Flannery O’Connor’s final letter was brief; and, it was still sitting on her nightstand when she died on August 3, 1964. Written on July 28th, less than a week before her death, she warned her friend, Maryat Lee, to “Be properly scared.”
Although O’Connor’s admonition on this occasion was a response to what appears to be a dangerous person harassing her pen pal, it could also conveniently summarize the entire project of her own literary corpus. Taking up this expression for the title of her book, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring, Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner conveys a similar notion when she writes, “Such proper scaring is what many of O’Connor’s characters and all of her readers require and experience in her fiction.”
Constrained to give the world its proper scaring, Flannery O’Connor’s works are often associated with piles of “dead bodies,” and widely recognized as possessing bizarre, protean elements, and freakish characters who are morally and socially distorted. Much like one might expect of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, they often demonstrate a violent will-to-power and carry out personal conquests, often by way of comedic or disturbing antics, to prove their autonomy and disbelief in God.
For example, in her novel, The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Marion Tarwater repeatedly tells his uncle Rayber (a modernist school teacher) that he is different from him because all Rayber can do is talk about his unbelief, but he (Tarwater) is capable of acting. At dinner just before Tarwater drowns Bishop, Rayber’s “afflicted child,” Tarwater tells his uncle, “It ain’t the same… I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.”
After he drowns the boy and makes for home, he tells the stranger with whom he hitches a ride, “I baptized him… it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… the words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again… I only meant to drown him… you’re only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water.” Tarwater carries on with the driver, disconcerted and shaken, not because he drowned a boy, but because he accidentally baptized him in the process. He laments the sacramental words of baptism escaped his lips as he pushed the retarded child under the water.
By drowning the very boy that he believed God had called him to baptize, Tarwater attempts to overcome his “bad conscience,” a conscience he further believes had been spoiled by the Christian moral ideal instilled in him by his Uncle Tarwater— the crazy prophet who had kidnapped him and taken him to the woods to raise him. Drowning the boy was a way of divorcing his conscience from the unnatural inclinations of Christianity which Nietzsche suggested ran counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short, any ideal hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.
Nietzsche had opined that in order for the modern world to avoid its inevitable plunge into the great nausea of nihilism, it would require a man with a “different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age.” The characteristics of such a man “would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health.”
Flannery O’Connor gave the modern world such a violent man as Nietzsche described in characters like Francis Tarwater and Hazel Motes (the protagonist from her first novel, Wise Blood). But she did so in order to loudly confront modern thought and ethics, not placate it.
Writing to Betty Hester in 1957 about the title of her second novel, she contended, “More than ever now it seems that the kingdom of heaven has to be taken by violence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Flannery O’Connor and her works, this short video is a helpful introduction to her worldview and literary project.
Tsundoku Reading Society
This month’s short story, “The Turkey,” is one of Flannery O’Connor’s earlier stories, and it is classic O’Connor. As with all of her stories, there is “Something Awful” at work in this story, something she wants her readers know is actually at work in them.
Download this free short story and give it a read. If you’re interested in joining us for the Tsundoku Reading Society, just become a paid subscriber. I’ll email you a Zoom link the day of our meeting. September’s Tsundoku Reading Society meeting is Monday, September 29th at 4:00 pm PT / 7:30 pm ET.
September Giveaway
When you become a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to the growing resource page, all the archived content, and free books when I publish them. Plus, once you join our merry band of bards, bishops, and bibliophiles, students, scholars, and philosophers, and poets, preachers, and pirates, you’ll also be entered into a drawing for a chance at September’s Giveaway—Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories. A name will be selected by a random generator and I’ll announce the winner at the end of the month
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Congratulations, Rocky!
Congratulations to August’s winner, Rocky R. of Indiana. His name was drawn for Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He is now the third recipient of a BOOKS AND LETTERS giveaway.