Indelible truths from a true original

Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is much like the birds she adored — sweeping prose, sudden flutters of violence and a dip into black humour every now and then.

A few weeks ago, a couple of peafowls visited our neighbourhood, roosting on trees and in empty lots looking for water and food. It’s a hot summer and the forest ranges nearby are dry so the birds have been making frequent forays into urban areas. They stayed around for a few days and we’d hear them call to each other through the morning, evening and even after sunset. Flannery O’Connor, the American short story writer and one of the truly great exponents of the southern gothic genre, described the peacock’s cry in a 1961 essay thus:

“Frequently the cock combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the centre of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-ii! Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me, it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.”

Given O’Connor’s love for the birds — as an adult she would raise them on the Georgia dairy farm where she lived with her mother — it’s no surprise that peacocks and peacock feathers can be found on the covers of various editions of her short story collections. In a way, these birds are an apt metaphor for O’Connor’s fiction — gorgeous prose that jolts you awake with its pitch-black humour and sudden outbursts of violence.

The Complete Stories was published in 1971, some seven years after O’Connor’s death. It brought together all her short stories — 31 in total — that had previously been published in different collections and in various magazines and literary journals. It would go on to win the National Book Award in 1972.

The stories here are, as the blurb on the back of the book says, powerful and disturbing. Family trips go devastatingly awry, baptisms in rivers are successful in a way that the baptised probably did not intend, and Bible salesmen with secret fetishes deceive women into parting with objects that make them whole.

O’Connor, who died at the age of 39 after enduring years of chronic illness, was deeply religious. She was a devout Catholic but her stories are refreshingly free of judgement. There are no obvious villains and heroes here. There are just people trying to get on with the business of living as best they can. In one of the stories, a young man named Enoch wants to become something more and he gets there through an encounter with a touring gorilla and assuming an identity completely alien from his own. In another, a serial killer has just slain a number of people and yet, turns out to be the one character with a definite moral code that he strongly adheres to — at least with more conviction than his victims.

Since she was writing about the South at a time when the civil rights movement was rising up, O’Connor’s stories didn’t shy away from addressing race and racial tensions. The most powerful of them that addresses this theme, Everything That Rises Must Converge, is, at first glance, a story about a son who’s had a more liberal education and thus possesses more progressive attitudes than his conservative mother. As it progresses, O’Connor uses the fraught relationship between these two to examine the discriminatory impulses of the majority towards a subjugated minority.

These stories that focus on a people and region that didn’t always find a place on the literary landscape might seem outlandish at first in their surface grotesqueness. But at their heart lie indelible truths about the human condition that are universal and underscore the depth of talent that O’Connor possessed. She was a true original and these tales are peerless masterworks.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.