Thoughts On Flannery O’Connor’s Late Stories
We finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories this week in my independent study. I think I’m becoming addicted to reading entire oeuvres of short stories, or as close to entire oeuvres as possible. So different from reading a comparable page-count of novel(s). More intense, the accumulated weight of choices in subject matter, ways of entering stories, developing plots, the kinds of endings an author tends towards…
Often, discussing the craft of fiction, our goal is abstraction; to separate authors’ use of language and structuring of events or types of narration so that we can identify techniques to apply to our own stories: shifts between present and past or in point of view; dips into scene or narration; whether we begin with setting or action, scene or narration, idea or character; how much is told and how much shown; etc.
Flannery O’Connor’s late stories seem to me to make such separation of content and form unusually difficult, because certain themes so drive her plots, and the scenes and shifts in points of view are structured to repeatedly expose the same ideas. There’s conflict aplenty in these stories, but even that seems to be only the means of breathing life—or fire—into her symbolic structures.
Chief among O’Connor’s propelling elements is the Scourge of God—the unstoppable figure bent on or disregarding its own destruction, rending society, showing up characters’ hypocrisy and delusion. (The original Scourge is Attila the Hun, sent to bring God’s wrath on the Roman Empire, though it consume him as well. My source? Kate Seredy’s 1937 children’s book, The White Stag. I must have been eleven or twelve when I read it…).
But, Flannery. Sarah Ham in “The Comforts Of Home”; Singleton in “The Partridge Festival”; Johnson in “The Lame Shall Enter First”; Walter (or the stroke-ridden father) in “Why Do The Heathen Rage”; the Wellesley student in “Revelation”; the Negro in “Judgment Day”; even the priest in “Enduring Chill” or the Negro woman in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The Scourge wants to shake loose the complacent good country people, despising their hypocrisy. This is not Christ come to save you.
The characters upon whom the Scourge visits destruction all partake of similar sins: pride and complacency; certainty of their superiority, judgment and righteousness; and presumption. They interfere, and take actions they have no right to. They play God, thinking that their judgment puts them above and apart from life when really they are acting from the same base impulses as anyone else, and if anything, less forgivably so for thinking they’re immune. Thomas in “Comforts” putting the gun in Sarah’s purse to frame her; Julian and his mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”; Calhoun in “Partridge Festival”; Sheppard in “The Lame Shall Enter First”; Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation”; they all proceed in ignorance and certainty. If they have an epiphany, it destroys them, because their entire selves are bound up in their error.
O’Connor’s characters are much more certain in their beliefs, and spend much more of the stories’ time talking about what they believe, than I am used to in realist fiction. Much more common today is aspiration or regret; what characters want and can’t get. O’Connor’s characters seem mainly not to want their will countermanded—thus the Scourge is able to undo them. Crossed, they fall into wrath (Mrs. Turpin, Thomas), delusion (Calhoun, Thomas) and ill-considered action (Sheppard)—symbolic and literal ruin.
Worst of all the sins for an O’Connor character to commit is betrayal of kin, as Sheppard does to his son, Norton, or Mr. Head does to the boy in “Artificial Nigger.” These betrayals precipitate further crisis, physically separating protagonists, with harm or the threat of it irreparably damaging the weaker character, propagating grudges and misunderstandings until the final unraveling or unrevealing.
