In their theoretical studies of the Model Reader and the Empirical Reader, Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser, authors of the cornerstones of Reception Theory, never measured themselves against the fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Born and having lived her whole life (1925-1964) in the American Bible Belt, the writer herself never enjoyed an entirely serene relationship with her readership and for more than one reason her fiction lends itself to an interesting examination of the reader’s role. Headstrong and fully convinced of her own Catholic perspective in an overwhelmingly Protestant environment, O’Connor fundamentally could not have cared less about the empirical reader, the one who, as the term suggests, actually picked up her books and read them, finding in them the most disparate themes. She was without doubt more interested in the Model Reader, or ideal reader, that fictitious entity capable of perceiving the full potential content of the text, capable of realizing it completely.
The empirical reader entered her orbit the moment the aesthetic horizon of her writing was misread or ignored, as when her work ended up pigeonholed in that Southern literary tradition, the School of Southern Degeneracy, populated by the eccentric, often sexually daring characters of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams. «Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader», she once wrote on the subject, «unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic».
Realistic and grotesque, healthy and sick, sacred and blasphemous, normal and aberrant are some of the oppositional dichotomies between which, as on a Procrustean bed, her reader’s expectations are painfully stretched. Thus, as Edgar Allan Poe had theorized a century earlier, the brevity of the short story and its effect on the final recipient are indispensable elements for understanding the use O’Connor makes of that quasi-Joycean epiphany which occurs at a given moment in the narrative and which strikes the unprepared reader as violently traumatic or else mysteriously fascinating. In her two novels, Wise Blood (La saggezza nel sangue), 1952, and The Violent Bear It Away (Il cielo è dei violenti), 1960, but even more in her two collections of stories, published in 1956 and 1965, posthumously in Italian under the title La vita che salvi può essere la tua, and later in various collections, what for Joyce was an epiphanic revelation of reality, a veil torn open without overly visible jolts, becomes for her characters a violent, if not extremely violent, coming to awareness, at times with a fatal outcome.
The model reader, having refined the specific encyclopedic competences (postulated by Eco) pertaining to the author’s aesthetic world, will understand that the bodies that explode (“The Displaced Person”) or are gored (“Greenleaf”) or dismembered (“Good Country People”), shot in cold blood (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), disfigured or violated in the least predictable ways, at best duped and swindled (“The Life You Save May Be Your Own”), are nothing other than bodies until then devoid of divine grace and so obtuse, so hardened by the secularization of their small world, that they must necessarily be subjected to such violence in order to be saved. They are also bodies that thrust themselves massively into the foreground, intrusive and misshapen (“The Geranium”, “The Lame Shall Enter First”, “Judgement Day”), because in the author’s Catholic outlook the rejection of corporeality sanctioned by Protestantism is, fundamentally, a heresy.
As the title of one of her stories has it, the body is “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”, and her fiction exposes and imposes the centrality of the body, so much so that critics have spoken of an «incarnational art» (Christina Bieber Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor, 2005). Paradoxically, some have judged her aesthetic vision, shaped by the theology of Saint Augustine and by the writings of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, both decidedly remote from the baggage of the average American reader of the postwar years (and beyond), to be so niche as to prevent the fullest (ideal) enjoyment of her fiction, thereby diminishing its cultural reach (Carol Shloss, Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies. The Limits of Inference, 1980). In truth, the greatness of this author lies precisely in her capacity to produce narrative texts that can be effectively navigated at the most varied depths without losing their evocative force, earning in any case a place of absolute prominence in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature.
Her troubled regional belonging, for example, provides an environmental backdrop that is in itself already high literature. Not because one hears echoes of other Southern authors, beyond her contemporaries whom she did not love, though such echoes are there (nineteenth-century Georgia folklore, for instance, and William Faulkner himself), but because, in her Augustinian conviction that the things of the world «pour forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things», on a denotative level her work is deeply rooted in a pictorial realism of the highest narrative power. Her texts are populated by ordinary people in ordinary situations in immediately recognizable places: the hills of Georgia, the countryside of the whole South, in some cases the cities, from Atlanta all the way to New York. Clothing, manners, turns of phrase, the furnishings of houses are all presented in rich detail.
There is always a domestic dimension from which the protagonist sets out, only to confront external entities and discover, never without an ensuing shock, that the boundaries between self and other are fragile, and that the psycho-physical armor behind which he or she is entrenched is invariably destined to be pierced and torn down. The centrality of this recurring pattern leads the narrator’s gaze to rest always on landscapes and settings that lend themselves to a connotation first of all evocative and then also symbolic: the edge of the woods, a furrow between two pastures, the fence around the farm, the river (a decidedly peculiar baptism takes place, in fact, in the story “The River”), the train tracks (“The Artificial Nigger”), the stairwell through which one no longer climbs toward home but toward a higher sense of life (“A Stroke of Good Fortune”).
It is as though the author lay in wait for both the reader and the hapless character, each destined to be stripped of their fatuous certainties and to suffer the violence of divine grace. O’Connor herself, in her lucid and cutting observations on the art of writing (Mystery and Manners, published in Italian as Nel territorio del diavolo), declares that she is always looking for some crossroads, a particular junction where the earthly and the divine may meet, just as happens in the Catholic sacrament. The journey, with its ensuing sense of direction or disorientation, the liminal areas between one geography and another, the non-places such as waiting rooms, thus become the perfect setting for forcing the recalcitrant protagonists to look inside themselves, to perceive reality, to see their presumption of superiority unhinged. Nothing disturbs her like cynical, disenchanted intellectuals, who become the victims of the author’s irony. But so does the typical landowning woman who looks down on the families of farm laborers, regarded as white trash, scarcely a step above the stock figure of the illiterate, insolent black man. Intellectuals are the protagonists of two of this author’s best-known and best-loved stories: Hulga, the philosophy scholar with a wooden leg in “Good Country People”, and Julian, the college graduate in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, the former subjected to a psychological and physical violence closely resembling rape at the hands of a perverse traveling salesman, the latter destined for endless grief after tormenting his mother to a fatal end. But in both stories the intellectual is set against another character who believes she or he knows life better, in a paired scheme that generates an unfailingly comic conflict.
«The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a schoolteacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans”, declares the mother of the thirty-something protagonist of “Good Country People».

One need not be an intellectual, however, to find oneself in a clash of this kind, in which one character becomes the target of another’s presumption, in a recurring scheme often designed to expose the fundamental ignorance of both. There is one case in which, quite beyond metaphor, one of these by now recognizable smug, self-important women is actually struck in the eye by a book hurled by a girl who can no longer stand her fatuous maxims. It is no accident that the point of impact is an eye: the lady, as the story’s title has it, is forced into a “Revelation”. Grandfather and grandson, in another of the author’s most accomplished stories, “The Artificial Nigger”, keep needling each other over who has more knowledge and experience of what the city is like, a world in truth alien to them both, living as they do in a shabby, isolated house in the Georgia countryside. After a journey full of surprises, both will return home, obviously not as they left it. The text, retracing the pattern of the country come to town, the countryman finding himself bewildered in an urban environment, is in fact also a perfect example of the initiation story.
As old as the art of storytelling itself, the initiation pattern necessarily involves a journey, a place of departure that will later be that of the final arrival, a series of “threshold” chronotopes such as dawn or midnight, as well as various other spatial and symbolic elements that appear, shrewdly interlaced, in the weave of this story. One fine day, at dawn, Nelson and his grandfather set out from their country dwelling to go and see Atlanta. On the train, they forget the lunch they had prepared at home, just as they will have to forget their old selves along the path of initiatory change. But the most interesting feature of this text is that the two protagonists will be exposed to a dramatic confrontation with the question of race, a universe of signifiers and signifieds of enormous historical and social import. In a South where the burden of segregation is still omnipresent, as though time had stopped before 1865, the ultimate sense of O’Connor’s message is that race is an artificial category. Not only will the boy, who has never seen a black man, prove unable to tell them apart from whites (to him they merely look more tanned, or “coffee-colored”), but, having ended up in an African American neighborhood, he will be deeply drawn to a large, sensual black woman in whom, in the end, he sees himself.
More than once in these stories the programmatic confrontation between self and other takes the form of a distorted racial mirror. In the already mentioned “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, whose title is drawn from Teilhard de Chardin, Julian’s bourgeois mother, so mindful of form that she boards a bus «as if she were going into a drawing room where everyone had been waiting for her», so anchored to her social and racial belonging, will die of heartbreak after a traumatic face-to-face encounter with a black woman who wears the very same hat (which had seemed to her an unmistakable mark of distinction) and who will not accept her patronizing behavior.
The displaced person of the eponymous story, meanwhile, is a Polish immigrant perceived as a threat so insidious and so powerful by the owner of yet another farm that it provokes in her a physical shock akin to an explosion, after which – though at the very highest price – the woman will be able to step out of the cage of her numb, impermeable body. If images of cages, pens and fences recur (part of the novel Wise Blood takes place in a zoo), it is as an emblem of these characters’ need to entrench themselves in their certainties, within which, however, deluding themselves that they are safe, they shut themselves off from true salvation. Alongside the religious reading, the one centered on race, and the one shaped by the semiotics of space, one should not, however, neglect an approach that historicizes this body of work within the discourse of the Cold War. Thus the Pole, the Bible salesman, and all the criminals and con men looming over O’Connor’s placid universes are also a representation of that sense of invasion and menace which the America of the Fifties traced back (not always explicitly and not always consciously: think of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to the red scare, the terror of the Communist enemy (Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, 2005). Thus the most ruthless of the criminals populating this fiction, the Misfit of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, who decides to wipe out an entire family for no reason other than sheer wickedness, can take on, for the ideal reader, a whole series of connotations that make him less inexplicable and less chilling.
The irony of some of O’Connor’s titles, like her realistic style, so detailed that it weaves the symbolic counterpart into its fabric with great lightness, conceals from the unprepared reader the fact that the author moves chiefly, as she herself maintained, in “the devil’s territory” (which is why she loved Dante and the sharp schematism of his Commedia). An artist with spiritual concerns, Flannery said, will find in modern life distortions that are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience used to seeing them as natural. «Such an artist may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it. But to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures». No literary manifesto was ever clearer or more fitting than this gloss on a violent, grotesque and destabilizing body of work. But let us not delude ourselves that we have thereby passed from the category of the hostile reader to that of the ideal reader. There is a level of mystery in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that never yields itself fully to interpretation. The prose of the ideal author she had in mind would constantly push toward “the limits of mystery”, since for that kind of writer the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where «adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will always be more interested in what we don’t understand than in what we do».

Flannery O’Connor (Savannah, March 25, 1925 – Milledgeville, August 3, 1964) was one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. A fervent Catholic, a daughter of the Protestant South of the United States and of the cultural area of the Bible Belt, she wrote 32 stories and 2 novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). Often marked by a grotesque register, her stories frequently present unpredictable events, as though representing the presence of an “other”, imponderable factor in the destinies of her characters, traceable to the Protestant environment in which she was formed. Two foundations bearing the writer’s name exist today, housed in her birthplace in Savannah, the “Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home”, and at the family farm in Milledgeville, the “Andalusia Farm”, where she lived her mature years, having moved there to find relief from her health problems.

Alessandro Clericuzio teaches Anglo-American Language and Literature at the University of Perugia. His work focuses on contemporary theater, poetry and multiculturalism in the English-speaking world. He has devoted several studies to the work of Tennessee Williams, and is the author of Grottesco americano. I racconti di Flannery O’Connor.