Reading Flannery O'Connor in Community

This past week, I had the pleasure of being part of a week-long seminar on the writing of  Flannery O’Connor. The seminar was sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Azusa Pacific University, where I teach writing. The deans of our college are interested in helping faculty to continue a project of life-long learning, building community, and generally becoming more literate.

Every weekday morning, we met and discussed O’Connor’s work, which is challenging, to say the least. She is held up by Evangelicals especially as an important Christian writer, but I once again found myself wondering how much of her work was meant to be taken as “Christian” writing. It seemed that some sort of interpretation was needed.

But this is what made for the robust and interesting discussions all week, which hadn’t flagged by Friday morning. If anything, the people I talked with seemed to be saying that they needed to read more of her work and think more about the questions her fiction raised. This is, again, all to the good. A fiction writer is worth reading if that is one conclusion she leads readers to make.

What We Mean When We Talk About Goodness

Certainly, too many of us today think quite differently. We think that the meaning of something should be apparent, and if we don’t get something in the first five minutes of staring at it, then it isn’t worth more of our time. We like easy fiction. Just look at what passes for block-buster movies these days.

With O’Connor’s fiction, it was interesting to see us jumping to ready-made conclusions—ideas we’d already thought about—when a careful reading of a passage did not support that common-place conclusion. If anything, it resisted that and forced us to more careful reading.

The first time, for example, we encountered the words “good man” in the short story with that in its title, this was not an occasion in which what a character was endorsing as “goodness” was the same as the author’s view. In fact, by the end of the story, the word “good” had been used to name conflicting ideas. If anything was clear, it was that the characters in this story, perhaps like the story’s readers, didn’t know what they were talking about when they used words like “good man” or “good country people.” What, then, did these terms mean?

This is Just the Beginning

O’Connor’s stories, like all good stories, like so much of the Bible, stays with us like a tough experience. We think about it later, and it deepens our understanding in some way.

And having other people to work through so many of these issues was helpful.

I see why people join book clubs. Thank you to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at APU for creating one out of the faculty. Reading seems a solitary venture, but at its best it does connect us with community and with our deepest concerns.