Flannery O'Connor

The Argument

Flannery O'Connor is the central figure of Christian literary fiction in the twentieth century, and her work is both the most demanding and the most theologically serious fiction produced by an American writer in that period. She wrote grotesque Southern Gothic stories populated by freaks, confidence men, deluded grandmothers, and violent grace, and she wrote them as a devout Roman Catholic who understood exactly what she was doing.

Her famous statement — that for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures — is the key to her method. She was writing for a secular audience that had lost the capacity to recognize grace when it appeared in conventional forms, so she made grace appear in unconventional ones: in a violent encounter on a highway, in the goring of a self-righteous farmer, in the drowning of a child who wanted to be baptized, in the moment of a murderer's bullet. Grace in O'Connor arrives with the force of a physical blow because that is the only way her readers will feel it.

For literary apologetics, O'Connor is the writer who demonstrates most clearly that Christian fiction is not about making Christianity look attractive. It is about telling the truth about reality, and reality includes the violent operation of grace on hearts that have closed themselves to it. Her stories are not comfortable. They are the most honest fiction being written in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and their honesty is inseparable from their theology.