Tuesday Tomes - Flannery O'Connor

I love the writing of Flannery O'Connor. My favorite of her short stories is "Revelation," which appears in the collection, Everything the Rises Must Converge. In fact, the name for this blog, Altered Faces, is taken from a phrase in that story.

A few days ago, I was pleased to discover there are a number of recordings available online of Flannery reading her own work. Below is a recording of her reading "A Good Man is Hard to Find" before a live audience at Vanderbilt University in 1959. Hearing it her own voice adds another dimension for experiencing this story. It's also amusing to hear the reactions of her audience. I would recommend that you listen to it with the text of the story in hand. If you don't already have the book, A Good Man is Hard to Find, you can find the story here.



From “On Her Own Work” in Mystery and Manners -

Much of my fiction takes its character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, though the reasonableness of my  use of it may not always be apparent.  The assumptions that underlie this use of it, however, are those of the central Christian mysteries.  These are assumptions to which a large part of the modern audience takes exception.  About this I can only say that there are perhaps other ways than my own in which ["A Good Man Is Hard to Find"] could be read, but none other by which it could have been written.  Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.

From “On Her Own Work” in Mystery and Manners -

I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies.  This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity.  The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it.  It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make.  It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

From “On Her Own Work” in Mystery and Manners -

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violence which precede and follow them.  The devil's greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist. 

I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.  Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.  This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considered cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

From “Writing Short Stories” in Mystery and Manners - 

 I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully.