Revelation (Flannery O'Connor)

Avalon Mentors

In this episode I read the short story "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor which tells the tale of a self-satisfied woman who encounters a nasty shock forcing her to take stock of who she really is.

"Revelation" was written during the last year of the author's life, a time she knew she was dying from her fourteen-year battle with lupus. The work was first published in the Spring 1964 issue of The Sewanee Review. The author was notified shortly before her death in August 1964 that her work won the O. Henry Award first prize for 1965, and the story was subsequently reprinted in Prize Stories 1965: The O. Henry Awards published that year. It was her third O'Henry Award first prize.

O'Connor's Southern Gothic style of writing was an attempt to get through to the generally self-satisfied culture of the southern United States. O'Connor wrote in an essay that

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

This deaf & blind tendency to feel "right with the LORD", however, seems to be an ubiquitous trait of humanity - the very definition of the first deadly sin, pride.

The tune referenced in "Revelation" is "You go to your church (and I'll go to mine)" written in 1931 by Philips H. Lord; recorded by Lulu Belle and Scotty in 1949, and by Bill Clifton & his Dixie Mountain Boys in 1959. The episode uses the Bill Clifton version. Here is the Bill Clifton recording of that tune:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnXaub0tUHs

The tune is originally a positive affirmation that all Christians are doing "the work of the Lord" and should get along in spiritual harmony with each other despite ecumenical differences. I think O'Connor probably uses the tune ironically to symbolize the separation that we create between our (sanctified) self and the (perdition bound) other.

O'Connor also drew satirical comics and was from this visual medium that she probably gained her keen sense of observation that served her so well in writing.

https://www.themarysue.com/flannery-oconnors-comics/

The Patreon Page:

https://www.patreon.com/user?u=21129179