‘Almost Imperceptible Intrusions of Grace’: On Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction and Readerly Entanglement

'The modem age,' Flannery O'Connor writes, 'does not have a sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.' Not making it easy on her dull-eyed readers, O'Connor crafts her stories with straightforward and bare description even as she narrates disconcerting invitations to grace. I demonstrate in this essay how the spare quality of O'Connor's fiction renders the human confronted with divine grace in a credible, non-sentimental, and sometimes terrifying way that demands readers put themselves at risk, in a posture akin to the vulnerability found in prayer. I first show the ways in which O'Connor's stories show grace as possible, forceful, and often found in suffering in the lives of her characters. Then, I show extended invitations of grace from within the stories to without them in the act of reading. I demonstrate the affinity between encountering grace in O'Connor's fiction and in contemplative prayer by employing Jean-Louis Chrétien's phenomenological description of prayer and St. Bonaventure's account of St. Francis's seraphic vision. At the heart of this essay, I argue for the kinship of reading O'Connor's spare fiction concerning divine grace with painful, graced, and blessed acts of prayer. That is, we not only read about encounters with divine grace in O'Connor's stories, but encounter it for ourselves.