor’s romance with Roman Catholicism remained both ardent and uncomplicated right up to the end.
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