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In one of Flannery O'Connor's best-known stories, a surly adolescent sets fire to his great uncle's farm and abandons the corpse of the uncle he promised to bury. In the same story, he drowns a young child in the act of baptizing him. Thereafter, he himself is a victim of homosexual rape. In another of her stories, a grandfather smashes his favorite grandchild's head on a rock in a struggle that has taken both beyond all inhibition. In another, a grandmother, her son, his wife, and three grandchildren are shot point-blank in a ditch by the side of the road. In another, an old man is stuffed between the bannister rails of his apartment building and left to die. In another, a widow is gored by a bull. The inventory could go on to include most of O'Connor's thirty short stories and novellas. In almost every tale, an implied epiphany is preceded or accompanied by an act of violence.
The fact of violence in fiction is certainly nothing new to readers raised in a media culture in which violence has become a cliche. What is surprising in O'Connor's stories is how she upends and indicts the cliches, the trivialization of violence, and the sentimentalities that soften our vision and confuse our judgment of it. Her objective, and her success, is to restore to a largely jaded audience the capacity for shock and with that, the possibility of recognizing evil, our involvement in it, and our need for redemption. She does this not by racheting up sensationalistic effects but by taking an insistently theological view of human action and motive that refuses to make sin a function simply of improper social conditioning, or evil a romantic idea. Her protagonists commit crimes, hate their neighbors, and wallow in bigotry, but they are not the antiheroes of other contemporary fiction. Nor are the objects of their hostilities sympathetic victims. Perhaps one of the truest general observations about O'Connor's characters is that none of them is likeable. Though some of them evoke laughter, there are none with whom any respectable reader would readily and wholeheartedly identify. One of the several biblical truths her stories serve to illuminate is that all have sinned, that there is none righteous, no not...