“Parker looked, turned
white and moved away. The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him —
still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.”
~ from “Parker’s Back” by Flannery O’Connor
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Flannery O’Connor
was born on a Wednesday, March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She was the only child of Edward and Regina O’Connor,
devout Catholics in the Bible Belt, ripe with Protestantism. O’Connor got a good dose of both influences
growing up, which influenced her writing almost as much as Jesus Christ
himself. After graduating from high school in 1942, O’Connor
enrolled in Georgia State College for Women and then moved on to the
prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Through her education, O’Connor met
teachers and critics that marveled at her work, encouraging her to develop her Southern
Gothic style, which employed regional settings and “grotesque” characters, such
as freaks or misfits. O'Connor's Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction. In and
online poll, conducted in 2009, Complete
Stories was named the best book ever to have won a National Book Award. O’Connor died, tragically, of lupus when she
was just thirty-nine years old. During
her brief career, O’Connor wrote two novels, thirty-two short stories, and many
reviews and commentaries.
When We Met: I was eighteen when I read “Parker’s Back”,
the haunting story of O.E. Parker, a man who wants nothing to do with religion. He meets a devout but austere woman who he
later marries, unable to fight the terrible truth that God is real. The title “Parker’s Back” refers to O.E.’s back
that he will not tattoo. The rest of his
body is covered in ink, which he wears proudly as an anti-establishment chip on
his shoulder. Once he realizes that
Jesus is an all-consuming fire, he searches a catalog in a tattoo parlor to
find a picture of him. The complexity
and desperation of the story is amazing – a web spun with pure gold.
Why She’s Good: O’Connor was “kissed by God” – she was meant
to write. Each story involves an
unapologetic wrestling with God, the central reason she is writing in the first
place. Flannery’s stories have deep,
spiritual themes. In addition to her round,
Southern characters, struggling to connect with those around them, O’Connor writes
God into her stories. He is always
there, somewhere. She openly wrestled
with paradoxes she saw around her. She
didn’t avoid subjects that “good Christian folk” were not supposed to talk
about. Her aim, she once explained, was “to
penetrate the natural to reveal the supernatural” by writing about the
unthinkable acts of grace. With all of
this said, Flannery O’Connor cannot be described as a “a Christian Writer” any
more than Shakespeare can be described as “an English poet.”
Plot Variations: A man intends to take his family from Georgia
to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother warns him of an escaped
convict heading in that direction. A
racist woman who runs a farm seeks to run a scrub bull from her property
singlehandedly, if possible. A PhD and
amputee opens her heart to a traveling Bible salesman only to see his true
colors exposed.
Favorite Quote: O’Connor viewed Christianity differently than
how she viewed the church: “The only thing that makes the church endurable is
that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed. The operation of
the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much
misunderstanding among the smug.”
Trivia: Flannery
O’Connor is cited by many authors as a writer who influenced their work, but
many others have been affected by her as well.
Once in an interview, Bruce Springsteen was asked to name his biggest
influence. He replied: “One would be
difficult, but the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You
could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of
life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day.
They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate
to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the
earth barely beneath us.”
The bleeding, stinking, mad shadow of Jesus: True to Southern Gothic Form, O’Connor wrote The Violent Bear it Away, a story about Francis
Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old character who does not want to fulfill a destiny
that God is calling him to: being a prophet.
A modern-day version of Jonah, many people say that they see Flannery in
him. Judge for yourself: "His black eyes, glassy and still,
reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the
distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus."
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