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…).
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