Righting the Skewed Definitions
I'd like to approach a reading of Flannery O'Connor's fiction from what may seem a strange angle. Both O'Connor and C.S. Lewis were pretty good lay theologians. Both also seemed to believe that some problems in theology lie in skewed definitions. For example, in The Problem Of Pain, Lewis writes,
By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness. . . . And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or that, but just happy. What would satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to be doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves," and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of the day, "a good time was had by all." Not many people. . .would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should like very much to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction. (39-40)
Mary Ann
Flannery O'Connor wrote in her [1961] "Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann," "Stories of pious children tend to be false. This may be because they are told by adults, who see virtue where their subjects would only see a practical course of action" (822). She seems to have feared that Mary Ann's story might become just such a book. O'Connor writes, "Bad children are harder to endure than good ones, but they are easier to read about" (827).
She successfully talked the nuns who asked her to write the book about the disfigured girl into putting the story together themselves and offered to edit the manuscript. When the book came to her, she had the following reaction:
There was everything about the writing to make the professional writer groan. Most of it was reported, very little was rendered; at the dramatic moment -- where there was one -- the observer seemed to fade away, and where an exact word or phrase was needed, a vague one was usually supplied. Yet when I had finished reading, I remained for some time, the imperfections of the writing forgotten, thinking about the mystery of Mary Ann. They had managed to convey it. (828)
The Sisters, O'Connor believed, gave Mary Ann "an education for death" (829). In this, Mary Ann may have been more fortunate than children born with straight faces. [A picture of Mary Ann shows half her face to be fine while the other was messed up badly (by cancer?).]
When the Sisters visited O'Connor in Milledgeville to talk about the book, she suggested "that Mary Ann could not have been much but good, considering her environment", and Sister Evangelist replied "We've had some demons!" (829). Later, during the same visit, one of the nuns asked O'Connor "why the grotesque (of all things) was [her] vocation" (829). Before the writer could answer, another guest said to the nun, "It's your vocation too" (830). O'Connor continued:
This opened up for me also a new perspective on the grotesque. Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept the fact that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look. When we look into the face of good, we are liable to see a face like Mary Ann's, full of promise. (830) {emphasis mine}
Baumgaertner's discussion of Wise Blood
In her book, Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring, Jill Baumgaertner writes that "Wise Blood. . .is about a modern pilgrim who does not want to progress, who is in fact more interested in moving backwards than forwards" (121). O'Connor called the novel's protagonist a "Christian malgre lui [in spite of himself]" (Author's Note To The Second Edition). Baumgaertner also connect the novel to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress:
The mythic journeys of both Christian in the seventeenth-century work and Hazel Motes in the twentieth-century novel trace emblematic routes through death to salvation. The difference is that Christian holds on to the ideal of salvation, and this surely allows him to persevere, even though he succumbs to temptation and experiences backsliding along the way. Hazel, on the other hand, has ostensibly rejected the ideal, and he attempts over and over again to regress, to deny God, to reject salvation. (121-22)
Hazel Motes is always moving. During most of the novel he is trying to get away from Jesus who moves
from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild and ragged figure motioning to him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. (O'Conner 22)
Of course, what Haze wants is "his feet on the known track" (22). Only after he blinds himself, Baumgaertner writes, does Haze finally "look as if he is moving forward toward something he can see. Ironically, for the first time, he is perfectly still" (125)
Haze, it seems, must be shaped back into belief. He constructs an illogical church, supposedly based on reason, and makes an idol of the "rat-colored" automobile. When Haze bargains for the car, he asks the boy in the lot "How much is it?" "Jesus on the cross," the boy said, "Christ nailed" (70). Baumgaertner writes,
The fact is that the car will cost Hazel his unbelief. The price will truly be Jesus on the cross. . . . In purchasing the car, Hazel hopes to run from Jesus more effectively, but he will discover that because of the car he will be forced to confront Jesus more squarely. At one point he yells, "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified." The loss of the car after its use as an instrument of murder will force him back to his feet and prove to him just how much he does need to be justified in the eyes of God. (124)
Haze, after choosing a life of spiritual blindness, chooses physical blindness at the end of the novel, and like Oedipus, is able to see. As Baumgaertner writes, "he is motionless, but he moves; he is sinner and his redeemed" (125).
"In most of O'Connor's fiction death is a major agent of revelation," Baumgaertner continues. "Death becomes an unavoidable fact for Hazel when he murders his double. . . . Haze kills the man, but before he dies the two become linked forever in the sacrament of confession" (136).
With the loss of his car, which has enabled him to move quickly (although he never goes anywhere), comes revelation. . . . He has become the ragged figure which he has been trying to avoid all of his life. (138)
Baumgaertner cites a letter from O'Connor to Louise Abbot in which O'Connor defines penance: "not acts performed in order to attract God's attention or get credit for oneself. It is something natural that follows sorrow" (Habit of Being 354). Baumgaertner claims that this "is the most satisfactory way of explaining Hazel's self-mutilation" (139).
He has, for the first time in his life, felt true sorrow, and it is natural for him to handle that sorrow by attempting to reject the parts of his body that have offended him. . . . He blinds himself not only because he is completing an act which the false preacher Asa Hawks never finished, but also because he realizes that his vision has led him astray. . . . Hazel is finally able to see God by following the way of the cross, by confronting its scandal, and participating in the kingdom of God it ushers in. With loss, suffering, and death comes revelation. With the sacraments of confession and penance come release and redemption. (139-40)
Lewis concluded
Does God love Hazel Motes? Again, I return to Lewis. He outlines the different pictures or "types" of God's love.
The lowest type, and one which is love at all only by an extension of the word, is that which an artist feels for an artefact [for example, Jeremiah's potter and clay image]. . . . We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something God is making. . . (42)
Events in Haze's life serve not to bring about his downfall, but to effect his humble return to Christ.
Another picture of God's relationship with his creation is "the love of a man for a beast" (Lewis 43). "We are his people and the sheep of his pasture," the Scripture says. Christ's parable of the lost sheep seems to apply to Haze because no matter how far Haze strays, God will always seek him out.
A similar picture, what Lewis calls "a noble analogy," is "a father's love for a son" (44). Lewis continues, "Love between father and son, is this symbol, means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other" (45). Haze rebels, but God continues to try and shape the runaway prophet into His image.
I find it interesting that Lewis' last analogy, that of God's love for humanity being like the physical union between a man and woman most difficult to see in Wise Blood. Perhaps in the end, when Haze is "farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light" (232), an application can be made. He is finally a pure, clean Bride, prepared for union with Christ, though in death.
Works Cited
Baumgaertner, Jill P. Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring. Wheaton: Shaw, 1988.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillian, 1962.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. Sally Fitzgerald, ed. New York: Farrar, 1979.
---. Collected Works. Sally Fitzgerald, ed. New York (?): Library of America, 1988.
---. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, 1962.