Flannery O'Connor's Rage of Vision

Abstract

IN DISCUSSING THE WRITER in America, A. Alvarez has noted that the ubiquitous violence which threatens to devour us in this age has been internalized by the artist who works out in the microcosm of his self the destructive potentiality of the time.' Certainly the times have provided spectacular metaphors for the darkest side of the mind; the violence of Dachau, Hiroshima, Mississippi too easily supports our most primitive fears. But the writer does more than assimilate the outer world to his purposes; he also projects his own corresponding impulses onto the macrocosm, shaping through his fictions world which reflects his specific inner vision. For the writer, the inner and outer worlds merge in imaginatively extended country, and in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor that country is dominated by sense of imminent destruction. From the moment the reader enters O'Connor's backwoods, he is poised on the edge of pervasive violence. Characters barely contain their rage; images reflect hostile nature; and even the Christ to whom the characters are ultimately driven is threatening figure, a stinking, mad shadow full of the apocalyptic wrath of the Old Testament. O'Connor's conscious purpose is evident enough, and has been abundantly observed by her critics: to reveal the need for grace in world grotesque without transcendent context. I have found that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil, she wrote,2 and she was not vague about what that devil is: an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy. It would seem that for O'Connor, given the fact of Original Sin, any intelligence determined on its own supremacy was intrinsically evil. For in each work, it is the impulse toward secular autonomy, the smug