Large and Startling Figures

Hi everyone, here are notes from the first two O'Connor classes. I will also paste in some of the emails that were circulating.

When Flannery died, Merton was not exaggerating his estimate of her worth when he said he would not compare her with such good writers as Hemingway, Porter and Sartre but rather with "someone like Sophocles … I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor."
Week one “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Week two “Good Country People”
Week three “Revelation”
Week four “Parker’s Back’

In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor writes, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. (New paragraph) Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies” (“The Fiction Writer and His Country”).

For each short story, try to identify the ways that O’Connor wants us to see the ideas of grace and redemption, and be sure to mark areas that you feel are quite humorous, as well as the areas that you find troublesome. Also, try to see if there is some key mediating figure who shares some characteristics of the person who is undergoing transformation.
Look for moments in the story that are the most uncomfortable—O’Connor has written that grace means change and change is uncomfortable.

Categorizing her work: Southern Gothic: Full of grotesques (disturbing, exaggerated characters), irony, violence, supernatural events. The importance of grace: some have suggested that as a Catholic, she would define grace as the influence or spirit of God, operating to regenerate or strengthen that person.

Context during the literary world: In O’Connor’s novel Wiseblood, Hazel Motes comments, “No one who has a good car has to be justified.” But it’s only when a policeman pushes Hazel’s car off the cliff that Hazel begins to really see (even though he also blinds himself). O’Connor is writing against the American trend of writing about the importance of the car and the road to finding oneself. Think about such works as Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Road,” The Great Gatsby, The Road, All the King’s Men, and more recently, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance and Easy Rider. Most of the main characters in these works believe in a type of innocence that they hope to find on the road, sometimes out west, or in their car. But Brian Ragen comments, “The only truth the driver seems to find at the end of his travels is that life is pointless as the aimless journey” (86). Flannery O’Connor’s ideas match up more closely with Nathaniel Hawthorne who would say the belief in the essential goodness and innocence of humankind is nonsense, and, like O’Connor, believed in original sin and evil. O’Connor writes, “that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil” (M&M 118). But in a 1959 letter to John Hawkes she says that she’s not as interested in the devil but in the evil things that lead up to a moment of grace.

In F.O. and the Christ-Haunted South, Ralph C. Woods argues that the narrator’s voice in her stories is O’Connor’s own and that she has a great deal in common with the fundamentalists that she writes about. For she herself once wrote in a 1959 letter, “It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors to realize that they are doctrinally nearer their traditional enemy, the church of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism.” Another provocative comment: “She admired Camus and Sartre and Nietzsche because they took God seriously enough to deny his reality” (Wood 31).

Comments about The Misfit:
The end of the story from Wood: “The Misfit’s voice is choking with self-pity when the Grandmother extends him her surprising gesture of solidarity. And as soon as he kills her, the red-eyed homicide wipes his glasses, since they are fogged with terrible tenderness toward himself. O’Connor discerns that The Misfit’s alternative to the hard realism of the gospel is not an equally hard nihilism but a squishy self-pity.”

O’Connor says of the Misfit: “I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a Pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to be.” Also, she says of the grandmother she should not be taught as if she is a witch, complete with a familiar (her cat). She notes, “It is true that the old lady is a hypocritical old soul; her wits are no match for the Misfit’s, nor is her capacity for grace equal to his; yet I think the unprejudiced reader will feel that the Grandmother has a special kind of triumph in this story which instinctively we do not allow to someone altogether bad” (M&M, “On Her Own Work” 110).

Here are some emails on the reading of "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

There are no right interpretations of these stories (unless the concepts do not match up with the words, and even then, who knows?)--we all see through our "lens" to use the term that Kathy and Turner both used last night.

Jeremy asked, What does the title mean? So we talked about O'Connor's emphasis on original sin (no one is good!)) and the fact that it's an ironic title. The Misfit is not good, ALTHOUGH the not so good grandmother wants him to be and is still trying to manipulate him with that cliché all the way to the end of the story. Another thing to ask is it better to be "good" or authentic? Good is awfully subjective and hard to define. And who among is truly authentic. In a discussion of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by Paul Elie, Jen Smith said that it's best to try to be good and authentic-- like Dorothy Day, Merton, O'Connnor, and Walker Percy, who at least, seem to be....

Kathy had a psychological/restorative justice reading of the text: Family is highly dysfunctional and grandmother is obnoxious due to being ignored/treated rudely/having to be subservient (I always say that's why Eve took the first bite :-). Being pressed into a subordinate role makes people passive aggressive and desperate for agency).

Rebecca had several interesting takes: One, this story represents a type of judgment of Christ. That's it! You don't get another chance. (Jeremy also spoke on this idea a bit). And two, Rebecca pointed out that the Misfit went underground (in prison) and resurrected much like Christ. And three, that the Misfit has moved from being a nihilist saying" There is no pleasure but meanness" to "no real pleasure in life"--indicating perhaps that he had moved philosophically and could become the prophet that O'Connor says he could be. BTW, both Turner and I used the word nihilist last night. It means someone who believes in nothing. It can be pronounced as ne-hilist (long e sound) or ni-hilist (long I sound). All last spring I pronounced it nehilist in my last class and that's harder for me to say so I've switched to the long I version).

Turner said that the Misfit is like Jesus overturning the tables in the temple.

Colette pointed out that the grandmother had to lose everything to gain her soul--so she lost her security (with Baily) and family members. (This, of course, is a basic teaching in all religions.)

Rebecca Hirst and Debbie Gayk both reiterated the idea that the lady-like grandmother could not cling to her "pristine" lady-like persona when faced with death. She thought of herself as attractive and was obviously NOT to most of us. Rebecca pointed out that we all think that we're pretty cool and attractive when maybe people are seeing a different thing.

Lynn pointed out that the Misfit's eyes look vulnerable at the end of the story which is a motif that you will see again in good country people--take off your glasses and maybe you can see better. Lynn's interpretation is one that I prefer to Wood's. I'm not sure that Wood has it right about the squishy self-pity (see handout).

David G. asked the question, would a Catholic reading be different from a protestant reading of the story?

Dan Scaperoth--said that the grandmother had to be shot three times since she was so bad and everyone else got only one shot.

The takeaway question: So what kind of person would you be if you knew that someone would shoot you every minute of your life?--and no second chances with plea-bargaining. We're all gonna die....and we might die suddenly like the Clutter family in Capote's Cold Blood that Turner mentioned. Right now there are an estimated 300 serial killers loose in the US. (I taught an essay on serial killers last semester). That's the reality of life. But it doesn't have to be serial killers--a wreck, a hurricane, cancer.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut says most people when discussing war want to hear "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." Do we think that way about a life of faith?

Another email:
Colette (thanks Colette!) sent me this provocative statement from the great Catholic writer Graham Greene. He is describing a woman much like the grandmother.

The setting is in Mexico during a time of Catholic persecution. A priest (the narrator) meets an older woman, both finding themselves arrested and in a small and dirty jail...

"She had the tiresome intense note of a pious woman. They were extraordinarily foolish over pictures. Why not burn them? One didn’t need a picture…He said sternly, ‘Oh, I am not only a drunkard.’ He had always been worried by the fate of pious women. As much as politicians, they fed on illusion. He was frightened for them: they came to death so often in a state of invincible complacency, full of uncharity. It was one’s duty, if one could, to rob them of their sentimental notions of what was good…He said in hard accents, ‘I have a child.’"

The Power and the Glory, pg. 152

Colette observed: It's interesting that there are so many brilliant and very thoughtful Catholic writers of fiction. Are there comparable Protestant or even any Evangelical writers? My response was C.S. Lewis and she also suggested CK Chesterton and Tolkien. But can anyone think of more protestant writers who write not about fantasy, but real, adult concerns and struggles (with their faith as the backdrop)? Do you think that protestants settle for cheap grace and want happy endings (which are not realistic for most--Jesus even says in the world we will have tribulation).

For those interested, here are the questions we used:

1. How does O’Connor foreshadow the ending?
2. How does Red Sammy’s fit in? What does O’Connor imply about consumerism?
2. How does the Grandmother’s “fictions” reveal who she is?
3. How would you describe the Misfit’s outlook on the world.
4. What can you make of the names in the story?
5. Think about the meaning of the images of blindness and glasses—a recurring motif in O’Connor’s works.


Questions for “Good Country People” (week of June 10)
1. How appropriate are the names of each of the characters? Why does Joy change hers?2. How is the color blue used in the story?
3. What kind of faith does Hulga have? 3. What does Hulga’s wooden leg represent? 4. Why does Hulga agree to meet with Manley Pointer? Does her experience with him confirm her cynical philosophy on "nothing"? Explain.5. What is Manley Pointer's motive for humiliating Hulga?6. Is there anything ironic about the title? Explain.7. What is Hulga's fatal flaw? Is there a moment of “grace” in this story?
9. Note the way that the story is framed by Mrs. Freeman. What is the significance?

Handout for "Good Country People"

From Franz Kafka:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us...We need the kind of books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Audience for this text: the Catholic reader and “the hard of hearing” and “the blind” (refer to first handout). “Ms. O’Connor sought to emphasize the literalness with which she took the traditional doctrines of the church and to separate herself from “those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a dept. of sociology or culture or personality development” Critic also notes that she is returning not to catholic tradition but to the evangelical protestanism of the reformation. She writes, “If you are Catholic you can go into a convent [if have a fervent faith], but if you are protestant and have it there is no convent and you go about the world getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head. This is one reason why I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers—because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious for me to catch” (Milder 162-163).

Other comments from O’Connor on her writing/faith
"Some may blame preoccupations with the grotesque on the fact that here we have a Southern writer and that this is just the type of imagination that Southern writer fosters. I have written several stories which did not seem to me to have any grotesque characters in them at all, but which have immediately been labeled grotesque by other non-Southern readers. I find it hard to believe that what is observable behavior in one section can be entirely without parallel in another....My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause."

Her spiritual disciplines: She read Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas every night: “I read it for twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say ‘Turn off that light, it’s late,’ I with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, ‘On the contrary, I answer that the light, being external and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes’ or some such thing”….
She also noted, “I read a lot of theology because it makes my writing bolder” (Gooch
228).

Some comments on O’Connor and “Good Country People” (1955)
Her stories and novels characteristically do not close on images of harmony and reconciliation, all passion spent, but in pain and violence and a profound sense of displacement, of permanent exile from the known and familiar—including the final displacement of death. And it is the surfacing of this memento mori at the end of all her works, whether literally on the page before us or metaphorically in those annihilations of ‘identity,’ that provides a final clue to her singular use of the doppelganger motif [a doubling of characters]…[t]he protagonists of O’Connor’s stories all cling to a narrow sense of ‘order,’ whether the ‘balanced’ social order of her many matrons or the dessicated rationalism of the intellectuals, for it allows them to feel safe…the double figure …embodies all that has been denied in order to create the inflated ‘invulnerable’
self” (Frederick 209).

“The relationship between the two women which frames the central action thus turns out to be a less sinister version of the encounter between their real and symbolic children. Like her daughter, Mrs. Hopewell persuades herself that she is in control of the situation, and like her she is self-deceived, for it is Mrs. Freeman with her mechanical, ‘driving’ gaze, her imperviousness, and her ability always to get the last word who dominates the relationship. If ‘Good Country People’ does not quite present parallel plots—the central encounter becomes a dramatic reversal, the framing action remains static and ongoing—it does set before us four characters in interlocking reflective relationship, like facing mirrors slightly askew” (Asals 199). And “Everybody is different” is not quite true.

“O’Connor repeatedly stressed her concern as a writer with the operations of supernatural grace, but its workings, she said, are not those of a ‘healing property,’ not ‘warm and binding’ but deeply ‘disruptive,’ ‘dark and divisive.’ The Christological passage she most often cited (Matthew 10:34) gives a precise description of the effect of her double figures: “Think not that I came to send peace of earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ (Asals 209).
But lest you think that O’Connor is ALL DARK here is what Wood has to say in his new esssay “God May Strike You Thisaway”: [Since Hulga is not slain, this is a hopeful sign] “It may mean that Hulga has begun to make her way back toward the embrace of her true name: Joy” (51).

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“The French Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was hailed by his contemporary, Pierre Bayle, as “the premier philosopher of our age.” Over the course of his philosophical career, Malebranche published major works on metaphysics, theology, and ethics, as well as studies of optics, the laws of motion and the nature of color. He is known principally for offering a highly original synthesis of the views of his intellectual heroes, St. Augustine and René Descartes. Two distinctive results of this synthesis are Malebranche's doctrine that we see bodies through ideas in God and his occasionalist conclusion that God is the only real cause.”


Martin Heidegger (1889-1976): “Instead of looking for a full clarification of the meaning of being, he tried to pursue a kind of thinking which was no longer “metaphysical.” He criticized the tradition of Western philosophy, which he regarded as nihilistic, for, as he claimed, the question of being as such was obliterated in it. He also stressed the nihilism of modern technological culture. By going to the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew. His writings are notoriously difficult. Being and Time remains still his most influential work.” (From Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The passage from Heidegger about nothingness explained (somewhat): [He] argues that the whole history of Western thought and life has constituted a sustained exercise in nihilism, that is, a negation of the present world for the sake of an alleged superworld….
The ancient affirmations of a transcendent order existing above and below ordinary life…have been linked to oppressive social and scientific systems….Scientists with their vaunted analysis of external reality, ignore the dense richness of the world, pushing it through the sieve of the mind’s reductive categories” (Wood 203).

Wood comments that nothing (the unknowable) has “a paradoxically effect: it returns us to the strangeness and mystery of the ordinary world” (203). Can you see this in the story about Hulga when she discovers that she knows nothing?

Heidegger notes, “Only when science proceeds from metaphysics can it conquer its essential task ever afresh, which consists not in accumulation and classification of knowledge but in the perpetual discovery of the whole realm of truth, whether of Nature or of History.” (From Heidegger’s 1945 commentary on his rectoral address of 1933 given when he joined the Nazi party) (Wood 203).


Next week's questions for June 17
Questions for “Revelation”
1. Why is this story called “Revelation?”
2. How does O’Connor use the symbolism of being dirty and clean?
3. How does Mrs. Turpin see herself before Mary Grace calls her a wart hog?
4. How is Mary Grace a prophet?
5. What is the narrator’s attitude toward Mrs. Turpin in the beginning of the story? How can you tell? Does this attitude change, or stay the same, at the end?
6. Describe the relationship between Mary Grace and her mother. What annoying platitude does the mother mouth? Which of Mrs. Turpin’s opinions seem especially to anger Mary Grace?
7. What do you infer from Mrs. Turpin’s conversation with the black farm workers? I she their friend? Why does she now find their flattery unacceptable? (“Jesus satisfied with her”)?
8. When, near the end of the story, Mrs. Turpin roars, “Who do you think you are?” an echo “returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.” Explain.
9. What is the final revelation given to Mrs. Turpin? What new attitude does the revelation impart or how is Mrs. Turpin left with a new vision of humanity?