Flannery O’Connor’s Suffering and Sanity

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Flannery O’Connor knew that her readers would only begin to see the beauty of a life with Christ by seeing the ugliness of a world without Him.

Upon my arrival in the United States at the beginning of the present century, I was woefully ignorant of the American literature of the previous century. Today, almost a quarter of a century later, I’d like to pay homage to perhaps the greatest American writer of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of T.S. Eliot.

Flannery O’Connor’s works are “Christ-haunted”, a phrase which O’Connor coined to describe the American South of which she wrote. Her novels and short stories are always infused, albeit subliminally, with an orthodox Catholic perspective of life which is simultaneously darkened with the ugliness and violence of sin and lightened with satirically grotesque humour and hints of grace. She paints worlds in which the chill of rationalism and the cold-hearted callousness of sin create a deep sense of alienation in the psyches of her characters, rendering their existence almost surreal, devoid of meaning and divorced from reality. In such vacuity, the scream in the vacuum becomes a cri de coeur, an impassioned desire for the Real Presence of the Divine because its real absence is unbearable.     

The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is savagely psychopathic and yet, at the same time, savagely sane. “I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.” In perceiving himself as a hapless victim of injustice, he appears to be a kindred spirit with that other “madman,” King Lear, who declared himself “a man more sinn’d against than sinning.” 

The problem with which the Misfit struggles, in his case unsuccessfully, is the conundrum at the heart of life itself. Why do we suffer, and do we deserve such suffering? This was the conundrum at the very crux of Chesterton’s novel The Man Who was Thursday which explores the mind’s quest for meaning in the face of seemingly meaningless suffering. At the novel’s end, we discover that it is the suffering of God himself that makes sense of all suffering, and it is through the suffering of Christ that Christians find meaning and purpose in their own suffering. The paradox is not that suffering is meaningless, as is claimed by the satanic accuser in Chesterton’s novel or by the manically rational Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” but that, on the contrary, it uncovers the very secret at the heart of life itself. Far from being senseless, it actually makes sense of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It is not needless but necessary.

All of this was known and embraced by Flannery O’Connor whose acceptance of her struggle with the debilitating effects of lupus is manifested throughout her work. Her experience of suffering, and the strengthening of faith and awakening of love that it heralded, could even be said to have been incarnated in her work, the pain serving as her Muse. 

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the real absence of this acceptance, as revealed by the Misfit’s complaints about the suffering that he had experienced, leads to a desire to inflict suffering on others. The anger that is the bitter fruit of the Misfit’s non-acceptance is literally deadly, reaping havoc. 

Solzhenitsyn lamented that the hedonistic modern world considered the acceptance of suffering as “masochism,” yet here, in O’Connor’s story, we see the absence of such acceptance leading to sadism, and sadism of the most psychotic kind.

In another of O’Connor stories, “Good Country People”, another misfit, the ironically named Joy Hopewell, makes an art of cynical indifference, even going so far as to change her name to the deliberately ugly Hulga as a means of denying and defying the “joy” which was given to her at birth. Hulga has declared war on “joy” as a bitter reaction to her losing a leg in a hunting accident as a child. Her whole philosophy of life is built on the bitterness of unaccepted suffering. Like the other Misfit, she feels that life has treated her badly and she hates life because of it, and, as for God, if He exists he is the one responsible for her hateful life. The sin of pride, the source of her bitterness, is made evident by the fact that she has effectively declared herself the god of her own cosmos, a fact revealed by O’Connor through the words of defiance that Hulga directs to her mother: “If you want me, here I am—LIKE I AM.” This is evidently a thinly veiled reference to the name that God gives to himself, when asked his name by Moses in the Book of Exodus: I Am Who Am. Hulga has not only changed her name, she has changed her religion. She now worships herself alone. She has declared herself god of herself. This, of course, is the de facto and default position of all relativists. In refusing to accept the existence of absolutes, including truth itself, they make themselves the sole arbiters of reality. 

Deceived by her pride into believing that she is not deceived by anything, Hulga tells Pointer, the Bible salesman, that “I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.” The delicious irony is that she is being deceived by Pointer even as she is speaking. As he steals her wooden leg, she vents her venomous spleen against him and the religion she believes he represents: “You’re a Christian!” she hisses. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another.”

Again, she is deceived by her own credulous incredulity, which is made clear when Pointer responds indignantly that he does not believe “in that crap”. His last words to her represent the final comical coup de grâce: “And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga, you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”

As with all of O’Connor’s fiction the key to understanding the work is to be found on the level of allegory. In “Good Country People,” the wooden leg is both the crutch and the crux of the story. It is the crutch upon which the whole story rests and the crux, that is, the cross, to which it points. The wooden leg is the cross that Joy/Hulga has been called to carry, that she is called to accept as Christ accepted his own Cross. In her refusal to accept her cross she sows the seeds of her own downfall. In refusing to accept her suffering with joy, it becomes the source of her bitterness, the root of her sin. Perhaps Hell is full of forsaken crosses. Perhaps it is from these that the damned hang eternally.  

Flannery O’Connor knew that her readers would only begin to see the beauty of a life with Christ by seeing the ugliness of a world without Him. She shows us the value of the light by showing us the darkness, reminding us that we do not value the good things in our lives, even our own particular “wooden legs”, until we lose them. This is the truth to which the aptly named Pointer points.

The brilliance of O’Connor’s use of the grotesque is that her stories bring the essential metaphysics to the surface. She presents us with gargoyles, such as the resentful Misfit and the joyless Hulga, in order to show us the face of the devil. Her grotesque conceits unmask the devil, to borrow the title of Regis Martin’s excellent study of O’Connor, by removing the mask of the mundane that obscures the struggle of good and evil at the heart of reality. It is as if she picks up the stone which our hardened hearts have become in order to reveal the nest of cockroaches, or serpents, lurking beneath. “My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” she tells us, echoing the words of Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” This is the battlefield of which O’Connor writes, and it is the most realistic battlefield of all because it is the one on which we are all fighting, whether we like it or not, or know it or not.

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The featured image, uploaded by Manelka Jayasundara, is a photograph, “A Peacock is perched on a tall branch of a dead tree” (28 April 2019). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.