In defence of Flannery O’Connor

I have a thought for the students of Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland: this Easter, why not resurrect Flannery O’Connor? Why not show that you appreciate America’s greatest Catholic writer even if the poor, frightened duds in charge of you do not?

Last summer, the university’s president, the Revd Brian F. Linnane SJ, removed O’Connor’s name from its halls of residence. The New Yorker had published a pompous piece about racism in O’Connor’s private correspondence, the George Floyd protests had begun and so… best not make the students uncomfortable, said Father Linnane.

The cosmic joke of this has stayed with me ever since. It’s not just that it’s the duty of any decent university to make its students uncomfortable, or even the sad irony of a Catholic institution that can’t forgive. The joke is that the whole point of O’Connor’s work is to make people uncomfortable: that’s her genius. And anyone who can’t stomach a little discomfort has no business putting her name on a wall in the first place.

Flannery O’Connor was one of the best short-story writers America has produced. She was born in 1925 in the segregated South and lived on a farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia with her mother until she died aged 39. Her characters were drawn from the world around her: farmers, preachers, religious conmen, feral children and upright, self-regarding Southern ladies. They’re often described as ‘grotesques’, though as O’Connor wrote: ‘I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it’s going to be called realistic.’

O’Connor’s characters might not be grotesque, but what happens to them sure is.