Misinterpretations, Idolatry, and Anti-Manichaeism in O’Connor’s Fiction

When I first read Flannery O’Connor, I thought she was lampooning Southern idiocy, the kind of evangelical buffoonery and racism that’s become a cheap joke. Then I read Mystery & Manners, and thought she was a Christian nut job mashing together the Old Testament God with the New Testament Christ to give her characters and readers some much needed tough love. I believed this lessened the importance and impact of her fiction.

            Oh, how wrong I was.

            Upon further investigation, I realize the problem was my agnosticism as a modern reader. I’d misinterpreted her work at every level. It wasn’t just the generation gap between O’Connor’s redemptive themes and our own cultural mores, but the complex structure of her fiction. And I was no doubt influenced by my flirtation with the New Atheists. Remember, New Atheists: religion = bad. Boogey-boogey-boogey.

Anyway, O’Connor’s use of imagery, vocabulary, and symbols that contain negative cultural connotations only enables further misinterpretation. She cleverly employs this technique, and therefore her true intentions may go unnoticed since her salvational concerns for her characters must find harsh conflict in the worlds they inhabit, ones that lack the Christian values of love, hope, and charity. Of course, this is O’Connor’s theological concern—the world of her characters is our own (har-har).

            In “Revelation”, for example, from her second collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, Ruby Turpin’s excessive judgments in the doctor’s office about Mary Grace seem to suggest Turpin’s fervent Christianity is the cause of this pervasive “othering.” O’Connor’s biting prose reads as if Grace is justified when she tells Turpin, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This makes sense as modern audiences tend to see Christians as rabidly judgmental, more concerned with our salvation than their own sins. Of course, this is the modern media stereotype. Westboro Baptist Church = all Christians. You get the idea.

Yet, in Turpin O’Connor examines the horror of human complacency. Turpin is so satisfied in her own beliefs she’s blind to her lack of character and in turn, of true Christian understanding. In the end, standing amongst her hogs, raging at God before the setting sun in a very Job-like scene, Turpin realizes her pettiness. The ignorance that follows complacency has almost ruined her life. Only by defeating her pride and her desire to possess “all the answers” without participating in the continual wheel of confusion/wisdom, does she find redemption.

I guess you’d call it God’s grace.

Many have called O’Connor’s work “good Catholic fiction,” a charge that at first seems ludicrous. Stories about murderers, pedophiles, and mouthy, fat Southern ladies? Really?!

Well, what’s considered good Catholic fiction by the Vatican isn’t necessarily considered such by O’Connor. After all, she often said the Church needs reform. This raises the question, “What is a good Catholic?”

First, let’s understand O’Connor’s vile characters are actually “prophets” in her work. A prophet in literature doesn’t have to stroll into town proclaiming the Good Word. No, he or she only has to proclaim O’Connor’s gospel. Catholic guilt aside, the importance of being Catholic, and thus a “good Catholic,” is to realize you will never have all the answers. In this way, you are imperfect (the Church and Pope’s infallibility is whole other can o’ worms). You’re human, and must recognize this in its totality. You are not a god, but a small cog in a vast, complex machine.

Why would you think you have all the answers?

Well, pride, and fear.

This sweet face writes about murderers.

            For O’Connor, any ideology that blinds one to the realities of the world is pagan worship. In thinking one is always right, one can’t see how often one is wrong. By worshipping one’s ideology, one is worshiping oneself, and putting his or her worth before God’s.

This often results in violent, disturbing, or blackly comic climaxes in O’Connor’s fiction. These “negative” denouements are essential—they’re a form of iconoclasm, the breaking of the individual’s psychological and spiritual idols. To understand this further, you must realize O’Connor’s favoritism of St. Thomas Aquinas’ critique of Manichaeism.

Manichaeism, developed in the third century, took God’s second commandment to heart: it deplored graven images. God is neither a man nor a physical being, and cannot be artistically depicted. St. Thomas Aquinas viciously opposed Manichaeism. While he agreed God is a spirit, and to worship images is sinful, he thought that just because someone renders an image of God doesn’t mean that person believes the image contains God. To Aquinas, Manichaeism concerned itself too much with materiality and failed to see the glory of the Divine picture, human dignity, and love. 

For O’Connor, “Parker’s Back” illustrates this. Parker, in an attempt to win the favor of his wife, Sarah, gets a Byzantine tattoo of Jesus Christ on his back. Although he acts as if he could care less about the fanatically religious Sarah, he actually wants her to see him as her lover, husband, and friend. He knows the tattoo is just a tattoo. Yet, when he shows it to Sarah, she condemns it. “He don’t look,” she says. “He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.” Not only is Sarah’s conception of God problematic (if He is a spirit, how does he have a face?), she’s blinded by pride. Like Ruby Tuprin, she only sees the world through her disapproval of others. She cannot understand the difference between a picture of God and the Divine Mystery, of which she is part, and therefore cannot truly see her husband, understand his love, or even herself.

Much if not all of O’Connor’s work can be seen as a battle between self-idolatry and true spiritual insight. Modern readers may misunderstand her purpose because of their inability to separate her intentions from her religious affiliation. She has no traditional “Catholic agenda” or ideological mission. By creating characters so convinced their doctrine is infallible, you’d think O’Connor is saying that their dogma is anything but. However, her point is that the human mind and all the wrathful deities within is where real fallibility lies. This type of stubbornness (ie, the fear of realizing this fallibility) must be broken. She smashes it with truth and irony.

Or if you’d like, God’s grace.