Ralph C. Wood reminds us that O'Connor was born this day in 1925. Though I blogged about her a month ago, Wood's article is so excellent that I need to blog about her once again. Wood offers suggestions to first-time readers of O'Connor:
The best place to begin encountering O’Connor’s radically Christian work is not
with her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Many people
are left sleepless after reading it. I would recommend a later short
story entitled “Revelation,” since it is perhaps the most redemptive of
her works. One might then progress to other stories that don’t conclude
with violent death, perhaps “The Enduring Chill” and “Parker’s Back.”
Along the way, one would do well to take up O’Connor’s magnificent
letters in The Habit of Being. Her lively correspondence with
all sorts and conditions of letter-writers constitutes, by my
reckoning, an
unparalleled epistolary witness. Readers get to listen in
as O’Connor makes stunning discernments of people and events, often in
jocular and self-mocking ways. But we also follow her sardonic though
faithful embrace of the suffering that led to her death from lupus in
1964, at age 39.
From these stories and letters, one should proceed to the two volumes of short fiction entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. The film version of “The Displaced Person,” one of her finest works, is set on the O’Connor farm in rural Georgia, and it is available from PBS. Only after such preparatory work should readers approach her brilliant but difficult novels, The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood. Throughout their scrutiny of O’Connor’s fiction, they should also examine the splendid volume of posthumously published essays and speeches, Mystery and Manners. All of her published fiction, as well as excerpts from her letters and essays, can be found in a handsome hardcover edition entitled The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, from the Library of America.
The key to comprehending Flannery O’Connor’s life and work is to remember that, in her lexicon, divine grace is never synonymous with human graciousness. On the contrary, it is often abrupt and rude and disrespectful of ordinary proprieties, for the skin of human resistance is exceedingly thick. When asked why her characters meet such violent self-awakenings, O’Connor replied that it’s because their heads are so hard. Grace must wound before it can heal, she declared, and her fiction is filled with both woundings and healings. O’Connor wittily consoled readers that, while a lot of folks get killed in her fiction, nobody gets hurt. In her unsentimental reckoning, there are states of thriving but damnable life far worse than a grisly but saving death. Thus is O’Connor’s fiction comic in a precise Dantesque sense: It does not close down toward tragic and final defeat, but opens out toward drastic, even eternal, hope — often at the threshold of total ruin. And this is why, though lean and angular, her fiction will endure.
— Ralph C. Wood is a professor of theology and literature at Baylor University and the author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.
From these stories and letters, one should proceed to the two volumes of short fiction entitled A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. The film version of “The Displaced Person,” one of her finest works, is set on the O’Connor farm in rural Georgia, and it is available from PBS. Only after such preparatory work should readers approach her brilliant but difficult novels, The Violent Bear It Away and Wise Blood. Throughout their scrutiny of O’Connor’s fiction, they should also examine the splendid volume of posthumously published essays and speeches, Mystery and Manners. All of her published fiction, as well as excerpts from her letters and essays, can be found in a handsome hardcover edition entitled The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, from the Library of America.
The key to comprehending Flannery O’Connor’s life and work is to remember that, in her lexicon, divine grace is never synonymous with human graciousness. On the contrary, it is often abrupt and rude and disrespectful of ordinary proprieties, for the skin of human resistance is exceedingly thick. When asked why her characters meet such violent self-awakenings, O’Connor replied that it’s because their heads are so hard. Grace must wound before it can heal, she declared, and her fiction is filled with both woundings and healings. O’Connor wittily consoled readers that, while a lot of folks get killed in her fiction, nobody gets hurt. In her unsentimental reckoning, there are states of thriving but damnable life far worse than a grisly but saving death. Thus is O’Connor’s fiction comic in a precise Dantesque sense: It does not close down toward tragic and final defeat, but opens out toward drastic, even eternal, hope — often at the threshold of total ruin. And this is why, though lean and angular, her fiction will endure.
— Ralph C. Wood is a professor of theology and literature at Baylor University and the author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.
Me: Read the whole article. It's well worth your time.