Flannery O'Connor

Time for a thread on the inimitable peacock lady from the state of my birth.

I'm currently re-reading A Good Man Is Hard to Find (the collection), and remembering just how good she actually was ... and how funny. Anyone else been moved by her work to varying mixtures of laughter, awe, pity, squick, and holy terror?

I really enjoyed Wise Blood. Took me a bit to grok that it was black comedy, and I found the whole thing quite amusing once I did figure that out.

I also have a one-volume collection of all her short stories that I'm working my way through. I liked "The Displaced Person", "Good Country People", and "The Enduring Chill".

And if Wise Blood is black comedy, then The Violent Bear It Away falls somewhere the ultraviolet range. Unfortunately, the world has more Raybers in it than ever before.

I'm very interested in O'Connor's work, but I've only ever read "Good Country People", which was enough to show me how extremely talented she is. It struck me that Hulga, despite being an atheist, seemed quite a bit of an Author Avatar. (Though that might have been simply because she was terminally ill, like O'Connor herself.)

I have Wise Blood and will read it sometime soon.

John Huston's movie adaptation of Wise Blood is very good and remarkably faithful to the book. The only real differences are:

• Huston's weirdly anachronistic costumes and sets—one minute the setting looks like the early '50s of the novel, and the next minute like the late '70s of the movie's filming.
• The movie can't depict the landlady's internal thoughts, which are the filter through which the last chapters of the book are mostly presented. As a result, she amounts to a bit part in the film.

I think that O'Connor was able to put a lot more punch into Hulga's character because of their similarities. One gets the impression that Joy/Hulga was the person O'Connot was tempted to become at the lowest points of her illness-riddled life. No wonder she was so merciless towards the character!

A fruitful question about O'Connor's works would be which single moment wins the Refuge in Audacity prize.

On the one hand, there's the young Bible salesman seducing an early Daria expy and running off with her wooden leg. And then there's the reluctant prophet-in-training who ends up fulfilling God's will by drowning a retarded child ... but not before accidentally baptizing him. Or the fiery descent of grace in the form of a sideshow hermaphrodite. Or the mounting gamesmanship, capped by a final horror, of "The Lame Shall Enter First."

Fair disclosure: I'm originally from Georgia, and was a long time realizing just how eccentric O'Connor's characters and plots looked to people who weren't from there. For me, a considerable lot of it was business as usual.

edited 14th May '12 9:42:14 AM by Jhimmibhob

Wait, she wrote two stories about river baptisms? I remember the one about the city kid who misunderstands the preacher baptising him and thinks that the Kingdom of God is literally at the bottom of the river. He goes back to the river to find the Kingdom by himself and drowns, while the atheist (who had been mocking the baptisms the prior day) tries and fails to rescue him.

What are your thoughts on "The Artificial Nigger"? I've read that one twice and I still don't think I get it. The protagonists' point of reconciliation just strikes me as weird.

Yep: you're describing "The River," whose ending gets semi-echoed in The Violent Bear It Away. River baptisms were quite a thing!

And I get stuck on "The Artificial N@#%&er," as well: the figure seems to be the trigger for a weird moment of grace, one that reconciles Mr. Head and his grandson to each other and the world. Something about the shabby statuette works on them ... the grandfather sees a kind of person he'd never even met before but feared, the grandson someone who'd comforted him in the face of his grandfather's betrayal. They seem to take from it some notion of human kinship and shared fallenness. It's still mostly a mystery to me.

"Revelation" is another one that stuck with me. I recall not quite understanding the point until some time later: a Calvinist preacher (perhaps ironic, considering how O'Connor tends to portray Protestants) told me that Christians ought to repent not just of their bad deeds, but their good ones as well. The blood of Christ washes them all away.

I was expecting Ruby Turpin to just realize that her bigotry was wrong. Instead she and I got something much deeper.

Recently read "The Lame Shall Enter First".

Sheppard. Damn. It's been years since the last time I've hated a fictional character as much as I hated him.

I've read all her short stories, but I had a really hard time with them. I couldn't figure out whether or not she actually believed in the bigotry her characters spout. The stuff I read about her assumes she doesn't, and that she was just writing characters realistic for the time period and setting. (The presence of racism doesn't make her works racist because her goal was to comment on grace, not racism?)

But if those characters are realistic to that time period and setting, and Flannery O'Connor is from that time period and setting, isn't the burden of proof on proving that Flannery O'Connor isn't like them? I just don't see any evidence for assuming she isn't. I think that when modern readers read her stories we assume that O'Connor is against racism and ridicules her racist characters because we know racism is bad and expect that. But did O'Connor actually intend for that reading?

Please don't hate me, I actually want to be wrong. I got angry after only the first couple stories in the anthology, so I'm sure I missed things later. I'm also sure I read things too shallowly.

edited 18th Oct '12 8:48:57 PM by Rhea

Guilty until proven innocent, eh?

I think O'Connor's depiction of black people themselves leaves a bit to be desired.

On the other hand, her racist white characters are—as best I can remember—all distinctly unpleasant people. I'm quite certain that the intended reader reaction is revulsion—made all the worse by the few times the reader actually does agree with the character. How can he get this right and everything else wrong?

And if O'Connor was a product of her environment, one needs to consider that her environment also included progressive intellectuals. There's certainly no shortage of them in her stories; they tend to come across no better than the ignorant country folk, just for different reasons.

O'Connor clearly believed that doing the right thing for the wrong reasons could be just as dangerous as doing the wrong thing. So when her viewpoint character espouses progressive ideas on race relations, they're going to be subjected to the same "everyone is flawed" treatment as all her other viewpoint characters—resulting in them expressing these progressive ideas in the most self-righteous, jerkish manner possible. See: "The Enduring Chill", "Everything That Rises Must Converge", and "The Revelation".

The biggest reason I think O'Connor's heart was in the right place: In "The Displaced Person", the immigrant is depicted as a righteous person, a blatant Christ symbol. When those around the immigrant react negatively to him, that's intended to reflect badly on them, not him. And one of the reasons they reject him is because he treats his black coworkers no differently from his white ones.

Yes, I fail at the guilty until proven innocent part, and I know the South had it's fair share of progressives. I wish I hadn't posted what I did, because I don't want to be inflammatory and accusations of racism are always inflammatory. Thank you for responding so kindly. It's very difficult to figure out author intent, and I should try not to assume the worst of people.

I actually remember liking "The Displaced Person," but I don't have my copy with me so I can't reread it. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," was good too.

I've been researching "The Artificial .". This article is interesting, and has a quote from O'Connor that says she meant the statue to be representative of everyone's suffering.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/postid/pid9999.0001.107?rgn=main;view=fulltext "III. The Dilemma of Sameness and Other in O'Connor"

Edit- Oh, the progressives. Since she has such a broad assortment of flawed characters, it would be ridiculous to say she thinks progressive viewpoints are negative because there are flawed progressive characters. I don't think that.

edited 19th Oct '12 9:26:52 AM by Rhea

Well, a quick google search pulled up a few interesting articles on the topic. This page has a selection of less-than-savory quotes from her letters. This one attempts to give some context to her views, concluding that O'Connor was against the mistreatment of black people, but she felt that the sanctimony of certain folks on the side of civil rights was a more pressing issue.

Sooo... she was not very progressive, but still worth reading, IMO.

O'Connor would probably have agreed with Chesterton's contempt for progressivism per se, without due consideration for the direction of the progress. As the latter put it (if memory serves), "I have nothing to say to a man who prefers Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

However, O'Connor seemed largely sympathetic to civil-rights reform, and to many other beneficial movements lazily labelled as "progressive." At the same time, though, she saw the special moral danger that comes from lazily and self-righteously identifying oneself with laudable causes without humility or insight into oneself ... without perceiving our universally fallen nature, while striking postures as a secular form of "grace on the cheap," and while preening oneself at the expense of the supposedly less enlightened.

So while forthrightly opposing bigotry, O'Connor understood that even racism could be relatively human, honest, and harmless to the soul ... when compared to certain extremes of unearned moral peacockery. The son in "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is more correct than his mother, and his politics more humane, but he is also more dishonest and contemptible—a patient far more desperately in need of God's terrible, agonizing, consuming grace.

edited 19th Oct '12 8:03:49 AM by Jhimmibhob