The Value of Violence in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction

“To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” As soon as I read that sentence I underlined it. It’s in an essay from Flannery O’Connor’s occasional prose collection, Mystery and Manners. It was O’Connor’s response to a question about her violent stories featuring bitter, proud or petty characters caught in extraordinary and traumatic circumstances, often of their own making: she wrote the way she did in order to convey a vision of sin and grace to a secular, rationalistic culture that was “hard of hearing” and “almost blind” to these two most basic Christian truths.

Mary Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 aged only thirty-nine. She published two slim novels and two slim collections of short stories; posthumously, a volume of letters, The Habit of Being, and a collection of addresses and essays, Mystery and Manners, were published. Despite her limited oeuvre and short life, its brevity compounded by the constraints of the lupus that finally killed her, I can think of no other twentieth-century writer—not even Chesterton or Lewis—who has as much to offer a contemporary fiction writer with a religious worldview as this lucid and sardonic Georgian peafowl-fancier.

In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor reflected:

From my own experience in trying to make stories “work,” I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace. This is not a piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories; it is a discovery that I get out of them.

When I first read her collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, I frequently finished each story with a sharp intake of breath. Often the stories ended with a violent twist that I didn’t anticipate. Nor did O’Connor when she wrote them: she didn’t see how a story would resolve until she reached the climax—the violent resolution was as much a shock for her as it is for the reader. She uses violence for a variety of purposes: to bring characters back to reality; to express a clash of values; and, not least, to explore the mysterious friction that results when the spiritual and the physical collide.

O’Connor writes:

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

Her characters, through death, injury or accident, are forced into sudden and agonising reappraisals of themselves or their values because they weren’t expecting either sin or grace to enter their nicely ordered lives.

In “A View of the Woods”, a grandfather wants to sell a parcel of land near a highway so a gas station can be built. He believes in Progress, Opportunity and Business. His young granddaughter, whom he idealises as his one true image-bearer, doesn’t want him to sell the land, nor do any of her family—they feel that the land, even though it’s just an unattractive block of poor pasture, provides the background to the family’s history. The grandfather persists in his vision of progress and sells the land. He and his granddaughter argue, and then fight when he tries to give her a spanking. The girl attacks her grandfather, viciously scratching and biting him. After the initial shock of her assault, he fights back, gets on top of her and repeatedly bangs her head against the dirt, not knowing the soil disguises a sharp rock. He kills his favourite grandchild. He bashes her to death. And for what? Progress? To spite her bitter father and sour siblings? To demonstrate his power over the family and the land? The story ends, as do many others, in a moment of trauma that presages a grasp of the elemental and the real. And there is no numbing of this traumatic experience for the characters in the stories: the pain is acute and undeniable. In fact, denial is what they’ve been doing for too long. O’Connor elaborates on this point in Mystery and Manners:

in my own stories I have found that violence is strongly capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept that moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

In the story “Greenleaf”, the main character, a proud but petty widow, Mrs May, treats her farm manager, Mr Greenleaf, with contempt. She assumes she is superior to Greenleaf and his family, even though it is obvious that the Greenleaf family and their farm are prospering. Mrs May is irritated by the Greenleafs’ wandering bull which tramples her garden and threatens to impregnate her dairy cows. She threatens to shoot the bull if Greenleaf won’t control it. Yet, once again, she finds the bull on her farm and confronts the beast in a paddock. It charges her and Mrs May is gored. Greenleaf arrives as the bull drives a horn through Mrs May’s chest. He shoots the animal five times through the eye but it’s too late to save the widow. The moment of her death, with the bull’s horn piercing her heart while the other horn circles her waist like an embrace, is Mrs May’s experience of rupturing grace, the instant expressed in O’Connor’s precise and rhythmic prose:

She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what his intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.

Mrs May’s adult sons, misanthropic rationalists, are examples of a type that is consistently portrayed by O’Connor as self-satisfied because they’re self-deluded. But even these cynics are not incapable of grace, although in most stories in which pretentious intellectuals feature, the grace comes at someone else’s expense.

In the story that provides the book’s title, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, the main character, Julian, has recently returned home from college to live with his overweight and insensitive mother. Every Wednesday, he helps her catch the bus to a YWCA weight-loss class. He hates accompanying his mother, especially as she patronises the Negroes on the bus; she thinks she is merely being friendly towards them. Julian makes no attempt to hide his frustration with her and resents the pettiness, the narrowness, and the “general idiocy of his fellows”. Julian, the snobbish prat, wants to be a writer. He and his mother argue on the bus, with greater spite on Julian’s side and with wounded dignity on his mother’s side. As they get off the bus and walk towards home—she will not continue on to the Y with Julian berating her—she has a heart attack. Julian’s contemptuous demeanour crashes down as his mother crumples to the pavement. One eye rolls back into her head, the other eye fixes on him but finds nothing and closes. “Mother!” he cries. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!”

She dies, and Julian is left stricken and helpless. Her death is his “entry into the world of guilt and sorrow”.

O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away—the title taken from Jesus’s picture of those pressing towards the Kingdom of God—explores the violence that is perpetrated by people who feel the pull of grace but resist it. The novel’s title puzzled many. To one friend, O’Connor wrote that the violence required was interior in essence: surrounded by a scornful culture, “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.” Moreover, it was a spiritual struggle against spiritual death. In her copy of the book Personalism, by the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier, O’Connor had written The violent bear it away next to this sentence: “Love is a struggle: life is a struggle against death.” Typically, O’Connor explores the extraordinary moments in ordinary lives, moments in which grace or reality violently intrude. But the violence is never gratuitous; it is used to reveal foundational concerns:

With the serious writer, violence is never an end in itself. It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially, and I believe these are times when writers are more interested in what we are essentially than in the tenor of our daily lives. Violence is a force which can be used for good or evil, and among other things taken by it is the kingdom of heaven. But regardless of what can be taken by it, the man in a violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story [A Good Man is Hard to Find] are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with them.

The violence in O’Connor’s fiction isn’t only physical; a less obvious violence erupts when there is a sudden and forthright clash of values: an accepted vision or philosophy is smashed by reality and the deluded individual is left to see his own moral inadequacy or spiritual poverty. This form of violence is inevitable when there is disunity between the Christian writer and her secularised culture because the Christian writer will see and portray monstrosity where the reader sees only normality. In the essay “The Fiction Writer & His Country”, she writes:

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience.

O’Connor reveals that normal people—a well-meaning liberal counsellor, a hard-working farmer, a college lecturer—are often the real monsters in society. When they’re confronted by society’s freaks—a nymphomaniac teenager or a spastic Pentecostal woman—the normal people are exposed as psychologically crippled or spiritually deformed: normality may actually mask deep dysfunction, and the people that are outwardly dysfunctional may have a better grasp of the essential things of life. There is a parallel here with Patrick White’s fiction. In The Solid Mandala or Riders in the Chariot, for example, it is the eccentric, the outcast, and the moronic characters who are the recipients and dispensers of grace.

O’Connor realised that there was a disconnection between the mysteries of her Catholicism and the disposition of modern America which largely wanted to dispense with mysteries. She wrote:

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject; but it is an added blow.

O’Connor insists that violence or comedy—both are found in equal measure in her work—are natural consequences if a writer attempts to link a concrete image with mysteries that are invisible, yet as real to the writer as anything that everybody sees. This is the violence born when the distance between the mysterious and the familiar is suddenly compacted. It is the violence that comes when the spiritual and the physical collide: oceans roar and mountains melt like wax, as expressed by the psalmist; hundreds of swine run headlong off a cliff and drown themselves in the sea, as described by the gospel writer. It is a form of violence perhaps best expressed by the holy pronouncement, “No man can see My face and live.”

The physical and the spiritual collide in the form of a tattoo in “Parker’s Back”. Parker, a shiftless, hard-drinking man, is married to a religious shrew, “her eyes sharp and grey like the points of two ice picks”. He gets drunk one night and gets the face of Christ tattooed onto his back. His wife, outraged by his blasphemy in portraying the spirit in flesh, beats her beer-soaked husband “almost senseless” with a broom until welts appear on the face of Christ. She inadvertently re-enacts the scourging of Jesus. Her husband, shocked by the beating and groggy with booze, retreats to shelter under a tree and weeps. His attempt to connect with his wife’s unorthodox faith is a complete failure.

O’Connor explores the collision of these mysterious forces in the lives of ordinary men and women. The baleful and the beatific are tossed together and comedy or conflict is the result. She wrote:

It’s not necessary to point out that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine.

It may not be necessary to point this out but I’m glad she did because she gave at least one slow-witted fiction writer—who might otherwise have missed the point—the courage to embrace the grotesque, the mordant and the violent as legitimate, even necessary, means of expression.

The violence of O’Connor’s stories is shocking not only because it is unexpected, but because it is so real and immediate. It happens right in front of the reader: there is no turning away from it. O’Connor stresses the need for the Christian writer, in particular, to describe the concrete world in which we live because this is where the dramas of grace and judgment are played out. The common experience of the world for all humanity is through the senses, and this is the first and most basic point of contact for the fiction writer:

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

This concern with sensual experience and corporeality never wavers because O’Connor knows her readers are unlikely to believe what she believes, so she knows she must convince them of the reality of the fictional setting before she has any hope of convincing them of the reality of the spiritual dynamics that are at the heart of her stories. She cautions:

Fiction writers who are not concerned with these concrete details are guilty of what Henry James called “weak specification.” The eye will glide over their words while the attention goes to sleep.

The attention never goes to sleep in O’Connor’s short fiction because she locates her dramas in particular places with prickly characters speaking in distinct regional idioms. She does all this hard work to ensure strong specificity; the stories that result are absorbing and intelligent—and they lodge in your memory like a burr.

Her narratives might be thick with violence but her use of language is piercing and precise. Her non-fiction, especially, reveals that O’Connor was a natural aphorist: in Mystery and Manners sentences flow straight from the page to the tongue because good sense or tart wit is transported by an apposite phrase. You want to have the opportunity to say them. Here she is on free will: “Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man.” On the secular understanding of freedom: “The Catholic novelist believes you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it that way.” On the modern sensibility: “At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.” On suffering: “Evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured.” On the benefits of forgetfulness: “Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.” And on writing courses:

Everywhere I go people ask me if I think universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

To those who desire to write fiction, she warns:

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

Fiction writers, particularly those who share O’Connor’s faith, are profoundly challenged by the depth of her commitment to writing fiction well; fortunately, they’re also aided by her example of a writer unafraid to portray sin and grace, in all their violence, operating in the lives of individual human beings. What Flannery O’Connor achieved in her brief life provides enough instruction, correction and rebuke to clear away sentimentality, unreality and laziness from the efforts of any writer—if they have ears to hear. She makes a whip of cords and drives the untalented and the uncommitted from the courts of literature. She tells them sternly to get out, they have no business to be there. Hers is a violent and shocking act but one that’s necessary for the entrance of grace.