Fabulous Flannery

Great snippet from Ralph C. Wood lecture on the life of Flannery O'Conner . . .


"The nuns just off the boat from Ireland gave her a no-nonsense education in the cathedral school. But back in Milledgeville, there were harder lessons to learn. Early pain and parental loss served as warning signs that her talents, as she had learned from Jesus’ parable, were not meant to be safely buried but boldly increased and returned to God, whether sooner or later. Hence her early ambition to be writer, dedicating her art to the glory of God. The call of the Gospel was not, despite her mother’s wishes to the contrary, for her to become a Southern belle but a Christian eccentric. Christians live literally off-center, not oriented upon the things of the world but upon Christ: “You shall know the Truth,” she supposedly said, “and the Truth shall make you odd.” Christian faith made her angular and knotty, not smooth and soothing. A radical Christian faith required a critical, even a satirical, distance from the world, but also a willingness to laugh at herself: “My function at my mamma’s tea parties is to cover the stain on the sofa.” Asked to name the most influential book of their childhood, the Milledgeville ladies answered: Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, or else the Canterbury Tales. O’Connor responded more candidly: “the Sears & Roebuck catalogue.” But, as she also confessed, “the humerous [sic] tales of Edgar Allen Poe.”"