Thrown Off Balance

One of the greatest disciples of the twentieth century was neither a priest, nor a religious, nor a married person. She was a celibate, single woman who spent the last 13 years of her life battling lupus while writing some of the best fiction the world has ever known—all while living on a 544-acre dairy farm in Milledgeville, Ga. with her mother, her books, and forty-four peacocks. Her name was Flannery O’Connor.

-Fr. Damian Ference, The Vocation of Flannery O’Connor

Writing that may be dismissed as jarring, acerbic, and too controversial by people who are loathe to sit in the same room with someone who won’t validate their narrative – whether Progressive or Christian – are the short stories of Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964). She didn’t compile fluff for people to sit with the comfortable.

“She believed that story-telling ought to help modern men and women see “things as they are,” cutting through the fog of a culture that tells us that everything can be just the way we’d like it to be.”  -George Weigel, Flannery O’Connor and Catholic realism

O’Connor’s stories are typically set in the rural American South. Her sardonic Southern Gothic style employed the grotesque, the transgressive, and wild, comical and deeply-flawed characters who are often alienated from God and often in violent situations. Because of these traits, her stories may be dismissed by some readers – they do not sense a clear-cut Gospel message in her work or a comforting message.

Faith, for O’Connor, was not something easy or comforting. It involved a struggle with doubt within the seeming randomness and cruelty of life. She understood that struggle as maturing her faith.

In a letter to Lousie Abbot, O’Connor wrote

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

O’Connor wrote about the world as she found it in the Protestant South and etched her Catholic worldview into her stories. She professed: “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.” 

Her signature short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, embodies this. You might recognize yourself and what’s at work in your life upon reading it.

The title of the story is the title of a well-known song of O’Connor’s day, sung by Bessie Smith. But the story doesn’t reference a woman’s hard time with men as the song does. The story would have us look at what it means to be a “good man”. Everyone has their own definition of what it means to be good, as do two characters in the story – the grandmother and the Misfit.

The grandmother values her Southern upbringing and mannerisms. For a road trip, the grandmother is all fancied up, white gloves and all, as is the habit of Southern women. The grandmother thinks goodness is being polite, nice, respectful, and agreeing with her views on things. This is brought out in her conversation with Red Sam, a character as fatuous as the grandmother. He delivers the title’s line that comes across as a cliché dismissive of the real world’s Misfit-type violence.

The escaped-convict Misfit, also steeped in Southern tradition, views the world through an amoral nihilist filter. He is unconcerned with traditional morality or even the value of other people’s lives. He shows up in a big black hearse-like vehicle. By a turn of events, generated by the manipulative grandmother and her cat, they meet. The grandmother, “good” in a decent person sense of good does not appreciate what she is up against. Will she finally grasp what makes a “good man?”

The family members, who shout and argue until someone gives in and behave in petty selfish ways without much reflection or moral thought find themselves in a less-than-good situation. What happens to them?

What does the Misfit say about punishment, the law, and about Jesus and the resurrection?

And what does the story show about the activity of and need for grace and the state of the human condition that refuses it?

I have purposefully not given you a summary of A Good Man is Hard to Find. Reading it first and then listening to podcasts would be the best introduction to her work.

Why do I read Flannery O’Connor?

Her unsentimental gimlet-eyed Kafkaesque realism speaks to me as a writer in our distorted and moronic times.

“Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” ― Flannery O’Connor

Her stories move mystical concepts down from a theological mountain into the hands of her characters – the misfits, freaks, and outsiders who reckon with them or don’t. Her ‘parables’ hit home more than all the logical sermons I’ve heard on grace, salvation, goodness, punishment, forgiveness, and moral decay.

And, like Jesus, she’s “thrown everything off balance.”

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The Great Books Podcast: ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ Flannery O’Connor | National Review

A Good Man is Hard to Find BONUS episode (1517.org)

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Bishop Barron Presents | Ethan and Maya Hawke – Understanding Flannery (youtube.com)

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Further on Flannery:

Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio | Open Culture

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — HCC Learning Web (hccs.edu)

How Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy Helped to Invent the South – By Nick Ripatrazone | The Marginalia Review of Books

The Complete Stories (archive.org)

Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in Rare 1959 Audio | Open Culture

Flannery | American Masters | PBS

The Vocation of Flannery O’Connor – Word on Fire

Flannery O’Connor Reads “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1959) (youtube.com)

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(Cormac McCarthy (1933 – 2023) had a several influences including O’Connor. Georgia-born O’Connor wrote in Southern Gothic mode and Tennessee-born McCarthy in Appalachian Gothic mode.  Both, with grim-humor, created grotesque characters and nihilistic settings – O’Conner to reveal the possibility of divine grace and lapsed Catholic McCarthy to wonder about the meaning of life. Both writers use violence in their stories. McCarthy to the extreme (Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men.)

Flannery O’Connor on Why the Grotesque Appeals to Us, Plus a Rare Recording of Her Reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”:

In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider.

All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.