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“I'm Alien to a Great Deal”: Flannery O'Connor and the Modernist Ethic

Flannery O'Connor's great skill as an artist is her ability to detail the dynamics of conflict, and to pose a dialectic of belief and disbelief that directly challenges the secular spirit of her time. More than any other writer of the modern era, O'Connor was in the habit of seeing all things in significant relation both to one another and to eternity. "It is the measure of her genius," Joyce Carol Oates explains in "The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor," "that she can so easily and so skilfully evoke the spiritual while dealing in a very concrete, very secular world of fragmentary people." The insights her characters are forced to entertain are born from tremendous individual suffering. Even those protagonists who are not personally dispatched at the conclusion of a story bear no resemblence to their former selves. They are liberated from their trance of Self by acts of extraordinary brutality, but in their abrupt transformations they seem to move from one extreme level of being to another: from an initially stable world of superficially secure investments and self-knowledge to a volatile realm of bewilderment and radical insight. The intensity of the encounter with revelatory experience in O'Connor's fiction leaves her characters displaced, stunned, and more often than not, deceased.