Flannery O’Connor, a truly original American fiction writer, captured our imaginations with short stories brimming with unforgettable characters and shocking moments. Often filled with a gallery of sinners and outcasts, her narratives feature sudden violence and unsettling events that might make you squirm. Yet, what truly sets O’Connor’s work apart is how these dark tales reveal a profound Christian vision, showing that even in the most terrifying corners of life, grace can make itself known. She dared to explore the human condition with unflinching honesty.
Flannery O’Connor herself explained that for a “post-Christian audience,” you sometimes have to “shout” and “draw large and startling figures” to make your vision apparent. She used the shocking nature of her Southern Gothic stories not for sensation, but to jolt characters – and us – into a moment of spiritual awakening. Discover the extraordinary mind of this Georgia native, whose powerful narratives chase down pride and complacency, ultimately revealing the relentless and often “terrible speed of mercy” in the human experience.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The show where America is the star and the American people. Recorded from the city where the West Begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Vanrie O’Connor is considered one of America’s greatest fiction writers and one of my favorites. Their stories, they’re peopled with a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves, and prostitutes and bigots whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence. But the most shocking thing about Vanrie O’Connor’s fiction is that it is shaped by her thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also a place where grace makes itself known. Here to tell her story is Jonathan Rodgers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, the spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor. Let’s take a listen.
00:01:05
Speaker 2: Flannier O’Connor was a twentieth-century writer best known for her short stories. She also wrote a couple of novels. Her most commonly anthologized short story is A Good Man. It is hard to find. People who’ve only read one thing by Flannier O’Connor tend to have read that story, and it’s a shocking story. It’s a story about a family that has making the trip from Georgia to Florida, and they have a car accident and run into a serial killer named the Misfit, and that serial killer, well, kills everybody. And it’s shocking stuff. And that kind of shocking violence is actually quite common in Flaneer O’Connor’s stories. For that reason, she’s often misunderstood. She once said, “Many of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.” She saw herself as writing to a post-Christian audience, for whom baptism, for instance, didn’t really mean anything. And the way she framed her use of shocking things, like, say, murder in these stories, well, here’s what she said: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax 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.” And so her stories that are so shocking are really a way of shouting, a way of drawing large and startling figures for people who otherwise can’t see what it is that she’s trying to show. She says, “The devil is always an appropriate subject from my kind of comedy because he’s always accomplishing ends other than his own,” which is a really helpful way of understanding what she’s up to in her stories. In another place, says that her stories are about the workings of grace and territory largely held by the devil, and so she’s famous for the sort of freakish, grotesque characters in her stories. But, you know, a magician gets your attention with what he’s doing with one hand, and then it’s the other hand that’s really doing the real work. That’s what she’s doing in these stories, insofar as it’s the freaks that gets your attention. But the real action of these stories is a character who seems pretty respectable, who thinks he or she already knows how the world works, thinks he or she understands their place in the world and their status before God. You know, the self-righteous and the self-assured, and those who are wise in the ways of the world. And then through the freakishness, through perhaps the violence, God gets their attention and shows them that they aren’t who they think they are. And so that moment of violence in flanneler’ connor’s stories is actually an offer of grace. Now, some of the characters receive that grace, and some don’t. So mercy in flanneler connor’s stories chases people down, and it is possibly terrible. And yet because we’re so blind to the workings of mercy and grace in the world, sometimes we have to be shocked and to see.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that I’m both a Southern and a Catholic writer. It’s standing for the Catholic writer to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but a writer who…
00:04:41
Speaker 4: happens to be a Catholic.
00:04:44
Speaker 3: This is a formula that has its uses, but I often wish that Cardinal Spelman had said it instead of mister Graham Green, and we would have heard no more about it. I’ve always been more attempted to say that I’m not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens to be Southern. However, I feel that both of these are evasions, and that they stop discussions that they ought to begin. The Southern rita can’t escape the image of the South that has built up a life of its own in his senses, in more than the Catholic can escape the indelible knocks that the…
00:05:17
Speaker 4: Sacons put on his soul.
00:05:20
Speaker 3: The Southern of sense of place is usually as unadjustable as the believe in Catholic sense of right and wrong.
00:05:28
Speaker 2: Flanner o connor is very much associated with her region, and not just her region, really, with her state of Georgia. She was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, spent most of her life in Millageville, Georgia, but her life started there in Lafayette Square in Savannah, Georgia. Just around the corner was the Catholic hospital where she was born that had a wing named for John Flannery, her ancestor for whom she was named. Her real name, by the way, is Mary Flannery O’Connor. She took the name Flannery O’Connor. When she left home and became a writer, she felt like the name Flannery O’Connor was a better writerly name than Mary Flannery O’Connor. But in your early life, a very Catholic existence. And then she moved to Millersville, Georgia. Later it was a place where she was exposed to very different varieties of Christianity. Millersville, by the way, is a fascinating place. It’s where the state hospital for the Middley Insane was. It’s where a reformatory was. Sometimes the boys would escape from the reformatory. As they were running away, they might run across part of her property.
00:06:35
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Jonathan Rodgers tell the story of one of America’s great writers, Flannery O’Connor. And my goodness, what she said about a sense of place and also her faith: “A sense of place is as unreplaceable as a sense of right and wrong.” Her discussing how being a Southerner and a Catholic we’re simply in unreplaced in her writing, and also what she said about mercy chasing people down in her stories, which, indeed, it does, and sometimes for the good, and sometimes not. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Fanery O’Connor here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and with the story of Flannery O’Connor, told by Jonathan Rodgers, who’s the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor. Let’s pick up where we last left off.
00:18:19
Speaker 2: And so it’s easy for people to miss: there’s lots of God-talk in Flannier O’Connor. It’s unavoidable, but I think sometimes people miss that she meant it. You know, this was not just her using the language of the Christ-haunted South. Let’s put it this way: in both wise, blood and the violent beard away, we have these prophetic figures, people who are literally street preachers and folk prophets who are possibly insane, and who, by the way, are very Protestant, not Catholic. And it’s easy to see these possibly insane people using all this God-talk, this Christian language, and think that she is somehow satirizing or mocking their faith. There’s a character named Old Tarwater. He semi-kidnaps a couple of his relatives and baptizes them without their parents’ consent—just nutty behavior. On the other hand, there are very sensible, modern schoolteacher types, and Flander O’Connor at one point says, “The reader will probably associate with the schoolteacher.” She said, “But Old Tarwater speaks for me.” The funny thing about Flander O’Connor: it’s not just that everybody misunderstood hers; that they misunderstood her in their own way. She got a letter from a woman in Boston who said, “I’m a Catholic, and I don’t see how anybody can even have such thoughts,” and it was just shocked by what she was seeing in there. And Flander O’Connor said she wrote her a letter back that could have been signed off on by the bishop. It was so orthodox, and so that they were big friends. Now, on the other hand, the little, let’s say, misunderstood her because they really loved what she was writing, but…
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