Flannery O'Connor: Writing beyond the point where religion has the answers.

Mitchell 1Christopher D. Mitchell

PHD Academic Paper

English PHD

December 7, 2014

Flannery O’Connor Practices What She Preaches:

Applying the Lessons of The Church and the Fiction Writer to

Parker’s Back

As the world forges onward into the twenty-first

century, it finds itself in a new realm of re-examination of

all things accepted and cherished. For instance, southern

literature that once portrayed the old south—works by

Faulkner and Mitchell—no longer portray the reality of a

modern south that has all but forgotten “the great cause”

and endured decades trying to live down the stereotypes and

legacies of the Civil War, slavery, and even the battle for

civil rights. The recent midterm and national elections,

however, have revealed a south still entrenched in religious

dogma, beliefs and activism. The challenge today for a

writer who yearns to create art or a student of literature

determined to establish a paradigm is to re-examine what

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Mitchell 2actually defines the category of Southern Literature. Being

written by an author from the south, depicting a southern

setting or creating characters embroiled in petty religious

dilemmas is not enough to sweep prose into this category.

At the core of most southern literature and writing

lies the religious conflict. Perhaps no other writer dealt

with this conflict with the depth and scrutiny of Flannery

O’Connor. In her essay, “The Church and the Fiction Writer”

(143 ), collected by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in the

anthology titled Flannery O’Connor: Mysteries and Manners O’Connor

discusses the problems faced by writers who write of

religion—the expectations of the religious cults who read

this writing and the responsibilities faced by a writer

seeking to create art—and leaves the reader with a timeless

and clear impression that to create art, a writer must go

beyond the point where religion offers all the answers. Like

any true religious lady of the south, O’Connor practiced

what she preached by applying her newly defined dogma to her

own short story published in Everything that Rises Must Converge,

“Parker’s Back” (219 ).

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In this essay, Miss O’Connor speaks of the Catholic

Church, but any religion could be substituted. My

interpretations of Miss O’Connor’s words in this essay are

my own—presented in the same manner that believers interpret

and twist the Holy Scriptures to support their own beliefs.

Miss O’Connor states that the church believes that,

whatever the religious writer CAN see, “there are certain

things that he should not see, straight or otherwise” (145).

She observes that it is supposed by believers that writers

should write fiction in a way to “prove the truth of the

Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the

supernatural” (145). This would require the fiction writer

to substitute the “parochial aesthetic and cultural

insularity” (145) of the church for his own vision of his

art.

This would seem to be one of the gravest forms of

censorship.

But Miss O’Connor notes that “what the fiction writer

will discover…is that he himself cannot move or mold reality

in the interest of abstract truth” (146). The artistic

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Mitchell 4writer will reveal his truth as he sees it, and he will

refuse to allow anyone else to substitute their version of

the truth for his.

O’Connor explains that such a writer “in so far as he

has the mind of the church, will see from the standpoint of

the central Christian mystery” (145). But she notes that “to

the modern mind …this is warped vision which bears little or

no resemblance to the truth as it is known today” (146).

She suggests that the problem for the Catholic fiction

writer is discovering the “presence of grace as it appears

in nature” and not allowing his faith to become “detached

from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is.”

Hemingway spoke of writing true sentences. O’Connor

speaks of writing true nature, and that grace must appear

from these observations, not be imposed upon them by the

writer—that is, if the writer seeks to create true art. When

O’Connor speaks of writing “nature,” she speaks of writing

as the real world exists—not writing subject to a

superimposed religious aesthetic.

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Her words further indicate a belief that the Catholic

reader—substitute religious reader here once again—has

separated “nature” and “grace” and “reduced his conception

of the supernatural to pious cliché” and that he recognizes

“nature in literature only in two forms, the sentimental and

the obscene” (147). Here she makes an incredible comparison

of the sentimental to pornography. She defines

sentimentality as “an excess, a distortion of sentiment

usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.”

That overemphasis tends to distort sentimentality into its

opposite, the obscene (147). O’Connor notes that we come

to grace because of our fall. Sin is reality. The reader is

left with the conclusion that sentimental writing omits the

concrete reality of our sins in order to arrive at a “mock

state of innocence” (147). She compares this process to

pornography, which she claims separates “the connection of

sex to its hard purpose, [reproduction] and so far

disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply

an experience for its own sake” ( 148).

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It is generally supposed…that the catholic who writes

fiction is out to use fiction to prove the truth of the

faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the

supernatural. He may be. No one certainly can be sure

of his low motives except as they suggest themselves in

his finished work, but when the finished work suggests

that pertinent actions have been fraudulently

manipulated or overlooked or smothered, whatever

purposes the writer started out with have already been

defeated. What the fiction writer will discover…is that

he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests

of abstract truth. The writer learns, perhaps more

quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of

what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete

in his medium; and he will realize eventually that

fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying

within them. (146)

Grace must be revealed by the true situations faced

everyday and deduced from the circumstances presented by a

skilled writer. The one-line clichéd scriptures tossed about

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Mitchell 7whenever religion is questioned do not fix or remedy

situations:

When fiction is made according to its nature, it should

reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it

in concrete reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the

real security of his faith, he will be obliged to use

them honestly, and his sense of mystery and acceptance

of it, will be increased. To look at the worst will be

for him no more than an act of trust in God; but what

is one thing for the writer may be another thing for

the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may

lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who

looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in

the face and is turned to stone (148-149).

A writer who seeks to create art must make no apologies

and respect no persons. Literature is about life. “A belief

in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the

believer to it” (150). The author who seeks to create art

must write about the people that religion has failed. “It is

when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong,

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Mitchell 8that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation

of life” (151).

On the last page of her essay Miss O’Connor explains

that “the serious fiction writer will think that any story

that can be explained by the adequate motivation of its

characters, or by a believable imitation of a way of life,

or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story to

occupy himself with” (153). If the one-line clichés of the

church can explain away the heart of the story, why write

it? In the last paragraph of the essay Miss O’Connor

instructs the writer who aspires to write true fiction to go

beyond the point where religion has the answers: “…the

meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where

these things have been exhausted” (153).

After submitting Job to horrendous trials in order to

win a bet he made with the Devil himself, God replaced all

he took from Job with excess, quality and abundance. If God

had not rewarded Job, the story would have been completely

different. O’Connor challenges writers who seek to create

art to write about those God forgot to reward after their

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Mitchell 9trials, those whose mistakes have left them suffering from

burdens from which they can find no relief, or who suffer

from burdens that, like Job’s, were created from no fault of

their own. These characters do not simply find peace and

success through a divine intervention. These characters are

truly challenged to find grace. Their prayers are not

mysteriously answered overnight. This is the obscenity of

which O’Connor writes--the pornography of oversimplifying

life and grace.

Although O’Connor’s writing is a living testament of

the application of these principals to her work, perhaps

none of her stories, novels, or collections epitomizes these

principals better than “Parker’s Back” (219) published with

other stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge. There are

several reasons to believe that she struggled with the story

and faced much of the same criticism of which she speaks.

In The Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being selected and

edited by Sally Fitzgerald we find a letter addressed to “A”

dated July 25, 1964 (594).

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No Caroline did not mean the tattoos [in Parker’s Back]

were the heresy. Sarah Ruth was the heretic—the notion

that you can worship in pure spirit. Caroline gave me a

lot of advice about the story but most of it I’m

ignoring. She thinks every story must be built

according to the pattern of the Roman arch and she

would enlarge the beginning and the end, but I’m

letting it lay. (594)

The “pattern of the Roman arch” that O’Connor speaks of

is the narrative arc the

church would impose upon all literature in order to prove

the existence of a supreme being.

In another of her letters, to Father J.H. McCown dated

February 6, 1956, O’Connor stated “Pornography and

sentimentality and anything else in excess are all sins

against form, and I think they ought to be approached as

sins against art rather than as sins against morality”

(134). “The pious style is a great stumbling block to

Catholics who want to talk to the modern world” 135.

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A close examination of “Parker’s Back” reveals how

O’Connor applied these principals to her own writing.

In the opening paragraph we are introduced to Parker’s

wife, Sarah Ruth, who remains nameless for a chunk of the

story. She is described as “…plain, plain” ( 219 ) as if a

simple plain wasn’t enough. She is pregnant, and Parker does

not like pregnant women. “But he stays with her as if she

had him conjured” (219 ).

Parker’s wife does not approve of automobiles. “…she

was always sniffing up sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink

whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and God knew

some paint would have improved it, Parker thought” (220).

Sometimes “he supposed she had married him just to save him.

At other times he had a suspicion that she actually liked

everything she said she didn’t. He could account for her one

way or another; it was himself he could not understand”

(220).

The story begins with an argument over Parker working

for a woman. He has lied to Sarah Ruth and told his wife

that his boss was a “hefty young blonde” (220). But in truth

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Mitchell 12his boss is “nearly 70 years old and too dried up to have an

interest in anything except getting as much work out of him

as she could” (220).

Parker first met his future wife when his truck broke

down in front of her house. He was looking under the hood

and sensed the presence of a woman. Acting as if he had

injured his hand, he clasped the limb to his chest and began

cursing , spewing expletives worthy of a sailor. He was

struck down by the “bristly claw” (221) of Sarah Ruth—

knocking him to the ground.

“You don’t talk no filth here” (221) his future wife

had said.

After striking Parker, she inspected the allegedly

injured hand. She spied the tattoos that covered every space

of exposed skin on his arm, and dropped his hand.

O’Connor takes the reader back in time to explain the

tattoos. We learn of Parker seeing a man covered with

tattoos at a fair. The event transformed him. “Parker was

filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are lifted up

when the flag passes by” (223).

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This is a classic example of O’Connor creating a

situation that goes beyond the point where religion provides

all of the answers. “Until he saw the man at the fair, it

did not enter his head that there was anything out of the

ordinary about the fact that he existed” (223). Of course,

religious dogma insists that man exists for only one purpose

—to serve God. Parker has never been exposed to this

concept, or at least he has certainly never embraced it. It

never occurred to him that there needed to be a purpose for

his existence.

He got his first tattoo. Then came a succession of

meaningless jobs pursued solely to pay for a continuation of

the tattoos. The tattoos seemed to poison his blood, causing

him to act in evil ways:

He found out that the tattoos were attractive to the

kind of girls he liked but who had never liked him

before. He began to drink beer and got in fights. His

mother wept over what was becoming of him. One night

she dragged him off to a revival with her, not telling

him where they were going. When he saw the big lighted

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church, he jerked out of her grasp and ran. The next

day he lied about his age and joined the navy. (223-

224)

Parker remained in the navy for five years, collecting

tattoos on his body

every where he went. He was satisfied with each tattoo for

about a month, then the new wore off. He loved large mirrors

where he could study his look. The effect of the different

tattoos was fragmented: “haphazard and botched” (224).

Unhappy with the work he would seek another artist and pay

for another tattoo. But his dissatisfaction grew.

“It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents

and eagles and the hawks had penetrated his skin and lived

inside him in a raging warfare” (225). He went AWOL. The

navy caught him. He served nine months in the brig and

received a dishonorable discharge.

It is important to note that the writer of pious prose

could resolve this dilemma by a simple redemption of his

character’s soul. Take Parker to church, get him some

religion, have him baptized and all will live happily ever

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Mitchell 15after. Even if the conflict is allowed to rage until the end

when Sarah Ruth rejects the tattoo of Christ on Parker’s

back, a writer who believes in religious dogma could always

redeem this character with a Christian conversion. The void

in Parker’s life is simply caused by a lack of Christ and

religion in his life. The structure of the prose that

O’Connor speaks of in her essay will resolve the conflict

with application of some religious canon that cures all.

The prose then becomes as clichéd as a sports story

where the underdog always wins. There is no suspense or

mystery in the Rocky movies, as we know Balboa will always

defeat the Clubber Langs and Dragos of the world. But true

art, as O’Connor stated, goes beyond the point where

religion provides the answer, and here the reader is left to

wonder if the woman, or religion, or the perfect tattoo will

fill the void in Parker’s life.

At their first meeting and after her initial inspection

of his arm, she replied in a manner that bewildered him.

“‘Vanity of vanities,’ she said” (225). She referred to his

eagle as a chicken. Parker stated that no one would want to

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Mitchell 16get a tattoo of a chicken. “What fool would have any of it”

(226) she exclaimed, referring to all of his tattoos.

He returned the next day with another bushel of apples.

Sarah Ruth ignored him. “…he might have been a stray pig or

goat that wandered into the yard” (226).

Offering her an apple from his bushel basket, he joined her

on the porch. The view from the porch stretched into a broad

vista of distance and depressed him. “You look out into

space like that and you begin to feel as if someone were

after you, the navy or the government or religion” (227).

The woman shows no interest in the tattoos, but wants to

know what the initials O.E. stand for. After some coaxing,

he tells her.

We know that O.E. Parker is not saved in the Christian

sense of the word. When asked by Sarah Ruth if he had been

saved, “he had replied that he didn’t see anything in

particular to save him from” (229). Parker used her question

as an opportunity to ask for a kiss. “I’d be saved enough if

you were to kiss me” (229).

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“She scowled. ‘That ain’t being saved,’ she said”

(229).

He later tried to get her to lie with him in the back

of his truck. “Not until after we’re married” (229) was her

response.

So they were married, but marriage changed nothing and

only made Parker more depressed. When he couldn’t stand much

more, he got another tattoo. “Parker did nothing much when

he was at home but listen to what the judgment seat of God

would be like for him if he didn’t change his ways” (231).

He used tales of the girl he worked for in vain attempts to

make his wife jealous.

Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that

there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had

to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim, half-

formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He

visualized having a tattoo put there [on his back] that

Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist—a religious

subject. (232)

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He raged within himself, worrying over what tattoo he

could get. He needed “the

right one to bring Sarah Ruth to heel” (232).

One day while baling hay for the lady he worked for,

Parker flipped her old tractor, nearly killing himself and

catching the machine on fire. He heard himself cry out “GOD

ABOVE!” (232) as he was propelled into the air. He saw his

shoes consumed in the tractor fire. “…if he had known how to

cross himself, he would have done it” (233).

The close brush with death caused an epiphany of sorts.

Parker ran to his truck and headed for the city. He was

shoeless. “…he only knew that there had been a great change

in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown…” (233). He

went straight to the tattoo parlor and asked to see the book

with all the pictures of God in it.

The man believed Parker to be drunk. “‘You’ve fallen

off some,’ he said. ‘You must have been in jail’” (234).

“‘Married,’ Parker said” (234).

Parker flipped through the pages desperately seeking

the tattoo that would heal and close the void between he and

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Mitchell 19Sarah Ruth. He knew he had found the one when he discovered

a Byzantine Christ with a haloed head. He bartered with the

artist for the work, which began immediately. When the

artist concluded for the night, Parker went to the Haven of

Light Christian Mission where he spent the night for free,

sleeping on a cot. He spent a tormented night at the

mission, yearning for Sarah Ruth, dreaming of the tree

reaching out to grasp him and of his shoes burning in the

accident (237).

The next morning Parker was waiting on the artist to

arrive at the parlor. As he began to work on Parker’s Christ

tattoo, he asked if Parker had gone and got religion. “Are

you saved?” (238).

Parker replied. “I ain’t got no use for none of that. A

man can’t save himself from whatever it is he don’t deserve

none of my sympathy” (238).

Ironically we now hear Parker pronounce his own

sentence. His inability to quell his dissatisfaction has

Parker turning in every direction but to the church for

salvation. This is where O’Connor’s mastery of her art is

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Mitchell 20most evident. We are taken back to her words that the writer

must discover the “presence of grace as it appears in

nature” (147). Although Parker has not accepted grace, he

has finally fallen to a point of desperation so low that if

his newest scheme does not satisfy his wife, the reader can

believe that he may well find grace at that moment.

We know that Sarah Ruth rejects Parker and the tattoo,

screaming “Idolatry! …I don’t want no idolater in this

house” (244) as she beats Parker senseless with a broom,

driving him from their house.

The last time we see Obadiah Elihue Parker, he is

leaning against the pecan tree in the front yard, “…crying

like a baby” (244).

O’Connor has refused to substitute the answers of the

church for the intuition and reasoning of her readers. After

all, it is up to the reader to decide where O.E Parker goes

next. We know from the night he spent in the mission that he

truly loves Sarah Ruth. His desperate and foolish attempt to

please her with a tattoo of Christ on his back was indeed

sincere and genuine. However, her rejection of him now has

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Mitchell 21inflamed to a new level, and Parker is stuck with the

idolatry that now adorns his back. If we are to believe he

is to continue as a one-dimensional character--as he has

been throughout the story--then he may well leave, turning

his back on his unborn child and wife. But redemption often

springs when rock bottom has been struck. The religious

reader may well believe that this is the opportunity for

Parker to seek salvation, and now perhaps God has worked

Parker into a position where grace and salvation might truly

make a difference in his life.

But that will be for the reader to decide.

As we consider the implications for writers and readers

of southern literature, it becomes clear Flannery O’Connor

has given us a terrific example of a story that takes the

characters beyond the point where religion furnished all the

answers. One cannot say this story or these characters could

not exist in another region of the United States, but it is

easy to see that they could very well exist in the south. We

have no mansions, no slaves, no use of the word “nigger” to

show how a different time had been. But we have characters

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Mitchell 22presented in a rich and mesmerizing dilemma with no ready

solution. The dilemma tests them both, and the reader is

left with his/her impressions to determine the fate of Sarah

Ruth and O.E. Parker. With her words, Flannery O’Connor

continues to set the paradigm of southern literature and

offers to students of the word and writers of the genre

boundaries to follow—and challenge—as we evolve and seek to

define the direction of southern literature in the coming

century.

Works Cited

O’Connor, Flannery. “Parker’s Back.” Everything That Rises Must

Converge. New

York: Farrar, 1993. 219-244. Print.

---. “The Church and the Fiction Writer.” Mystery and Manners:

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Ocasional Prose. Comp., Ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert

Fitzgerald. New York:

Farrar, 1969. 143-153. Print.

---. “To ‘A.’” 25 July 1964. Letter of Letters of Flannery

O’Connor:TheHabit of Being.

Comp. Ed Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1979. 594.

Print.

---. To Father J.H. McCown.. Comp. ed. Fitzgerald. 134-135.

Print.

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