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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works: Wise
Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away /
Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters edited
by Robert Fitzgerald (Library of
America) Flannery O'Connor did not even live to see her 40th
birthday; she died, in 1964, of lupus, the same inflammatory disease
which had killed her father when she was a mere teenager and which
all too soon began to cripple her as well. A graduate of the Iowa
State University's journalism and writing program, she had started
to write her first stories, poems and other pieces when she was
still in high school, and had submitted a collection of six short
stories entitled "The Geranium" as her master's thesis in
university. (Most of the stories contained in that collection were
published individually in various magazines and anthologies around
the time of their inclusion in the thesis; the collection as a
whole, however, was first published only posthumously in the
National Book Award winning "Complete Stories of Flannery
O'Connor.") Only a few years after having obtained her master's
degree, and after a prolonged residence at Yaddo artists' colony in
upstate New York, O'Connor began to spend time in hospitals and, in
due course, was diagnosed with lupus. From that moment on, she
focused on her writing even more than she had before - and the
result were two novels, two short story collections, several
stand-alone short stories, essays and other pieces of occasional
prose, as well as a barrage of letters. The majority of that work
product, including twenty-one previously unpublished letters, is
reproduced in this collection published in the Library of America
series; notably, the fiction part also includes, as one piece,
O'Connor's master's thesis, "The Geranium: A Collection of Short
Stories."
A native of Georgia, Flannery O'Connor defined herself as much as a
Catholic writer as a Southerner; and she commented on the impact
that regional influences on the one hand and her religion on the
other hand had had on her writing in the 1963 essays "The Catholic
Novelist in the Protestant South" and "The Regional Writer." Yet,
while religion (and more specifically, Catholicism) certainly plays
a big part in her writing, from the "Christian malgre lui," as she
herself characterized the hero of her first novel "Wise Blood" in
the Author's Note to book's 1962 second edition, to the "odd folks
out" and searching souls populating her short stories, and to her
frequent biblical references, it would not do her writing justice to
limit her to that realm, nor to that of "Southern" fiction. (No
matter for which specific dramatic purpose a writer employed a
Southern setting, he would still be considered to be writing about
the South in general, and was thus left to get rid off the label of
a "Southern writer ... and all the misconceptions that go with it"
as best he could, she quipped in her 1960 essay "Some Aspects of the
Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Rather, she added three years later
in "The Regional Writer," location matters to an author insofar as
any author "operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place
and eternity somehow meet," and it is up to him to find that precise
spot and apply it to his writing.) Similarly, while her heroes are
certainly not the kind of people you expect to meet on your daily
errands (or do you?), it would shortchange them were we to succumb
to the temptation of merely defining them as some particularly
colorful examples of grotesque fiction. For one thing, "[t]o be able
to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole
man," as O'Connor noted in "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in
Southern Fiction." More fundamentally, however, she saw her calling
- and that of any Southern author treading the same ground as
William Faulkner and trying not to have their "mule and wagon
stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" - as an
attempt to reach below the surface of the human existence to that
realm "which is the concern of prophets and poets," and to strike a
balance between realism on the one hand and vision, poetry and
compassion on the other; to recognize the expectations of his
readers without making himself their slave.
Thus, the famously unexpected endings of Flannery O'Connor's
narratives are more than merely weird plot twists, the encounter
between the grandmother and The Misfit in the title story of her
first published short story collection "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
(1955) is the result of a wrong turn in the road as much as that of
a series of wrong choices, coincidences and essential
miscommunications, and the title story of her second, posthumously
published collection of short stories "Everything That Rises Must
Converge" (1965) truly does indicate more than a physical
proposition and indeed, a situation applicable to the entire world,
as O'Connor wrote in a 1961 letter regarding the initial publication
of the collection's title story in New World Writing.
A six-time winner of the O. Henry Award for Short Fiction and winner
of the posthumously awarded 1972 National Book Award for her
Collected Short Stories, in her short career as a writer Flannery
O'Connor left an indelible mark on American literature, far
transcending the borders of her native South. We can only speculate
what she would have contributed had illness and death not intervened
- and in a time when, as O'Connor wrote so prophetically in "Some
Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," too many writers
abandon vision and instead contend themselves with satisfying their
readers' more pedestrian expectations, her contributions would
doubtless be invaluable. Alas, we are left with a body of work that
fits neatly into this marvelously edited single-volume entry in the
"Library of America" series - but the content of this one book alone
is worth manifold that of the much ampler output of many a writer of
recent years.
Examines the structural elements and narrative methods Flannery O'Connor employs "to create her fictional landscape." Focuses on her use of the archetypal trickster as "a likely guide through [her] landscape and interpreter of her narrative secret."
Discusses the characteristics, importance, and utility for her "artistic and religious purposes" of the trickster figure. Suggests that these figures not only link her stories "with diverse literatures but also open a discourse between twentieth-century material-rationalist interpretations of reality and ancient folklore and myth."
Focuses on five "narrative devices through which O'Connor shapes the structures of stories" in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, including, her use of: backwoods speech juxtaposed to biblical allusions; incantation; doubled characters who embody the shadows and contradictions of innocence and experience; circular narrative structures; and, her use of "ambiguous figures who move from the fringes to the center of action" to transform characters.
Discusses how she uses "techniques of indirection" to create tension. Then, explores: the unpredictable and uneven role of her narrators and the challenges they pose for critics; "how the shifting narrative voice assists "the mediations of the trickster"; her use of "as if"; and, use of irony, "which makes it possible to hold apparently contradictory perceptions simultaneously."
Juxtaposes Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away to review the variety of literary devices she uses to animate the structure of her fiction, and reviews "the principle of analogy" to explore "how the very structures of her novels are animated by her metaphysical views of the Incarnation."
Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen, Jon Parrish Peede(Mercer University Press) Continuing the debate of classifying O'Connor as a religious writer, this book offers significant new essays by leading scholars - William A. Sessions, John F. Desmond, Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner, Ralph C. Wood, and John R. May - who have advanced the codification of O'Connor as a writer preoccupied with religious, and especially Catholic, themes. In counterbalance, the collection presents voices of sharp dissent - chiefly Joanne Halleran McMullen and Timothy P. Caron. These scholars find themselves at odds with O'Connor's own interpretations and with much of the existing scholarship concerning her work. Contributors include Helen R. Andretta, Stephen C. Behrendt, and Robert Donahoo explore issues completely outside this dichotomy, such as comparative literature and the influence of consumer culture on her writing. The promise of such a diverse collection rests in the dialogues between and among their essays. One will not find consensus within these pages, nor even a settled path for the future of O'Connor studies. Rather, the collection puts on record the state of affairs during this period of transition, when those scholars who knew O'Connor personally are declining in number and canonical authority, and those who know her as a field of study as opposed to a flesh-and-blood human being are in ascension.
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