In the preface to his short story collection, Bagombo Snuff Box, author Kurt Vonnegut laid out his Eight Rules to Creative Writing. Staying true to form, he tempered the extent of his literary cachet with a little bit of self-deprecation.
“The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor,” he said. “She broke practically every one of my rules…Great writers tend to do that.”
Indeed, the ghost of Flannery O’Connor has a bit of a reputation. In many ways, Vonnegut’s quote speaks directly towards O’Connor’s vaunted position amongst her fellow writers. Just like Vonnegut, O’Connor was an iconoclast. But while most mid-century satirists drew their charge from humanistic texts, her criticisms were leveled on the behalf of an institution entirely hinged upon iconic theological figures. In a world that had been flipped on its head by 500 years of reformation, O’Connor positioned herself as a reverse-recusant. Her renowned devotion to her Catholic beliefs gifted her with perhaps the most incongruous source for subversive satire in all of 20th century literature.
It’s no wonder that people like Vonnegut, who should have served as her philosophical opposite, sang (and continue to sing) her praises. O’Connor was, for lack of a better term, a character. Any self-respecting author could only dream of creating someone so beautifully and thoroughly complicated.
She may have had the look of a pious librarian, but O’Connor packed a fierce literary punch. While her fiction is certainly rooted in religious theory, it also musters the inherent melancholy usually found in far more nihilistic works. Through her celebrated short stories and two drastically underrated novels, the author takes shot after shot at southern Protestants for missing the point, directing a bevy of sharp barbs towards anyone inclined to use their religious reputations for earthly gain.
It’s easy to see how this message continues to appeal as much to progressive atheists as it does to people who share O’Connor’s beliefs. For staunch Catholics, entire generations have been gifted a fine-tuned poetic voice. For those who aren’t especially religious, the outré of her work provides a wholly unique outlook on the extremely touchy issues of guilt, corruption and the delusion of karmic balance.
Perhaps this is why when a frustrated Jonathan Franzen was soul-searching during the years between his first and second novels, he tapped continuously into O’Connor’s work for motivation. In an interview with the Paris Review, he explained the inspiration he drew from an author who was able to transcend her initial outward leanings.
“My first book had been published, and my wife and I had fled to Europe; things were getting hard in the marriage. And, perhaps not coincidentally, I’d fallen under the spell of religious writers, particularly Flannery O’Connor and Dostoyevsky. My wife and I began touring cathedrals and looking at medieval sculpture and Romanesque churches. Wise Blood, The Brothers Karamazov, and the cathedral at Chartres are all examples of religious art, which is neither just religion nor just art; it’s a special category, a special binding of the aesthetic and the devotional. O’Connor and Dostoyevsky venture intensely into the extremes of human psychology, but always with serious moral purpose.”
And this is why Flannery O’Connor will always be an author’s author. She used the art of prose to the full extent of its unique philosophical capabilities. While many writers did not (and do not) share her devout faith in organized religion, they do trust completely in the sanctity of the written word. And in this church, Flannery O’Connor was canonized the very same day she passed away. In the house of literary fiction, she is an undeniable saint.
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Elsewhere in inReads: Liked The Corrections and Freedom? Check out more of Jonathan Franzen’s work. Or read a short story by Kurt Vonnegut.