SHORT FICTION FLANNERY O'connor Richard John Charnigo Green August 1975
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A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE SHORT FICTION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR Richard John Charnigo A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1975 610275 WW 1a. xvo.lM ABSTRACT O’Connor’s best stories ("Parker’s Back” and "The Arti ficial Nigger" can be used as touchstones to judge the others) are highly wrought artifacts consciously produced to achieve a single effect; and that single effect is her con cern with man and his quest to understand, often fitfully, the mystery of his purpose in life and his frequent inabil ity to cope with the revelation of failure that accompanies this search. If one analyzes the architectonics of her stories, one is able to see that O'Connor uses the components of struc ture to aid her in the production of this effect. The expositions, compact but informative, introduce the haunted characters, each flawed in some way, who will seek their fortunes in an equally flawed world. That world is almost always the South--its "isolated rural areas and its people as yet uncaught in the maelstrom of conformity. Their single-minded rusticity enables O’Connor to view life in its elemental, unsophisticated form: from Mrs. Pritch ard's four abscessed teeth to Parker's back, O'Connor is able to portray life stripped of its cosmetic varnish. The complication of an O'Connor story serves to disturb the calm, and with it the complacency, of the character's world, which has hitherto been in an unstable equilibrium. Within the complication, one also finds the heart of O'Con nor's conflict of opposites technique. It is important to her stories because, by juxtaposing antithetical characters (often by using doubles), she forces a violent confronta tion between good and evil, between blindness and sight, betweeri the'"apparent—and—the^ real7 which creates a tension wh'ichreverberates throughout_the_story. The resolution of an O'Connor story sees the private world of the characters—shattered, usually in some violently inexplicable way, but with the possibility of its being rebuilt again. The ending, then, since it is so frequently shocking^ xs^the most interesting aspect of her structure; and the problem of the shocking ending is, at times, per plexing. In most cases, however, the shocking ending is justified, since the finality achieved by the violence befalling a character, although leaving the reader momentar ily shocked, can, at the same time, force him into the stunned insight that such a revelation produces. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ’X would like to thank the members of my Doctoral I Committee for their comments, suggestions, and kindnesses. Therefore, thanks to: Professors Edgar F. Daniels, Don K. Rowney, Ralph H. Wolfe, Frederick W. Eckman, and special thanks to Ray B. Browne, my Committee Chairman, whose encouragement I appreciate and whose confidence I am grate ful for. For Barbara. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................ii CHAPTER ONE.................... 1 CHAPTER TWO............................ 31 CHAPTER THREE ....... .......... 58 CHAPTER FOUR ........ .......... 84 FOOTNOTES........ .. .............. 124 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................... 131 CHAPTER ONE THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR: AN INTRODUCTION Though Flannery O'Connor wrote only thirty-one short stories, two short novels, and some occasional prose, her writings have generated a considerable body of criticism. Much of this criticism, however, has been devoted to the grotesque or gothic elements in her fiction, to her reli gious and philosophical beliefs as they relate to her art, and to her place in the Southern Tradition or as a Catholic writing in the Protestant South. It is understandable that these areas should be covered extensively: they are the highly visible areas most attractive to the critical eye. To be sure, these areas are important, for any light shed on an artist's life and beliefs helps to put the work into clearer focus. But too little attention, comparatively speaking, has been paid to her as a literary craftsman and to her work as an esthetic product. Consequently, I propose to analyze the structure which undergirds her work and which helps to give it its meaning. There are some difficulties concerning the term structure which initially beset the critical investigator. Since the term itself, to borrow a phrase from Cleanth Brooks, has a "nexus or cluster of meanings,"'* it will first be necessary to indicate how the term will be used in this study. In its 2 most basic and comprehensive sense, the term will refer to the pattern or form that a work takes; it will refer, in other words, to the way a work is put together—that is, its archi tectonics. For example, the structure of a short story can be divided into its exposition, complication, and resolution. But being able to identify these elements of structure is a relatively uncomplicated task, and a lengthy study devoted solely to such an identification would yield little beyond the skeleton of the work. One must therefore look beneath the surface to the substructural shaping devices such as irony, paradox, and dilemma, and the 'dramatic tensions they produce, . along with metaphor and symbol, and the range of meanings they yield, to see more clearly how the lifeblood of the work is being pumped, and to what end, and whether it is just ordi nary plasma or the ichor of great art. In sum, one must be able to determine the substructural shaping devices that produce not only a unified work of art but a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn, points in this direction when he calls structure an "achieved harmony" and refers to it as the "principle of unity" of a work.. He views structure as a "pattern of resolved stresses" or as a "pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations developed through a temporal scheme." Brooks is referring to poetry, of course, but his observations can apply to the short story as well. In what follows, then, I shall examine the structure of the short stories to see how 3 the components of structure function in their practical and organic senses. The exposition of a story compared with the complication and the resolution, is the least important of the three, but it is what captures the reader's.interest; and one can see that from a purely practical point of view, the exposition can be most crucial to .the success of the work. The exposition gives the reader his first important pieces of information: he finds out what the setting is, who the characters are, when the events are taking place, who is telling the story, ■« and whether the initial tone of the story indicates whether it is to be taken as one of adventure, mystery, atmosphere, irony, and so forth. The exposition thus functions as a general introduction to the story. The brief survey of the more specific elements of the exposition which follows will demonstrate their importance in gaining the reader’s attention. Like the exposition itself, the setting is not frequently as important to the total meaning of the story as are other elements and is sometimes only important insofar as it provides a locus for characterization and theme; however, in some cases, it can play the role ordinarily assigned to a character, and thus its significance will be in proportion to the emphasis that the author places on it. For example, when one thinks of Naturalistic writers, like Dreiser., for instance, one realizes that their preoccupation with the environment gives the setting the force of character and elevates it, through 4 emphasis and photographic detail, to one of their prime structural concerns. Though not a Naturalist, but one who possessed an acute sense for detail, O’Connor at times inte grates the setting into the structure so that it plays con siderably more than a supportive role. "A View of the Woods" is an example of one of her stories where the setting— the inscrutable woods—achieves dramatistic significance.as the backdrop for the action, as the central mystery, and as the most important "character" in the story. Mark Fortune wants to despoil the "view of the woods" with a gas station, but Mary Fortune, his granddaughter and double, wants to preserve what Miles Orvell refers to as the "gratuitous beauty" of the landscape. At the end, however, both Fortunes are "lost" as a result of their mutually destructive conflict, and the woods—stolid, soldier-like—endure. On the other hand, an example of the more frequent role assigned to set ting in an O’Connor story, as a secondary supportive struc ture, is seen in "The Artificial Nigger," where the rural area is counterpointed against the city. The rural area, though it is customarily presented with sympathy, is hardly the archetypal green world, but the city is nearly always z associated with confusion and disarray. It is in the city, for example, that the countrified protagonists of the story, Mr. Head and Nelson, find themselves lost in the labyrinth of concrete and unfamiliar faces. It is for them a fright ening but lustrative experience. The setting in this story, 5 then, augments the reader’s feeling for them as characters. The setting, then, as these examples illustrate, can be more or less important to the story, depending on the author’s overall purpose. Once the setting has been determined, the fictional land- cape must be peopled with characters who will be the agents for the action of the story. In the same way that the purpose of the story determines the choice of setting, it also deter mines the kinds of characters the story will have.