The Passion of Flannery O’Connor
"Had Flannery O’Connor been on the scene, we can be sure, she would have
reported it as some kind of freak-out, a dusty near-riot, not Woodstock
but Altamont—scuffles, bad vibes, mic feedback. Where the Word was
operational, for O’Connor, it was always disruptive: in its presence,
one’s head was supposed to explode. Her short stories,
especially, reengineered the Joycean epiphany, the quiet moment of
transcendence, as a kind of blunt-force baptismal intervention: her
characters are KO’d, dismantled, with a violence that would be
absurdist, if the universe were absurd. But the universe is not absurd.
“There is an interaction between man and God which to disregard is an
act of insolence,” wrote the rabbi and theologian Abraham Joshua
Heschel, her contemporary, in The Prophets. “Isolation is a fairy
tale.” The upended moment, the breaking-in or breaking-through of a
vagrant, unbiddable reality: this is the grace of God and the sign of
his love."
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