Years ago, when I was in college, I often experienced strange coincidences while traveling that only made sense as divine gifts—God lining events up to produce beautiful coincidences. In the spring of my senior year, I had been invited to join a weekend seminar in Atlanta, Georgia, on community and civil society, and I thought to arrive a day early so I could rent a car and drive down to Milledgeville, Flannery O’Connor’s hometown. It was only when I arrived to visit what is now Georgia College & State University, O’Connor’s alma mater, that I realized it was also her birthday: March 25, the feast of the Annunciation. I had not planned this in any way; it just so happened that the seminar was the weekend after, and so I felt that coincidence as a happy gift from a loving Father.
As Catholics, we spend a great deal of time preparing for and celebrating the most important annual occurrences, such as Easter, Christmas, Pentecost, and others, like the feast days of our patron saints and the anniversaries of our baptisms if we’re particularly on top of things and the rush of time doesn’t overwhelm us. This year happens to be the 100th anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, and already a number of worthwhile articles have discussed her Catholic approach to suffering, her recently exhibited paintings, and her extraordinary witness to the Gospel. But briefly examining the liturgical feast associated with her birth might help us to see something which, even after decades of scholarly writing about her works of fiction, has generally remained obscure: how the form of her writing, and especially her novels, reflects the Christian understanding of personal freedom.
In St. Luke’s telling of the Annunciation, there are but two characters: the archangel Gabriel and the Blessed Virgin Mary—or that’s what we might remember just from reading the Gospel pericope. But St. Luke does not begin his Gospel with the Annunciation, or at least not that to Mary; he rather begins with the annunciation to St. Zechariah, who would become the father of John the Baptist, when the priest was offering incense in the temple. Reading these annunciations in concert, as the Gospel’s form asks us to, reveals that while both Zechariah and Mary question Gabriel, Mary’s question results from her belief, whereas—as Gabriel makes clear—Zechariah’s questioning arises from his unbelief (Luke 1:20), and he is temporarily struck mute as a witness to the divine promise he has received. Mary’s question does not come from unbelief but from confusion; as the Protoevangelium of St. James testifies, she had been offered to God as a virgin in the temple, which apparently contradicted the message of the angel. How could she give birth to the son of God when she knew not man—not simply yet but would not in the future? Her question concerns her freedom to conceive a child given the vow already pledged on her account, but she asked it with a full desire to bring about the will of God.
“Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”
While the saints, canonized and uncanonized, diverge tremendously in their personalities, they are all alike in participating in that same desire. Flannery O’Connor wanted to exercise her God-given talents to produce fruits for the Lord so that her writing could be a gift re-gifted to its source. Reading her prayer journal, composed when she was a student in the MFA program at Iowa, reveals her imploring her Creator to bring her gifts to fruition in times of discouragement: “Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted.” In the 20/20 of hindsight, we can see these prayers as fully answered, but she struggled in prayer with a sense of her own ingratitude even after having received inspiration toward a story, not quite knowing how much life would remain in her stories once they had entered the world.
While readers today may be familiar with O’Connor’s discussion of her own stories in her letters collected in The Habit of Being, her early readers were not so blessed—but ten years after she had published her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), she gave a rare public indication of what she thought her novel was about. After suggesting the difference between herself and many of her readers with respect to her main character, Hazel “Haze” Motes—their sense of his integrity, she thought, was that it depended on how much he strove to be rid of Christ, while she thought Haze’s integrity lay in his inability to flee from Christ—she questions whether integrity can consist in what we find ourselves unable to do. She answers, “I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”
O’Connor understood the task of fiction not to be the simple representation of sociological reality nor of mere moral instruction (although the moral imagination was for her an important part of what the writer saw) but rather the deepening of mystery within its readers, and the work of her first novel was to deepen in our understanding the mystery of freedom. In her comment above, she provides a notion of freedom profoundly like that revealed by St. Augustine in his Confessions, which goes back even further to St. Paul’s account of his own struggle to live according to Christ’s charity: “For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do” (Rom. 7:15). As men and women subject to concupiscence, our wills are divided, such that freedom cannot mean simply following our will without prudent judgment of which of our desires are of God, what in the terms of St. Ignatius of Loyola would be understood as “discernment of spirits.”
In seeking to bring her readers to greater contemplation about the reality of human freedom, O’Connor followed one of her chief literary influences, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, generally known for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, living and suffering under communism in the following century, saw Dostoevsky as having developed a new literary form which truly revealed the truth about the human person: the polyphonic novel. Dostoevsky’s novels do not rely on character “types,” such that certain characters are merely useful for the novelist’s story, but rather, as Bakhtin claims, he truly treats his characters as persons, as “a particular point of view on the world and on oneself.” Dostoevsky’s vision contrasted with that of the materialistic psychology of his time (still alive in ours) that regarded human beings as utterly legible before the eyes of scientific experts. Rather, Dostoevsky knew, in Bakhtin’s words, “In a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal, in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition.” Before all other humans, we each contain a depth that is hidden unless we choose to reveal it; how great a mystery it is, then, what St. Augustine writes about God, interior intimo meo, that he is nearer to us than our own inmost self! God knows us in our depths but from the inside, as we know ourselves but also beyond our self-deception, and as one who loves us more than we love ourselves.
For her first 100 years, Flannery O’Connor has been largely esteemed as a writer of short stories, and brilliant as these are, I hope the next century brings about a greater focus on her novels. They have generally not been understood, as readers have been too given to the monologic mode of authors like Tolstoy rather than the profound Christian depths that Dostoevskian polyphony requires. Wise Blood is truly a polyphonic work, as we see when reading about the many characters its protagonist, young veteran Hazel Motes, encounters as he wanders the fictional city of Taulkinham struggling with the desire for God in his divided heart. These include the young man desperate for friendship, Enoch Emery, who develops a strange fascination with Gonga, a movie gorilla; the storytelling teenager Sabbath Lily Hawks, out to make Haze her man; and Haze’s landlady, Mrs. Flood, full of modern opinions yet drawn to his later penances. As I have discussed in various lectures, the almost unexplored archival version of the novel in Milledgeville means that both amateurs and scholars still have much to learn and discuss both from and about the novel. Approaching our country’s 250th anniversary suggests we should consider afresh our freedom and its aim, in the here and now and in the life to come, and O’Connor’s Wise Blood will help us deepen our sense of this mystery if we “approach with fear of God and with faith.”