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46 THEINTERCOLLEGIATEREVIEWFall/Spring 2000-01

The Iconographic Fiction and ChristianHumanism of Flannery OConnor

Vigen Guroian

Vigen Guroianis a professor of theology and ethics atLoyola College in Baltimore. He is the author ofnumerous books includingEthics after Christendom(1994),Tending the Heart of Virtue: How ClassicStories Awaken a Childs Moral Imagination (1998),and Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening(1999). This essay was first delivered as a talk to a recentgathering of ISI Weaver Fellows at the Russell KirkCenter for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan.

What the word says, the image showssilently; what we have heard, we have seen.

That is how the Seventh Great EcumenicalCouncil held at Constantinople in 787 sum-marized its defense of the use of icons inChristian worship. What the council con-fessed to have heard from scripture and tobelieve is that God became man in JesusChrist. According to the Gospel of Johnthe Word became flesh and dwelt among

us, and we have seen his glory, the glory asof the only begotten of the Father, full ofgrace and truth (John 1:13-14). Throughan act of unfathomable kenosis, humilityand love, the infinite had become finite, theuncircumscribable was circumscribed in ahuman being, and the invisible was madevisible. In so far as the divine Word, theOnly Begotten Son of the Father, had be-come flesh and took the body of a man, heand the saints could be painted on wood orrepresented in mosaic or mural art. The

Old Testament prohibition against imageshad been lifted by God himself.

Flannery OConnor did not use paint tomake icons; however, she was an iconog-rapher with words. For she embraced theIncarnation with utter seriousness in herlife and in her fiction. To her close friend

whom we know in the correspondence onlyas A, she writes in September of 1955,God became not only a man, but Man.

This is the mystery of Redemption.1Someyears later, in another letter to A,OConnor explains how this belief in theIncarnation ran up against the secularity ofher audience as she was challenged to lendfresh expression to the Christian vision oflife.

The setting in which most modern fiction takesplace is exactly a setting in which nothing is solittle felt to be true as the reality of a faith inChrist. I know what you mean here but youhavent said what you mean. Fiction may dealwith faith implicitly but explicitly it deals onlywith faith-in-a-person, or persons. What mustbe unquestionable is what is implicitly impliedas the authors attitude, and to do this the writerhas to succeed in making the divinity of Christseem consistent with the structure of all reality.


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The Iconographic Fiction of Flannery OConnor by Vigen Guroian

THEINTERCOLLEGIATEREVIEWFall/Spring 2000-01 47

This has to be got across implicitly in spite of aworld that doesnt feel it, in spite of charactersthat dont live it.2

The ancient defenders of icons said essen-tially the same about paintings and theIncarnation. The icon made the divinity ofChrist seem consistent with the structure ofall reality, and most especially human ex-istence. Icons of Christ and the saints testi-fied to the real potential of human life,exceeding even the highest expectations ofpagan humanism. God became man andmade it possible for man to become Godnot, of course, by nature God, but mostassuredly by grace that transfigures life.

The Incarnation made it possible for allbelievers in Jesus Christ to be partakers ofthe divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Christianhumanism introduced the ideas of Cre-ation, Incarnation, and the sanctificationof life while at the same time rejecting thestrong prejudice of Hellenic culture thatspirit is opposed to matter and that, there-fore, God, who is spirit, would never enterthe material world. In light of the Incarna-tion and bodily Resurrection and Ascen-sion of Jesus Christ, human salvation could

no longer be thought of as an escape of thecaptive soul from the prison of the body.

The early church condemned as heresiesDocetism and Manicheanism, two gnosticmovements within Christianity, preciselybecause they embraced this dualism ofmatter and spirit. In her day, FlanneryOConnor combatted what she viewed asmodern reincarnations of these ancientgnostic heresies. She detected the gnosti-cism in currents of contemporary spiritu-ality that thrived even within the Christian

churches. In her essay The Nature and Aimof Fiction, OConnor names the enemy:

The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. Tothem all material things were evil. They soughtpure spirit and tried to approach the infinitedirectly without any mediation of matter. Thisis also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the

sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if notimpossible to write because fiction is so verymuch an incarnational art.3

This passage needs some explanation.After all, arent moderns materialists? Andyet OConnor seems to maintain that con-temporary people value material thingsless than spiritual reality. How is she able tosay this in the face of societys massive appe-tite for material goods and obsession withthe body and sex? OConnor does not dis-pute this description of modern tastes andbehavior. But she does point to a two-foldirony in it. First, this much-discussed anddepicted sex is radically devalued sexnot

that it is reduced to mere animal sex. Hu-man sexuality is thoroughly permeated byspirit and always transcends mere instinct.Rather, modern sex is either trivialized bysentimentality or distorted into obscenityand pornography. Sentimentalized sexleaps over sin to a mock state of inno-cence. Obscenity (and pornography) isalso essentially sentimental, for it leavesout the connection of sex with its hardpurpose, and so far disconnects it from themeaning in life as to make it simply an

experience for its own sake.4Sentimental-ized and romanticized sex ultimately de-values the body, as it views the body asmerely an instrument of the self, not consti-tutive of it. This frequently leads to alien-ation, ennui, and boredom. As for materi-alism and consumerism, the objects withwhich contemporary people clutter theirlives do not satisfy their need for a meaning-ful life. The mandarins of marketing andadvertising know this. So they constantlyfuel this dissatisfaction and inflame the ac-

quisitive spirit with incessant promises thatthe next purchase will quench the craving.

Thus, when modern people turn to reli-gion, they often look for release from thissyndrome, in flight from the body andmaterialism to peace of mind by the quick-est means available. A plethora of mysti-


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cisms, transcendental religions, and newage spiritualities compete for the attentionof the people. OConnor writes: Todaysreader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it assomething which can be separated fromnature and served to him raw as instantUplift.5As Frederick Asals has observed sowisely in his study of OConnors craft:The central thrust in all of FlanneryOConnors later fiction is to explodethis...escapism or pseudotranscendence byinsisting again and again that existence canonly beinthe body, inmatter, whatever thehorrors that may entail.6 Even this astuteassessment falls short of naming all that is at

stake for OConnor in her defense of incar-nate being. Nature does not end in orgasm,a full stomach, or owning a late modelluxury vehicle. Nature is both a windowinto and a path to the supernatural.OConnor understands the special chal-lenges that a secular age poses for a writer offiction with orthodox Christian convic-tions and a sacramental vision of life. Eventhe average Catholic reader is smittenwith the gnostic spirit, she observes. Byseparating nature and grace as much as

possible, he has reduced his conception ofthe supernatural to pious clich7 and na-ture is emptied of grace. In a discussion ofOConnors fiction, Peter S. Hawkins con-cludes that what is distinctive about themodern era is that the conflict betweennature and grace has been resolved by theelimination of the notion of grace alto-gether.8 This may be an exaggeration.OConnor did not believe that the modernperson dismisses grace entirely. However,she does conclude that when modern people

entertain grace as a possibility in their lives,they are inclined to think of it as a divineutility, not as a sacramental presence. Graceis an extra, alien ingredient added to natureby God, conjured up by priests and prayers,like gas pumped into an empty fuel tankuseful but not present under ordinary cir-

cumstances. What is more, this instrumen-talist view of grace makes it almost impos-sible to write about supernatural Grace,says OConnor. Supernatural grace is notmagic; it is not subject to human manipu-lation, or restricted to human needs. In aneffort to impress this upon her readers,OConnor says that in her fiction she ap-proaches grace almost negatively.9 Inpractical terms this means that the major-ity of her protagonists strenuously resistthe action of God upon them. The lessonthey learn, often through suffering, is thatgrace is Gods own free doing and can comeupon anyone even in the face of his or her

disbelief.Although Thomas Aquinas andCatherine of Sienna may have helped shapeher religious imagination, OConnor feltacutely how different her location in lifewas from theirs. She recognized that thevast majority of people for whom she waswriting lacked a vision of a unified worldthat comes from the hand of God, is fallenbut redeemed by the Creator-Word, and isindwelt by the Holy Spirit. She assayed thatonly a small minority of her readers, and

even fewer of her reviewers, shared herincarnational faith: even many Catholicsdid not take the Incarnation with deepseriousness as a rule for their lives or trulybelieve in the resurrection of the body.Nevertheless, OConnor made it her task toshow her readers that the world is sur-rounded by mystery and that the physicalcreation is itself an icon and a window intothat mystery. In her essay Novelist andBeliever she explains that the Christiannovelist will reject the influence of those

Manichean-type theologies which...[see]the natural world as unworthy of penetra-tion, because he knows that the infinitecannot be approached directly in his art.Rather, he must penetrate the natural hu-man world as it is, without an ideologicalformula or hardened preconceptions of


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what lies behind it. The more sacramental[the writers] theology, the more encour-agement he will get from it to do just that.With these prerequisites of belief the Chris-tian writer of fiction seeks to penetrate theconcrete world10with a confidence that hemay catch a glimpse of, the image of thesource, the image of ultimate reality.11

Thus in Flannery OConnors stories, apigpen momentarily becomes the placefrom whence Jacobs ladder reaches into

the heavens and bears the saints upward; aline of tree tops may be experienced as theprotecting wall of an Edenic garden sanctu-ary; and a water stain on a bedroom ceilingtakes flight as a bird of pentecostal grace tocure one rebellious youth of his spiritualblindness. Much like the icon painter,

OConnor turns to inverted perspectiveand distorted form in order to impressupon her reader that the ordinary may berevelatory, that the natural bears the im-age of the supernatural. And like the iconpainter, OConnors art is figural and ty-pological. The images she paints with words

and the mysteries that are revealed to herprotagonists join the biblical world and itsevents with theirs, just as the iconographerpaints his gospel scenes in such a mannerthat the Old Testament prefigurements ofthe New Testament events are gathered upin icons of Christs birth and baptism or histransfiguration. In other words, forOConnor fiction truly is an incarnationalart.

Yet for these efforts, Flannery OConnorwas badly misunderstood. Her trouble was,as she well understood, that those whoreceived her fiction lacked the biblical moor-ings and moral imagination to compre-

hend the true nature of her iconographicart. Modern interpreters of iconographyhave described the icon as primitive in onebreath and idealistic in the next, not foronce grasping its realism grounded in theIncarnation and revelation of transfiguredlife. When OConnor first came on the scene,critics described her fiction as grotesque,and attributed to her the same metaphysi-cal and moral dualism that she stoodagainst. What possible respect could thiswriter have for the body when she routinely

portrayed disfigured characters and, worseyet, put them through, what seemed tothese critics, trials of gratuitous violence?

They concluded that OConnor was com-mitted to the irreconcilableness of matterand spirit.

Hawkins sets the record straight, how-ever, when he correctly observes that thewarfare she [OConnor] wages is not, infact, spirit against flesh, but rather, spirit inflesh. Her goal is not only to make it impos-sible to deny the sacred as present in the

midst of the secular; it is to make it impos-sible to rest easy with any notion of secular-ity at all.12 In her stories OConnor de-scribes a human drama in which flesh, in St.Pauls sense ofsarxor sinful human nature,resists the action of grace by which Godseeks to heal sin and destroy death. To her

Courtesyof

theInaDillardRussellLibrary,

GeorgiaCollege&StateUniversity.

Flannery OConnor


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friend Cecil Dawkins, she states: All hu-man nature vigorously resists grace be-cause grace changes us and the change ispainful.13This, she insists, is as true for herreaders as for the characters in her stories.

The psychosomatic unity of human per-sonality and the Words incarnation of thisnature are the grounds of Gods efforts toredeem the fallen creature that he has madein his own image. These are also the Chris-tian truths that generate the drama ofOConnors stories. Often her protagonistsdeny the divine image within them andresist Gods redemptive purpose in their

lives. In other words, they inveterately re-sist grace, until grace moves them to em-brace the mystery of their existence withina revelation of divine meaning. In TheEnduring Chill, Asbury Fox is a youngman filled with hubris and immersed in self-delusion about his talents as a writer. Herejects the Christian religion because hethinks it stands in the way of his artisticimagination and fulfillment as a writer. Hesays to a priest in the story, God is an ideacreated by man and The artist prays by

creating.14 Asbury leaves his home on acountry farm to live in New York City (thesecular city) to make his mark on the liter-ary world. But things do not go well forAsbury. He is not productive and he be-comes ill.

His sickness weakens him so that he hasno recourse but to return home to what heimagines will be his speedy demise. Hissister Mary George, a principal of an el-ementary school and someone equally smit-ten with pride in her own intellect, sarcas-

tically diagnoses Asburys condition:Asbury cant write so he gets sick,15 shequips. But Asburys sickness is not just in hishead. It is also genuinely physical. Later inthe story, we learn that before leaving forthe city, Asbury drank unpasteurized milkat the family farm in an unsuccessful at-

tempt to make friends with two of the Ne-gro workers. From this he contracts undu-lant fever, called bangs in cows, that causespainfully alternating chills and fevers inhumans, though it is not fatal.

Asbury is one of OConnors moderngnostics, alienated from home and his ownbody, sick with the sin of pride, especially inhis case intellectual hubris, and attracted toNew Age sorts of mysticism that projectman as his own savior and perfecter. Sincechildhood, Asbury has resisted that gracewhich is neither of his own conjuring nor inservice to his selfish ways. A water stain onthe ceiling above his bed is the sign of this

grace that he resists. For as long as Asburycan remember, it has been there, taking theform of a fierce bird with icicles in its clawsmaking ready to descend upon him. At theclose of the story, Asbury lies in bed dread-fully sick but also aware that he is not goingto die. The old life in him [was] exhausted.He awaited the coming of a new. The fiercebird appear[ed] all at once in motion, theHoly Ghost descended upon him, OConnorannounces, emblazoned in ice instead offire.16

The Enduring Chill is as complex astory as Flannery OConnor penned, andwe cannot touch upon all facets of its mean-ing. Several details in the story, however,point to its principal themes. Early in thestory, OConnor establishes that Asburyhas a peculiar relationship to the bovinespecies. It is not just that he drinks their milkand gets sick. More important is the factthat although he is not a cow, hecanget sickwith a disease that is a cow disease.OConnor reminds us that human beings

share an animal nature with other crea-tures. During a car ride back to the farm,Asbury notices that a small walleyedGuernsey...[is] watching him steadily as ifshe sense[s] some bond between them.With sardonic humor, OConnor com-ments: On the point of death, he found


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himself existing in a state of illuminationthat was totally out of keeping with the kindof talk he had to listen to from his mother.

This was largely about cows with names likeDaisy and Bessie Button and their intimatefunctionstheir mastisis and their screw-worms and their abortions.17

Asburys endeavors to practice an intel-lectual angelism are defeated. He wants todie, or more accurately, he wants to shed hisbody. But it is not his body, nor the bodiesof the cows on the farm, that blocks hisillumination. A spiritual disease frustrateshis creativity and prevents his happiness. Ithink it is usually some form of self-infla-

tion that destroys the free use of a gift, saysOConnor in one of her essays.18Ironically,the bird that descends upon himisa prod-uct of Asburys own furtive imagination,suggesting that this young mans most cre-ative period of life might lie ahead of him.He will live, and maybe even inherit thekingdom of God, in a physically diseasedbody but with humility, because the lastfilm of illusion...[has been] torn as if by awhirlwind from his eyes.19

Like the humanism of a Thomas More ora John Henry Newman, Flannery OConnorsChristian humanism is grounded in an un-wavering incarnational faith and sacra-mental vision. But faced with the moderntemper, she chose a strategy that she gambledwould shake the spiritual cataracts fromher secular readers eyes and open theirvision to the operations of grace in theeveryday world. In her essay Novelist andBeliever, she explains:

When I write a novel in which the central actionis a baptism, I am very well aware that for amajority of my readers, baptism is a meaninglessrite, and so in my novel I have to see that thisbaptism carries enough awe and mystery to jarthe reader into some kind of emotional recog-nition of its significance. To this end I have tobend the whole novelits language, its struc-ture, its action. I have to make the reader feel,

in his bones if nowhere else, that something isgoing on here that counts. Distortion in thiscase is an instrument; exaggeration has a pur-pose, and the whole story or novel has been

made what it is because of belief. This is not thekind of distortion that destroys; it is the kindthat reveals, or should reveal.20

OConnor does not limit herself, how-ever, to the traditional sacraments to makeher case. It is fitting that the last story shefinished stands up as her most profoundaffirmation of the sanctity of our bodies asimprinted with the image of God and hav-ing a place of permanence in the redemptivepurpose of God. For she completed

Parkers Back in her hospital bed in defi-ance of her doctors instructions not topress her own failing body any further.Parkers Back crowns the achievement ofOConnors Christian humanism. In thisstory, she resoundingly rejects gnosticismand iconoclasm and shows that the Incar-nation is the true source of lasting beauty,goodness, and truth. Without the slightestdidacticism she builds the case that beautyand goodness are not ends in themselvesbut point to the Creator of those things in

which they may be seen, enjoyed, and thetruth known. Through a back country char-acter, whom she describes as ordinary as aloaf of bread21an only slightly disguisedallusion to the bread of the Eucharistsheshows that divine truth is never an abstrac-tion, but is always manifested concretely inthe human being who praises God in hisglory.

Obadiah Elihue Parker is the opposite ofAsbury Fox in almost every respect, exceptthat like Asbury he is driven by a desire for

perfection. Asbury is an intellectual whothinks that he can create beauty and truthout of his own head, whereas Parkerforthat is the name he goes by, since he isashamed of his first and middle nameswants to wear beauty on his body. WhenOConnor introduces us to him at the start


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of the story, Parker is twenty-eight years ofage and has married a young woman namedSarah Ruth who is the daughter of a funda-mentalist preacher. They were married inthe County Ordinarys office because Sa-rah Ruth thought churches were idola-trous.22 But we have to be taken back towhen Parker was fourteen years of age tofully understand what moves him through-out the story. In that year, at the fair, Parkerset his eyes on a tattooed man whose entirebody, from head to foot, was covered withimages. OConnor writes: Until he saw theman at the fair, it did not enter his head thatthere was anything out of the ordinary

about the fact that he existed. Parker doesnot exactly think these thoughts about mys-tery and life, for OConnor makes it clearthat he is a character moved more by in-stinct and emotion than by intellect. It wasas if a blind boy had been turned so gentlyin a different direction that he did not knowhis destination had been changed.23

Nevertheless, the course of Parkers lifehad been changed. For the first time, heentertained a vision of beauty. His searchfor God had begun. The man, who was

small and sturdy, moved on the platform,flexing his muscles so that the arabesque ofmen and beasts and flowers on his skinappeared to have a subtle motion of itsown. From that moment on, Parkerwanted the same for himself. He wanted towear everything that there is on his body inbright color and beautiful design. He be-gan to appropriate tattoos. But strangely,no tattoo kept him satisfied for very long;and as the space on the front of him fortattoos decreased, his dissatisfaction grew

and became general. No combinationseemed to achieve the desired result. Theoverall effect was not the harmony of colorand form and movement, the beauty Parkersaw on the tattooed man, but somethinghaphazard and botched. Changing meta-phor and perspective on human desire and

the longing for happiness, OConnor adds,Hungry people made Parker nervous.24

When we meet Parker at the beginning ofthe story, his entire body is covered withtattoos, except for his back. He had nodesire for one anywhere he could not readilysee it himself. Parker has no idea that he is

being moved by and toward a profoundtheological truth. But through comic irony,OConnor invites the reader to explore theserious notion that man is a microcosm ofcreation, that in the human being, whomGod has created in his very own image, thewhole universe reverberates. God intendsthat man be the custodian and priest of thiscreation, giving it order and blessing it togood use, even lending it his voice to glorifyGod. Once again, Parker does not think

these things, but he does feel them, or moreprecisely, he senses them. It is revealed inhis eyes, which OConnor describes as thesame pale slate-color as the ocean andreflect[ing] the immense spaces around himas if they were a microcosm of the mysteri-ous sea.25

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To please his wife, for nothing seems toplease her, especially not his tattoos, Parkeris determined to have a tattoo done on hisback that she will approve of. He is alsomoved by a dissatisfaction [that] began togrow so great in Parker that there was nocontaining it outside of a tattoo. It had tobe his back. There was no help for it. Oneday Parker crashes a tractor into a tree andsets it on fire. Immediately, he takes flight inhis truck straight to the city fifty miles awaywhere he visits the local tattoo artist. Parkeris convinced that nothing short of a tattooof God himself will please Sarah Ruth. Hepages through a book of pictures of God

and is caught by the all-demanding eyesof a Byzantine Christ, as if he were beingbrought to life by a subtle power.26Parkeris about to have himself inscribed by theimage of him whom St. Paul calls the ex-press image of God the Father and thearchetypal image of our humanity. Hisearlier skirmish with the burning treean allusion to Moses revelation on Sinaisignifies and foreshadows Parkers personalappropriation of the Incarnate God, in-scribed on his own flesh.

In her description of Parkers crash intothe tree that sends him on this mission to gettattooed one final time, OConnor em-ploys the ancient Christian double entendreof the sun and the Son of God. I have addedthe emphases to the text to highlight notonly this use of the double entendre but alsothe other biblical allusions that she care-fully plants within the scene.

As he circled the fieldhis mind was on a suitabledesign for his back. Thesun, the size of a golf ball,began to switch regularly from in front of him

to behind him, but he appeared to see it bothplacesas if he had eyes in the back of his head.All at once he saw thetreereaching out to grasphim: a ferocious thud propelled him into the air,and heard himself yelling in an unbelievablyloud voice, GOD ABOVE!

He landed on hisbackwhile the tractor crashed

upside down into thetreeand burst intoflame.The first thing Parker saw were hisshoesquicklyeaten by fire.... He could feel the hot breath ofthe burning tree on his face. He scrambled

backwards, still sitting,his eyes cavernousand ifhe had known how tocrosshimself he wouldhave done it.27

Soon Parker will have eyes in the back of hishead, or more precisely on his back. Hiscavernous eyes mirror proleptically theeyes of the Byzantine icon of Christ. And theimage of the burning tree anticipates theend of the story when Parker encountersanother fiery tree that is his cross.

We need to review briefly the action

before this denouement. When he leavesthe farm for the city, Parker has embarkedon a transformative journey of discoveryand revelation. When the tattoo artisttaunts Parker, Have you gone and gotreligion? Are you saved? Parker objects,but his protestations seem to leave hismouth like wraiths and to evaporate atonce as if he never uttered them. On theway home, Parker stops at the local poolparlor where he is ridiculed when he showsoff his tattoo. O.Es got religion and is

witnessing for Jesus. The locals throw himout of the building as if the long barn likeroom were the ship from which Jonah hadbeen cast into the sea. Like Jonah, Parkersresistance to his calling is to no avail. He isreminded once again that in some mysteri-ous way he has become a follower of the Onewhose image he has had put on his back.The eyes that were now forever on his backwere eyes to be obeyed. He was as certain ofit as he had ever been of anything. It is as if,like Jonah, Parker is driven to a foreign

country where he truly comes to himselfand completes his service to God. It was asif he were himself but a stranger to himself,driving into a new country though every-thing he saw was familiar to him, even atnight.28

When Parker arrives at home just before


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dawn, the door is locked. He calls to SarahRuth. A sharp voice close to the door said,Whos there. Parker answers, I dontknow no O.E., the voice answers. At thatmoment the sun comes up. The sky hadlighted slightly and there were two or threestreaks of yellow floating above the hori-zon. Then as he stood there, a tree of lightburst over the skyline. It is the lone pecantree in the yard and Parker suddenly has anecstatic religious experience: He felt thelight pouring through him, turning hisspider web soul into a perfect arabesque ofcolors, a garden of trees, birds and beasts.

This ecstatic moment is quickly extin-

guished, however, when Sarah Ruth expelshim from their home. For when Parkeruncovers his back and shows it to her, theresults are not as he imagined. At first SarahRuth is confused. She does not recognize theface on his back. It aint no body I know,28

she says. Her words are packed with irony.

Its him, Parker said.

Him who?

God! Parker cried.

God? God dont look like that!

What do you know how he looks? Parkermoaned. You aint seen him.

He dont look, Sarah Ruth said. Hes spirit. Noman shall see his face....

Idolatry, Sarah Ruth screamed. Idolatry.... Idont want no idolater in this house! and shegrabbed up the broom and began to thrash himacross the shoulders with it...and largewelts...formed on the face of the tattooedChrist. Then he staggered up and made for thedoor...still gripping [the broom] she lookedtoward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still

more. There he waswho called himself ObadiahElihueleaning against the tree, crying like ababy.30

The story ends this way. OConnor givesit no full closure. The fate of this scourgedand crucified figure is left unknown. Butit seems clear that Parker has come to some

deep subliminal understanding of the mean-ing of his name and the destiny it holds forhim. Obadiah means servant of God,which Parker has become, in spite of hisaversion to God and religion. And Elihuemeans God is he, with whom Parker hasidentified in the most intimate manner bycarrying his image in his own flesh. What ismore, Elihue is a variant of Elihu, who in thebook of Job turns from explaining sufferingas the result of human sin to interpreting itas part of the divine mystery of Gods cre-ation. Let us recall that Sarah Ruth as onewriter said sees his tattoos as vanity anda sign of sinfulness, whereas to Parker they

represent ineffable mystery. What is more,Parker signifies someone whose home is apark, a walled garden like those in icons ofthe Expulsion from Paradise and of the New

Jerusalem. Parker courted Sarah with applesand other fruit, an allusion to Eden.31

When he arrives home at dawn, Parkerimagines that he indeed has gotten to Eden.After being forced to repeat his full nameObadiah Elihue, he feels the light pouringthrough him, turning his spider web soulinto a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden

of trees, and birds and beasts.

In Voice of the Peacock, Kathleen Feeleycomments: It seems strangely fitting thatthe story of a man led in mysterious ways toincarnate the Redeemer on his own bodyshould be the final story of an author led byequally mysterious ways to make Redemp-tion a reality in her fiction.32 Feeley turnsour attention back to the powerfulincarnational vision that drove FlanneryOConnors fiction and stood at the heart

of her Christian humanism.OConnors iconographic fiction was

drawn out by the challenges to Christianorthodoxy that she felt compelled to an-swer. And Parkers Back in particularhelps us to understand where and on whatgrounds she parts company with the funda-


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mentalist religion of the Southa religionthat on various occasions OConnor saidshe otherwise stood beside as a RomanCatholic in opposition to the secular mind.Ironically, modern fundamentalismdoesnt take the Incarnation seriouslyenough. It limits the limitless God to thewritten word and denies his presence in thephysical creation. Sarah Ruth completelyfails to detect Gods presence in the dramathat unfolds around her. She is unable to seethe image of God in her husband and doesnot comprehend his participation in thesuffering of Christ and redemptive victoryon the cross. Could this be because she is a

Christian gnostic? OConnor leaves SarahRuth no better off in relation to God andhumanity than the secular people she ab-hors. On another occasion, FlanneryOConnor penned these words about herart which crystallize in her characteristi-cally homely way her remarkableincarnational and humanistic vision of life.Fiction, she said, is about everythinghuman and we are made out of dust, and ifyou scorn getting yourself dusty, then youshouldnt try to write fiction. Its not a

grand enough job for you.31Now that is alesson not limited to writing but applicableto the whole of living.

5. OConnor, Mystery and Manners, p. 165.

6. Frederick Asals,Flannery OConnor: The Imagina-tion of Extremity(Athens, Georgia: The University ofGeorgia Press, 1982), p. 66.


8. Peter S. Hawkins,The Language of Grace(CowlyPublications, 1983), p. 24.

9. OConnor, Habit of Being, p. 144.



12. Hawkins, Language of Grace, p. 24.

13. OConnor, Habits of Being, p. 307.

14. Flannery OConnor,The Complete Stories(NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), p. 376.

15. OConnor, Complete Stories, p. 373.


17. OConnor, Complete Stories, pp. 362, 367.













30. OConnor, Complete Stories, pp. 529-530.

31. Credit is due here to a splendid little paper submit-ted in a course I taught in the summer of 2000 on theicon as theology. The paper, entitled Ironic Icon, isby Annette M. Chappell and the quoted material istaken directly from that paper.

32. Kathleen Feeley,Voice of the Peacock(New York:Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 15-51.


Notes

1. Flannery OConnor,The Habit of Being, ed. SallyFitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1979), p. 102.

2. OConnor, Habit of Being, p. 290.

3. Flannery OConnor, Mystery and Manners (NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 68.


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Guroian Flannery OConnor