Flannery O'Connor and the Theology of Discontent
© 18 April 2000, Stephen Sparrow
In 1959
Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend who was struggling to understand the
nature of Faith. In the letter
Flannery said, ‘And remember the Mercy of God…hard to believe it, but try
believing the opposite and you will find it too easy. Life has no meaning that way.’ In those few words lay the heart and the secret of O’Connor’s
fiction. In other words, it
is often easier to understand Christianity by trying to imagine a world where it
does not exist. The fishhook of Christianity lies hidden inside most of
O’Connor’s fiction and throws light, often in an oblique way on a world
where the message of Christ is all but forgotten. Her characters should know
better but in varying degrees of the spectacular, turn their lives into hash,
just like so many of us do. A
common theme is violence and yet in her story ‘A Stroke of Good Fortune’ the
closest encounter with violence is the child Hartley Gilfleet’s imaginary
world of villains and heroes and gunfights using toy pistols and all described
in one piercing yell as the child thunders up the stairs near the end of the
story. The real violence is implied; the violence we do to ourselves through
inward looking and inward living, the violence that shapes our attitude giving
us a distorted view of the world.
"A
Stroke of Good Fortune" centres on a series of "let downs"
starting with the three flights of stairs Ruby Hill must climb each time she
returns from shopping to reach where she and her husband Bill live. Ruby’s recurring dream is a new home in ‘one of those new sub
divisions’ and no stairs. This particular day Ruby is not feeling well and on
her way up the stairs she rests often and at one stage sits down painfully on
the Gilfleet child’s pistol which with absence of mind she picks up and
carries. Her slow tiring
ascent allows her to be waylaid by an eccentric retired schoolteacher whose sole passion seems to lie in questioning
people to find out how little they know. Mr. Jerder asks Ruby whose birthday it is. Ruby neither knows nor cares but being out of breath has to endure the
interrogation. Each question
and its answer lead to further questions. The birthday is the State of Florida’s. Who discovered Florida? A Spaniard called Ponce de Leon. What
was he searching for? The
Fountain of Youth. And did he
find it? Asks Ruby wearily. Of course not screams Jerder. Would not every person in the world have drunk from it if he had, but
Jerder has found it. Where?
Asks Ruby. Here in my heart
replies Jerder. Ruby inwardly groans and heads further up the stairs. Is Flannery telling us something here? Ponce de Leon
searching for the Fountain of Youth discovers a patch of coastal swamp jungle
infested with mosquitoes and alligators – what a let down.
Ruby’s next
stop is on the landing where her friend Laverne Watts, a flighty man mad
spinster lives. Ruby is
feeling groggy and knocks on Laverne’s door with the toy pistol and as the
door opens Laverne almost collapses in laughter at the sight of her plump friend
staggering into the room waving a gun. Laverne
listens to Ruby’s complaints and then sows the seed that she is probably
pregnant, an assertion, which Ruby stoutly denies. At the beginning of the story Ruby talks of her mother, having child
after child and getting deader and deader with each one and ending up in her
thirties looking like a dried up sour apple. "And all of it for what. Because
she hadn’t known any better. Pure
ignorance."
That was the
problem. No way was Ruby going to fall into that trap. No way was there going to
be any room for babies and children in her life. Laverne keeps up the baby banter and then shifts to the
subject of Ruby’s little brother Rufus, twenty years old and just out of the
army and moving in for a while with Ruby and Bill. "He’s cute."
Declares Laverne. "He aint but a baby." Retorts Ruby. Laverne takes
off one of her size nine shoes and holding it out asks Ruby if she thought Rufus
might be interested in the foot that went with it. Ruby is very protective of Rufus. She might not want any babies cluttering up her life but she
hates the thought of her baby brother becoming entangled with someone like
Laverne who is at least ten years older than him.
Are
Laverne’s shoes a play on Cinderella’s glass slipper? A fairy story where the young couple live happily ever after? Yes we can all relate to that; something unattainable; a fairy story;
something we reluctantly let go of when we leave childhood, a let down for all
who fail to grow up.
Ruby starts
journeying up the stairs again and we switch back to the beginning of the story
as she remembers Madam Zoleeda and recalls the knowing smirk as the Palmist
tells her what lies ahead. The
illness would last for a while but would end in a stroke of good fortune. Ruby knew herself she was unwell. She
had not needed Madam Zoleeda to tell her that, but then the Palmist was a very
perceptive lady. She never missed much.
Ruby had
nearly reached the top of the stairs and the idea of a pregnancy was now well in
place; a real ‘let down’ in her eyes, but in reality as most mothers know,
the most satisfying experience many women ever have. There is a paradox here in Ruby’s feeling of discontent and
that same paradox is endemic to all discontent. This longing and hope for
something or somewhere better is almost universal in mankind and is accepted by
reason as pointing strongly toward the existence of God and yet Ruby is caught
in her own trap. She is her own
God. Ruby wants to stay where she
is without growing up and moving on. She has rejected the reality of life and
with it the chance to understand some small part of the Mercy of God. The arrival of the baby would probably help to change all of that, but
this story does not go that far, it ends near the top of the stairs.
Without faith
in the Mercy of God, life becomes a drudge; discontent covers everything like
dust and suffering becomes unbearable. We
can see Flannery O’Connor nodding in agreement as she undoubtedly read these
words of Simone Weil’s written some time in the late 1930s.1 "The extreme
greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural
cure for suffering, but a supernatural use of it."
Flannery O’Connor had an intimate
awareness of physical suffering. From
the age of twenty-six years she lived with the knowledge that her life would be
short. She used her prodigious
talent, to tell stories that brought discontent and suffering into its true
perspective inside Christian redemption [the Mercy of God] the only place it
makes any sense. She told her
stories from the other side, the dark side where people who shun the ‘light’
try to work out their lives on their own. Characters
who illuminate Christianity by trying to run away from it. Flannery summed it all up in one line of a letter she wrote to her friend
Betty Hester in 1955; "God rescues us from ourselves if we want Him
to."
1. Simone
Weil [1909-1943] French Philosopher. Background Jewish and agnostic. Made her
own way to Christianity but was never baptized. |