Too Awful to Ignore

When I was in high school, I used to claim pretentiously that Flannery O’Connor changed my life. I have no idea what I meant by that, and if I was honest with myself at the time, I’m sure I would have admitted I had no idea then, either. Such was the depth of my ignorance and my pretention, in fact, that I made this claim after reading through the Complete Stories and being completely unable to point out the religious dimensions of her work. College did that for me, along with a book I picked up at a Christian music festival, Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner’s Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. Baumgaertner’s book is the perfect introduction to traditionalist readings of O’Connor—she goes through her work story by story and explains what she’s up to.

The phrase you hear bandied about in O’Connor studies—I don’t have the energy to comb through Baumgaertner’s book to see if it’s in there, although it’s not listed in the somewhat skimpy index—is tragic grace. However sophisticated you want to get with your interpretations, it’s a hard thing to ignore, and it’s certainly the method endorsed by the author herself, who famously notes in “The Fiction Writer and His Country” that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

So to get her very premodern point across to those of us numbed by the modern and postmodern worlds, O’Connor kills off her main character in pretty much every story. (In the few stories where the main character doesn’t die, something nevertheless terrible happens to her, as we see in Mrs. Turpin’s public come-uppance in “Revelation,” a personal favorite.)

In O’Connor’s Catholicism, a character who receives a flash of grace just before her death is given a chance for full acceptance of that grace in Purgatory; thus, it really counts for something that the Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” “would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” She’s a good woman for 35 seconds on earth, and she’s given a chance to be a good woman forever. Furthermore, the reader is made aware of divine presence and grace and given his own chance to accept that grace by viewing someone else’s tragedy.

All of this is de rigeur O’Connor criticism; throw a rock up in the air on a college campus, and you’ll be sure to hit someone who wrote a paper to this effect. What I didn’t recognize until I reread, for the first time in 15 years, the previously uncollected work at the front of Complete Stories, is the extent to which her own biography created and then necessitated this approach.

The stories in question—“The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “Wildcat,” “The Crop,” and “The Turkey”—were part of O’Connor’s master’s thesis at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, from which she graduated in 1947. The future, presumably, was wide and open in front of her at this point; she would attend the Yaddo Writer’s Retreat in a few months and move in with lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzpatrick shortly after that, and these appear to have been happy times in her life.

What these stories have in common is their weakness, at least when viewed in the larger context of her later work. (O’Connor, best I can tell, got much better as she went along—A Good Man Is Hard to Find is better than Wise Blood, and Everything That Rises Must Converge is better than both of them. We’ll ignore The Violent Bear It Away.) Readers looking for tragic grace in these early stories will not find it, not without stretching credulity to its limits. “The Barber,” the best of the five, sets up the reader for a great fall that never comes; death permeates “Wildcat” up until the very end, when it mysteriously vanishes; and “The Crop” is a very ill-advised attempt at John Barth-style metafiction (even if it was composed before Barth was a blip on the radar). We get in these stories all the elements that make O’Connor such an entertaining and philosophically interesting writer—but without a catalyst to put them all together.

Then came 1950. O’Connor was hospitalized for a floating kidney, and while she was there, she discovered she suffered from the lupus that claimed her father eight years earlier. She was dying—there was no cure and not much treatment for the disease in those days. She finished Wise Blood while recovering from her surgery and adjusting to her new lifestyle in Milledgeville.

I am not sure of the degree to which her conception of this novel changed once she learned of her illness. It’s obvious from the fragments published earlier (also collected in Complete Stories) that it gained a certain measure of darkness, a darkness which her later stories would not only replicate but intensify. Hazel Motes blinds himself in penance, but the Grandmother, say, or Mrs. May, aren’t given a choice in the matter. Fate or God takes over, and we’re to them as flies are to errant boys.

We can see the difference between pre- and post-lupus O’Connor in the twin stories “The Geranium” and “Judgment Day,” the first and last stories she published. The latter is a rewrite and expansion of the former; they both deal with an elderly Southern man adjusting to life in New York City by staring at a plant on a balcony across the street, but the tone of their endings is radically different. “The Geranium” ends with a thud, the potted plant falling off the balcony. Old Dudley survives, at least for the time being, but the story ends in alienation and ugliness.

“Judgment Day” is somehow less dark, despite Tanner’s ending position with his head stuffed into a balcony. His death is made explicit here—and it’s one of the most horrifying in O’Connor’s entire corpus—but the story offers redemption. He’s explicitly given the judgment day he’s so hoped for, and he makes it back to Georgia, even if he does so in a pine box. “The Geranium” is a tragedy; “Judgment Day” is a comedy of sorts.

So American literature may have received its own form of tragic grace in O’Connor’s untimely death; as Walter Clemons remarks on the back cover of my edition of Complete Stories, “What we lost when she died is bitter. What we have is astonishing: the stories burn brighter than ever, and strike deeper.” The point is, however, that those stories wouldn’t burn at all without her knowledge of her impending death—for whatever reason, she needed that time limit in order to create her own unique vision of the world.

Nothing More Than the Traveling Hands of Time

V. and I went on Friday night to see the UGA Theater production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play I loved in high school but have not really looked at since I read it for my master's comps in 2005. It's an odd play, in that you remember it as Main Street U.S.A. when it's actually The Sound and the Fury. I remembered it as sweet and a little corny--a traditional play if there ever was one--but that's a great disservice. It was as Modernist as anything Eliot or Faulkner or Joyce ever wrote, what with the whole "Stage Manager" conceit breaking the fourth wall and stopping the play every 15 seconds to trot out another "expert." (Those experts, I suppose, are a bit like Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land, obfuscating rather than elucidating the thing in itself.)

If you read my post on Meet the Robinsons, you probably picked up on my recent interest in time. The party line--repeated nearly ad nauseum in the brutal third act of Our Town--is that we should live in the moment, appreciate each second for what it is, let go of the past, and not fixate on the future, which is of course imaginary. This clashes with the Southern Agrarians I've been reading this semester. Andrew Lytle specifically condemns the Wilder system, calling the human results of it "momentary man":

that man who no longer has location, who is forever on his way, speeding from one inn to another, to the same bed that is not the same bed, to poor cuisines served in the same false ornament of supposedly foreign architecture.

Lytle demands allegiance to the past, and in fact, out of the twelve I'll Take My Stand guys, he's the only one who could have a reasonable claim of actually living in the past, living on a farm and whatnot.

And then there's Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury posits three systems. Quentin Compson, the world's most famous suicidal neurotic, can live only in the past, both personal (watching his sister get her underpants dirty) and corporate (the antebellum chivalric system he can't let go); his brother Jason lives in the future, and is a monster for it. Only Benjy Compson lives in the present--and he's an idiot man-child, certainly no role model.

Faulkner's solution is to present us with Dilsey, the Compsons' black servant. Dilsey receives the final section of the novel, and her chapter is marked by its third-person narrator and its more or less coherent voice. There's no wild shifting back and forth between present-day and thirty years previous in Dilsey's section--we see things as God must see them, from above them. And so Dilsey comes off stable, happy, dependable--three words no one would ever use to describe Quentin, Jason, or Benjy.

And so I submit that Faulkner wants us to follow Dilsey's lead. In a book about the way the past, present, and future conspire to destroy your mind, only Dilsey escapes. I'm sure you could blame that on Faulkner's racism if you wanted to--perhaps Dilsey escapes because she lacks the mental capabilities to analyze time. But I don't think so. He has a real and obvious affection for her, and he gives her section the weight of the novel's structure (it closes the whole ugly story) and its themes (she receives Easter Sunday and the resurrection that day implies).

And Dilsey's secret is that she's too busy to think about time at all. She works non-stop taking care of Benjy, Jason, and Miss Quentin Compson--not to mention her own children and grandchildren--and has no time for the type of poisonous self-reflection that wrecks the Compson family. She's no idiot, but she's no intellectual, which is to say that she lives neither and simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

Wilder might agree, whatever Emily Webb screams from her grave at the end of Our Town. After all, his play--whatever else it does--collapses and twists time. First it invents an era that may never have really existed (at least the way he portrays it); further, he does so in a blatantly nostalgic move, writing the play on the cusp of World War II and setting it before World War I. But then he destroys that era. Death is all around his characters, and the Stage Manager alerts us to the eventual deaths of the people we meet nearly as soon as we meet them. So past and future have been collapsed into an amorphous blob.

And as far as the present goes, Wilder subverts himself. If the important thing is for us to live in the present, then why present a nostalgized past? And why bother talking about material progress (which is going to make us look ahead, even when the progress takes place in the past--that's what the Carousel of Progress is all about)? No, the present is not as simple as Emily Webb wants it to be, and Wilder is well aware of it. The present is important but not distinct--Our Town makes the audience into Dilsey; it collapses and combines past, present, and future and hands it to us in a ball.

Do whatever you can with it.