Amidst preachers and murderers, you’ll find the fiery heart of Flannery O’Connor

Among Flannery O’Connor’s writings is a portrayal of the divine that underlies every event like a basso continuo: for O’Connor, a Catholic amongst Protestants in the ‘Christ-haunted’ South of the United States – the so-called Bible Belt, where religion plays a decisive role in every aspect of life – God acts in ways that are unknowable, faith is no guarantee of salvation, and Grace, something akin to a fiercer version of Manzoni’s Providence, can arrive at any moment. If this is the burning heart of O’Connor’s work – described by Robert Lowell as ‘heroic as a saint’ – and to this we add a life spent in semi-seclusion amongst the animals on a farm in Georgia (in particular her beloved peacocks, ‘intrusions of grace into the devil’s territory’), the lupus erythematosus that would plague her existence until her untimely death, and harsh, anachronistic narratives that leave few glimmers of light, it seems impossible to recognise, in a present mired in worldliness, the contemporary significance of a perspective that responds to a genuine urgency to tell a story. Benedetta Centovalli has curated a series of events in Milan on the writer’s work and legacy, which find their definitive form in "Il cielo e la polvere. Visions and Worlds of Flannery O’Connor (Mimesis), which bears witness precisely to the eternal inspiration of preachers and murderers, violent children and hardened racists – characters united by different lives who nevertheless speak to us, despite their distance. Romana Petri begins precisely with O’Connor’s distinctive perspective – the tool that ‘every writer must possess to see the other reality, the true one’ – to explain her unique vision of God (‘O’Connor said that religion could not be a blanket for our lack of faith and that we do not turn to God to ask for help but out of genuine love, to be as closely connected as possible with the One who has redeemed us’), the poet Angela O’Donnell sheds light on the ambivalent way in which O’Connor addresses the issue of race (the problems, but also the prophetic vision of “Omega Point”, in which “despite the progress made in creating a more just and equitable society, racism still afflicts the country and still has a place in the American soul and mindset”), whilst Sandra Petrignani explains how she became a cult author without feminism “having to fight in the slightest to establish her”.

In one of the two previously unpublished interviews, O’Connor summarises the core themes of her poetry: “faith, death and grace, and even the devil”. These are themes that appear far removed from today’s digitalised and hyper-connected world, and yet within the American writer’s pages lies a sense of unease that transcends time, becoming, in its irrelevance to the present, eternal, as is evident in her early short story "The Geranium" (centred on a man who leaves the South and follows his daughter to New York, in a sense of geographical and existential disorientation that recalls O’Connor’s connection to her homeland, so steeped in the sacred and the sinful) or in the famous “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (where a group of criminals cross paths with an unsuspecting family and, whilst an unspeakable act of violence unfolds, the dialogue between the grandmother and one of them turns into a theological dispute that encapsulates the inevitability of suffering and the impossibility of mastering one’s own existence).

Within a literary tradition such as contemporary literature, which is incapable of leaving its mark on time, O’Connor’s grotesque world, populated by freaks and outcasts, reveals, as Centovalli writes, “what we are, what we have been and what we might become”. One cannot ask more of literature than this: the truth.