WEBVTT - Flannery O'Connor Turns 100 0:00:01.490 --> 0:00:05.930 Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. 0:00:05.960 --> 0:00:11.600 I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host. Flannery O'Connor's 100th birthday would 0:00:11.630 --> 0:00:15.590 have been this week. She was born on March 25th, 1925, 0:00:15.590 --> 0:00:20.090 in Savannah, Georgia. In the firmament of 20th century American letters. 0:00:20.090 --> 0:00:22.280 Her star was one of the brightest, and it burned 0:00:22.280 --> 0:00:25.489 all too briefly. She died at the age of 39 0:00:25.520 --> 0:00:28.190 of lupus, a disease that had caused her pain and 0:00:28.190 --> 0:00:32.900 debility since the age of 25. O'Connor's short stories and 0:00:32.900 --> 0:00:36.500 novels are often shocking in their violence and horror, though 0:00:36.500 --> 0:00:39.620 they are also as hilarious as they are horrible. She 0:00:39.620 --> 0:00:42.019 once wrote, in general, the devil can always be a 0:00:42.020 --> 0:00:44.390 subject for my kind of comedy, one way or another. 0:00:44.390 --> 0:00:47.360 I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends 0:00:47.360 --> 0:00:52.010 other than his own. Perhaps the most shocking thing about 0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:54.860 O'Connor's fiction is the fact that it is shaped by 0:00:54.860 --> 0:00:58.370 a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is 0:00:58.370 --> 0:01:01.770 dark and terrifying. It is also the place where grace 0:01:01.770 --> 0:01:05.220 makes itself known. My subject in fiction is the action 0:01:05.220 --> 0:01:08.970 of grace and territory largely held by the devil, she wrote. 0:01:09.030 --> 0:01:13.350 O'Connor's broken world. Our world is the stage whereon the 0:01:13.350 --> 0:01:18.660 Divine Comedy plays out. The following essay is adapted from 0:01:18.660 --> 0:01:21.900 the introduction to my 2012 book, The Terrible Speed of 0:01:21.900 --> 0:01:26.670 Mercy A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor, with a few additions. 0:01:28.530 --> 0:01:32.040 Flannery O'Connor was 27 years old when her debut novel, 0:01:32.040 --> 0:01:35.340 Wise Blood, was published. She was small, of frame and 0:01:35.340 --> 0:01:37.500 sweet faced, in spite of the fact that she had 0:01:37.500 --> 0:01:39.750 already lived for two years with the lupus that would 0:01:39.750 --> 0:01:43.320 kill her before her 40th birthday. She was mostly quiet 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.080 in public, but when she did speak, she spoke in 0:01:46.080 --> 0:01:49.860 the lilting tones of Georgia's Piedmont. She did not, in short, 0:01:49.890 --> 0:01:53.670 come across as a force to be reckoned with. While 0:01:53.670 --> 0:01:56.730 visiting friends in Nashville, O'Connor encountered a man who put 0:01:56.730 --> 0:01:58.660 into words what many of the people who met her 0:01:58.660 --> 0:02:01.480 must have been thinking about. The young author of Wise Blood. 0:02:01.720 --> 0:02:04.570 That was a profound book, he said. You don't look 0:02:04.570 --> 0:02:08.380 like you wrote it. O'Connor described the whole scene in 0:02:08.380 --> 0:02:12.040 a letter to Elizabeth and Robert Lowell. She said, I 0:02:12.040 --> 0:02:16.210 mustered up my squinty assed expression and snarled, well, I did. 0:02:17.380 --> 0:02:21.880 Flannery O'Connor, who lived a comfortable, conventional, pious, middle class 0:02:21.880 --> 0:02:25.750 existence on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, wrote stories 0:02:25.750 --> 0:02:29.500 that were like literary thunderstorms, turning on sudden violence and 0:02:29.500 --> 0:02:33.220 flashes of revelation that crashed down from the heavens, destroying 0:02:33.220 --> 0:02:38.110 even as they illuminate. Nothing about O'Connor's outward demeanor would 0:02:38.110 --> 0:02:41.890 suggest that such storms surged within her. Hers was a 0:02:41.889 --> 0:02:45.040 quiet life, not free from trouble by any means. She 0:02:45.040 --> 0:02:48.910 was sick, but her life was regular and stable, except 0:02:48.910 --> 0:02:51.339 for four and a half years in her 20s, years 0:02:51.370 --> 0:02:54.610 spent training as a writer in Iowa, New York and Connecticut. 0:02:54.639 --> 0:02:58.200 She spent her whole life in Georgia under her mother's roof. 0:02:58.230 --> 0:03:01.350 Her mother could be domineering, but she was solicitous of 0:03:01.350 --> 0:03:04.440 Flannery's health and well-being, and she always gave her daughter 0:03:04.470 --> 0:03:06.660 the space to do her work, even if she didn't 0:03:06.660 --> 0:03:09.810 always understand or appreciate the work her daughter was doing. 0:03:10.770 --> 0:03:14.100 Flannery O'Connor and her mother lived a most regulated, most 0:03:14.100 --> 0:03:20.100 devout life on the farm they called Andalusia, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia. There, 0:03:20.100 --> 0:03:23.760 every morning, including Sundays, she spent four hours writing stories 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:28.769 about street preachers, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, hardscrabble farmers, sideshow freaks, 0:03:28.770 --> 0:03:32.100 murderers and charlatans, while her mother tended to the business 0:03:32.100 --> 0:03:35.790 of the house and farm. Then, at noon, the O'Connor 0:03:35.790 --> 0:03:38.040 women drove back into town, where they had lunch at 0:03:38.040 --> 0:03:40.500 the Sanford House Tea Room among the hatted and white 0:03:40.530 --> 0:03:45.540 gloved ladies of Milledgeville's patrician class. According to biographer Brad Gooch, 0:03:45.570 --> 0:03:48.900 Flannery was especially fond of the Sanford House's fried shrimp 0:03:48.900 --> 0:03:53.700 and peppermint chiffon pie. No, Flannery O'Connor did not look 0:03:53.700 --> 0:03:56.430 like she could have written Wiseblood or the violent beard away, 0:03:56.460 --> 0:03:59.010 or a good man is hard to find. Nothing about 0:03:59.010 --> 0:04:01.950 her life story seems to account for the particular genius 0:04:01.950 --> 0:04:07.020 the seedy, violent, even trashy genius that defines her fiction. 0:04:07.560 --> 0:04:10.170 She wrote of the great mysteries she wrote in The 0:04:10.170 --> 0:04:14.280 Great Mysteries, she was a mystery herself. In The Life 0:04:14.310 --> 0:04:16.710 You Save May be Your own. Mr. Shiftlet speaks to 0:04:16.740 --> 0:04:18.780 the mysteries of the human heart in his first meeting 0:04:18.779 --> 0:04:22.830 with Lucy Crater. Lady, he said, and turned and gave 0:04:22.830 --> 0:04:25.710 her his full attention. Let me tell you something. There's 0:04:25.710 --> 0:04:28.020 one of them doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife 0:04:28.020 --> 0:04:31.140 and cut the human heart. The human heart? He repeated, 0:04:31.140 --> 0:04:34.260 leaning forward out of a man's chest, and held it 0:04:34.260 --> 0:04:37.109 in his hand, and he held his hand out, palm up, 0:04:37.110 --> 0:04:39.300 as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, 0:04:39.300 --> 0:04:41.760 and studied it like it was a day old chicken. 0:04:41.790 --> 0:04:45.089 And lady, he said, allowing a long, significant pause in 0:04:45.089 --> 0:04:48.480 which his head slid forward and his clay colored eyes brightened. 0:04:48.510 --> 0:04:51.480 He don't know no more about it than you or me. Why? 0:04:51.480 --> 0:04:53.280 If he was to take that knife and cut into 0:04:53.310 --> 0:04:55.400 every corner of it. He still wouldn't know no more 0:04:55.400 --> 0:04:59.599 about it than you or me. No amount of poking 0:04:59.600 --> 0:05:02.539 around in the external events and facts of Flannery O'Connor's 0:05:02.540 --> 0:05:04.969 life could get at the heart of her. There's no 0:05:04.970 --> 0:05:08.810 accounting for Flannery O'Connor or her heart in those terms. 0:05:09.800 --> 0:05:13.730 The outward constraints that O'Connor accepted and ultimately cultivated made 0:05:13.730 --> 0:05:16.789 room for an interior world as spacious and various as 0:05:16.790 --> 0:05:20.960 the heavens themselves. Whole worlds orbited and collided in there. 0:05:21.050 --> 0:05:24.620 Her natural curiosity was harnessed and directed by an astonishing 0:05:24.620 --> 0:05:29.090 intellectual and spiritual rigor. She read voraciously, from the ancients 0:05:29.089 --> 0:05:34.279 to contemporary Catholic theologians to periodicals to novels. Everybody who 0:05:34.279 --> 0:05:37.250 has read Wiseblood thinks I'm a hillbilly nihilist, she wrote 0:05:37.250 --> 0:05:40.130 in a letter to a friend. In fact, she wrote, 0:05:40.130 --> 0:05:43.520 she was a hillbilly Thomist. The raw material of her 0:05:43.520 --> 0:05:48.110 fiction was the lowest common denominator of American culture. But 0:05:48.110 --> 0:05:51.440 the sensibility that shaped the hillbilly raw material into art 0:05:51.440 --> 0:05:54.200 shared more in common with Thomas Aquinas and the other 0:05:54.200 --> 0:05:57.440 great minds of the Catholic tradition than with any practitioner 0:05:57.440 --> 0:06:01.099 of American letters, high or low. There was nobody doing 0:06:01.100 --> 0:06:04.490 what she was doing when she was working on Wiseblood, 0:06:04.490 --> 0:06:08.059 she got sideways with an editor named John Selby at Rinehart, 0:06:08.060 --> 0:06:11.570 the publisher that originally planned to publish the book. Selby 0:06:11.570 --> 0:06:14.870 didn't understand what she was doing with Wiseblood, and recommended 0:06:14.870 --> 0:06:17.300 that she make huge changes to make it more palatable 0:06:17.300 --> 0:06:22.130 to readers. In response to Selby's suggestions, O'Connor wrote this 0:06:22.220 --> 0:06:23.900 I can tell you that I would not like at 0:06:23.900 --> 0:06:26.150 all to work with you, as do other writers on 0:06:26.150 --> 0:06:29.090 your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may 0:06:29.089 --> 0:06:32.000 have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. 0:06:32.360 --> 0:06:35.150 I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think 0:06:35.150 --> 0:06:37.250 that the quality of the novel I write will derive 0:06:37.279 --> 0:06:40.970 precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of 0:06:40.970 --> 0:06:44.240 the experience I write from. In short, I am amenable 0:06:44.240 --> 0:06:46.760 to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I 0:06:46.760 --> 0:06:49.219 am trying to do. I will not be persuaded to 0:06:49.250 --> 0:06:53.220 do otherwise. There are two things that I want to 0:06:53.220 --> 0:06:57.090 point out about this remarkable communication. First, Flannery O'Connor was 0:06:57.089 --> 0:06:59.940 23 years old and unpublished when she wrote this to 0:06:59.970 --> 0:07:01.950 the editor, who would seem to have the power of 0:07:01.950 --> 0:07:05.250 life and death over Wiseblood. Even at that point, she 0:07:05.250 --> 0:07:08.040 was so committed to her peculiar vision that she wouldn't 0:07:08.040 --> 0:07:10.950 be swayed. Second, I want to draw your attention to 0:07:10.980 --> 0:07:14.850 that phrase, the peculiarity or aloneness of the experience I 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:18.870 write from. When she wrote that she wasn't raising peacocks 0:07:18.870 --> 0:07:21.930 on a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, she wrote from 0:07:21.930 --> 0:07:25.230 the storied Yaddo artist colony, where she was working alongside 0:07:25.230 --> 0:07:29.010 such literary lights as Robert Lowell and Malcolm Cowley. She 0:07:29.010 --> 0:07:32.670 was fresh off three years at the Iowa Writers Workshop, then, 0:07:32.670 --> 0:07:35.429 as now, one of the most respected MFA programs in 0:07:35.430 --> 0:07:38.490 the country. On the strength of her performance at Iowa, 0:07:38.520 --> 0:07:42.360 certain tastemakers in the literary establishment were already welcoming her 0:07:42.360 --> 0:07:45.030 and recognizing her as one of the great talents. When 0:07:45.030 --> 0:07:47.460 she wrote of her aloneness, she was writing from a 0:07:47.460 --> 0:07:50.950 place very near the epicenter of American letters. From very 0:07:50.950 --> 0:07:53.860 early in her career, she jealously guarded her aloneness. Her 0:07:53.860 --> 0:07:58.450 peculiarity for her peculiarity was the peculiarity of a prophet. 0:07:58.480 --> 0:08:01.510 Her voice was the voice of one crying in the wilderness. 0:08:02.440 --> 0:08:05.500 Perhaps the surest measure of O'Connor's sense of calling was 0:08:05.500 --> 0:08:09.220 her willingness to be misunderstood. She didn't expect her literary 0:08:09.220 --> 0:08:12.010 audience to understand what she was up to. She wrote, 0:08:12.010 --> 0:08:15.160 many of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and 0:08:15.160 --> 0:08:18.790 disturbed if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, 0:08:18.820 --> 0:08:21.850 thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give 0:08:21.850 --> 0:08:25.930 my work its chief characteristics. Nor was she especially bothered 0:08:25.930 --> 0:08:29.230 when her co-religionists misunderstood her, which was just as well 0:08:29.230 --> 0:08:31.210 for almost all of the Christians who knew her work 0:08:31.210 --> 0:08:34.510 misunderstood it. A real ugly letter from a woman in 0:08:34.510 --> 0:08:37.510 Boston was typical. She said she was a Catholic, and 0:08:37.510 --> 0:08:40.990 so she couldn't understand how anybody could even have such thoughts. 0:08:42.010 --> 0:08:44.949 O'Connor made it clear in her letters and essays, however, 0:08:44.950 --> 0:08:47.830 that she wrote such shocking fiction not in spite of 0:08:47.830 --> 0:08:51.480 her Christian faith, but because of it, she wrote. It 0:08:51.480 --> 0:08:54.330 is when the individual's faith is weak, not when it 0:08:54.330 --> 0:08:56.370 is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest, 0:08:56.370 --> 0:09:01.110 fictional representation of life. Flannery O'Connor wrote what she saw, 0:09:01.110 --> 0:09:04.739 and she saw a world that was broken beyond self-help 0:09:04.770 --> 0:09:08.579 or instant uplift, but a world also in which transcendence 0:09:08.580 --> 0:09:12.390 was forever threatening to break through. Welcome or not. Therefore, 0:09:12.420 --> 0:09:16.020 O'Connor set herself against not only the religious skeptic, but 0:09:16.020 --> 0:09:18.540 also the religious believer who thinks that the eyes of 0:09:18.540 --> 0:09:20.550 the church, or of the Bible, or of his particular 0:09:20.550 --> 0:09:25.559 theology have already done the seeing for him. O'Connor's challenge. 0:09:25.559 --> 0:09:28.080 Her calling was to offer up the truths of the 0:09:28.080 --> 0:09:30.209 faith to a world that, to her way of thinking, 0:09:30.210 --> 0:09:33.540 had mostly lost its ability to see and hear such truths. 0:09:33.630 --> 0:09:36.420 She wrote, when you can assume that your audience holds 0:09:36.420 --> 0:09:39.090 the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little 0:09:39.090 --> 0:09:41.790 and use more normal means of talking to it. When 0:09:41.790 --> 0:09:43.980 you have to assume that it does not, then you 0:09:43.980 --> 0:09:46.380 have to make your vision apparent by shock to the 0:09:46.380 --> 0:09:48.929 hard of hearing you shout. And for the almost blind, 0:09:48.960 --> 0:09:54.270 you draw large and startling figures to smugness and self-reliance 0:09:54.270 --> 0:09:58.829 and self-satisfaction in all its forms, from pseudo intellectualism to phariseeism, 0:09:58.830 --> 0:10:02.460 to fundamentalism, to the false gospel of postwar optimism with 0:10:02.460 --> 0:10:05.550 its positive thinking gurus and its can do advice columnists 0:10:05.550 --> 0:10:09.480 and its faith in modern science. Oconnors fiction shouts, thus 0:10:09.480 --> 0:10:13.920 saith the Lord! The violence, the sudden death, the ugliness 0:10:13.950 --> 0:10:18.270 in O'Connor's fiction are large figures drawn for the almost blind. 0:10:18.300 --> 0:10:22.050 If the stories offend conventional morality, it's because the gospel 0:10:22.050 --> 0:10:26.100 itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal. 0:10:26.100 --> 0:10:28.979 It always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand 0:10:28.980 --> 0:10:32.490 to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe, 0:10:32.490 --> 0:10:35.490 even as he called the self-righteous. A brood of vipers 0:10:36.120 --> 0:10:38.910 in a good man is hard to find. O'Connor's most 0:10:38.910 --> 0:10:41.970 widely read story, it is painful to see a mostly 0:10:41.970 --> 0:10:44.850 harmless old grandmother come to terms with God and herself 0:10:44.850 --> 0:10:48.010 only at gunpoint. It is even more painful to see 0:10:48.010 --> 0:10:51.819 her get shot anyway. In a more properly moral story, 0:10:51.850 --> 0:10:54.460 she would be rewarded for her late breaking insight and 0:10:54.460 --> 0:10:58.240 her life would be spared. But the story only enacts 0:10:58.240 --> 0:11:01.150 what Christians say. They believe already that to lose one's 0:11:01.150 --> 0:11:03.010 body for the sake of one's soul is a good 0:11:03.010 --> 0:11:06.550 trait indeed. It's a mystery, and no small part of 0:11:06.550 --> 0:11:09.460 the mystery is the reader's visceral reaction to truths he 0:11:09.460 --> 0:11:12.940 or she claims to believe already. O'Connor invites us to 0:11:12.970 --> 0:11:16.270 step into such mysteries, but she never resolves them. She 0:11:16.270 --> 0:11:20.920 never reduces them to something manageable. O'Connor speaks with the 0:11:20.920 --> 0:11:23.890 ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She's 0:11:23.890 --> 0:11:26.410 like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to comfort ye, 0:11:26.440 --> 0:11:29.650 my people. Except for this, there is a kind of 0:11:29.650 --> 0:11:33.340 comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That's what 0:11:33.340 --> 0:11:36.370 happens in every one of Flannery O'Connor's stories. In a 0:11:36.370 --> 0:11:41.530 moment of extremity, a character, usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character, 0:11:41.530 --> 0:11:44.809 finally comes to see the truth of her situation. She 0:11:44.809 --> 0:11:46.910 is accountable to a great God who is the source 0:11:46.910 --> 0:11:50.060 of all. She inhabits mysteries that are too great for her, 0:11:50.630 --> 0:11:52.970 and for the first time there is hope, even if 0:11:52.970 --> 0:11:57.500 she doesn't understand it yet. In O'Connor's unique vision, the 0:11:57.500 --> 0:12:01.040 physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a 0:12:01.040 --> 0:12:04.220 place where Grace still does its work. In fact, it 0:12:04.220 --> 0:12:07.189 is exactly the place where Grace does its work. Truth 0:12:07.190 --> 0:12:10.459 tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout. 0:12:11.960 --> 0:12:14.569 Brad Gooch has pointed out that the phrase like something 0:12:14.570 --> 0:12:17.000 out of Flannery O'Connor has entered the vernacular as a 0:12:17.030 --> 0:12:20.959 kind of shorthand to describe a funny, dark, askew moment. 0:12:21.020 --> 0:12:23.600 He might have added that the phrase is also used 0:12:23.600 --> 0:12:26.390 to describe a wide range of phenomena around the edges 0:12:26.390 --> 0:12:30.020 of American culture, from religious manias to violent crimes to 0:12:30.050 --> 0:12:34.850 family dysfunction and reality TV freakishness of every stripe. That phrase, 0:12:34.850 --> 0:12:37.190 like something out of Flannery O'Connor, is a wave of 0:12:37.190 --> 0:12:39.979 the hand and a wink that says, we already know 0:12:39.980 --> 0:12:43.290 what to think about this person, about this situation, don't we? 0:12:43.320 --> 0:12:45.450 We already know what to think about two seed in 0:12:45.450 --> 0:12:49.800 the spirit Predestinarian Baptists in trailer park criminals and Florida man. 0:12:49.830 --> 0:12:52.020 Just as we already know what to think about serial 0:12:52.020 --> 0:12:55.079 killers and backwater racists and ignorant Bible salesmen who stump 0:12:55.080 --> 0:12:59.640 from country to country town. Except that in O'Connor's fiction, 0:12:59.640 --> 0:13:01.350 it turns out that we don't know what to think 0:13:01.350 --> 0:13:04.290 about them after all. Her fanatics and freaks can never 0:13:04.290 --> 0:13:07.380 safely be ignored or dismissed, for they have. The unsettling 0:13:07.380 --> 0:13:10.200 habit of telling the truth in A Good Man is 0:13:10.200 --> 0:13:13.020 hard to find. The misfit understands things about Jesus that 0:13:13.020 --> 0:13:16.320 the grandmother never has. The freak show hermaphrodite in a 0:13:16.320 --> 0:13:18.660 temple of the Holy Ghost, has a grasp on theological 0:13:18.660 --> 0:13:21.360 truths that have eluded the good Catholics in the story. 0:13:21.570 --> 0:13:24.570 Wise bloods Hazel motes may or may not be crazy 0:13:24.570 --> 0:13:27.270 in the head, but his heart pumps a wise blood 0:13:27.270 --> 0:13:29.700 that finally brings him back to the ultimate truth that 0:13:29.700 --> 0:13:34.770 he tries so strenuously to escape. In common usage, like 0:13:34.770 --> 0:13:37.020 something out of Flannery O'Connor is a license not to 0:13:37.050 --> 0:13:40.620 take a person or situation very seriously. But O'Connor did 0:13:40.650 --> 0:13:44.050 take her grotesque characters seriously. They seem to carry an 0:13:44.050 --> 0:13:47.920 invisible burden, she wrote. Their fanaticism is a reproach, not 0:13:47.920 --> 0:13:52.059 merely an eccentricity. When we gawk at O'Connor's characters and 0:13:52.059 --> 0:13:54.640 mock them, it is easy to assume that O'Connor must 0:13:54.640 --> 0:13:58.120 be mocking them too. We should be open to the possibility, however, 0:13:58.120 --> 0:14:02.020 that O'Connor is mocking us. In the violent, buried Away, 0:14:02.050 --> 0:14:04.929 old Tarwater is a self-appointed prophet with a penchant for 0:14:04.929 --> 0:14:09.130 baptizing children without their parents or guardians approval. His nephew, 0:14:09.160 --> 0:14:11.890 the enlightened schoolteacher Raber, is convinced that the old man 0:14:11.890 --> 0:14:16.449 is insane. The reader is inclined to agree. O'Connor. Not 0:14:16.450 --> 0:14:20.140 so much. The modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher, 0:14:20.140 --> 0:14:22.690 she wrote, but it is the old man who speaks 0:14:22.690 --> 0:14:27.100 for me. In Flannery O'Connor's body of work, there are 0:14:27.100 --> 0:14:29.710 as many kinds of misfit and maimed soul as there 0:14:29.710 --> 0:14:33.280 are stories the street preacher, the prostitute, the moonshiner, the 0:14:33.280 --> 0:14:37.270 serial killer, the hermaphrodite, the idiot, the bumpkin, the false prophet, 0:14:37.300 --> 0:14:40.940 the reluctant prophet, the refugee, the amputee. The con man. 0:14:40.970 --> 0:14:45.560 The monomaniac. The juvenile delinquent. Perhaps the phrase like something 0:14:45.590 --> 0:14:48.620 out of Flannery O'Connor is so widely applicable because there 0:14:48.650 --> 0:14:50.990 is such a wide range of characters in her fiction. 0:14:51.710 --> 0:14:54.170 But there is one other character type that appears in 0:14:54.170 --> 0:14:57.140 O'Connor's short stories at least as often as The Freak. 0:14:57.410 --> 0:15:00.320 Most of her stories involve a figure who is convinced 0:15:00.320 --> 0:15:03.080 that he or she already knows what to think, whose 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:06.170 certainty and self-righteousness have been a shield against the looming 0:15:06.170 --> 0:15:11.030 reality of sin and judgment and redemption. Joy Halga, the 0:15:11.030 --> 0:15:14.780 one legged philosopher in good country people. Julian, the social 0:15:14.780 --> 0:15:19.190 justice warrior. And everything that rises must converge. Asbury, the 0:15:19.190 --> 0:15:23.030 invalid and failed artist and the enduring chill throughout O'Connor's 0:15:23.030 --> 0:15:26.570 body of work. The complacent and self-reliant are confronted with 0:15:26.570 --> 0:15:29.510 a choice they can clutch at their own righteousness like 0:15:29.510 --> 0:15:32.330 a drowning man clutching at a cinder block. Or they 0:15:32.330 --> 0:15:34.880 can let it go, admit that they have been fools, 0:15:34.880 --> 0:15:39.030 and so enter into life. So the central figure in 0:15:39.030 --> 0:15:42.030 O'Connor's fiction, as it turns out, is neither the freak 0:15:42.030 --> 0:15:45.900 nor the fanatic, nor the felon, but the Pharisee. If 0:15:45.900 --> 0:15:49.260 we cannot see ourselves in the lunatics and deviants, surely 0:15:49.260 --> 0:15:51.810 we can see ourselves in the upright and the self-assured, 0:15:51.810 --> 0:15:54.240 who turn out to be so wrong about themselves and 0:15:54.240 --> 0:15:57.240 the people around them. Which is to say, we have 0:15:57.240 --> 0:15:59.850 all been one way or another, like something out of 0:15:59.850 --> 0:16:04.830 Flannery O'Connor. Where does vision like that come from? I 0:16:04.830 --> 0:16:07.410 wouldn't say it came from her physical suffering, but I 0:16:07.410 --> 0:16:10.500 will say that her physical suffering and its attendant limitations 0:16:10.500 --> 0:16:14.010 sharpened and disciplined her vision and her work. She wrote, 0:16:14.010 --> 0:16:16.860 I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, 0:16:16.860 --> 0:16:19.740 sickness is a place more instructive than a long trip 0:16:19.740 --> 0:16:22.830 to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, 0:16:22.830 --> 0:16:27.180 where nobody can follow. To the end of her short life. 0:16:27.210 --> 0:16:29.760 O'Connor was stewarding her energy so that she could devote 0:16:29.790 --> 0:16:34.140 what little she had to writing. Two weeks before she died, 0:16:34.140 --> 0:16:36.420 she sent a letter to pen pal Janet McKane in 0:16:36.420 --> 0:16:38.650 which she reproduced the prayer to Saint Raphael that she 0:16:38.650 --> 0:16:42.790 prayed every day. O Raphael, lead us toward those we 0:16:42.820 --> 0:16:46.960 are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, 0:16:46.960 --> 0:16:49.930 angel of happy meeting. Lead us by the hand toward 0:16:49.930 --> 0:16:52.780 those that we are looking for. May all our movements 0:16:52.810 --> 0:16:56.020 be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. 0:16:56.560 --> 0:17:00.130 Angel Guide of Tobias. Lay the request we now address 0:17:00.130 --> 0:17:01.930 to you at the feet of him on whose unveiled 0:17:01.930 --> 0:17:05.950 face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed 0:17:05.950 --> 0:17:09.129 by the separations and sorrows of life. We feel the 0:17:09.130 --> 0:17:11.680 need of calling you, and of pleading for the protection 0:17:11.680 --> 0:17:13.900 of your wings, so that we may not be as 0:17:13.900 --> 0:17:17.109 strangers in the province of joy, all ignorant of the 0:17:17.109 --> 0:17:21.700 concerns of our country. Remember the weak, you who are strong, 0:17:21.700 --> 0:17:25.240 you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder. And 0:17:25.240 --> 0:17:28.720 a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright, 0:17:28.720 --> 0:17:32.860 with the resplendent glory of God. It's an amazing thing 0:17:32.890 --> 0:17:35.199 to think about this woman who made a name for 0:17:35.200 --> 0:17:39.560 herself with stories of earthly terror and grotesquerie, meditating every 0:17:39.590 --> 0:17:42.830 day on the province of joy, preparing herself lest she 0:17:42.859 --> 0:17:46.100 be ignorant of the concerns of her true country. All 0:17:46.130 --> 0:17:49.310 that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All 0:17:49.340 --> 0:17:52.490 that violence was in the service of peace and serenity. 0:17:52.609 --> 0:17:56.150 And finally, at the age of 39, the writer whose 0:17:56.150 --> 0:17:59.240 every story was a thunderclap took her place beyond the 0:17:59.240 --> 0:18:03.980 region of thunder. There won't be any biographies written of me, 0:18:04.010 --> 0:18:07.760 O'Connor wrote, because for only one reason lives spent between 0:18:07.760 --> 0:18:10.550 the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy. 0:18:11.810 --> 0:18:14.750 Her life wasn't as uneventful as all that, but it 0:18:14.750 --> 0:18:16.669 was true that her life was mostly free of the 0:18:16.670 --> 0:18:20.060 drama and self-indulgence and entanglements that have made for more 0:18:20.060 --> 0:18:24.080 exciting copy in some of her peers biographies. There were 0:18:24.080 --> 0:18:27.080 no blow ups or meltdowns or crack ups or addictions 0:18:27.080 --> 0:18:30.560 in Flannery O'Connor's life. There was mostly a quiet attention 0:18:30.560 --> 0:18:33.260 to the work at hand, and a willingness to settle 0:18:33.260 --> 0:18:36.629 in and pay attention, to look, to listen until truth 0:18:36.630 --> 0:18:39.930 tells itself, no matter how loud it has to shout. 0:18:46.800 --> 0:18:49.860 The Habit Podcast is brought to you by the Rabbit Room, 0:18:49.859 --> 0:18:53.670 where art nourishes community, and community nourishes art. You can 0:18:53.670 --> 0:18:57.090 support their work including this podcast, by becoming a member. 0:18:57.119 --> 0:19:03.000 Visit rabbit room.com/membership. Special thanks as well to Taylor Leonard 0:19:03.000 --> 0:19:05.400 for letting us use her song diamonds as the theme 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:08.340 music for The Habit podcast. You can learn more about 0:19:08.369 --> 0:19:13.170 Taylor and follow her work at Taylor leonard.com. The Habit 0:19:13.200 --> 0:19:16.290 membership is a library of resources for writers by me, 0:19:16.290 --> 0:19:19.530 Jonathan Rogers. More importantly, the habit is a hub of 0:19:19.530 --> 0:19:22.710 community where like minded writers gather to discuss their work 0:19:22.710 --> 0:19:25.500 and give each other a little more courage. Find out 0:19:25.500 --> 0:19:27.600 more at the habit.co.