Flannery O’Connor’s Sensitive Young Men – Titus Techera

This year marks the centennial anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birth, an author unique in American letters for the attraction she exerts. Her life was cut short by disease, and she wrote only two novels and two collections of short stories—yet she has a reputation among American writers of the twentieth century. Further, she was Southern, and her stories tend to be about the South, but she is nevertheless beloved in both the North and the West. Stranger still, she is a Catholic with a reputation among the new, post-Protestant Americans.

O’Connor is so widely beloved because there is something about storytelling that makes us think she may know us better than we know ourselves. Her context is the American context—the great transformations of the continental democracy in the post-war era. Despite the vastness of those themes, she looks at major social movements from a certain distance which, paradoxically, encourages her readers to enter into the intimacy of her characters—to search their hearts, in a way that’s only possible in times of great changes, when our hopes and fears become unsettled.

The questions O’Connor’s approach makes her readers ask may even help lead us to self-knowledge. Of the Catholic readers, one would have to ask: Why do they like O’Connor’s black comedy so much? Of the Northern readers, one would ask: Why do they like the social observation of the very stratified class society of the South so much? More broadly, of the post-Protestant audience, one has to ask: Why do they wish to see the conjunction of violence and grace that marks her storytelling?

Two of her stories help us begin to answer that question. The title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge, O’Connor’s second collection of short stories published in 1965, the year after her death, is one example of her distinctive style. Julian, our protagonist, is a restive college graduate of no particular ability—and an aspiring writer who does not write—living somewhere in the South with his mother. He resents everything about her, partly because she’s frivolous, partly because he owes her so much and believes he will never be able to repay her, and partly because of her apparent racism.

Julian is what his mother wanted him to be: handsome, college educated, a young man with a future. He believes himself to be her martyr, nonetheless, and believes he made something of himself despite her. The irony, of course, is that he is unable to truly do anything in the world. Julian may be considered an apostate—he despises the genteel world in which he was raised and desperately wants to have success as a liberal in the form of intellectual applause and the moral approval of black people, of whom he really knows nothing. Despite these revolutionary visions, there is something strangely innocent about Julian.

One night, taking his mother to her exercise class, he decides to humiliate her on the bus, for her condescending, grandmotherly behavior to a small black boy who wants her attention. He gets his wish. In the midst of their funny and annoying little family drama, there is a moment where their disagreement turns theoretical and raises the question: What does it mean to be human? Julian believes mind is what matters, his mother believes it’s the heart. He’s a liberal—mind could possibly bring us all together, overcome race differences, for example, in the way math can overcome any political difference—mind can make us one. She’s all about class, since heart or character is determined by upbringing.

The story suggests that there’s much to each argument and also that each is, in a specific way, wrong. Your upbringing can’t be who you are, or else there would never be misunderstandings between parents and children who are brought up well, much less the drama of Julian and his mom. She must mean she wishes people had more heart. But also, mind, which separates the smart and the stupid, cannot be the answer as to why Julian ostentatiously prefers black strangers to his mother. Moreover, he can’t quite see that his insistence on mind should lead him either to self-knowledge or to theoretical science—either way, it wouldn’t sustain his self-pity or moralism. But instead of distancing himself from his own passions, he’s just trying to break his mother’s heart. Since Julian’s family is falling apart and America is changing, these questions that seem to threaten to pull the human being apart cannot be avoided. The things we used to take for granted are now painful rather than reassuring.

I take the title “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to be an ironic reference to a phrase by the heretical Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In the story, people converge in their fallenness—Julian, his nameless mother, etc.—and the idealism of rising above the human condition is a matter of cruelty rather than wisdom, since it does not involve rising above oneself but rising above others, who must be lowered. Even rising to achieve equality—a black lady with the same hat as a white lady, or sitting in the same seats—involves too much anger.

O’Connor’s story reveals the fundamental tension at the core of civil rights. The ‘60s may have seemed to the world a period of moral triumph, in both iconic protests and landmark legislation, but the heady atmosphere of the time also led to a kind of moral collapse through division, fear, and hatreds, which ultimately produced race riots. If civil rights are strictly a matter of law concerning public things, they must involve the privatization of opinion. In Julian’s liberal utopia, people have to stop noticing things which, if said aloud, would lead to conflict. Accommodation would be difficult, unsatisfying to everyone, and there’d be no special virtue in being in favor of civil rights. To achieve that special importance, to embody a moral ideal, one would have to think of civil rights as a judgment of private opinions and private associations, too, done in full view of the public, with the instruments of the state, since it would require proving who is of pure heart and who is a racist and then acting on that proof in order to prove that moral superiority makes a difference in ordinary life. Everyone would end up looking racist, as in the story.

In their small way, O’Connor’s characters show us the American drama. In a middle-class society, parents want a better life for their children, but that requires social reform as well as educational reform. For kids to rise above their parents is also for the young to end up judging, and perhaps even damning the old. College kids are almost inevitably revolutionaries. Progress makes ingrates. The black family in the story is no exception. The mother may wish to proudly separate herself from whites whom she suspects, but her kid, precisely because America is a free country, just wants to attract the old white lady’s attention. That boy, precisely because the old white lady likes him, is breaking his own mother’s heart.

Whereas social revolution through a transformation of racial attitudes is the problem in “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in “The Enduring Chill,” from the same volume, religion is the problem. The protagonist is again a fatherless college boy, Asbury, who returns to the South from New York to his mother, whom he also loathes because she has sacrificed to make something of him. He is deluded about being an artist, but he has failed to write a play he started. Asbury is too weak, too soft to be a revolutionary; although softness has given him sufficient cruelty. Instead, he wishes to have a religious revelation and to die a meaningful death of a mysterious disease—and part of the meaning would be punishment for his mother.

Asbury destroys his writings in advance of his anticipated death and writes his mother a deathbed letter, blaming her for his lack of talent—she treated him like a slave, he went to New York to liberate himself, only to find himself useless. Asbury’s ingratitude is the cornerstone of his liberation. To defy his mother, who likes books like Gone with the Wind, Asbury persuades the black workers in her dairy to join him in revolutionary solidarity by, for example, smoking over the milk or drinking it raw. They do not like him, but they accept a cigarette.

Instead of putting any trust in the local country doctor, Asbury prefers to talk to a priest, a Jesuit preferably—an intellectual. He would like to rival Christ as a “dying god.” It would also give him pleasure because it would humiliate his Protestant mother’s prejudices. The scene, however, turns comic: the no-nonsense priest tells him to pray and tries to catechize him while scolding him for his ignorance, laziness, and carelessness of his near and dear. For once, we see something of a man. Asbury is a momma’s boy who despises his successful late father as a stupid Southerner. Asbury was not brought up by a demanding authority and therefore has no strength of character.

The oddity of the story is that in his foolishness, in playing with death, in turning from the religion of art to religion, Asbury has made two mistakes he cannot take back. He has shown that he is more foolish than the uneducated people who care for him, like his mother and doctor. At the moment, he has committed to live out the remainder of his life with his family, and, too, he has opened himself up to reflection on mortality. He is, like so many young people today, touchy, irritable, and oversensitive. Another way of putting that is, needy. If he cannot have a father, perhaps he can turn to the Father in heaven.

O’Connor wrote stories about guilt and grace, whose protagonists are losers busy politicizing their pathologies. That’s also the story of youth revolutionary movements since the ’60s. O’Connor shows why that collegiate class’s liberalism must fail—it will not lead to a real education or work, but instead encourage a kind of casual cruelty. The young are too inexperienced and irresponsible in our educational system; their ability to read and write confuses them about where they stand to adults, and at the same time tempts them with ideology, which can offer them the victories their sensitivity demands.

Ordinary life in a liberal society can be quite boring, which encourages extreme alternatives, not least because, in being unknown, their dangers can be attractive rather than fearful. Moreover, liberalism itself can be heightened to a demand to tyrannize on principle, attempting, so to speak, to turn all life into a college education where you have to prove you’re able to make the grade. Yet people cannot but fail to rise to the heights of humanity, so Progress is a cruel thing.

O’Connor does us a great favor in making such comedy out of the inner lives of young men who are not particularly impressive, because that’s the middle-class condition which higher education cannot eradicate. There may be a kind of mercy in her interest, her invasion of privacy, if you will, her attempt to know them better than they or their parents know them. We have to take seriously what’s obviously mad about the young, or how are they to become sane? Having gone this far down the liberal path of higher education, we must do it well or come to grief. So we must plunge into the depths of the soul; O’Connor can be a help in this adventure.