No matter how you read it, the gospel contains birth in a cold, dirty stable and violent death on Golgotha. The Incarnation finds its actual fulfillment in the Resurrection, but resurrection requires death. O’Connor understood that this is one hard fact humankind would rather ignore, and her characters show extraordinary initiative and ingenuity in finding ways to avoid confronting their frailties, the chief of which is their own mortality. It is often only when a character smacks flat up against death that the necessity of salvation is finally apparent. That is why so many of O’Connor’s stories reach a violent climax, forcing the characters to see grace in a new and terrible way.

Sight and insight are intimately connected metaphors in O’Connor’s stories—for both character and reader. Josephine Hendin has adopted the phrase “comic literalization” to describe the metaphorical development in these works. “Beginning with a metaphoric statement,” she writes, “the story develops as the metaphor becomes realized in a concrete action or material object.” At key moments—often at the height of a story’s crisis, sometimes at a moment of foreshadowing—O’Connor clicks the camera and catches a strange picture. In the seventeenth century, these would have been called emblems; and the fictive moment containing them, the emblematic moment. In her stories she adds a further dimension to these moments, transforming them into spiritual epiphanies.

For the seventeenth-century reader emblems were the pictorial representations of scriptural truth—highly exaggerated yet literal. Emblems literalized a motto, epigram, or scriptural passage to provoke a new response to an old and often too familiar saying. Thus, the picture used in Francis Quarles’s emblem book, Emblems, Divine and Moral (1635) to illustrate the verse, “Stay my steps in thy paths that my feet do not slide” (Psalm 17:5) shows a person in a child’s walker being led through the streets by an angel. The steps are literally “stayed.” The feet do not slide because the walker supports and the angel guides.

O’Connor’s emblems work in similar ways. She often paints stark pictures which draw attention to themselves both pictorially, as still moments caught in time, and emblematically, as exaggerated representations of deeper spiritual truths. In “The Geranium” the flower pot crashes to the pavement, and the flowers lie on the ground, roots in the air. The camera clicks. In “The Barber” Rayber runs out of the barber shop, his bib still on, lather dripping from his chin. The camera clicks again. In “Revelation” Mrs. Turpin, leaning on the fence, turns the water on the hogs. In “Parker’s Back” Parker leaves his shoes burning in the middle of the field. In each of O’Connor’s stories, the climactic moment could be lifted from a seventeenth-century emblem book. These moments are often violent, bizarre, surprising. The Christ tattooed on Parker’s back is beaten with a broom. The old lady whose family has just been shot reaches in sudden affection for her killer. The child drowns in the river in which he has been baptized.

O’Connor always pushes us back to the agonizing scandal of the cross. That scandal has at its heart the recognition that humanity is fallen and needs redemption. Of course, for the Christian the mysteries remain mysterious to the end.

Toward the end of O’Connor’s letters, one experiences a depressing sense of inevitability. As one approaches August 3, 1964, the temptation is simply to stop reading—as if that would somehow keep O’Connor alive. Sally Fitzgerald notes that O’Connor’s final letter, written on July 29th, 1964, and found on her nightstand after her death, is almost illegible. It is playful in its nicknaming, but serious in its brief contents, and refers to an anonymous phone call her friend received. “Be properly scared,” O’Connor advises, “and go on doing what you have to do, but take the necessary precautions. . . . Cheers, Tarfunk.” ²

Such proper scaring is what many of O’Connor’s characters and all of her readers require and experience in her fiction. We must go on doing what we have to do, but with clearer eyes and more sensitive ears, having run into Truth along the way.

1. Review of Paul Horgan, Humble Powers: Three Novelettes in The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, compiled by Leo J. Zuber, ed. Carter W. Martin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 19.

2. The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 596.

These excerpts are Copyright 1998 by Cornerstone Press Chicago, and are from the book A Proper Scaring, by Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, available November 15, 1998 from Cornerstone Press Chicago.