Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality

Edited By
Jan Nordby Gretlund
&
Karl-Heinz Westarp

The University of South Carolina Press ($39.95)

ISBN: 1-57003-601-2

More than forty years after her death, Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and life resonant again in a collection of fourteen essays by friends and scholars that range from the conversational to the scholarly; however, Lila N. Meeks succinctly explains all one really needs to know in one sentence, “For O’Connor the greatest literature involves the salvation or loss of one’s soul.”  Everything else in Radical Reality is gravy.

O’Connor’s devotion to Catholicism is reinforced and explained more in depth into her fiction, but some little known gems are revealed about her life, such as the fact that she drew cartoons; however, access to the originals at the State University in Milledgeville (Georgia) where there are close to 150 “marginal drawings, linoleum-block cuts, prints, paintings, watercolors, and sketches” housed are extremely limited.

Several essays in this collection stand out as captivating – those by Sarah Gordon, Jean W. Cash, and Marshall Bruce Gentry’s comparison between O’Connor and Truman Capote, and the respect that Capote had for her work, respect that was one-sided as demonstrated in a 1955 letter to Betty Hester when O’Connor writes, “Mr. Truman Capote makes me plumb sick.”  Gentry’s comparison is compelling and accurate as he discusses, among other things, the “significant borrowings from ‘A Good Man’ for In Cold Blood.”  And, Hans H. Skei’s essay is a prerequisite for any fiction writer as he details the narrative structure of O’Connor’s fiction.  We are also privileged to have essays by Marion Montgomery and William Session.  Montgomery, a hugely prolific scholar, has several volumes currently in print on O’Connor, while Sessions at 80+ years old is writing the definitive as well as first authorized biography of O’Connor, which is estimated to be between 500 and 600 pages in book form.

In the current climate of the United States with its political and anti-religious atmosphere, Westarp’s metaphoric process is examined in O’Connor’s serious study of Christianity and what she viewed as an apparent conflict with her audience:

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in the audience.  My audience are the people who think God is dead.  At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.” 

The collection concludes with a conversational remembrance by longtime friend Ashley Brown as he vividly reconstructs O’Connor’s life at Andalusia, bringing O’Connor home and grounding the reader in the activities surrounding her farm as though serendipitously observing from a bird’s eye view.  Gretlund and Westarp compiled a robust and unique blend of like minds, but so vastly different as to make reading these essays as enjoyable as O’Connor’s fiction.  The reader gains a new perspective on O’Connor from varied realities.