Flannery O'Connor's resentful artists

I wrote for L&L, on the occasion of the Flannery centennial, about two stories from her posthumous volume Everything That Rises Must Converge.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, an author unique in American letters for the attraction she exerts. Her life was cut short by disease, & she wrote only two novels & two collections of short stories—yet she has a reputation among American writers of the twentieth century. Further, she was Southern, & her stories tend to be about the South, but she is nevertheless beloved in both the North & the West. Stranger still, she is a Catholic with a reputation among the new, post-Protestant Americans.

O’Connor is so widely beloved because there is something about storytelling that makes us think she may know us better than we know ourselves. Her context is the American context—the great transformations of the continental democracy in the post-war era. Despite the vastness of those themes, she looks at major social movements from a certain distance which, paradoxically, encourages her readers to enter into the intimacy of her characters—to search their hearts, in a way that’s only possible in times of great changes, when our hopes & fears become unsettled.

The questions O’Connor’s approach makes her readers ask may even help lead us to self-knowledge. Of the Catholic readers, one would have to ask: Why do they like O’Connor’s black comedy so much? Of the Northern readers, one would ask: Why do they like the social observation of the very stratified class society of the South so much? More broadly, of the post-Protestant audience, one has to ask: Why do they wish to see the conjunction of violence and grace that marks her storytelling?

Read it & enjoy the stories, which you can listen to in pleasant narrations online as well:

Here’s one by Stephen Colbert, too, quite well done, shame he had to get into political nonsense, it’s done nothing for his artistry: