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. In the typical formula story, for example, the main character will be little more than a cardboard cutout, a two-dimensional figure „ who will function more as a symbol than as a human being. To illustrate, the typical western hero is, as John G. Cawelti points out, a "character of minimal ambiguity,and any potential ambiguity about this character would be dispelled by his easily Identifiable costume marking him as the arche- typally pure and innocent quester for justice. Dorothy Walters also seems to be describing the formula hero as she comments on O’Connor's characters:

Typically, her characters display "fixed" qualities in dress, action, and attitude. Caught in the vise of self­ hood, they are flat rather than rounded; the stage is frequented by one-sided persons, so wedged in a mold of self that actions seems predetermined, response totally predictable. Clothing, for example, often serves as a summary of personality, a comic reflection of an unchang­ ing inner sense of self.5

But O'Connor"s characters are not typical formula figures; they are more the result of the caricaturist's pen which combines realistic traits with absurd mannerisms to produce / 6

characters who are both believable and incredible at the

same time. A cartoonist prior to turning to fiction­ writing, O'Connor is able to render the excesses in man by

exaggerating his flaws. For example, Mrs. May, in "Greenleaf,"

is pictured as a raucous-voiced blue jay in this portrait:

"... she leaned out the kitchen door, a small woman with pale near-sighted eyes and gray hair that rose on top like the crest of some disturbed bird."6 Other of her characters come in for similar treatment; and by this method of carica­ ture, O'Connor is able to delineate the deficiency in love, growth, and understanding, for example, that make these characters incomplete both as characters and as human beings.

Closely allied to the selection of well-drawn characters is the question of^point of ^view. A story can be narrated by one or several of the characters or by the author himself. Whatever method he chooses, the author must realize that his choice will affect not only the way the reader interprets the actions of the characters but also the way he responds to the story as an artistic unit. When a character, for example, acts as narrator, the reader is at times able to gain valuable insights into the character's own nature of which the character himself is unaware. Faulkner not only gives the reader one narrator to peer into in The Sound and the Fury, he gives him four narrators of differing dispositions and perceptions. He thus multiplies the insights, and the irony, when he chooses an impercipient Benjy, an intelligent but not quite perceptive

Quentin, an unfeeling and selfish Jason, and a sympathetic / ■ ' servant, Dilsey, to chronicle the rise and fall of the Compson family. In a similar way, although modified to suit his pur­ pose, Joseph Conrad, a writer whom O'Connor admired, uses

Marlow as secondary narrator in addition to a primary nar­ rator in "Youth" and Heart of Darkness♦ In this way Conrad is able to increase the distance between the events as they occurred and as they are related by the primary narrator to the reader. O’Connor as well uses the technique of multiple viewpoints. Miles Orvell points out that their use in The

Violent Bear It Away "gives a special shape to the book's structure" because "certain key events and situations in the lives of the characters" are "told and retold from different angles, and with different interpretations put on them." 7

The significant thing about O'Connor's use of multiple view­ points in this case is that, while not formally changing the point of view from one character to another, as, for example,

Faulkner does above, she is able to give different perspectives of this key event—the immanent baptism of Rayber's mentally retarded child—by having it occur in the minds of different characters at various points in the story. Thus, although

O'Connor gives the different viewpoints of her characters, she still reserves the direct telling to herself. In doing this, she does not permit her characters a great deal of dialogue but rather tells much of the story in her oWn voice.

She had this to say about her narrative technique: "Dialogue should be used sparingly, and mostly to reveal character. It 8

follows the law of diminishing returns. The more of it you p use, the less its effect." By restricting her use of dia­ logue, she is able to interpret the actions of the characters to a greater degree than if the characters were more drama­ tically presented. What results is what critics have termed the ’’indirect interior monologue" — "the only peculiarly twentieth-century technique she uses with any regularity," according to Melvin J. Friedman. This technique tends to create an. effective ambiguity since the feelings of the characters are sometimes indistinguishable from those of the omniscient author and also because it preserves some of the mystery of personality. By telling the reader that Harry

Ashfield ("The River") is only "four or five" years old, for example, O’Connor, who as omniscient author should know exactly, creates a character who is more mysterious, and hence a more symbolic representative of innocence, because he is incompletely delineated.

Moreover, her reliance on the omniscient point of view

¡in all her writings is also one of the ways that she is able to convey her humorous and ironic tone to her reader. 'Tone, which exists on a subsurface level, becomes technically ineffective if it intrudes itself too vigorously or too obviously onto the story. Thus, because a reader reacts subliminally, for the most part, to the tone, it can become an imperceptible force that complements the theme of the story. In addition, like Heller, Vonnegut, Albee, and others 9

who rely on humor in the service of irony, O’Connor achieves

her ironic humor by juxtaposing incongruous elements without

apparently expecting the laughter which follows. The reader,

being momentarily caught off guard by the incongruity, thus

laughs at things which are sometimes too deep for tears.

"A Late Encounter with the Enemy" reveals such an incongruous

situation when a one-hundred-and-four-year-old counterfeit

Confederate general, who received his uniform at a movie

premiere, dies on stage while attending his sixty-two-year-old

granddaughter ’ s college graduation. . This situation is treated

seriously, the author maintaining a detached manner from the

events, and thus the reader is forced to search for meanings

beyond the surface level.

Corresponding to the practical aspects of the exposition

enumerated in the preceding paragraphs is the internal move­ ment toward union, toward integration in O'Connor's fiction.

In the beginning of her stories, the characters—who have not as yet entered the crucible of conflict--exist in a universe; boththeir deficiencies and their strengths exist as they have been created by their author. Thus, in this

incipient state, they have the opportunity to fulfill them­

selves or to become even more deficient. But since the mood at this early point in the story is predominantly comic, the motion of the story will reflect this attitude. In other words, the stories start off in a benign enough way. For example, in "The Artificial Nigger," Mr. Head only wants to 10

help Nelson by showing him the perils of the big city; in

"A Late Encounter with the Enemy," General Sash is content

to exist in his reverie of the "preemy," parades, and

beautiful "guls," and his granddaughter wants to begin a new

life as a college graduate while still holding onto her old

traditions and teaching methods;, in "The Partridge Festival,"

Calhoun embarks on his salvific mission to reform the town of Partridge; and in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own,"

Tom T. Shiftlet wanders onto the Crater farm ostensibly to help himself while at the same time helping the Craters.

But, as the reader notices before too long, things get com­ plicated for these characters: the movement becomes more dynamic and the conflicts begin to present themselves for solution.

The complication is that aspect of the narrative struc­ ture which contains the dramatic conflict^ the resultant dilemma, and the inevitable climax. Conflict may appear in varying degrees of explicitness--from a protagonist agonizing over a seemingly unimportant decision in a sophisticated work to a clearly defined struggle between sheriff and out­ law in formula fiction. One will recall that in the beginning of a story, the protagonist exists in an undisturbed universe.

What disturbs this universe is the merging together of dis­ junctive forces which not only fail to unite but which create a tension which reverberates throughout the story. Thus the inexorable motion of the story will produce the dilemmas which 1.1,

are the logical outcome of the conflict.

A brief look at three of O’Connor's stories will indicate

how these conflicts arise and the resultant tensions produced

by them. "The Geranium," O'Connor’s first published story,

adumbrates several of the major plot conflicts of her later work. In it one sees the tension between parent and child

(the conflict of parent and child or grandparent and child will be a staple in virtually all of O'Connor's fiction), the confusion and disorientation produced by the city con­

trasted to the unsophisticated but preferable life of the country (already briefly alluded to in "The Artificial Nigger"), and the tensions between blacks and whites which, to use

Langston Hughes’ words, "sag like a heavy load" in O'Connor's fiction but never "explode" into direct confrontation. A look at the plot of "The Geranium" will reveal these frequently occurring conflicts: Like the potted geranium plant on the window sill of a neighboring apartment at the beginning of the story, Old Dudley, the story's protagonist, finds himself uprooted from his native Southern soil and transplanted in the confining environment of the big Northern city. He made the decision to live with his daughter and her family in their

New York apartment but regretted it almost immediately. While he is living there, neither father nor daughter is able to communicate with each other, thus contributing to Dudley’s ,, feeling of dislocation and discomfort. Moreover, feeling dis­ oriented in a city where all the buildings look alike, "all 12 blackened-red and gray with rasp-mouthed people hanging out their windows looking at other windows and other people like them looking back," (p. 6) Old Dudley yearns for the sense of importance he has as "the man in the house" and sole arbiter, of the "sparrow-like wars that rasped and twittered inter­ mittently" (p. 5) among the old ladies at the boarding house where he lived and for the uncomplicated life of fishing by day and ’possum hunting by night with his black companion

Rabie. Old Dudley's world is further shaken by his encounter with a friendly black man who lives next door to him in the apartment building and who Dudley ignorantly feels must be a servant. While he is ascending the stairs of the building,

Old Dudley is reenacting a former hunting episode where he failed to shoot a covey of birds because he slipped while aiming his rifle. He is interrupted with his imaginary ' rifle at-the-ready by the black neighbor, who ask him: "What are you hunting, Old Timer?" (p. 12) To be caught in the act of shooting an imaginary rifle is embarrassing enough for Old

Dudley, but to be caught by a black man in this position is more than Old Dudley can bear. He feels that he is being patronized by the black man, who subsequently helps the old man up the stairs while making polite conversation with him.

As Dorothy Walters observes, the emphasis in this story is

"on the new role of equality which casts the black as potential savior rather than as villain."^ This situation where

Negroes "don't know their place" and where a white man can 13 find himself dependent on a black man:—is no doubt another reason why Dudley feels uncomfortable in this Northern city.

His black friend Rabie, on the other hand, was always in the dependent, inferior position in his home town. In short, then, like the geranium plant at the end of the story lying in the alley "with its roots in the air" (p. 14), Old Dudley's world has been turned upside down.

The tension in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is created through the inner conflict of the main character Tom

T. Shiftlet, the one-armed carpenter, ambiguous Christ-figure and knight-of-the-road-errant., Shiftlet arrives at the run­ down "plantation" of the Crater family conducting a homespun philosophical enquiry into the nature of man: "'Maybe the best I can tell you is, I'm a man: but listen lady,' he said and paused and made his tone more ominous still, 'what is a man?’" (p. 148) His talk little interests Mrs. Crater, who is "ravenous for a son-in-law" (p. 150) and who would like a handyman husband for her thirty-two-year-old mentally retarded daughter. Unlike Mrs. Crater, however, the reader is interested in the nature of man—one man, Shiftlet himself: is he a charlatan bent on fleecing the old woman out of her farm and money, or is he a man whose salutary actions in restoring the farm reveal a thaumaturgic presence, or is he a man whose idealized vision of life is in conflict with the reality of life? The story will reveal the answer. Mrs.

Crater tempts Shiftlet with an old Ford (which Shiftlet has 14

been eyeing since he arrived and which represents freedom and mobility for him), and he consents to marry the daughter to get the car which has not run in fifteen years. Shiftlet, like Hazel Motes, feels that, as Motes says, "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.Thus the conflict is centered around the decision Shiftlet must make—the girl and the car or nothing, or as Mrs. Crater more poignantly puts the latter alternative: "there ain’t any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man" (p. 152). The curious use of asyndeton in Mrs. Crater's sentence brings the words together with a dramatic force that sums up Shift- let’s situation and makes his conflict greater: he realizes that what she said is true, and even though he does not Want the daughter, he knows that the alternative—nothing—is beyond his power to accept. Shortly after the wedding cere­ mony, Shiftlet abandons Lucynell in a greasy spoon called, appropriately enough, "The Hot Spot," for that is just the situation that Shiftlet is in. As Shiftlet heads west, in the face of the setting sun and perhaps toward the death of the spirit, he picks up a young hitchhiker and, compensating for his earlier abandonment.of Lucynell, tries to be friendly to the boy who he guesses is a runaway. Shiftlet tries, in what is an ironic sequence, to make the boy realize the comfort and security of home that he has just foresaken by talking about his own mother: "’My mother was an angel of

Gawd,’ Mr. Shiftlet said in a very restrained voice. ’He 15 z

took her from heaven and giver to me and I left her”' (p. 156).

The hitchhiker, who is not sentimental, rebuffs Shiftlet with

the comment: "My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a

stinking pole cat!" (p. 156) Prior to this exchange, the

counter-boy at The Hot Spot had referred to Lucynell, who had

dozed off at the lunch counter, as an "angel of Gawd" (p. 154).

Thus, the echoing of these same words by Shiftlet identifies

Lucynell with his own mother, and this repetition and identi­

fication emphasizes his own inner conflict at having left his new bride. After the hitchhiker abandons Shiftlet, Shiftlet's

own inculpatory gesture "'Oh Lord,' he prayed, 'Break forth

and wash this slime from the earth!'" (p. 156) is accompanied by "guffawing" thunder and raindrops like "tin can tops" signifying marriage gone afoul; and a distraught Shiftlet, accompanied now only by his guilty conscience, races the shower in his auto to Mobile. Stanley Edgar Hyman, whose monograph on O'Connor in the Minnesota series was one of the first lengthy studies (1966) of O'Connor's work and which still exerts considerable critical influence, coins the appropriate term "automobilolatry" in referring to Shiftlet's car, which, he notes, "represents an ideal marriage to him."-1-^ Thus the reader sees a man in conflict with himself over a car on the surface level, but on a deeper level he sees the Pyrrhic price paid for mobility. In, his guest for idealized flight, the planetary Shiftlet fails.to consider the responsibilities that he has left behind. 16 /

In "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," it is ironic that a college commencement—the controlling metaphor for the story— should be the setting, for this ceremony is both a beginning and an ending for the two principal characters in different ways, as shall be presently shown. With her customary terse­ ness of exposition, O’Connor gives a complete outline of the plot, and the incipient complication, in the first fifty- eight words:

General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from col­ lege. The General didn't give two slaps for her gradua­ tion but he never doubted he would live for it. (p. 134)

As the story progresses, the reader learns that the grand­ daughter is in conflict with the present, the grandfather in conflict with the past, and both of them in conflict with each other. Sally Poker Sash is not satisfied with the way things are, and has not been for forty-six of her sixty-two years, as she informs the reader at the beginning of the story. She would like the present remade into the past’s image. She therefore decides that she "wanted the General at her graduation because she wanted to show what she stood for, or as she said, ’what all was behind her,' and was not behind them [the "upstarts," as he refers to "them," are the moderns who defile her romaticized image of the Southern past]" (p. 135). Clearly, her motivations are suspect and foreshadow her ironic comeuppance at the conclusion. Even 17

more questionable, though in a different sense, is her

choice of culture-bearers, her. grandfather. She sees him

as the personification of the past, as the "glorious upright

old man standing for the old traditions" (p. 135). But Gen­

eral Tennessee Flintrock Sash, whose title is as spurious as his dreams (he was born George Poker Sash and "had prob­ ably been a foot soldier" [p. 135] in the war), is, as Gil­ bert H. Muller points out, "the epitome of the cultural gro­ tesque, because he represents not the substance of a tradi­ tion (for he wasn’t really a general in the war), but rather the dessication of it."13 General Sash, in contrast to his granddaughter, wants nothing to do with tradition, with what he considers the "black procession" of the past: "To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades" (p. 136). In fact, his only real remembrance of the past is encapsulated in the "preemy they had in Atlanta" (p. 136). The movie premiere is there­ fore the only thing palpable to this unreal general; and just as the movies' stock in trade is illusion, so too is the

General’s own picture of himself illusion.

O’Connor extends her graduation metaphor by equating the black procession (literally the professors in their academic robes) with the historical events of the South’s past. When the black-robed graduation speaker remarks, "If we forget our past . . . we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won't have one" (p. 142), this 18

statement applies to the General quite literally, for he has

supressed his real past for a counterfeit past—his illusory

world of the movie premiere, parades, and beautiful girls.

It is when the real but ordinary past penetrates his brain

("The General felt as if there were a little hole beginning

to widen in the top of his head" [p. 141]), and he is forced

to accept the true past, that he dies on stage. Thus, the

General’s moment of recognition is also the moment of revela­

tion for the reader that romanticized traditions cannot sus­

tain existence. Moreover, what was to become a beginning in

the traditional sense has become death and the end of illu­

sions in a more important, though ironic, sense.

In sum, then, the complication functions in both a prac­ tical and an organic sense. In its practical aspect, it heightens the interest of the story by disturbing the calm not only of the characters but also of the reader, who sus­ pends his disbelief that such things can occur. Necessary to this complicating action are certain components, conflict being the most important of these. Listing the possibilities for conflict available to a writer will reveal the rangethat they encompass: from mythical creatures, animals, objects, natural phenomena, persons, groups of people, society at large to the unknown inner conflicts of man himself--that is, from the the abstract to the concrete to beyond the concrete— these antagonists afford the writer almost limitless 19

possibilities to choose from. (O'Connor's half dozen major

recurrent conflicts will be discussed in detail in Chapter

Two.) Another practical aspect of the complication is the

dilemma^-the natural outgrowth of a conflict or its efficient

cause—the choice between the rock or the whirlpool that

intensifies reader interest. The dilemma will be resolved

in three possible ways: the character may consciously choose

one of the alternatives and suffer for his choice; in this

case the movement of the story would be toward the tragic

mode (Shiftlet from "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is

an example of a character of this type). He may seek a

mid-path between and by a synthesis of the alternatives

achieve an acceptable though not always satisfactory goal

(Nelson and Mr. Head of "The Artificial Nigger" are examples);

in this case the story would be moving toward a comic

resolution. Or the character may let Fortune’■ s .Wheel_decide

his fate; in this situation the story would be proceeding in an ironic mode (Asbury Fox of "The Enduring Chill" is an

example of such a character). Thus, the decision—whether

the character makes it himself or it is made for him by his non-action—will yield the climactic portion of the story. Hence, the high point of reader involvement is the culmination

of the complication which, as soon as it occurs, initiates

the resolution of the story. The organic aspects of the complication,- on the other 20 /

hand, are individual to an author's work, so they will

naturally be examined in relation to O'Connor's work only.

Using her title "Everything That Rises Must Converge" as a

metaphor will be useful in this discussion of complication.

There is a movement toward union, toward integration, in

O'Connor's works which is thwarted at the point of convergence.

This divarication corresponds to the climax which has fol­

lowed the conflict in the story. But, along with the actual

movement of the action, there is a suggestion or implication

of how this sought-after unity might be achieved. This part

corresponds to the alternatives of the dilemma. The movement -

toward integration, then, begun in the exposition (Rayber's

rational quest to aid Tarwater, Calhoun's mission to reform

the town of Partridge, Shiftlet's desire for a car, etc.),

is something that would make their lives more complete, so z they think, but that is not what happens. What does happen

is that a point is reached where the original goal is not

achieved and where something is substituted, usually something which the character would not want to happen, such as Shiftlet's marriage to Lucynell. The resistant force which opposes the

unity is usually a person. (Tarwater resists Rayber's rationalistic philosophy; Mrs. Crater makes Lucynell a con­ dition for the car; Calhoun's mission is thwarted, ironically,

by Singleton himself, etc.) Hence, the conflict between the

two forces will produce something else—a third thing that neither proponent will usually want. For example, Shiftlet's 21

abandonment of Lucynell thwarts Mrs. Crater's need for a

handyman as well as Shiftlet's own goal of the car because

he has not fulfilled his part of the contract. The action

in the first part of the stories tends to be comic to reflect

the mood of the characters and the motion of the story. As

their world falls apart, the mood changes and the motion

with it. The story then moves in tragic fashion, and the

combination of these two distinct modes yields a synthetic

resolution which is predominantly ironic.

If one surveys the endings of short stories, novels, an- d * plays, one discovers that rarely, if ever, are they wholly

satisfactory. After the initial interest and involvement,

there is a noticeable let-down at the end. Man, it seems, prefers a continuum rather than a conclusion; he prefers the exposition for -its enticement into the world of the imagination and the complication because it further entwines him in the plot, but the resolution announces the end of entertainment, diversion, and, in some cases, instruction. Like the speaker

in Keats's "Nightingale" Ode after completing his journey to the ideal world, the reader comes back to a real world which is fraught with complexity and uncertainty. By their very nature, then, endings present both structural and esthetic problems for the writer: how will he maintain interest while producing a work that is artistically satisfying and, on a different level, how will he harmonize the disparate elements 22 /

of the story into a balance that produces unity. A closer

look at the resolution as a structural element will reveal

these problems and the way a writer must come to terms with

them.

It need hardly be said that the way a plot is resolved

will be a good indication of the success or failure of the

story—in short, the ending is a good barometer of quality.

There are numerous ways a writer can resolve a story; some

are inventive and others more traditional. A writer may, for

example, avoid conventional endings by using a circular,

rather than a linear, structure. Like Joyce in Finnegans

Wake, he may make the ending of the story actually the

beginning by a seamless verbal stitching of the resolution

to the exposition. Other experimental methods, though

basically unsuccessful, have focused attention on other pos­

sibilities for art by modifying or rejecting structure to

permit more spontaneity. The "Happening" is a recent example

of such an attempt. This type of artistic experience attempts

to avoid either linear or circular structure by bombarding the

senses; and structure, if it exists at all, becomes a flexible part of the experience presented. But like the Dadaists before them who rejected structure and in doing so put them­

selves out of commission, the practitioners of the Happening,

by their efforts, point to the inherent need for at least

a minimal amount of structural.undergirding. Hence, the more conventional ending-types have proved useful to most 23

literary artists, O'Connor among, them. A consideration of

several ending-types will show both their practical use and

their, appeal to the writer. The surprise ending, for example,

forces the reader to be interested in the events of the story

until the very end. Unlike the classic comic ending which

results in the marriage of the principal characters or the

classic tragic ending which results in the fall of the hero

from high estate, the surprise ending maintains its interest

by being less predictable; however, surprise endings are usu­

ally confined to unsophisticated literature where the ending

achieves a disproportionate emphasis which precludes the pos­

sibility of the reader's getting involved with the story in more than a superficial way. The shocking ending, though

closely allied to the surprise ending because it too main­

tains interest through the resolution, usually is found in

literature that leans more toward the ironic or tragic modes, and thus it achieves greater stature because of its associa­ tion with serious literature. Using this type of ending, how­ ever, the writer must exercise care that the shocking ending

is not gratuitous to the organic structure of the work and thus become an impediment to the overall quality of the story.

Perhaps because of her frequent use of such endings, O'Connor's works are susceptible to this charge. (The matter of the shocking ending and O'Connor's use of it will be taken up in more detail in Chapter Four.) In the indeterminate ending, the next to be considered, there is no definite conclusion to 24

the complication. Thus, in this type of ending structure,

more attention is directed back to the body of the story, and

therefore the writer is able to obviate some of the practical

difficulties, noted above, which inhere in the ending itself.

O'Connor’s use of the indeterminate ending is also significant

because such use forces the reader's attention more directly

on the theme of the story, and on the imagery which helps to

convey it, than on the plot. The last type of ending possi­

bility to be considered here is the ironic, a curious and volatile mixture of the tragic with the comic. O'Connor's

endings—many of them indeterminate, most of them shocking—

are virtually all ironic. If one examines several of the resolutions of her stories, one will be able to see the tech­ niques she so frequently employs.

"The Partridge Festival" is an interesting story with which to begin because O'Connor utilizes shock not at the end of the story, which is of course a more likely occurrence in her fiction, but at the beginning; she then proceeds to tell a story with an ironic reversal at the end. Calhoun, the pompous, pumpkin-headed protagonist, arrives in the town of Partridge ostensibly to attend the annual Azalea Festival but actually to gather information for an article about Singleton, the man who, went berserk and killed six townspeople because, having refused to buy an Azailea Festival Badge, he was "jailed," along with a goat, "in an outdoor privy borrowed for the occasion by the Jaycees" (p. 422). Calhoun views Singleton 25

as a unique individual "willing to suffer for the right to

be himself" and who became maddened by the madness around

him" (p.423). In short, Calhoun blames the town for perse­

cuting him and feels that they, not Singleton, are the guilty

ones. Calhoun and his female double, Mary Elizabeth, who

regards Singleton as a persecuted Christ-figure and scapegoat,

go to the hospital where Singleton is confined to see their

spiritual kin and to tell him that they "understand." But i ■ . the old man turns' out to be â bona fide maniac, and like a

demented Wee Willie Winkie, he leaps over a sofa, onto a table,

and races around the room in his nightgown. After making a

hasty exist from the hospital, Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth

"sat silently, looking at each other. They each saw at once the likeness of their kinsman and flinched" (p. 443). Thus, in this conventionally ended story, O'Connor uses the tech­ nique of the ironic reversal, where the apparently sagacious and empathetic youth turns put to be the personification of bathos. O'Connor has prepared the reader well—almost too well—for this ironic recognition scene by setting up the divergent characters right from the beginning. Earlier in the story, for example, she deflates the pompous Calhoun through a not-so-flattering comparison: "He [the barber] put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice" (p. 429).

Calhoun thus comes in for treatment accorded other would-be intellectuals in O'Connor's work. Julian Godhigh in "Everything 26

That Rises Must Converge" and Asbury Fox in "The Enduring

Chill" are his real spiritual kin, alike in that their self-

righteous zeal blinds them to the needs of others. Singleton,

the distorted caricature of individualism, becomes Calhoun's

reminder of his own false portrait of himself.

In both the opening as well as the closing of "A View

of the Woods," the reader is presented with a pictorial des­

cription of a convergent woods, the mysterious power in the

story which could bring the warring elder Fortune together

with his son-in-law Pitts through the agency of Mary Fortune

Pitts, Fortune's granddaughter and Pitts's daughter. However,

the convergence of Pitts and Fortune never comes about, and

the story ends with the deaths of the seventy-nine-year-old Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter. The conflict

of the story arises over a crucial parcel of land that the

elder Fortune wants to sell in the name of "progress"—the

two hundred feet in front of the family home on which Fortune wants to build a gas station. Mary Fortune is opposed to his selling it because it would spoil the "view of the woods"

and because her father grazed his calves on it. Despite her pleas, Old Fortune goes through with the deal to sell the land

to a man named Tilman. While Fortune is completing the deal

in Tilman's store, Mary Fortune demonstrates her displeasure by hurling a bottle at Tilman and by causing havoc throughout

the store. Old Fortune decides that he must do something

that he has never done before but which his son-in-law has 27

done repeatedly—whip the girl. Even though Fortune saw

Pitts whip the girl, she has always denied it with a fierce

loyalty to her father and tells her grandfather several times

throughout the story that "Nobody's ever beat me in my life .

and if anybody did, I'd kill him" (p. 351). Ironically, her

statement comes true. When Fortune takes Mary Fortune to the

same place her father had in order to beat her, she turns on

the old man with such ferocity that he reacts violently and

beats the child until she dies. From all the preceding exer­

tion and fury, he dies of a heart attack as the girl lies

motionless on the ground near him. The woods, though they

have been violated,. emerge as the stolid force that carries

on after the two Fortunes have met their deaths. Thus one

has a conclusion where nothing is concluded"—except that two principal characters die in a violent and apparently meaning-

less way. But the submerged meaning lies in the ineluctable power of the woods, the importance of which O'Connor has so carefully prepared the reader for by mentioning it at the beginning and amplifying it at the end of the story. The woods represent the mysterious power of the landscape which endures and which finally captures Old Fortune. It is as if the natural world were protecting itself against the invaders who would destroy it. For this reason, like O'Neill's Emp­ eror Jones, Old Fortune would like to "escape and leave the woods behind him" (p. 356). But the lake which might pro­ vide his escape and cleanse him is denied him because he was 28

not able to swim nor did he buy the boat he was going to buy for his granddaughter, and he is made a prisoner of the sol­ dier-like pines which stand guard around the lake. He is left alone, to die without understanding completely the brooding significance of the radically innocent woods. The story is thus an account of a deluded and proud man, one who thought his progressive ideas would bring him not only fame but

Fortune, Georgia--the town he hoped would rise from the red

Georgia clay to be his monument. But this is progress gone awry, with the old man mistakenly thinking that earth-moving equipment to dig the holes and cement to fill them up will provide him with a tangible example of advancement and the immortality that he hopes will go with it. It, of course, brings him infamy as his new phoenix, laden with concrete, is unable to rise. Though the important recognition scene is only partially apprehended by Fortune, it provides the reader with an ironic, indeterminate, and unconventional ending.

Thus, like the complication, the resolution functions in a practical and an organic sense. In its practical aspect, it serves to continue the interest of the story up to the end by being, in O’Connor’s fiction, indeterminate, shocking, or ironic—or perhaps all three. Moreover, the "moment of last suspense," necessary to tragedy to maintain interest after the climax, is not necessary in a work when the reso­ lution is. either surprising/ shocking, indeterminate, or 29

ironie. So too is the predictability of comedy obviated by

these types of endings--types so commonly found in O’Connor’s

stories. In an organic sense, after the movement toward union or integration has been somehow thwarted through some

selfishness or misunderstanding, the divergence into disunity takes place. The result of this disintegration prompts the reader to investigate the causes of the disruptive activity in the story. Some element of the character's make-up—some deficiency in understanding other pople, as in "The Geranium," or not taking into account the mystery of place, as in "A View of the Woods"—results in a disharmony in the character1s own life. This is the case in the majority of O'Connor's stories, but a notable, and rare, exception is "The Artificial Nigger," where the movement toward union, fitfully halted by Mr. Head's denial, is nevertheless accomplished through the fiery forge of conflict. However, even though the unity has been achieved, the initial disruption of the universe has taken place, and the universe of the characters can never be the same but will be tinged with the trauma that could give them strength in their future encounters. In a well-resolved story, then, the disparate elements will be recombined into a unity so that no essential element will obtrude itself onto another and cause a short-circuiting of the electricity produced by the inter­ play of the dramatic forces. For example, the reader has a tendency to want to direct the outcome of any story. He would like Tom Shiftlet to turn his car around and return to 30

the Crater farm (as he did in the television adaptation of the

story), but that essential change would affect not only the

ending but also the tension created by the protagonist’s

dilemma. In this case, the tension would have been reduced,

and the inordinate emphasis placed on the ending would have

made Shiftlet easier to comprehend but less the mystery he is

supposed to be. In "A View of the Woods,” the catastrophic

ending helps to focus more attention on the landscape than on

the characters. If the ending were otherwise structured, the

woods, which two people indirectly died for, would certainly

not seem as crucial to the story. But "The Partridge Festival,"

on the other hand, because it uses only an ironic reversal at

the end with Calhoun realizing how foolish he was, does not

achieve the same impact as other of O'Connor's more fully realized stories because it does not involve the mystery of place or personality but only the obvious pretensions of the would-be intellectual and social reformer. Thus, even though endings are not entirely satisfactory in themselves, an author can use certain structural devices to continue the interest already built up in the exposition and complication,while alleviating practical problems such as predictability and to maintain the tension caused by opposites in conflict. Because of the fundamental importance of conflict in an O'Connor story, this important ingredient,: considered in its rudimentary form in this chapter, must be examined in greater detail. 3) CHAPTER TWO

EVERYTHING THAT RISES WILL DISINTEGRATE:

PATTERNS OF CONFLICT IN O'CONNOR'S FICTION

Although O'Connor is not generally regarded as a tech­

nical innovator, she is, according to Dorothy Walters, "an

innovator in a special sense: she achieves her effects

through a fusion of familiar—but highly disparate—elements

to attain a 'blend' which is peculiarly her own. The reader,"

she says, "is asked to respond on many levels simultaneously,

and this multileveled approach invests her work with its

particular stamp of originality." Like Blake's, "her work is

charged throughout with the tension bred of contaries . . . •

Thus, because conflict is so integral a part of her stories,

this important aspect should be dealt with in depth. To this

end, this chapter will be devoted to examining the patterns of conflict which recur in O'Connor's works in order to deter­ mine how they operate in the individual story, in the totality of her short stories, and how, ultimately, they provide themes

for her fiction.

If one were to make a survey of the recurrent major con­ flicts in O'Connor's fiction, one would find a half dozen or so which would stand out: the conflict between tradition and progress (sometimes, seen In the conflict between the Old

South and the New South or a sense of a false past and the reality of a true past); the conflict between the city with the confusion inherent in it and the hardly bucolic but less 32

complex rural area; the conflict between superficial know-

ledge that leads_one astray and the real knowledge that brings

him back; the simmering but suppressed conflict between the.

blacks and the whites; and the pervasive, conflict of the real

and the ideal or the apparent and the real—the structural

basis for much of the irony found in O'Connor’s fiction.

The conflict between parent and child or grandparent and

child is one of the most prominent of the half-dozen conflicts

enumerated above. A brief look at a few of her works will

typify the frequency with which this conflict occurs. (It

will also serve as an introduction to a more detailed examina­

tion of this conflict and other conflicts in "Everything That

Rises Must Converge," the title story of O'Connor's second

collection of short stories and one of the principal stories

in the O'Connor canon.) In The Violent Bear It Away, for

example, the young Tarwater is in a constant battle with his

dead grandfather over whether he should accept the charge of the old prophet and baptize Rayber's mentally deficient child

Bishop. Tarwater finally accedes to the powerful influence

of the old man, despite Rayber's attempts to stop him and

Tarwater's own internal struggle against the grandfather's wishes. In Wise Blood, too,, the dead parents of Hazel Motes exert an extraordinary influence over this single-minded protagonist as he tries to reject his own role, a role designated to him in childhood, as a preacher of the Gospel.

In "The Geranium," her first published work, as well as in 33

"Judgement Day," a reworked version of this story, the

father’s sense of place is disturbed, by the daughter's

insistence that he uproot, himself from his Southern home

and live with her in the North; in each story this conflict

provides a tautness to the structure by making this sense

of discomfort the focal point about which the story revolves.

In both "The Enduring Chill" and "Good Country People," as well as in other stories of this type, the protagonists provide an ironic commentary on Wordsworth's "The Child is

Father of Man" idea by attempting, then failing, to instruct the parent in the sensibilities of the life of the mind. But the parents, through their all-too-practical approach to life, become the unwitting deflaters of their progeny's romantic illusions. The frustrated children then become the pupils of the object lesson that the story is meant to illustrate. Indeed, in practically all of the O'Connor stories, this elemental conflict is apparent; whether as the main conflict or as a subordinate conflict; in either case, it reveals a great deal about not only the external, sometimes internecine, struggles of the characters, but also about the internal state of mind of these haunted people.

"Everything That Rises Must Converge" exhibits not only the parent-child conflict but most of the other conflicts which.recur with regularity—like drums beating their insist­ ent message to primitive auditors far away—in her short stories. For this reason, an extended look at this important 34

story is necessary. In the opening paragraph, the reader is

presented with a deftly described portrait of one of the two

principal characters—Julian's mother, a member of the Godhighs,

a family whose splendor is now as lusterless as the old family

mansion that the mother yearns for. She is portly, domineering,

frugal, and somewhat vain—a type so frequently found inhab­

iting the O'Connor landscape. The reader also learns that

she suffers from high blood pressure, a fact which foreshadows

her fatal stroke at the end of the story. She is cast from

the same mould as. Mrs. May in "Greenleaf" but is more compas­

sionately drawn than hen strident counterpart. The sympathy

with which the reader views Julian's mother is partly a result

of O'Connor emphasizing her eyes: "her eyes, sky-blue, were

as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten" (p. 406). Description such as this is rare

in O'Connor, and it is noteworthy here because it tends to

heighten the irony contained in the conflict between mother

and child by making the reader realize that the mother is not

the ogre that Julian makes her out to be. Her ingenuous qualities therefore make Julian's quest for independence, his implicit goal, more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Like Mrs. May, Julian's mother has managed to hold on to a son who cannot seem to live' with his mother but who lacks the courage and determination to enter the world on his own. The son Julian, on the other hand, who is the only character referred to by name in the story, is similar to other aspiring 35

but spiritually enervated intellectuals in O'Connor’s stories.

He views himself as a martyr (at one point in the story he is

pictured as "waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to

begin piercing him" [p. 405]), but he is not one in the

Christian sense of the term. Perhaps this is the reason

that O'Connor chose to name him Julian; he might be named

after Flavius Claudius Julianus, the Roman emperor and oppo­ nent of Christianity, known as Julian the Apostate.2 This

possibility is supported by several facts in this story and

in other stories by O'Connor. Frequently in her writing one sees names which have symbolic or ironic significance: the

self-debasing and joyless protagonist of "Good Country People"-

is named Joy-Hulga; Tom T. Shiftlet is.the "shiftless" con­

fidence man that he appears to be by warrant of his name, but

the archaic sense of the word shift means "resourceful," and

that is the impression that one also gets of this curious

character; Mrs. Hopewell is incurably optimistic; and Mr. Head

is the head-strong guide of Nelson in "The Artificial Nigger."

Thus, one should be alert to the possible meanings engendered

in the names themselves. In addition, Julian's mother remarks on two separate occasions that "Rome wasn't built in a day" (pp. 406, 411), and this ordinarily trite statement further contributes to the association with the Roman emperor

Julian. Moreover, as Julian and his mother go to her reducing class at the Y, Julian is described as having "his hands in his pockets, his head down and thrust forward and his eyes 36 glazed with the determination to make himself completely numb during the time he would be sacrificed to her plea­ sure" (p. 406). The preceding description, along with images of martyrdom in the story, casts Julian in the role of the modern anti-martyr who would prefer that he be, like

Eliot's Prufrock, anesthetized against the realities of his existence rather than come to terms with them. It is in an insensitive manner, then, that he conducts himself through­ out the story—that is, until he is awakened from his somnambulance by the death of his mother at the conclusion of the story.

0'Connor's technique of interspersing dialogue with description is effective in engaging the reader in both the external action of the story and also the interior state of mind of Julian and his mother. The mother's ordinary, sometimes banal, conversations, which are counterpointed against Julian's depressed reaction to them, are reminiscent of Joyce’s "Araby," where the boy-narrator comes to a reali­ zation about life because of the inane conversations of the shopkeepers at the bazaar which precipitate his epiphany.

In O’Connor's story, however, the conversations become not a moment of spiritual or emotional illumination but rather a caricaturist's device to show Julian's irascible nature, his willfulness, and his apparent antipathy toward his mother

At one point, his mother remarks to Julian: "if you know who you are, you can go anywhere" (p. 407). But Julian 37

responds with a verbal attack: "Knowing who you are is good

for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where

you stand now or who you are" (p. 407). What Julian’s remark

does is to emphasize the fact that the story centers around

identity, with both characters feeling that they know them­

selves; in reality, both Julian and his mother have deluded

themselves, and neither knows his true self. Thus, mainly

through the vehicle of irony, the reader has his attention

adverted to these two characters in search of themselves.

But it is through a secondary conflict that the reader will

be able to learn more about this quest.

The secondary conflict between blacks and whites rein­

forces the primary conflict between mother and son. Julian,

on the surface, believes in sojoiety1 s „integration, while his

mother believes in the separate-but-equal doctrine, or, as

she states it, that the blacks "should rise, yes, but on

their own side of the fence" (p. 408). Julian’s true nature,

however, is revealed by two things: his reflection on the

old Godhigh mansion, a monument to the old order, and his manner of using black people in the story. O'Connor says

of Julian: "He never spoke of it [the mansion] without con­

tempt or thought of it without longing" (p. 408) . Furthermore,

"it occurred to him that it was he, not she, who could have

appreciated it" (p. 408). One thus sees, through the omniscient author's voice, Julian's anti-democratic, elitist bias and the superiority he feels over his mother for her 38

illiberal views. In addition, Julian takes pleasure in

trying to "teach her [his mother] a lesson that would last

her awhile" (p. 413). Indeed, the idea of teaching his mother

a lesson becomes Julian's overriding preoccupation. (He is,

however, about as successful as the other "teachers" in

O'Connor's fiction: Mr. Head attempts to guide Nelson

through the city.and, by implication, through life, but fails;

the rationalist Rayber tries to keep Tarwater on a more "rea­

sonable" path than he has been set on by the old, eccentric

Tarwater, but ultimately the old man, who has been dead

throughout the story, wins; and Sheppard, who seems so soli­

citous to his son Norton and to Rufus Johnson, becomes an

ineffective teacher to both.) While they are on the bus heading toward the mother's reducing class at the Y, Julian attempts to demonstrate his lack of prejudice (and to infuriate his mother) by asking a black man for a light. However, since

Julian has no cigarettes (he had given them up two months previously) and since a "No Smoking" sign prohibits his apparently friendly gesture, Julian ends up looking as foolish as he really is. His intention of quite literally using the black man to make his mother explode, fizzles. It is at this point that he ponders more efficient ways to teach his lesson: he could try to cultivate black friendships, participate in sit-in demonstrations, or, the "ultimate horror" for his mother, "bring home a suspiciously Negroid woman" (p. 414).

After his spiteful reverie, a large black woman wearing the 39

identical hat as his mother enters the bus carrying an ominous

red pocketbook "that bulged throughout as if it were stuffed

with rocks" (p. 415). In a certain sense, the black woman

is the double of Julian’s mother: identically hatted, they

both suffer from too much pressure—the black woman from too

much exterior, societal pressure; Julian's mother from too

much interior, physical pressure. The whole idea of lesson­

teaching culminates in this episode: Julian feels that the

black woman and her hat will show his mother that times have

changed, that the old days of privilege represented by the

Old Godhigh mansion are gone, and that the days when a black

person can sit in the front of a bus and wear the same ridicu­

lous hat as a white person are here. But Julian's mother

finds the coincidence of the identical hats amusing, and the

lesson that Julian was trying to teach is thwarted by his mother's sense of humor. As they all leave the bus together—

Julian, his mother, the black woman, and her son—Julian's mother decides to give the little child a nickel since "she

thought little Negroes were on the whole cuter.., than little white children" (p. 415), but she is hit by the child's mother with the "mammoth red pocketbook," precipitating the stroke, the climax, and the denouement in one mighty swing.' Like

Katherine Mansfield's Miss Brill, who unexpectedly finds out what people really think of her, Julian's mother is momen­ tarily shocked into cruel reality; unlike Miss Brill, Julian's mother does not survive the shock. As his mother groggily 40

gets up from the sidewalk, Julian, unaware of his mother’s

serious condition, chides her: "I hope this teaches you a

lesson" (p. 419). The impact of these words prepares the

reader for the poignant scene at the story’s end where Julian's

actions are symbolically ineffectual:

Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. "Mother!" he cried. "Darling, sweetheart, wait!" Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed for­ ward and fell at her side, crying, "Mamma, Mamma!" He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing_.and closed. "Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster . he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into,the world of guilt and sorrow (p. 420). One sees, as Julian runs for help, that his senses which had

been so strong in his own stubborn support, fail him. The

life-giving lights move away as he runs toward them; his feet

take him nowhere; and his voice, which had been so reproving,

fails him. He has gone against the biblical injunction by

reviling his mother in the fullness of his strength, and now

he finds this strength ineffective as his mother wavers be­ tween life and death. He. has anesthetized himself into his own "mental bubble," and now he cannot undo what he has done.

Ironically, he will realize this as he enters "the world of 41

guilt and sorrow." His moment of recognition has been more painful than his mother's since he will have to live on his own, without her as his buffer against the outside world and as his scapegoat. He had indeed found himself.

The subordinate conflict between whites and blacks in

O'Connor's stories usually supports the main conflict and helps to reveal, in an ironic fashion, the true nature of the major characters. This was the case in "Everything That Rises

Must Converge" and can be seen in other stories wherein this

V conflict takes place. "Judgement Day" is an intricately structured .work where the author utilizes the black-white conflict to yield considerable insight into Tanner, the aging and feisty protagonist. In this story, O'Connor adroitly shifts time sequences and connects episodes through carefully wrought details of characterization. Like its forebear

"The Geranium," the story begins with W.T. Tanner (Old Dudley) living, unhappily, with his daughter and son-in-law in their

New York apartment. Ill at ease in the giant metropolis, he plans to return to his home in Corinth, Georgia, dead or alive, and he makes preparations for his return by pinning an errati­ cally scrawled note on himself which reads: "IF FOUND DEAD

SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA" (p. 531).

Sister Kathleen Feeley notes that Tanner's obsession with the place of his burial reflects an ancient and universal concern with burial rites, for primitive people commonly believed that their earthly resting place prefigured the place of eternal rest.3

Tanner is afraid that his daughter will bury him in New York, as, indeed, she plans to. The daughter's choice of burial

sites is, according to Carter W. Martin, significant:

As is often true of the city in Flannery O'Connor's fiction, New York is a place of the damned, a godless hell for the old man, allegorically a purgatory of suf­ fering antecedent to his entry into the eternal true country.4

As the reader progresses in the story, he finds that Tanner's fears come true; he is buried in the city. However, because of the daughter's guilt feelings at having not acceded to

Tanner's burial wishes, she has the body exhumed and sent to its final resting place in Georgia.

As is customary in O'Connor's stories, one finds her using the Doppelganger technique to conspicuous advantage.

Tanner's double is Coleman Parrum, the black man whom Tanner had conned into becoming his servant thirty years previously:

When Coleman was young, he had looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey. With Tanner it was the opposite; when he was young he had looked like a monkey but when he got old, he looked like a bear (p. 534).

Parrum is further described as being the "negative image" (p. 538) of Tanner. As a result of this doubling technique, a negative symmatry—a kind of structural chiasmus—is achieved, and the irony of the story is thereby intensified since what happens to Parrum happens, but in an unusual way, to Tanner through the agency of the unnamed black actor in New York. In order to associate Parrum with the black actor who becomes Tanner's nemesis, O'Connor makes the actor the double of Parrum by making him black and, more important for the doubling, by 43

outfitting him with eyeglasses. (Thus the Poppe1ganger will

now be triangular, with all three sharing essential character­

istics.) It was through a pair of make-shift eyeglasses that

Tanner had originally conned Parrum into working for him: by accidentally whittling a pair of spectacles out of a piece

of bark, fastening some haywire to them to serve as earpieces,

and giving them to Parrum saying, "I hate to see anybody can’t

see good" (p. 538), Tanner establishes, through this fortuitous

and inarticulate gesture of friendship (but which Tanner viewed

as a clever gambit on his part to dominate the strong, sullen,

bear-like Parrum), a kind of symbiotic relationship that lasts

for thirty years. Later, when Tanner removes himself to New

York to live with his daughter, he meets the bespectacled

black actor, who lives next door, and tries to strike up a

conversation with him by calling him "Preacher" to flatter

him. (Thus he tries to con the black actor, an atheist, in

much the same way that he had conned Parrum, but here the

relationship becomes antibiotic.) Tanner felt that there

was an art to handling black people; he would handle them, so he says, "with his wits and with luck" (p. 536). But in

the case of the black actor, his new "negative image," he

proceeds unwittingly, saying exactly the wrong thing: "I

thought you might know somewhere around here we could find us a pond" (p. 544). The black double of Parrum, and by extension Tanner, reacts sullenly and inhospitably to Tan­ ner’s fishing gambit and pulls the old man's black hat over 44

his eyes, sending Tanner reeling into his daughter's apart­

ment. Later, on a second occasion, the same ritual with the

hat is performed. This time the unlucky Tanner is found dead,

with "his hat . . . pulled down over his face and his head

and arms thrust between the spokes of the bannister" (p. 549).

Earlier in the story, Tanner had concluded a reverie by think­

ing to himself:

You make a monkey out of one of them [the blacks] and he jumps on your back and stays there for life, but let one make a monkey out of you and all you can do is kill him or disappear (p. 539).

Thus, the repetition of the conning scene of thirty years before has produced an ironic reversal: the black actor from the city has made a monkey out of Tanner. Retributive jus­ tice has been served.

The conflict between city and country is always a minor conflict in O'Connor's work, but it provides a certain mythic dimension, at times, to her stories. In "The Artificial Nig­ ger," for example, the Dantean tangle of city streets and the underground network of sewers are set in relief against the more easily apprehendable, hence more acceptable, life in the rural area. The cities are always complex, confusing, and disorienting to the characters, who seem more able to deal with the exigencies of life in a simpler setting. Even though this is true, the country is not the ideal world, but it is a less complex battleground on which to highlight the conflicts of the heart and spirit, those conflicts which are 45

more important than the solely environmental ones. The

country setting, then, provides the basis for some of the

irony so frequent in O'Connor's work. In "A Circle in the

Fire,V for instance, the much-valued woods of Mrs, Cope

is destroyed by three poor, city-dwelling youths who come to

enjoy the more attractive rural setting in the story. Their

destruction of the woods is mindless, as is the destruction

of Old Misery's house in Graham Greene's "The Destructors,"

but it is understandable. As in Greene's story, the ordinary

constructive instincts have been perverted by the unfortunate

conditions under which the young boys grew up. Their retalia- K

tion—though they do not understand the underlying reasons

for it—underscores, on one hand, the selfishness of Mrs.

Cope, who wants to keep a natural endowment to herself, and, on the other, the inherent superiority of the natural life of the country to the artificial life of the city. In a natural setting, one is better able to see oneself as one really is than in an environment where complexity itself masks the true goals of life, because the problems of survival in a network of mazes make it so.

In another of O'Connor's short stories, "The Enduring

Chill," the city-country conflict provides the backdrop for an ironic Kunstlerroman which may remind one of Joyce's

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. However, Asbury

Fox, hardly the wily craftsman, is the negative image of

Stephen Dedalus, the cunning craftsman that his name implies. f

Asbury Fox has exiled himself in New York, but because of an

apparently fatal illness he is forced to return to his home

in Timberboro, the rural antithesis of the big city. He has

come home to die and, paradoxically, to live out his romantic

fantasies, at the same time; but he is cured by a country

doctor, of his disease—undulant fever--which he had contracted

on his mother's farm from drinking unpasteurized milk. His

romantic ideas of the dying artist making a significant state­

ment to the world, or even to himself, are thus unceremoniously

blasted away. Even his illness is unromantic—"bangs in a

cow" it is called by the doctor--but it is nevertheless the cause of his regeneration, or at least his gaining of partial

insight. It is here, then, in this "collapsing country junc­

tion," not in the larger world of the city, where Asbury sees

himself as he really is—a petulant, conceited dilletante.

The lifeless and wooden fiction he had written was a failure

because he could neither see the world nor himself without the

romance of illusion. After his chastening experience, his writing, if he continues, will have been burned clean, to a

certain degree, by the experience he has just gone through.

While progress is a suspicious commodity in O'Connor's

fiction, tradition is a two-edged sword that cuts down the false gods of the past ..but also prepares a clearer path to the future. In ^Greenleaf," for example, Mrs. May fears that she and her family will be supplanted by the burgeoning

Greenleaf clan. Her fears are far from groundless since /47 the mood and motion of the story give her reason to fear for her displacement. Even though one sees the Greenleafs emerging as a pioneering force in the story, they are not portrayed as one old force replacing another old force; rather, they are unschooled in the old aristocratic manner but are strong and productive newcomers who will set a new direction for the

Old South, replacing the superannuated classed society with democratic iconoclasm. The Greenleafs are like Bruce Catton's description of General Grant, who came to Appomattox to sign the truce wearing a private’s uniform and muddy shoes, but he came as the victor, a representative of the new democratic force that would set different standards in man's relationship with his fellows.

But the story which best exemplifies the conflict of the

Old South and the New South is "The Displaced Person." In this story of a Polish immigrant’s attempt to start a new life and

Mrs. McIntyre's desire to stop it, one sees that progress takes a back seat to tradition. The story depicts the moral dilemma facing Mrs. McIntyre: should she fire the best worker she has ever had—the hard-working, superbly efficient Mr.

Guizac, the story's Displaced Person—because he has arranged to have his sixteen-year-old cousin marry a black field hand who works on the McIntyre farm; or should she accept the consequences of Guizac's actions and alienate herself from her own society by going against tradition. Thus, the fear of encroachment by’newcomers, with different ideas, and the 48

concomitant fear of being displaced by these foreigners,

yields insight into the representatives of the old order,

Mrs. McIntyre and the Shortleys, while producing a moment of

recognition for the reader.

This•three-part story begins with an effective descrip­

tion of Mrs. Shortley, the dominant half of the husband and

wife team hired by Mrs. McIntyre to help her run her dairy

farm, and the focal character of the first part. Mrs. Short-

ley is described in mythic dimensions: a modern-day collosus,

"she stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-

confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of

granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward,

surveying everything" (p. 194). O'Connor also tells the

reader in this opening scene that Mrs. Shortley "might have

been the giant wife of the countryside" and that she "ignored

the white afternoon sun" (p. 194). As a result of these descriptions, she is characterized as an almost pagan divinity;

she is gigantic, contends with the sun (In O'Connor's fiction, as Stuart L. Burns points out, the sun "practically always . . . functions as a visible manifestation of some Divine Agency,

intervening in or judging the affairs of men. "5), and is pic­ tured as a modern Apollo, the collosus of Rhodes, standing guard over her domain. She watches with her beacon-like eyes and is able to see Astor and Sulk even though they "were hidden by a mulberry tree" (p. 194).

Mrs. Shortley's redoubtable appearance, however, comes 49

under the narrator's ironic scrutiny and is deflated numerous

times. For example, Mrs. Shortley remarks that the priest

who has come to bring the Displaced Person to the McIntyre

farm had on a "collar that he wore backwards, which, Mrs.

Shortley knew, was what priests did who wanted to be known

as priests" (p. 195). A further illustration of Mrs. Short-

ley's shortcomings is provided through the central and recur­ ring scene that depicts wartime atrocities in newsreel fashion.

This scene shows:

a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in'here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out> a hand raised clutching nothing. (p. 196) This scene represents the reason for the displacement of the

Guizac family; like others terrified by the inhumane treat­ ment going on in their country or of having their lives disrupted by its aftermath, they have fled to a sanctuay far from their scarred homeland. However, Mrs. Shortley, in her illogical manner, feels that this sort of inhumanity is somehow catching, and that if this were done to people like the Guizacs, then perhaps they would bring this insanity with them and infect the inhabitants of their new surroundings.

Mrs. Shortley's thinking, of course, represents her provin­ cialism, ignorance, and, above all, her fear. She feels that just as the tractor replaced the mule, so too will the dis­ placed persons of the world displace the blacks, and ultimately 50 what she fears is that she herself will be displaced. Her fears are grounded in fact when she finds out that her husband

Chancy is soon to be fired. She directs her two children,

Anne Maude and Sarah Mae, to help her pack their things in their overburdened car, which Mr. Shortley has brought around to accommodate their heavy load. The description of the encum­ bered auto is similar to the description of the European death scene during the war:

Mrs. Shortley sat with one foot on a packing box so that her knee was pushed into her stomach. Mr. Shortley’s elbow was almost under her nose and Sarah Mae’s bare left foot was sticking over the front seat, touching her ear (p.‘2l3).

It is at this point—the moment of her stroke—that she has her recognition scene:

All the vision in them [her eyes] might have been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr. Shortley*s elbow and Sarah Mae's foot at the same time and began to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself (p. 213).

This scene is similar to the others, but this time Mrs. Shortley has become part of the mass of bodies, the victims. She has been displaced by the D.P.s, but she has also taken the place of the victims of social injustice and in this way has perhaps expiated her own selfishness by this transference. She has gained a sense of propinquity with mankind, in a comically ironic way;- and thus, after her vision, she dies. The collosus has become more like Shelley's Ozymandias, a hulking, disembodied mass. . 51

The second section of this story is a transitional one,

and the focal character is now Mrs. McIntyre, who tells Astor

that "we can get along without" (p. 214) the Shortleys. It

is in this section that Mrs. McIntyre finds out that Sulk plans to marry Guizac's cousin. Consequently, she decides

to inform the D.P. that he will have to abandon his plans

if he wants to keep his job.

Earlier in the story, Mrs. McIntyre had been more than

satisfied with Mr. Guizac, at one point affirming this fact

by exclaiming: "That man is my salvation!" (p. 203) (In

O’Connor’s work, statements like Mrs. McIntyre’s will usually have ironic overtones, as indeed this one does in the present

story.) In the final part of the story, Mrs. McIntyre tries to rationalize her decision to fire the Displaced Person by regarding him as a foreigner, as an "extra" person in a world already overpopulated; but her decision is complicated for her because Guizac, though not perfectly Christlike in his actions,6 is frequently associated with Christ throughout the story. He has, as noted above, been called her "salva­ tion"; also, the old priest, Father Flynn, talking about

Christ, but also by extension about Guizac, says of him that

"He came to redeem us" (p. 226). On another occasion, Mrs.

McIntyre remarks to the priest that "Christ was just another

D.P." (p. 229). Thus the association of Guizac with.Christ is unmistakable and intensifies her moral dilemma. Curiously enough, she resolves her dilemma by doing nothing—that is, 52

by watching, almost paralyzed, as Guizac is run over by an

unattended tractor. Her spiritual paralysis is then trans­

formed into a physical paralysis as the story comes to a

close: now confined to bed, the once-hearty Mrs. McIntyre

has been transmogrified and is finally displaced herself.

That which Mrs. McIntyre had feared—that Guizac would "upset

the balance around here" (p. 231)—has come true, but in a

way not foreseen by any of the characters. Commenting on

this story, Sister Kathleen Feeley states:

The death of the displaced person has a historical and social significance as deep as its religious one. The death-dealing conflict between the European "old world" with its unreformed religion and quaint social customs and the new, brash, pragmatic American world is epito­ mized in the death of Mr. Guizac at the hands of a resentful white farm laborer, a sullen Negro, and a fear-filled landowner, all of whom share an intuition that the foreigner is likely to displace them.7

Tradition has been upset; the remaining Guizacs, like the

Greenleafs, will now help to reconstruct society in their own way.

The most important conflict in an O'Connor story is that between the apparent and the real because it provides her ironic voice with the timbre necessary to a thematic statement. "Revelation" is a story which typifies this con­ flict in a well-modulated structure that balances the oppos­ ing forces in a subtle yet striking way. The central char­ acter is Ruby Turpin, a forty-seven-year-old woman who domi­ nates not only her husband but the entire story as well.

She feels herself to be a self-sufficient, charitable, 53

hard-working woman, possessed of a sense of humor that she

feels has kept her young: "there was not a wrinkle in her

face except around her eyes from laughing too much" (p. 490).

But Mrs. Tumpin's smug complacency is put to a test of

fire as she is forced to face her own inadequacy squarely.

As the reader shall see, the story is structured so as to yield a reversal of expectation at the end: the bottom rail

—to use one of Mrs. Turpin's sayings—does indeed come out on top. Mrs. Turpin repeatedly thanks Jesus for what she has and for who she is. Ordinarily, this is an admirable trait, but when thanksgiving is self-deluding, one can expect

O'Connor to provide an ironic comeuppance for her character, and this story is no exception to the O'Connor practice.

The author tells the reader that Mrs. Turpin "occupied herself at night naming the classes of people" (p. 491). She arranges them in hierarchical order with the blacks and the white- trash as co-equal inhabitants of the bottom rung of the ladder.

One rung above this unfortunate group are the home-owners; a rung above them are the home-and-land owners (the class she assigns herself to); at the top of the ladder are the rich people. Her preoccupation with her class is revealed also when she wonders

who she would have chosen to be if she couldn't have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, "There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash," what would she have said? "Please, Jesus, please," she would have said, "just let me wait until there's another place available," and he would have said, "No, you have to 54

go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind." She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, "All right, make me a nigger then—but that don't mean a trashy one." Ane he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black (p. 491).

Clearly, something is about to happen to Mrs. Turpin! ♦ The agent for Mrs. Turpin's regeneration is a homely

Wellesley girl who throws a book (significantly, the book is Human Development) at Mrs. Turpin in the doctor's office waiting room and then proceeds to choke her.

According to Josephine Hendin, the girl, Mary Grace, is o Mrs. Turpin's double, her "negative self-image." Like the black actor in "Judgement Day" who functions in a similar way, she is more a retributive force in the story than a character. Under "normal" circumstances, she would be regarded as a lunatic, as in fact she is by the white- trash woman in the doctor's office. What prevents this facile interpretation is her association with the sun in the story, the powerful force which directs the onslaught on Mrs.

Turpin but which also provides her with a clearer view of herself, as she would be with her virtues burned away. Mrs.

Turpin, called by Mary Grace an "old wart hog" (p. 500) from hell, feels that the girl is the bearer of some divine mes­ sage, a message which she fails to comprehend. She then questions God: "How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?" (p. 506) She is unable to understand the 55

dualistic battle between flesh and spirit, thinking that

only externals count, such as saying "Hi yawl this

evening?" (p. 503) to the blacks she regards as chattel

but who she realizes must be treated nicely if work is to

be-got out of them. In a word, she is a hypocrite. Still

without an answer that she can comprehend, she bellows,

■once againto God, "Who do you think you are?" (p. 507)

The echo that she receives back from her question provides

her with the unexpected answer that precipitates her epiphany:

The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood (pp. 507-08).

The answer, of course, is the question (Who do you think you

are?) boomeranging back at her. At this point she is stunned

into sight: like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life (p. 508). She has been devastated by the terrible knowledge that she

is very like these humble creatures. To signify her accep­

tance of this mysterious insight, she, like the Ancient

Mariner blessing the water snakes, raises "her hands . . .

in a gesture hieratic and profound" (p. 508). In her

open-eyed state', she sees a vision of souls "rumbling 56

toward heaven" (p. 508). The order in which she sees the

souls proceed toward heaven is not like the hierarchical

order that Mrs. Turpin had formulated: here too she is sur­

prised as she notices that the blacks, white-trash, lunatics,

and freaks are all ahead of the respectable people like

herself and her husband Claud. As she surveys this latter

group, "she could see by their shocked and altered faces

that even their virtues were being burned away" (p. 508).

Thus, those characteristics which Mrs. Turpin had perceived

as virtues—respectability, self-sufficiency, pretended

affability—are now seen as impediments that must be got

rid of if she is to gain entry into paradise. In an inter­

esting use of color imagery, O'Connor seems to parallel the

astronomical phenomenon known as the "Red Shift." The sun,

representing a regenerative force, is seen as a bright

white light at the beginning of the story and progresses

through the spectrum to violet at the story's end. As light moves toward the violet end of the spectrum, the light waves

get shorter, indicating that the celestial body is getting

closer to a fixed point. As Mrs. Turpin begins to see more

clearly, and correspondingly as the day wanes, she likewise

comes closer to being what she thought she already was at

the beginning of the story. Thus, in an ironic way, the

situation is reversed; Mrs. Turpin has been demolished only to be rebuilt again, this time in a.more substantial way.

Throughout this chapter, the basic conflicts which 57 pervade O’Connor's fiction have been illustrated by but a few of the many stories in which these warring contraries appear.

But conflict by itself means very little unless some important thing is derived from it. That important thing, of course, is a thematic statement. To this end, then, the themes already implicitly discussed in the present chapter will be developed explicitly in the pages which follow. 5&

CHAPTER THREE

WHEELS OF LIGHT:

THEMES IN THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR

The theme of an O'Connor story—that electric charge

produced by the confluence of contraries—illuminates for

the reader the way people mistakenly view themselves, their brothers, and the world they both inhabit. There are three closely related themes that run throughout her work, and each in some way corresponds to and corrects the mistaken perceptions of the haunted characters that occupy the pages of her stories. The theme of incompleteness, the first to be considered, depicts the deficiency in the individual and, by extension, those deficiencies in the larger society to which he, through his short-sightedness, has been a contrib­ utor. The second theme focuses on the necessity for the character to respect the ..mystery inherent _in_places, objects, and people. By his awareness of such mystery, he will gain a better understanding of himself and his relationship to others. The third, and most important, theme reflects the arduous guest through the convoluted passages of the mind and heart to find one's self. »

One notices, as one reads through the O'Connor stories, that the basic unit of society's structure—the family—is usually incomplete in some significant way. Frequently, one of the parents is either widowed (Julian's mother in 59

"Everything That Rises Must Converge," Sheppard in "The Lame

Shall Enter First," and Mrs. May in "Greenleaf" are three of the many examples that could be cited), divorced (Mrs. Hope- well in "Good Country People" and Rayber in The Violent Bear

It Away are two such examples), or incapacitated (Tilman in

"Why Do the Heathen Rage?" is an example of a parent incapac­ itated by a stroke). From both a structural and practical point of view, this single-parent phenomenon is understandable, for the absence of either a husband or a wife narrows the focus on the ensuing conflict between parent and child. With both parents on the scene, the- focus would have to be widened, , while the interest would be diffused through two parents.

However, the frequency with which this phenomenon occurs in the stories suggests that more emphasis is being placed on this deficiency than would normally occur in society. For this reason, one can see that the physical manifestation of incompleteness in the family, if one takes it as a microcosm of society, may well connote an incompleteness in the larger society for which it serves as the model. The inference to be drawn, then, is that something is needed to fill the void created by this incomplete or disintegrating unit.

"The Lame Shall Enter First" emphasizes the deficiency in family life which leads to the story’s tragically ironic conclusion. Sheppard (whose name indicates what he should be—a guardian) is the part-time counselor at a reformatory and a full-time recreation director, but one who is unable 60

to guard or direct his own small flock: one son and one errant

youth reclaimed from the reformatory. Sheppard is a widower,

and his son Norton’s lack of maternal attention is conspicuous

from the very outset of the story. The opening scene has the

boy eating, for breakfast, a stale piece of chocolate cake

smeared with peanut butter and ketchup to make it more palat­

able—a mess which he later throws up. Hyman's perceptive

commentary on this scene indicates its thematic usefulness to

the entire story:

This [the cake-eating and subsequent vomiting) is not only grotesque but thoroughly repulsive, and no less repulsive to the author, but it is entirely functional and necessary in the story: it perfectly symbolizes the indigestible mess of Sheppard’s "enlightened" views which Norton will similarly be unable to keep down.l '2> In addition, the episode helps to develop not so much the

character of the son and his eating habits as it does the

father and his lack of concern for the boy he considers selfish,

greedy, and mediocre. Shortly after the cake-eating scene,

the father gazes out the window and ruminates on the past and

present; at the same time, the reader notes further the void

of incompleteness in the story:

The side lawn, green and even, sloped fifty feet or so down to a small suburban wood. When his wife was living, they had often eaten outside, even breakfast, on the grass. He had never noticed then that the child was selfish (p. 446).

This last sentence indicates that Sheppard himself has been delinquent with his son; O'Connor evidently wants the reader to make no mistake about the father's shortcomings. In 61

addition to feeling that the child is selfish and mediocre,

Sheppard also feels that Norton grieves too much for his

mother, now dead over a year; this he regards as abnormal.

From this scene the reader sees that Sheppard is too coldly

practical, too insensitive, and emotionally unable—or

unwilling—to give his child the care and love that he needs.

When Sheppard sees the possibility of saving an intelligent,

delinquent boy four years older than Norton, he neglects his

own son to devote his entire attention to Rufus Johnson, who

has the potential to be everything his own son cannot. Shep­

pard believes that Johnson's delinquency has been caused by

his club foot—as compensation for his own imperfection.

O'Connor tells the reader that "Johnson was as touchy about

the foot as if it were a sacred object" (p. 459). In a sense

Johnson shares some of the same characteristics as Pan. Like

the goat-footed Arcadian shepherd-god, he is able to attract

people almost magnetically. Sheppard endures insult after

insult from Johnson, yet he cannot resist "saving" Johnson;

Norton also comes under Johnson's spell after first resisting

friendship with him. Johnson is also able to incite confusion

into Sheppard's household (the general confusion, or panic,

felt by Sheppard is perhaps an indication). Also, because of

the cloven foot, and the imagery of darkness surrounding

Johnson in the story, he can be likened to the devil. Shep­ pard's approach to solving Johnson's problem seems much too facile: he thinks that outfitting him with a new orthopedic 62

shoe will make a new boy out of Johnson. Certainly, Rufus

Johnson is the most interesting of the three characters

presented in the story, for he is the proximate cause of the

important events which occur. He says that he is in the

power of Satan; he introduces key eschatological elements

into the story: he teaches Norton about heaven and hell,

for example, and is also the cause of Norton's desire to join

his mother in heaven, hence Norton's suicide by hanging.

Again, though he is the dark, demonic agent of the story,

Johnson is also the cause of Sheppard's epiphany at the

story's end, where the father at last realizes what his real

son means to him. Thus, Rufus Johnson is in himself a para­ dox, for although portrayed as evil (although certainly not of the same magnitude as Shakespeare's Aaron or Iago), he is in a certain sense the story's regenerative agent. He even recognizes the possibility of his own regeneration when he says: "If I do repent, I'll be a preacher. ... If you're going to do it, it's no sense doing it halfway" (p. 476).

This mysterious character, therefore, combines in his person­ ality both the capacity for evil, which is exercised through­ out much of the story, and the capability for good, which appears to burgeon at the end of the story.

Though incompleteness can be shown through family inter­ action, or the lack of it, this theme can also be effectively demonstrated through a single character. O'Connor's "Good

Country People" provides the example. "Nothing is perfect" (p. 272), c 63

one of Mrs. Hopewell's favorite sayings, underscores the

theme of incompleteness in this story. She herself is imper­

fect though she, like so many O'Connor characters, does not

realize it: "Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own

but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive

way that she never felt the lack" (p. 272). Her thirty-two-

year-old daughter Joy, who at twenty-one had changed her name

to Hulga, is also imperfect—even more so than her mother.

As with Julian’s mother in "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

and with Mrs. Shortley in "The Displaced Person," O'Connor

uses the eyes of a character to reveal the inner—person:

Hulga's eyes are described as being "icy blue, with the look

of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of the will

and means to keep it" (p. 273). But it is Hulga's physical

imperfection, made manifest through her artificial leg, that reveals her most fully to the reader and, ultimately, to her­

self. The force in the story which precipitates the myopic

Hulga's clearer vision of herself is a nineteen-year-old Bible

salesman who turns out to be not so much interested in "Chrus-. tian service" and selling Bibles as he is in seducing his customers. . Unaware of his true nature, Hulga decides that she will seduce this apparently innocent youth in order to show him how to "see through to nothing." This existentialist emphasis on le néant is what has become Hulga's preoccupation, and it provides the basis for the story's ironic conclusion.

For example, Joy chose the name Hulga for its negative power; 64

like "the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace

and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when

called" (p. 275), Joy-Hulga sees herself as a talented out­

cast unable to live in the domesticated world of her mother,

one who rebels against her mother's conventional values.

She feels that her antithetical name choice is her "highest

creative act" (p. 275), and this indicates the perversion of

her creative instincts into their opposites. "One of her

major triumphs," the author tells the reader, "was that her

mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the

greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into

Hulga" (p. 275). Joy, who is a nihilist, can, by turning

her dust into Hulga, create; she can do something, and thereby

affirm her own being in her own way. Hulga's activity is thus

a negative aspect of the Cartesian igpgito, and it becomes a

spark of hope for her regeneration even though she does not

yet realize it. To stress Hulga's preoccupation with the negative, O'Connor has her underline the.following passage

from a book she has been reading:

Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing (p. 277). For Hulga, however, Nothing is important; she wishes to know something of Nothing. This sets up the meeting with the Bible salesman who apparently knows Something essential but who, as 65

it turns out, is also a believer in Nothing. Hulga's object

in going on a picnic with the Bible salesman is to mock him

with her absurdist dialogues. She tells him that "some of

us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing

to see. It's a kind of salvation" (p. 288), says Hulga.

However, the youthful salesman is more interested in making

another conquest than he is in pursuing absurdity, and he asks

her where her "wooden leg joins on" (p. 288). Hulga's arti­

ficial leg becomes, like the shrunken and mummified figure in

Wise Blood, an object of veneration, a fetish. O'Connor tells

the reader,that she "was as sensitive about the artificial

leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away" (p. 288).

When, in the seduction scene, the salesman makes his provoc­ ative request to see the leg, Hulga is momentarily taken aback but recovers to ask him why he wants to see it. His answer feeds her ego. His answer that "it's what makes you different" (p. 288) is taken by Hulga as an indication of his innocence and as a recognition by him of her own particular strength. She feels, because of his remark and his demeanor, that "for the first time in * her life she was face to face with real innocence" (p. 289). When she agrees to show him, "it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it, miraculously, in his" (p. 289).

Thus, Hulga surrenders, in a quasi-religious way, to someone 66

whom she feels she has no reason to fear, and the preceding

quotation becomes a secular parody of the salesman's Biblical

quotation: "He who losest his life shall find it" (p. 280).

(In an ironic way, of course, Hulga must shed the illusions

of her present life to be regenerated.) However, the sales­

man's disarming answer is only part of his artful deception

because he wants, to remove the leg and immobilize his victim.

Again, the reader sees an ironic sequence, since Hulga has

been adept at victimizing others in her life, but with the

latest victim, the Bible salesman, she fails. Because Hulga

will not tolerate being separated from the leg, which has

achieved symbolic proportions by this time, the mutual seduc­

tion is frustrated. As his penultimate parting comment, the

salesman reveals himself: "I may sell Bibles but I know

which end is up and I wasn't born yesterday and I know where

I'm going" (p. 290). From the three successive cliches,

however, the reader has his doubts about the salesman's boasts.

Then, just prior to leaving the hayloft, the salesman makes

his final comment to the soon-to-be-abandoned Hulga: "You ain't

so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was

born" (p. 291). Hyman notes that the Bible salesman's state­ ment "is the exposure of a fake Christian, but more signifi­

cantly it is the exposure of a fake atheist, her intellectual

pride and superiority revealed to be only ignorance and gullibility."2 The young man then places the leg into his

valise and leaves Hulga stranded in the hayloft to ponder her 67

plight. The artificial leg, then, is the symbolic embodi­ ment of the complex truth of Joy-Hulga. It became for her more than an artificial appendage, more than a physical ■

compensation for a physical disability; it became both her

scapegoat and, paradoxically, her source of power. Miles

Orvell, commenting on the loss of the leg, draws an interesting mythological parallel:

In surrendering1 the leg to Manley, Hulga surrenders what is at once her strength and her weakness: she is the Philoctetes of Georgia, and both her wound and her bow are taken from her. She has let her stump separate her from biped humanity; her soul-—by grotesque metonymy—has become her leg.3

It denoted an incompleteness in her personality, for it encapsulated her spiritual debility and, in a negative way, her spiritual pride. By losing the leg at the end of the story, Hulga will be forced to reassess her life in the light of her new illumination. Having been duped by the young man,

Hulga now knows that she is like the rest of us, fallible creatures with sometimes inordinate dependencies on ourselves and on things which are as lifeless and as wooden as her leg.

One need not read far into O'Connor's writings to discover that a sense of mystery is important to her work. O'Connor, writing in Mystery and Manners, noted that "a story always involves, in a dramatic way, the mystery of personality.

In many of her stories we do indeed confront inscrutable characters. Rufus Johnson, for example, is both the demonic agent and the regenerative force in "The Lame Shall Enter 68

First." But not to be overlooked in her work is the mystery of place and the sense of mystery in things. In "A View of the Woods," for example, the land itself exerts a force on the characters which is inexplicable but which nevertheless makes its presence felt on them as if it were an actual agency committed to upholding its own integrity. Again, in "The

Artificial Nigger," the plaster statue is the cause of illu­ mination for Nelson and his grandfather and produces, in a mysterious way, a conclusion which is accepted though not understood by either character. One thing, then, becomes clear as one reads through O'Connor's stories: the characters must be in harmony with their total environment if they are to understand themselves and their relationship not only to people but to things as well.

"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is an explicitly religious story which develops the mystery in things as well as people and which succeeds largely because of its precise imagery and the way the imagery is developed to correspond with other concrete elements of the story. The main character of this dramatically ironic story is a twelve-year-old girl who Is exposed to the mystery revealed by a side-show freak at a country fair. Though the girl herself does not actually see the freak, the details of the show are reported by her two cousins, weekend visitors from the convent school they attend forty-five miles away. Joanne and Susan call them­ selves Temple One and Temple Two, and they explain how the 69

names came about:

Sister Perpetua, the oldest nun at the Sisters of Mercy in Mayville, had given them a lecture on what do if a young man should—here they laughed so hard they were not able to go on without going back to the beginning—on what do do if a young man should—they put their heads in their laps—on what to do if— they finally managed to shout it out—if he should "behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them in the back of an automobile." Sister Perpetua said they were to say, "Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!" and that would put an end to it. The child sat up off the floor with a blank face. She didn’t see anything so funny in this. What was really funny was the idea of Mr. Cheatam or Alonzo Myers beauing them around. That killed her (p. 238). The idea of Mr. Cheatam, a portly old farmer, or Alonzo

Myers, an overweight eighteen-year-old taxi driver averse to bathing, entertaining the visiting cousins amuses the young girl, but she later suggests a more plausible alternative—

Wendell and Cory Willkins, two young farm boys who aspire to be Church of God preachers. Prior to going to the fair,

Wendell serenades the girls with a "hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn" (p. 240).

With a "dog-like loving look" he sings to Susan:

"I've found a friend in Jesus, He's everything to me, He's the lily of the valley, He's the One who1s set me free!" (p. 240)

The two girls, suppressing their giggling at the rustic boys and as uncomprehending of the Willkinses' religion as the Willkinses are of the girls', retort by singing the "Tanturn

Ergo," the ancient benediction song written by St. Thomas

Aquinas, a very natural song in a convent or church setting 70

but under the present circumstances conspicuously out of

place. The dumbfounded reaction of Wendell to this Latin

hymn that it "must be Jew singing" is countered by the

eavesdropping little girl, who shouts: "You big dumb

ox!" (p. 241). The reference to Aquinas, who had been

called the dumb ox because of his appearance, is unmis­

takable and, of course, ironic since she, in an inverted

sense, unwittingly pays Wendell a compliment. This little

interchange reinforces the theme of the story that all peo­

ple—even though they seem not to be—-are temples of the

Holy Ghost. Later, when the two cousins return from their date at

the fair, they relate to the little girl what they had seen

there:

It had been a freak with a particular name but they could't remember the name. The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for men and one for women. The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear. The stage ran all the way across the front. The girls heard the freak say to the men, "I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way." The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat. "God made me this- away and if you laugh He may strike you the same way. This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain't disputing His way. I'm showing you because I got to make the best of it. I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen. I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I'm making the best of it. I don't dispute hit." (p. 245)

The freak, of course, represents the central mystery of the story, and the child's reaction to the girls' description of 71 him reveals this: the child felt "as if she were hearing the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself" (p. 245). The cousin's explanation that "it was a man and woman both" (p. 245) did not really solve her riddle.

Lying in bed and trying to figure out the sphinx-like riddle, the child reconstructs the event in a different, but more significant, way:

"God done this to me and I praise Him." "Amen. Amen." "He could strike you thisaway." "Amen. Amen." "But he has not." "Amen." "Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God's temple, don't you know? God's spirit has a dwelling in you, don't you know?" "Amen. Amen." "If anybody desecrates the temple of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen." "I am a temple of the Holy Ghost." "Amen." (p. 246) /■ The girl has transposed the setting from the fair to a church, with the people responding to every statement made by the freak, now the grotesque witness to the power of God.

The next day the girls return to their convent school accompanied by the younger girl and her mother. While they are there, they are invited to benediction services in the chapel; there the little girl once again hears the "Tanturn

Ergo," and the girl's "ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God" (p. 247).

When the priest raises the monstrance containing the ivory- 72

colored host, the little girl’s mind travels back to the

fair, and she hears the freak say, "I don’t dispute hit.

This is the way He wanted me to be" (p. 248).

The point of the story does not present a great deal of

difficulty: though everyone may be grotesque in some way,

or seem to be grotesque in the eyes of others, everyone—

Mr. Cheatam and his peculiar courting gestures to the lonely

spinster Miss Kirby; Wendell and Cory Willkins and their

rustic behavior; the two cousins and their giggling and

laughable attempts at being sophisticated; Alonzo Myers and

his sweaty, porcine appearance; the little girl and her

sassiness and pride—is a temple of the Holy Ghost. What is

remarkable, however, is how this point is brought subtly yet

forcefully to the reader. A look at O'Connor's method will

indicate her achievement. It was said at the outset that

this story is dramatically ironic; and this is where it

achieves its power, for the events are not fully realized by

the characters—not even by the precocious child protagonist.

Thus, even though the characters do not fully realize the significance of the events, the perceptive reader does, and

herein lies the story's irony and its effectiveness. But the most important aspect of the story from a structural point of view is the interconnection of the symbols and images with

certain corresponding events of the plot. For example, in

O'Connor's writing, the sun, or light, usually represents divine power. Early in the story, when Wendell is about to 73

sing his hymn, this sentence appears: "The sun was going

down and the sky was turning a bruised violet color that

seemed to be connected with the sweet mournful sound of the music" (p. 240) . The conjunction of the sun with the music

indicates that even though the girls giggle at the music,

it is nevertheless an acceptable and pleasing tribute to God.

In another scene, the search-light beacon from'" the fair is described as "searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun" (p. 242). Here an association—the natural affin­ ity of all things with their Creator—is made with the fair

(especially the side-show freak) and divine power. This association is further reinforced when O'Connor has the little girl hear the fair's calliope and see in her mind's eye "all the tents raised up in a kind of gold sawdust light" (p. 242).

As the little girl muses about what she would like to be, she thinks first of being a doctor, then an engineer, and finally decides that she "would have to be a saint" (p. 243). But she then decides that "she could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick" (p. 243).

Continuing her daydream about martyrdom, she pictures herself in "a pair of tights in a great arena" (p. 243) , waiting for the first lion to charge. The arena is pictured as being

"lit by the early Christians hanging in cages of fire, making a gold dusty light that fell on her and the lions" (p. 243).

Again, through the "gold sawdust light" shining on the modern circus tents and the"gold dusty light" of the ancient lion- 74

crowded arena, an association is made between the fair and its principal attraction—the freak—and the Christian imagery

of the story. Thus, the freak, like the plaster statue in

"The Artificial Nigger," emerges as the subsuming figure that brings all the events of the story to its vortex. It is instructive to note what importance O’Connor had placed in these mysterious and grotesque characters:

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some con­ ception of the whole man, and in the South’4 the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement,■and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the stand­ point of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature. In the freak, therefore, we are able to recognize ourselves; but in him there is also an indication of the mystery which inheres in people, and in the fair (the embodiment of secular mystery), the sense of mystery in things. Thus it is that one sees the convergence in the story of the fair and its mysterious and grotesque creature with the Christian images of martyrdom and, through martyrdom, the acceptance by faith of the Christian mysteries. As Martha Stephens indicates, 75

there is a double mystery involved in this story: "The

mystery of God's unfathomable will for men--This is the way

he wanted me to be—and the almost greater mystery of the

power of the afflicted believer to accept God's will on simple faith."6 And the second part of this double mystery

is conveyed through the leitmotiv that O'Connor uses of the

"Tanturn Ergo," especially the lines:

Praestet fides supplementum Sensuum defectui (p. 241),

which indicate that faith will make up for the deficiency of

the senses. O'Connor, then, has explored these mysteries in

such a way that they come to life for the reader who has no doubt been puzzled by the curious events presented at fairs

and carnivals. Indeed, these entertainments are built on certain kinds of mysteries: there are sleight-of-hand tricks, the illusion of sawing a lady in half, escapes from locked trunks, bearded ladies, and other "mysteries" which have as their basis apparently non-rational causes. Hence, the fair becomes effective as a means of association with Christian imagery simply because its secular mystery, though not as seriously intended as that which it approximates, is so readily apprehendable by such a large audience.

The quest to find one's self, since it deals primarily with the individual—not so much with things, places, or society at large—is the most important theme to be found in

O'Connor's work. This fundamental theme is seen in a number 76

of her stories: in "The Enduring Chill," for example, Asbury

Fox, the disillusioned and failed artist, returns from the

city to his rural home in Timberboro and discovers in this

unlikely ambiance that "for the rest of his days ... he

would live in the face of a purifying terror" (p. 382). Chas­

tened by the experience of having his romantic illusions

summarily shattered, Asbury will now see more clearly that he

is weak but salvagable entity, that, as Carter W. Martin puts it, "the inevitability of his own salvation" is at hand.7 In

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own," Tom T. Shiftlet thinks

that unharnessed freedom in an-old Ford automobile will provide

the escape out of his internal abyss, only to discover that

his flight to Mobile (another of O'Connor's significant ono­ mastic usages) is hounded by the thunder of responsibility and

the rain of conscience, signifying that he can never be com­ pletely free of himself. "Parker's Back," one of O'Connor's best stories, defines one man's attempt, however inadequate, to sort out his life and make—through a series of tattoos arranged randomly on his body—a coherent statement about it.

Indeed, as Gilbert H. Muller points out,

in both of O'Connor's novels and more than half of her short stories, episodes of quest serve as pen­ ultimate examples of life enacted as an ordeal, as descents into the dark night of the soul, where dragons and other fierce monsters, frequently in human form, await their unsuspecting victims.

One of these monsters in human form is Mr. Paradise, the personification of lurking evil in "The River," an O'Connor 77

story where the quest theme is seen in its most explicit form.

This story depicts a child's attempt to find himself through

an underwater journey to the Kingdom of Christ. The story

begins with Harry Ashfield, the young boy who "wasn't high

enough for a table yet” but "too big for a highchair" (p. 171)

being picked up by his spectral babysitter, Mrs. Connin (thrice described as skeleton-like and the unwitting agent of death in the story), at six in the morning to attend a healing at the river. The boy's family is described as typifying the ennui of the modern world; even their name—-Ashfield—suggests the waste land of the spirit that inhabits their home. Later, as the two await the streetcar that will take them on their jour­ ney, Mrs. Connin (who knows only his surname) asks the boy his first name, and he replies, "Bevel," the name of the preacher conducting the services at the river's edge. The child had overheard Mrs. Connin mention it to his father as the two de­ parted for the streetcar, and he has now assumed it as his own. Mrs. Connin is struck by this extraordinary "coicident":

"She stood looking down at him as if he had become a marvel to her" (p. 159). The boy thus begins his quest—the final goal unknown to him at the moment but soon to be revealed to him as he continues his journey.

When they arrive at the Connin home prior to going to the healing, Bevel notices a picture of Christ on the wall but does not know who He is. However, he is interrupted by the

Connin children before he can ask about the carpenter with 78 the circle over his head sawing a piece of wood. The chil­ dren proceed to take him to the hog pen and play a trick on him, orchestrating his removal of a rotten piece of wood and thus letting a pig out. The pig, to the children's muted delight, charges and mauls Bevel before he is rescued by Mrs.

Connin. Pigs are important symbolically in the story, as the reader will see, for they are associated with evil. The pig with his ear bitten off, the same pig that chased and mauled Bevel, is described as looking like Mr. Paradise, the diabolic baiter of the preacher. Paradise has a cancer on .. the side of his head and goes to the healing to show that he has not been cured. Furthermore, in Mrs. Connin's chil­ dren's book entitled "The Life of Jesus Christ for Readers

Under Twelve," there is a picture of Christ "driving a crowd of pigs out of a man" (p. 163), and thus the contest between good and evil is embodied in the conflict between the skep­ tical Mr. Paradise and the believers in the preacher Bevel

Summers. As they leave the Connin house, Bevel—having confronted evil in the form of the pig and having learned that there is somebody who can drive out this evil—is noticeably different in his demeanor: His mind was dreamy and serene as they walked along and when they turned off the highway onto a long red clay road winding between banks of honeysuckle, he began to make wild leaps and pull forward on her [Mrs. Connin's] hand as if he wanted to dash off and snatch the sun which was rolling away ahead of them now (pp. 163-64). 79

With the benevolent sun guiding him, Bevel makes his way

through the dark woods, "looking from side to side as if he were entering a strange country (p. 164) . Emerging from the woods, the boy enters into the pasture, described in Edenic terms by the author:

At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond (p. 164).

Suggesting the presence of the Spirit, "two silent birds" 'A are seen "revolving high in the air" (p. 165). At this, the central episode of the story and the culmination of the first part of the boy's guest, the preacher speaks of the river of life and its saving qualities—all of which is taken in by

Bevel. The Reverend Bevel Summers tells the crowd of onlook­ ers:

. . . if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because that's the River that was made to carry sin. It's a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet (p. 165). As Bevel is about to be baptized, he does not realize the change that will come over him. He does, however, know that what was happening to him at the river "was not a joke." At the Ashfield apartment, on the other hand, "everything was a joke" (p. 167). O'Connor thus indicates that his life will be materially and spiritually changed by the action he will undergo at the hands of his namesake. The preacher questions 80

Bevel after explaining the significance of baptism in meta­

phoric terms that the boy of "four or five" will take liter­

ally:

If I baptize you . . . you'll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you'll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that? (p. 168)

Bevel responds affirmatively to the preacher's question,

thinking that now he will not have to return to his apartment

waste land but will go "under the river" to fulfill his quest

The first part thus ends with Bevel's baptism and with Mr.

Paradise's heckling; both will be set in juxtaposition at

the story's end.

The scene as Mrs. Connin and Bevel return to the Ash- ■a field's apartment reinforces the waste land aspect of the

story. The next morning, after Bevel wakes up, he eats a motley breakfast of crackers and anchovy paste, with left­

over ginger ale as a chaser. His hunger still not satis­

fied, he eats some raisin bread and peanut butter with some

chocolate milk. His breakfast, similar in its repulsiveness

to Norton's in "The Lame Shall Enter First," indicates his

hunger for parental attention as well as for a more substan­

tial, spiritual diet. To amuse himself before his late- sleeping parents wake up, Bevel empties some ash trays on the floor and creates his own private ash field to play in.

As he sits playing, he notices his still-damp shoes that he had worn the previous day to the river. At this point, the 81

boy decides to continue his quest and sets out for the river

by himself. Retracing his steps of the day before, Bevel

arrives at the river and wades in. "He intended not to fool

with preachers any more but to baptize himself and to keep

on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in

the river" (p. 173).With the river seemingly rejecting him,

Bevel thinks that this is perhaps yet another joke, the kind

that he had been accustomed to and which seemed so pointless

to him. However, with his nemesis Mr. Paradise lurking in

the background waiting to tempt him, Bevel, like King Arthur

being transported on his deathly barge to Avalon, is swept

by the current to the Kingdom of Christ in an onorthodox, mysterious way:

He plunged under once and this time, the waiting current caught him like a long gentle hand and pulled him swiftly forward and down. For an instant he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him (p. 174).

In this story O'Connor uses some of the familiar devices

of the quest to show how innocence is drawn mysteriously to

the good. The archetypal journey underground, for example, is replaced by Bevel's journey under the river; the Paradise-

Hades image is embodied in the oxymoronic use of the name

Mr. Paradise, for he is clearly the demonic agent in the story who is given an anti-Christie name to indicate how alluring evil can be; and the search for the father, another frequent device in-the quest, is incorporated in Bevel's journey to reach his Heavenly Father through the river of 82

life. Furthermore, Bevel's quest to revivify the Waste Land

of the Ashfields by the cleansing and life-giving waters of

baptism amplifies the spiritual barrenness existing in the

modern world and the consequent need for renewal. It is

partially through an unlikely agent, this small child, that

O'Connor thus attempts to get her message across. But she

needed more than characterization to accomplish her goal, for,

as W.H. Auden points out, "the Quest tale is ill adapted to

subtle portrayals of character; its personages are almost

bound to be Archetypes rather than idiosyncratic individuals.

To accomplish what characterization alone could not, therefore,

O'Connor used interconnecting imagery to link together the

obstacles to Bevel's physical and spiritual development. For

example, the three Connin boys, an early obstacle in Bevel's

progression, are described in the same terms that the pigs— 1 emblems of evil in the story—are: they are gray in appearance

and have twitching ears. Thus they are associated with Mr.

Paradise, who wears a gray hat and drives an ancient gray

automobile. The pig imagery is continued into the Ashfield apartment when Bevel, looking for food, spots, among other

things, a pork bone in the refrigerator. The pig imagery,

then, along with the familiar sun imagery found in O'Connor

stories, helps to direct the reader's attention to the con­

test between good and evil and the importance of baptism

that is the story's main purpose to highlight. Thus, as

Muller states: Through the quest motif, Miss O'Connor can maneuver her ! ) 83

characters into sharply defined situations which force them to confront that religious mystery which the author sees at the center of experience—that felt pre­ sence which can never be wholly understood, which exists but is inexplicable.10

This important theme, then, delineated here in one of its aspects—the traditional quest—forms, along with the themes of incompleteness and mystery, the basis for O’Connor's

"large and startling" message to the reader.

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Q4

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FICTION OF FLANNERY O'CONNOR:

AN ASSESSMENT

In the preceding chapters, both practical and organic elements of the structure of O'Connor's short stories have been discussed in order to see, ultimately, whether the de­ sign the artist as architect used to convey her ideas became an effective medium and produced substantive works of art.

In order to answer this fundamental question, one must raise other questions about her stories as well. For example, is there what one critic refers to as a "tonal problem" in her work—"the problem ... of how to 'take,' how to react to, the disasters that befall her characters"?'1' Secondly, since violence plays so obvious a part in her fiction, what is its effect on the credibility of her stories? More specifically, are some of the endings of her stories gratuitously shocking?

And, finally, how do the numerous dualities found in her fiction—the use of doubles, opposites, and paradoxes, for example—affect the meaning of the stories? The answers to these questions will help to determine whether she has achieved a. structural harmony in her work.

Notwithstanding the explanation she gave of it at a Hol­ lins College lecture,2 the story which presents more than a few difficulties in interpretation is the title story of

O'Connor's first collection of short stories. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" begins unceremoniously enough but ends with

the mass murder of six people at the hands of a primitive yet

philosophical killer appropriately called "The Misfit." As

is customary in the O’Connor expositions, the principal char­

acters are introduced and the scene is set, and in this case

the grimly ironic conclusion is foreshadowed through a news­

paper account of the escaped convict which the grandmother

has shown to her son Bailey to dissuade him from a Florida

vacation. Not really thinking about the potential danger of

running into the convict, she uses the Misfit to gain a better

bargaining position for her choice of vacation sites—East

Tennessee. The grandmother, portrayed as a romantic, likable- but-domineering woman who gets her way through friendly in­

trigue rather than pure guile, constantly makes mistakes, and her mistakes cause the concatenation of events which lead to the catastrophic ending. As the family sets out for their vacation, she, in her role as back-seat driver, gives the wrong directions to her son; she upsets the basket that her cat Pitty Sing is hidden in, and the cat, celebrating his new­ found freedom, sinks his claws into Bailey's shoulder causing him to lose control of the car and end up in a ditch on a lonely country road. Coincidentally, the Misfit and his two cohorts, Hiram and Bobby Lee, spot the accident and come to' investigate. "The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew" (p. 126); and, a short time later, having remembered the newspaper article, 86

she blurts out: "You're The Misfit! .... I recognized you at once!" And, as one might expect, the Misfit answers her by saying, "it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me" (p. 127). From this point on, five of the family members are systematically mur­ dered, and the grandmother's conversation while all this is going on provides the story with its philosophical discussion and its apparent meaning. Trying to appeal to his sensi­ bilities and his self-pride, Bailey's mother tells the Misfit that she thinks that he is a "good man" (and the ironic over­ tones of the title descend on the reader) and later advises the agnostic killer to pray. Central to this story is the reader's apprehension of the Misfit's beliefs, or the lack of them. He is similar to another of O'Connor's darkly myste­ rious characters, Rufus Johnson of "The Lame Shall Enter

First," in that he is actively pursuing evil but has the capa­ bility, though unasserted, of doing good, of being, according to O'Connor, "the prophet he was meant to become."3 But the

Misfit's problem is that he takes things entirely literally, cannot draw inferences, and the judgments he makes are ill- founded. He says, for example, that he could not remember why he was sent to prison, that in fact the kind or degree of criminal activity was indistinguishable to him: "You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it" (pp. 130-31). 87

In addition, a prison psychiatrist said that what he "had

done was kill [his] daddy" (p. 130), but the Misfit, again

literal-minded, reasons that this could not have been so

because his father died of influenza in 1919. In concert

with his literal-mindedness, the Misfit's talk of the redemp­

tive effects of Christ's crucifixion introduces the important

religious element into the story:

"Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one be­ cause they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get a signature and sign everything you do and’ keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,"’he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment" (p. 131).

The Misfit is capable of believing only that which he can see

or experience, and in order not to forget that experience, he must have a record of it; in short, he has no faith, no

ability to believe anything on somebody else's or society's

say-so. We see further evidence of his predicament and his obsession with the redemptive act of Christ in the following:

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead." The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl (p. 132). 88

The MisJ it then laments the fact that he was not present at

Christ’s redemptive act by banging his fist against the dirt.

Had he been there, he reasons, he would have known for sure

whether to believe. The Misfit’s anguished desire to have

concrete proof runs counter to Christ's words that those are

blessed who have not seen and yet have believed, and this

implicit idea underscores the deficiency of faith that the

Misfit has. The next scene in the story, the final dialogue

between the two principal characters, is where, according to

O'Connor, the grandmother makes an "anagogical" gesture. In

the alluded-to-college lecture, O'Connor explains the signi­

ficance of the grandmother's actions in the following way:

There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. . Her head clears for an instant and she real­ izes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. At this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.**

The spiritually uplifting gesture that O'Connor is talking about occurs just prior to the grandmother's death and is

indeed the cause of it: the grandmother says, "Why you're

one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" (p. 132).

The Misfit's response to this startling revelation is to

shoot her three times in the chest. He then takes off his glasses, cleans them, and tells Hiram and Bobby Lee to throw

her body with the others. The symbolic cleaning of the glasses reinforces.the idea that the Misfit is unable to see— 89

to perceive, to believe—without the aid of empirical^ science, which brings things into focus for him, and is therefore blind

to the mystery which surrounds things and people. As a con­ cluding comment, the Misfit tells Bobby ¿ee that the grand­ mother "would of been a good woman . . . if it had been some­ body there to shoot her every minute of her life" (p. 133).

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is what might be termed a

"problem story, and the problem centers around the character­ ization of the Misfit and the grandmother, the gesture that the grandmother makes to the Misfit, and the violent and pos­ sibly gratuitous ending of the story. The nature of the Mis­ fit—is he the hero, the regenerative agent for the grand­ mother, orr merely a psychopathic killer whose actions, for the most part, are unaccountable?—poses the first of our pro­ blems. Because of his obvious lack of stature, the Misfit is not heroic (though he may, in a sense, be regarded as the parody of the tragic hero), but he might be better regarded as more a symbolic character than a real one; thus, his major function in the story would be to exhibit his reliance on rea­ son rather than on faith, and the consequences of that pro­ nounced lack of faith. Taken in this way, the Misfit becomes almost a morality play figure (as are many O'Connor characters) who depicts to what depths a person might go without dependence on others and with total dependence on himself to figure out life's mysteries-—both physical and spiritual. If one looks at the Misfit in this way, he becomes, then, not heroic but 90

simply the embodiment of nothingness since he seems para­

lyzed into a life that leads him into a dead end. The reader

knows, for example, from the Misfit's comments, that he be­

lieves only what he can see and then doubts that because he

cannot retain in his memory everything at once; the things

that he forgets, then, have to be reaffirmed with more con­

crete evidence, and the Misfit is back where he started.

Since he does not know things for certain, and certainty is

one thing—perhaps the one thing—that he strives for, he permits himself to be led inexorably on the path toward satisfaction—whether it be by killing, stealing, or any other meanness that will tend to give his life some semblance of meaning. He is like O.E. Parker, who strove toward new experience through tattoos; he is unlike Parker in that the latter was able to apprehend some meaning by means of the very tattoos that covered his body. Parker, as a result, was a fit receptacle for regeneration; the Misfit, on the other hand, was not receptive to regeneration because, as Sister

Feeley suggests, his self-sufficiency and pride prevented him from opening himself up to spiritual reality.In effect, he frustrated his own quest to find himself. Furthermore, though the potential for finding himself is there (as noted by O'Connor in her discussion of this story),? the actuality of the Misfit's behavior in the story is what must be dealt with. His major function, then, seems to be little else than the physical agent for the destruction of the vacation-bound 91

family of six.

The problem with the grandmother and her gesture of love

toward the Misfit is that it does not quite work in the way

that O’Connor apparently intended. Josephine Hendin, for

example, feels that "the grandmother's gesture of 'tenderness'

—her claim that he is one of her babies— is ambiguous and ironic."3 is the reader to take the gesture as an indication

of the grandmother's realization of her kinship to this killer, as many critics believe?® Or has the grandmother "taken

leave of her tortured senses altogether," as Martha Stephens suggests?^® Or does the grandmother try to "buy off the Mis- Il fit's revenge with a gesture," as Hendin believes? Or does

the "grandmother's action come rather as a shock to the

reader" because it was not thoroughly prepared for earlier in

the story, as Thomas M. Carlson suggests? 12 One can see,

from this sampling of critical opinion, that there are pro­

blems in this story which affect meaning. That the grand­ mother's gesture poses an unacceptable ambiguity in this story

seems evident, for it does not expand the meaning of the ges­

ture through plurisignation but rather serves to make the meaning of the gesture, and with it the meaning of the story because of its climactic position, less clear, hence confusing.

Though the grandmother is a likable character, but one who is perhaps concerned too much with herself, she does not seem to be the kind of person who would make so obvious a charitable gesture in light of her past, rather selfish, behavior. It 92

seems more likely that she is trying, desperately, to save

her own life. Why she makes this gesture is therefore unac­

countable by what has preceded it in the story. Martha Step­

hens' commentary on this story also points to the ambiguity

of the central gesture of the grandmother and its problem­

atic nature. She contends that the story "ends in a highly

unsatisfactory way" because of the tonal imbalance contained

in the story. She feels that the tonal shift toward a disas­

trous conclusion does not follow from the preceding comedy

and results in a "tonal snarl" which leaves the reader per­

plexed because the grandmother, a sympathetic character, does

not seem to deserve the violence which befalls her at the

conclusion. The reader, who closely identifies with the 13 grandmother and her family, is left at a loss at their loss.

As a result of the ambiguity and subsequent confusion that

arises because of the grandmother's gesture in "A Good Man Is

Hard to Find," then, the ending must certainly seem to the

reader excessively violent, and gratuitously so. In contrast,

the violent illumination afforded Mrs. May through the Green­

leaf bull, with all its symbolic, mythic, and regenerative

associations, is more convincing because it was thoroughly prepared for earlier in the «story. As Frederick Asals so

succinctly states: Christ and vegetation god, fertility and suffering, love and death, recurrent cosmological rites and the uniquely historical Crucifixion resonate through this Georgia dairy farm before "Greenleaf" is two pages old.14 93

Mrs. May's illumination, or extension of grace, is therefore

more reasonable to believe because it has been made an inte­

gral part of the story's structure. Thus, though "A Good

Man Is Hard to Find" is certainly an interesting story, it

does not succeed as fully as it might.

Another story which falls short of achieving structural harmony is "A Stroke of Good Fortune," is rather predictable

story which is partially rescued from mediocrity by its ending, which turns the reader's focus from the fear of childbirth to the more universal fear of growing old. Ruby Hill, the smugly independent thirty-four-year-old wife of Bill B. Hill, is presented unsympathetically from the very beginning of the story; she has a head like a vegetable, accidentally wears a collard leaf on her cheek as she arrives home from the gro­ cery store, has a body shaped like a funeral urn, and—O'Con- f" nor continues her mock-epic food catalogue—has her hair stacked in sausage rolls. The entire story takes place as

Ruby walks upstairs to her apartment on the fourth floor, making stops at the second and their floors to catch her breath and to talk to two neighbors, Mr. Jerger, the old but spry former high school teacher, and Laverne Watts, Ruby's thirty-year-old girl friend.« It is mainly through Ruby's breathless struggle to reach her almost insurmountable desti­ nation (and O'Connor renders the sense of fatigue well) that the reader is brought into the story in more than a peremp­ tory way. Ruby's physical ailments and mental turmoil are a 94

result of her being pregnant-something she does not yet

realize or, if she does know, will not admit to herself.

There are about ten references in the story to her being

pregnant before this fact is made explicit to her when

Laverne, swaying back and forth with her stomach extended

and later doing a comic dance, sings: "Put them all to­

gether, they spell MOTHER!" (p. 104) The reader, however,

has perhaps been putting them together long before hearing

Laverne's diagnosis. For example, early in the story,

Ruby's fortune teller, Madame Zoleeda, informs her that she

will have a long illness that will bring her "a stroke of

good fortune" (p. 96). The reference to six-year-old Hart­

ley Gilfeet, known in the story as "Little Mister Good For­

tune" (the title he received from his mother who, when her dying husband told her that he had given her nothing in

life but the child, retorted, "Rodman, you given me a for­ tune!" [p. 98]) makes the association with pregnancy almost

inescapable. There are also physical signs of pregnancy as the story progresses: Ruby's nausea, shortness of breath, weight gain, and her swollen ankles, for example, make her pregnancy a fact for the reader, though she rationalizes these symptoms by thinking she has heart trouble, cancer, or has simply gotten fat. In this story, as in others by O'Connor, we see the familiar city versus country conflict, this -time more pro­ nounced than usual. Ruby, who has moved to the city from 95 rural Pitman, seems to dislike everything associated with country living. Her distaste is epitomized by her attitude

toward collard greens, a vegetable she has not eaten since moving to the city five years ago and which she has just bought for her brother Rufus, who is coming to stay with them after serving two years in the "European Theater."

She feels that his love for such an uncivilized food only indicates his lack of sophistication and good taste and per­ haps accounts for his having "about as much get as a floor mop" (p. 95). As she discovers the collard leaf on her cheek, now the symbol for her of the blight and ignorance of the country, she reacts as if the contagion were following her to the city: "'Collard greens!' she said, spitting the word from her mouth this time as if it were a poisonous seed" (p. 95). Most importantly, the country represents for

Ruby the tribulations and weariness of her mother, who at thirty-four,

had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn't satisfied with anything. She compared her­ self at thirty-four with her mother at that age. Her mother's hair had been gray—hers wouldn't be gray now even if she hadn't touched it up. All those children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with every one of them. And all for what? Because she hadn't known any better. Pure ignorance. The purest of down­ right ignorance! (p. 97) The resistance to aging and its correlative, the quest for youth, is brought out in her conversation with Mr. Jerger. 96

As she makes her way up to the second floor, she is met by

this somewhat eccentric old man, who asks her whose birthday

it is [Florida's] and proceeds to explain, signficantly enough,

about Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth. He tells Ruby

that the Spanish explorer sought "a certain spring . . . whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words ... he was trying to be young always" (pp. 100-101).

Ruby, too, would like to find this same fountain, and when

Mr. Jerger says that he has already discovered it, she becomes attentive and asks him where he had to go to find it. His trite answer "into my heart" (p. 101) is not satisfactory to her (nor to the sense of the story, for such an obvious answer, although consistent with the characterization of Mr. Jerger, does not amplify the theme in any way that would make the reader ponder the mysterious relationship of wisdom to happi- ness), and she struggles up another flight of stairs to the apartment of Laverne Watts. After hearing Laverne tell her she would have a baby,

Ruby leaves her friend's apartment still not wanting to be­ lieve her condition. Sitting on the stairs, she laments:

"No. No. It couldn't be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not" (p. 106). She recovers from this terrifying possibility by once again rationalizing her condition; this time she con­ cludes that it must have been gas that caused her to be upset. As she sits there, a mass of worries, Hartley Gilfeet 97

thunders up the stairs, "crashe[s] into her rocket[s] through

her head, smaller and smaller into a whirl of dark" (p. 107).

Though it is not clear whether he physically crashes into her,

he certainly penetrates her brain in a metaphoric sense; and

thus "Little Mister Good Fortune"—here depicted as a brattish

young child—once again reminds Ruby of her own pregnancy.

The story then concludes with the image that has been twice

before mentioned in connection with her own brother, Rufus,

the youngest child borne by her mother, and it brings into

sharp focus her fears:

Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time. (p. 107)

The image of the child waiting "out nowhere in nothing" does

adequately suggest Ruby's fear of childbirth and the concom­

itant fear of waging; as the life process goes on, but it is,

however, not strong enough, nor is it sufficiently amplified,

to support the rest of the story. There is absent in this

story a sense of mystery, which is usually conveyed by the

substructural use of imagery and which, when it appears in her

stories ("A View of the Woods" is a good example), tends to

make them more effective by their being more subtle, less

explicit, and more ambiguous in order to suggest correlative meanings which enhance, through their prismatic effect, the

total effect of the story.

"The Comforts of Home" seems to exist for its ironic, 98

surprising, and shocking ending. There is a lack, as in "A

Stroke of Good Fortune," of a sense of mystery conveyed by

imagery which would have made the story more convincing. In

the opening paragraph of this ironic story centering on

O'Connor's oft-repeated conflict of mother and son, Thomas

watches through a window as his mother brings home Star Drake

(nee Sarah Ham), the nineteen-year-old waif who appealed to

the mother’s "daredevil charity" but whom Thomas regards as a futile reclamation project. Though Thomas is filled with rage—his characteristic emotion—at the sight of the girl, the picture presented to the reader is quite different. She is greeted by the dog, "who bounded, overjoyed, shaking with pleasure, to welcome her" (p. 383). O'Connor may here be relying on the common folk belief that dogs are good judges of character, for later in the story when Thomas, the dog's master, comes home, the dog barely notices him and goes back to sleep. Indeed, not only in the opening paragraph but throughout the entire story, Thomas overreacts to the girl's presence and views her as an incipient threat to his comfort­ able and pampered existence as his mother's thirty-five-year- old baby.

One of the reasons for «the mother taking in the wayward girl, who had been in jail for passing bad checks, is that she wants to do for someone else what might be done for her son if he were in the same unfortunate situation. By thus using opposite characters, O'Connor accomplishes two things: 99

by choosing two characters—Star and Thomas—so antithetical

in nature, she increases the distance between them and there­ by causes greater conflict possibilities (at the sacrifice of some credibility, though), and she is able, by juxtapos­ ing one against the other, to show that they are similar in that both are deficient in the area that the other is extreme in. For example, Star is portrayed in Thomas's mind as a

"nympermaniac" (as his mother refers to it), while Thomas is cold and passionless; one is extroverted, the other intro­ verted; one spontaneous, the other methodical. Thomas, for example, thinks that his mother's charity is obssessive; he feels that "no excess of virtue is justified, that a modera­ tion of good produces likewise a moderation in evil" (pp. 385'

86). Furthermore, Thomas' s utilitarian view of virtue as a

"principle of order and the only thing that makes life bear- able" (p. 386) marks him as an O'Connor intellectual who will get his ironic comeuppance before too long. The reader has only to wait.

Important to the resolution of this story is O'Connor's use of the prompting device of Thomas's dead father exhorting his son to "put his foot down" and take some decisive action to rid himself of the girl. * This device (seen again in The

Violent Bear It Away as the mysterious stranger talks to Tar- water) enables the reader to see more clearly into the char­ acter of Thomas. Like his counterparts Wesley and Scofield

May in "Greenleaf" and Julian in "Everything That Rises Must 100

Converge," Thomas complains a great deal but will not act

decisively on his own. He seems, like them, to be paralyzed

in a state of self-imposed dependence on his mother. The

father, then, enables him to act, but Thomas’s actions pro­

duce calamitous results, heightening the ironic situation he

finds himself in. When the gun that is kept in the desk

drawer in the den is found missing, and Thomas suspects that

Star has taken it, he is given his opportunity to get rid of

the girl, and he hears, once again, his father's prompting

voice telling him what to do: "idiot! The criminal slut

stole your gun! See the sheriff! See the sheriff!" (p. 399)

Thomas, still not acting on his own, gets Farebrother, the

sheriff, and they agree on a search of the house at six o'clock

that evening to locate the missing gun. Later, when Thomas

arrives home to await the sheriff, he nervously doodles on an

envelope, then 'absent-mindedly opens the desk and sees the

"missing" gun. This new complication is again solved by the

voice of his father as it advises him to plant the gun in the

girl's purse. However, Star catches him in the act; a strug­

gle ensues, and the mother, trying to protect the girl, is

shot. Farebrother, who is neither fair nor brotherly, enters

and sees what he thinks are two lovers standing over the for- bidding mother, now out of the way forever. As one critic notes, this story's lack of a sense of place detaches the characters from their surroundings and makes it a story which "veers into melodrama."I5 Though not 101

totally melodramatic, "The Comforts of Home" does share some of the essential elements of this sub-genre. The violent ending, for example, with its surprising and ironic reversal, does mete out poetic justice of a sort to Thomas, but his mother, who is one of O'Connor’s more favorable portraits of women, becomes the innocent victim of her son's insufficiently motivated rage, and her death seems a little contrived. The most interesting character in the story is Star Drake, who bears a resemblance to Temple Drake of Faulkner's Sanctuary, but she is not given the room within the story's structure to develop more. Thomas, on the other hand, because of his strident and total opposition to the girl, is too unpalatable a character to give the story the life that it needs to make it more convincing. Though the story is interesting, as all

O'Connor stories are, it does not possess the engaging quali­ ties that, say, one of her earliest, and best, stories pos­ sesses. In contrast to "The Comforts of Home," "The Turkey" establishes sound characterization within a structure that achieves a harmonious tonal effect.

"The Turkey" begins with eleven-year-old Ruller, the pro­ tagonist of this early story by O'Connor, capturing an imag­ inary desperado and tying him up when he sees a more formi­ dable quarry—a turkey—not far away. This is not exactly the most dangerous game, but it provides enough action for the imaginative little boy to occupy him throughout this captivating story that has been generally overlooked by 102

O'Connor critics. By having the boy engaged in an imaginary hunt and then a real hunt, the author parallels a more signif­

icant hunt, or quest, since the boy wants to be Somebody in

the eyes of his parents, the town, and his own, and this half-

dead bird becomes his means to that end.

When Ruller spots the turkey, he immediately fantacizes

about the effects of capturing the bird, thinking of what

others might say of his extraordinary feat, especially his

father, who shows his concern because Ruller has been too

much an inhabitant of his own private world. Ruller is aware

of his parents' concerns because he had made it a habit to

listen in on their conversations at night, taking particular

interest in their reactions to the behavior of his older brother Hane, who gave them cause for alarm because of his

smoking, playing pool, and arriving home late at night. Rul-

ler was naturally interested in what his parents' reactions were to his own behavior, and his eavesdropping activities make him aware of his father's concern about his being intro­ verted. The day after, when Ruller's father asks him "what he had been doing lately," the boy responds, fully aware of his father's concern that he has been playing by himself too much, that he was "playing by himself" and "walked away sort of like he had a limp" (p. 44). This humorous interchange is technically similar to that used by Joseph Heller in Catch-22 and catches the reader off guard; the discrepancy between the expected answer and the one received provides both humor and 103

a dramatically ironic insight into the boy who wants to

continue his father's concern for him so much that he gives him the answer that will achieve it and throws in a limp to

insure it.

After chasing the bird with no luck, and getting scratched and dirty in the process, Ruller questions why he had seen the turkey if he was not permitted to capture it.

He feels that "it was like somebody had played a dirty trick on him" (p. 45). This disappointment is the inciting force for his experimentation with forbidden language. He begins with an inoffensive "Nuts" and’then progresses to "Oh hell."

The extensive quotation which follows illustrates the best piece of comic writing in all of O'Connor's fiction, while at the same time presenting a vivid account of someone testing temptation for the first time:

"Oh hell," he said cautiously. Then in a minute he said just, "Hell." Then, he said it like Hane said it, pulling the e-ull out and trying to get the look in his eye that Hane got. Once Hane said, "God!" and his mother stomped after him and said, "I don't want to hear you say that again. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, Thy God, in vain. Do you hear me?" and he guessed that shut Hane up. Ha! He guessed she dressed him off that time. "God," he said. He looked studiedly at the ground, making circles in the dust with his finger. "God!" he repeated. "God dammit," he said softly. He could feel his face getting hot and his chest thumping all of a sudden in­ side. "God dammit to hell," he said almost inaudibly. He looked over his shoulder but no one was there. "God dammit to hell, good Lord from Jerusalem," he said. His uncle said "Good Lord from Jerusalem." "Good Father, good God, sweep the chickens out the yard," he said .and began to giggle. His face was very 104

red. He sat up and looked at his white ankles stick­ ing out of his pants legs into his shoes. They looked like they didn't belong to him. He gripped a hand around each ankle and bent his knees up and rested his chin on a knee. "Our Father Who art in heaven, shoot 'em six and roll 'em seven," he said, giggling again. Boy, she'd smack his goddam head in. He rolled over in a fit of laughter. God dammit, she'd dress him off and wring his goddam neck like a goddam chicken. The laughing cut his side and he tried to hold it in, but every time he thought of his goddam neck, he shook again. He lay back on the ground, red and weak with laughter, not able not to think of her smacking his goddam head in. He said the words over and over to himself and after a while he stopped laughing. He said them again but the laughing had gone out. He said them again but it wouldn't start back up. All that chasing for nothing, he thought again. He might as well go home. What did he want to be sitting around here for? He felt suddenly like he would if people had been laughing at him. Aw, go to hell, he told them. He got up and kicked his foot sharply into somebody's leg and said, "Take that, sucker," and turned into the woods to take the short trail home. (pp. 46-47)

After this episode, Ruller, once having broken the dam of restriction, feels a new kind of freedom; however, it is freedom which he does not know how to take. In anticipa­ tion of his parents' interrogations about his torn shirt and the bump on his head, he will lie and say he "fell in a hole" (p. 47). He never had heard himself speak that way before, and he wonders if he should continue his present course or go back to his old, more innocent, ways but decides,

"Heck . . . hell, it was the. way he felt" (p. 47). Here the conflict of feeling versus reason, of doing what one wants versus the restriction of a moral code is presented.

Ir is a conflict that is important to O'Connor here and in her later stories, and here one sees its adumbration in a 105

comic setting with the undertones of pathos making it all

the more real and poignant.

As a result of his giving into his feelings, Ruller wonders if he is going bad. He reflects that "God could go around sticking things in your face and making you chase them all afternoon for nothing" (p. 48). But just as he questions God's wisdom in letting the bird get away from him, Ruller spots the turkey, now dead, near a wooded area.

Feeling that this too is a providential occurrence, he wonders if it is meant for him to take. Once again he re­ sumes his fantasy of bringing home the quarry and decides to take the bird. At this point he gets puffed with pride and decides that perhaps the turkey was meant "to keep him from going bad. Maybe God wanted to keep him from that" (p. 49).

He considers himself an unusual child, one who is the special recipient of a charge from God to be a preacher. He picks up the turkey and imagines how grand he looks with the bird slung over his shoulder. In order to show off, Ruller decides to take the long way home, hoping that the townspeople will notice his great capture. While he makes his trek toward home, the boy is overcome with gratitude and feels that he must do something for somebqdy else, just as God had done something for him. He wants to give away his only dime, and he importunes God to send him a worthy beggar. As if in direct response to his prayer, he meets Hetty y.Gilman: She was an old woman whom everybody said had more money than anybody in town because she had been 106

begging for twenty years. She sneaked into people's houses and sat until they gave something. If they didn't, she cursed them. Nevertheless she was a beg­ gar (p. 52) .

Feeling euphoric at giving this well-known beggar a dime, he continues to walk toward home. But some country boys who had been following him catch up to him and take away his tur­ key. Saddened by his unaccountable experience, Ruller races home feeling "certain that Something Awful was tearing behind him with its arms rigid and its fingers ready to clutch" (p. 53).

This story has warmth and comicality without the somber­ ness of her later stories and foreshadows the later works in that it presents, an inchoate form, some of the same conflicts and themes. The real success of this neglected story, how­ ever, lies in its characterization of Ruller—he comes off as a precocious but naive little boy who has the same single- minded qualities as Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away but who has more charm than the curious figure. It is in Ruller as paradigm that the reader sees himself: petulant and dar­ ing in adversity, euphoric and self-righteous in prosperity.

Neither of these conditions—the story seems to say—is war­ ranted, for Ruller will learn more about himself if he con­ siders, in light of his thoughts and actions prior to the final loss of the bird, that life is more a mystery than a game. Because they combine originality of content with organ­ ically sound structure, plumb the mystery of personality with 107

ordinary characters searching for themselves in extraordinary

ways, and preserve the sense of place so that one feels that

these unusual people are emanations of the landscape, "The

Artificial Nigger" and "Parker's Back" are O'Connor's most

interesting and best stories.

In "The Artificial Nigger" the reader sees a departure

from the structure of most of O'Connor's stories: there is

no violent conflict, no shocking ending, no indeterminate

ending, and the story approaches a comic ending as the pro­

tagonists solve their complication and are happier and wiser

at the end. Mr. Head, the slightly built but headstrong

grandfather of Nelson, sees himself on a moral mission to

guide his grandson through the tortuous streets of the city.

In this story, a quest for knowledge of one's self through

experience, Mr. Head wants Nelson "to see everything there

is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at

home for the rest of his life" (p. 251). Unlike the alluded-

to Vergil or Raphael of the story, however, Mr. Head proves

himself to be not "one of the great guides of men" (p. 250)

because pride causes him to get both Nelson and himself lost.

Later, having walked for some time in the unsolved maze of

city streets, Nelson, fatigued, falls asleep on the sidewalk next to a building. Mr. Head then decides to make the boy more dependent on him by hiding:

He justified what he was going to do on the grounds that it is sometimes necessary to teach a child a 108

lesson he won't forget, particularly when the child is always reasserting his position with some new impudence (p. 264).

When Nelson awakens to find Mr. Head gone, he races frantically

down the sidewalk and right into an old woman. The woman

threatens to call the police and wants to know who the boy's

father is. Mr. Head, who has finally caught up to the boy,

denies to the woman and the witnesses around her that he even

knows Nelson. Mr. Head's denial of Nelson, so similar to

Peter's denial of Christ, precedes the epiphany scene and

makes Mr. Head feel the bleakness of life after cutting him­

self off from his own flesh. From this point on, their rela­

tionship is strained to the point of Nelson's walking fifteen

feet behind his grandfather and his refusing a conciliatory

"Co1 Cola" and a proffered drink of water from an outside

spigot. These ineffectual offers are insufficient to bring

them together, and it is a mysterious, almost providential,

occurrence which does bring about the longed-for reconcilia­

tion and which makes Mr. Head realize the speed of God's mercy. Ironically, it is an icon of prejudice., a plaster

figure of a black boy with a watermelon, which brings them

together. A close look at this ending scene is necessary to

show why such an ordinary tiding should produce such extra­ ordinary results:

He [Mr. Head) had not walked five hundred yards down the road when he saw, within reach of him, the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low.yellow . brick fence that curved around a wide lawn. The Negro was about Nelson's size and he was pitched forward at 109

an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon. Mr. Head stood looking at him silently until Nelson stopped at a little distance. Then as the two of them stood there, Mr. Head breathed, "An artificial nigger!" It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead. "An artificial nigger!" Nelson repeated in Mr. Head’s exact tone. The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry need for that assurance. Nelson's eyes seemed to implore him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence. Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one." After a second, the boy nodded with a strange shiv­ ering about his mouth, and said, "Let's go home before we get ourselves lost again" (pp. 268-69).

From an earlier portion of this story: They were grandfather and grandson but they looked enough alike to be brother and brothers not too far apart in age, for Mr. Head had a youthful expression by daylight, while the boy's look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it (p. 251), and from a portion within the epiphany scene quoted above:

"Mr Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a 110

miniature old man," the reader realizes that Mr. Head and

Nelson are actually doubles. In this story, as in others,

O'Connor uses the Doppelganger technique, where the younger

double is an atavistic throwback to an older progenitor.

(Compare Calhoun and his grandfather in "The Partridge Fes­

tival" and Mary Fortune and her grandfather in "A View of

the Woods.") This technique is a ready-made device for pro­ ducing irony since it focuses twice the amount of attention on the actions of the characters, and each individual action of either character is doubly important. Furthermore, in this scene we see an amplification of its use as the two principal characters are subsumed in the third figure, the statue: O'Connor mentions that it is "about Nelson's size," and the fact that their posture in surveying the statue resembles the "bent-over" and victimized look of the statue further reinforces this multiple association. Thus, what­ ever is said about the statue will have not only ironic sig­ nificance but will yield the larger meaning of the story itself. It is interesting that O'Connor should have chosen this figure as the catalytic focal point for the reunification of the central characters. When Mr. Head says that "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an arti­ ficial one," he is no doubt voicing his ignorant and prej­ udiced attitude, but the statement can contain an ambiguously ironic second meaning: in a suburban area, the real Negro is out of place, so a copy of one, actually a caricature, is Ill substituted as both a monument to triumph, on the one hand, and to shame, on the other. The implantation of this figure in a foreign, suburban, environment becomes, in a symbolic way, a physical manifestation of the subjugation of one man by another and points out the necessity for man to come to an accommodation with his neighbor. The beaten-down figure's influence is perhaps subconsciously felt by the wrong-headed guide of the story, Mr. Head. Through fortuitous, unorthodox, and ironic means, therefore, Mr. Head's union with Nelson is achieved, and the latter's confidence in his grandfather is restored. The ending is extraordinary precisely because the cause of the epiphany—the worn-looking plaster statue—was so ordinary as to have been taken for granted for years.

The effigy is, in a way, like the long-suffering leech-gath­ erer whom Wordsworth describes in "Resolution and Independence":

■a. His body was bent double, feet and head Coming together in life's pilgrimage; As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage Of sickness felt by him in times long past, A more than human weight upon his frame had cast.

But the plaster figure is not the noble-looking, rock-like, persevering old man of the poem; he is rather his caricature, his parody, and hence the irony produced by this absurd figure, though lost for the most paft on Mr. Head, is not lost on the reader. "Parker's Back," like the "Artificial Nigger," also depicts man's attempt to order his universe. In this story,

O'Connor chooses an appropriate metaphor to suggest Parker's 112

chaotic attempts to find, through external means (the tattoos

which cover his body), the internal pattern which will har­

monize his life. The story begins with a not-too-flattering

description of Sarah Ruth, Parker’s pregnant wife. She is

onion-faced, has eyes "like the points of icepicks" (p. 510),

does not like automobiles, smoking, dipping snuff, drinking,

and make-up; and she considers Parker's tattoos "a heap of

vanity" (p. 515). Parker, on the other hand, wonders why he

ever married such a scold and, now that he is married, why he

even stays with her. Their courtship, next described, is

interspersed with information about Parker and his penchant

for tattoos, the most curious and significant aspect of the

story. Parker places inordinate emphasis on the tattoos,

making them an external substitute for an internal dissatis­

faction. Parker came under the influence of the tattoo when

he was just fourteen and a spectator at a fair. There he saw

a man

. . . tattoed from head to foot. Except for his loins which were girded with a panther hide, the man's skin was patterned in what seemed from Parker's distance— he was near the back of the tent, standing on a bench— a single intricate design of brilliant color. The man, who was small and sturdy, moved about on the platform, flexing his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a sub­ tle motion of its own. -Parker is filled with emotion, lifted up as some people are when the flag passes (pp. 512-13). Once he had his first tattoo, Parker soon had to have another, and this habit became the pattern of his life. Tattoos are for Parker a representation of perfection, and thus he 113

continues to look for something—some tattoo nonpareil—that

will satisfy his quest for this idea. He gradually goes up

the chain of being from inanimate to animate, but he is still

not satisfied with the progression or with the chaotic result:

He had stopped having lifeless ones like anchors and crossed rifles . He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and liver were respectively. He did not care much what the subject was so long as it was colorful .... Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it that had attracted him would wear off. Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study his overall look. The effect was not one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched (p. 514).

We see that Parker tries to integrate his life by getting tattooed do that everything will appear as "a single intri­ cate design," but since Parker is myopic (like so many other short-sighted characters in O’Connor’s fiction), he cannot step back and use the needed artistic perspective to make himself an "arabesque of colors." This is, of course, a metaphor for his life, which he has not been able to put into perspective either. He only likes what he can see close up, and what he sees makes him want to do something, almost any­ thing, new to stimulate his senses. Hence his marriage to Sarah Ruth: she becomes a challenge to him—a” new stimulus—• because of her sternly religious attitude and her steadfast resistance to his amorous advances. As part of their court­ ing ritual, his wife-to-be extracts from him his full name, and this revelation introduces into the story Parker's role 114

more clearly. He reluctantly tells her his name and she

repreats the name approvingly:

"Obadiah," she whispered. Her face slowly brightened as if the name came as a sign to her. "Obadiah," she said. The name still stank in Parker's estimation. "Obadiah Elihue," she said in a reverent voice. "If you call me that aloud, I'll bust your head open,” Parker said. "What's yours?" "Sarah Ruth Cates," she said (p. 517).

Names of characters, as has been noted in this study, are

usually significant in O'Connor’s fiction, and here they are

especially so. Sarah Ruth's names are logical in light of

her being the daughter of a "Straight Gospel preacher" since

they suggest the Old Testament virtues of wifely obedience and loyalty, but they are ironic in light of her demeanor in the story. But Obadiah and Elihue are especially significant

(Obadiah means "worshipper of Jehovah" and Elihu "whose God

is He") because Obadiah was a stern Old Testament prophet and Elihu was the man who gave Job advice that might enable him to understand his suffering. Parker's names at the begin­ ning of the story and throughout most of it seem inappropriate because Parker appears to be so unlike his namesakes; but at the end of the story, as one shall see, both names become ironically appropriate, especially the second. After they exchange marriage vows in the County Ordinary's office (Sarah Ruth considered it idolatry to be married in a church), Parker still feels the internal dissatisfaction that had prompted him to get tattoos all over his body, but the 115

urge could not be lessened; it had to be satisfied, even if

the tattoos were to be on his back: "A dim half-formed inspi­

ration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a

tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist—-

a religious subject" (p. 519) . He becomes preoccupied with

the idea of a religious tattoo; he does not know what the

design will be, but he wants it, as he says, "to bring Sarah

Ruth to heel" (p. 520). As he is working on the farm of the old woman who has employed him, and thinking what subject would be most suitable for his blank back, his actions par­ allel those of Moses, who, approaching the burning bush, took off his sandals and listened to the word of God. Here again the sun, symbolizing divine power, is evident as Parker’s tractor circles in an ever-decreasing radius to a fixed point:

The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbelievably loud voice, "GOD ABOVE!" He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into the tree and burst into flhme. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire .... (p. 520)

After this moment of revelation, Parker goes immediately to the city to be tattooed. He. acknowledges "that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse un­ known, and that there was nothing he could do about it" (p. 521).

He is thus inexorably propelled toward his goal: he wants to get a tattoo of God! While he is at the tattoo parlor, Parker 116

chooses a picture of a stern-looking Byzantine Christ "with

all-demanding eyes" (p. 522). Like Moses who feared to look

on God lest he die, Parker too does not wish to look at the

completed picture that now occupies his back. Parker knows,

that his life has been irrevocably changed, but he does not

yet realize the full import of that transformation. However,

Parker is able to look into himself, and here begins his pro­

cess of increasing insight. He thus examines his soul, which

he sees as a "spider web of facts and lies that was not at

all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in

spite of his opinion" (p. 527). Feeling a strange and unac­

countable change within himself, Parker begins the long jour- 'A ney home to show his wife the tattoo that he hopes will

please her. But since he has been gone a night without tell­

ing her, she refuses to let him in when he knocks at their

door just before dawn. Parker identifies himself as "O.E.,"

but his wife refuses to acknowledge him until he identifies

himself with his full name—Obadiah Elihue. Once again, Par­

ker seems to be guided by divine intervention as the night

sky lightens and "a tree of light burst[s] over the sky­

line" (p. 528). To his wife's impatient, questioning voice he now has sufficient answer:

"Who's there?" the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, "Who's there, I ast you?" Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. "Obadiah," he whispered and all at once he 117

he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts {p. 528).

Like Moses on Mount Horeb, who was told what to do and what

to say to the Israelites by God, Parker received a similar

kind of illumination when he realized that he must give his

full name to his wife in order to gain entry into their house.

Once in the house, however, Parker does not fare too well.

When he shows the tattoo of Christ to Sarah Ruth, she does

not recognize it. Then when Parker tells her who it is, she

rejects his explanation of it by saying, "God don't look

like thatl" (p. 529) She considers this latest tattoo to be

idolatry and beats Parker's back with a broom, raising welts

on the face of Christ. Thus scourged, Parker is last seen by

the reader in a kind of tableau, "leaning against the tree

crying like a baby" (p. 530). Having at last found himself—

at least partially—he is repudiated by the one he has attempted

to please. If he is truly to be a worshipper of God, he must

learn the meaning of suffering; and certainly one of the

causes of suffering is the feeling of being misunderstood.

O’Connor has constructed an original story to depict the

tortuous paths one must take in the journey through the mind and soul to achieve the goal of knowing one's self better.

Her achievement in this story results from portraying a rustic character who, lacking the masks of sophistication, is more real as he makes his journey into himself. 118

O’Connor’s best stories (and "Parker’s Back" and "The

Artificial Nigger" are two examples that can be used as touch­

stones to judge the others) are highly wrought artifacts consciously produced to achieve a single effect, and that single effect is her concern with man and his quest to under­ stand, often fitfully, the mystery of his purpose in life and his inability, often, to cope with the revelation of failure that accompanies this search. If one surveys the architectonics of her stories, one is able to see that O'Con­ nor uses the components of structure to aid her in the pro­ duction of this effect. The expositions, compact but inform­ ative, introduce the haunted characters, each flawed in some way, who will seek their fortunes in an equally flawed world.

The world of her stories is almost always the South, with its isolated rural areas and its people as yet uncaught in the maelstrom of conformity and therefore more single-minded, where their very rusticity enables O'Connor to view life in its elemental, unsophisticated form. The writer who is able to use the material of the people is at a distinct advantage / here: Wordsworth sought to reproduce the "plainer and more emphatic language"^ of the country folk and succeeded in capturing their ingenuous qualities in the Lyrical Ballads;

Synge left Paris to study the rustic behavior and language of the Aran Islands and produced The Playboy of the Western

World; and Malamud's shopkeepers of the Jewish ghetto suited his message—effectively demonstrated in The Assistant—of 119 suffering and perseverance. O’Connor's characters, too, vibrate with a life that is real: from Mrs. Pritchard's four abscessed teeth to Parker’s back, O'Connor is able to portray life stripped of its cosmetic varnish. Also in the exposition, she establishes her comic tone through an omni­ scient voice that is sometimes chiding, sometimes ambiguous, but always engaging, which forces the reader to pay close attention as the comedy devolves into tragedy, then irony.

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), either in a physical way (by gas stations replacing grazing land, as in "A View of the Woods"), in a social way (by for­ eigners replacing native Americans, as in "The Displaced

Person"), or in a moral way (by vision replacing blindness, as in virtually all of her stories). Within the complication, one also finds the heart of O'Connor's conflict of opposites technique. It is important to her stories because, by juxta­ posing antithetical characters (often by using doubles to accomplish this), she forces a violent confrontation between good and evil, between blindness and sight, between the apparent and the real, which creates a tension which rever­ berates throughout the story. This conflict is seen not only with characters but also within groups (the blacks and the whites), within regions (the city and the country, the

Old South and the New South), and on a different, and more 120

important, level within the perceptions of man (Julian’s

life after his mother's death promises to be more painful

but at the same time more enlightened as he enters "the

world of guilt and sorrow"). Like others who spoke about

the reconciliation of disparate elements—Aristotle, Hegel,

Blake, Coleridge, and Yeats, for example—O'Connor sees in

this union a synthesis which inevitably commands one's

attention. In her stories, the union produces an ironic

revelation to both character and reader, one which makes

them see the world in a way different from their expectations.

The resolution of an O'Connor story sees the private

world of the' characters shattered, usually in some violent way, but with the possibility of its being rebuilt again.

The sought-for integration, if it is to be accomplished, will be done in such a way that it is surprising, if not devastating, to the characters (Mrs. McIntyre's paralysis into vision at the end of "The Displaced Person" depicts such a violent reintegration). The ending, then, since it is so frequently shocking, is the most interesting aspect / of her structure, and the problem of the violent ending is, at times, perplexing. One might say, generally, that those stories which end in disaster are not as effective as those stories which do not and sometimes produce the tonal problem about which Martha Stephens speaks in The Question of Flannery

O'Connor.Sometimes a short story is short-circuited by the all-too-quick termination of the story through some 121

violent action ("The Comforts of Home" is a case in point),

and this sudden termination precludes further development

of the theme; or because of its quickness, it leaves under­

developed a crucial point (the grandmother's gesture in

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an example) that should be

amplified. In most cases in O'Connor's fiction, however,

the shocking ending is justified since the finality achieved

by the violence befalling a character (the deaths of Mary

Fortune Pitts and her grandfather in "A View of the Woods,"

for example), although leaving the reader momentarily shocked,

can, at the same time, force him into the stunned insight

that such a revelation produces.

O'Connor's stories do indeed achieve harmony, and this

is accomplished through the dynamic interaction.of the

structural components enumerated above. There is an initial

stress, begun early in the story, which continues unabaited throughout the story and which is relieved only at the conclu­ sion. This tension is achieved, in large measure, by the dualities which were artfully established in the story.

These dualities—the antithetical characters, doubles, con­ flicts, and the ensuing dilemmas—produce two more dualities, the paradoxes and ironies found in her fiction. Neither a paradox nor an irony can be sufficiently and finally explained because neither can be completely delineated. As a result, the tension produced by these dualities continues to a cer­ tain, and lessening, degree even after the story is completed. 122

Thus, by so frequently using a technique of juxtaposing

opposites, O’Connor has emphasized the insoluble mysteries

which it has been her task to bring to the surface of the

American consciousness.

The idea that O'Connor spoke to the American conscious­

ness in a tradtional way would, no doubt, be confronted with

arguments to the contrary. But 0"Connor is both traditional

and non-traditional, and this paradox is less a paradox than

those found in her fiction. From what has been said in this

study about her best stories--that they are highly wrought

artifacts consciously produced to achieve a single effect--

it can be seen that she belongs in the main tradition of the

American short story and that her structural forebears are

Poe and Hawthorne. But, as Robert Drake indicates, she pos­

sesses a uniqueness that defies categorization. This unique­ ness, according to Drake, is a result of her question, "who

is Jesus Christ, and what are you going to do about Him?" posed over and over again in her stories.20 But even if her works were looked at from a purely artistic viewpoint, they would possess the individuality of great art. From a reading of her stories, one would note the originality of content and style, even though the stories are circumscribed by con­ ventional design. One need only look at some of her best stories, and these have been mentioned in this paper, to see the masterful use of dialect, the capturing of nuance, and the use of imagery so effectively integrated into the structure 123 of the story that it becomes a part of the texture. Finally, one would also note her ability to say a great deal in so compressed a space, and this fact alone might lead one to agree that the short story was indeed her metier. FOOTNOTES CHAPTER ONE 1 For example, Structuralism is an anthropologically and linguistically oriented movement that, according to

Geoffrey H. Hartmann, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-

1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), has not as yet left its imprint on literary criticism. The goal of the

Structuralist critic is to uncover the latent elements of a culture and fit them into a coherent structure that will explain how one cultural element (the ballad, for example) interrelates with another (communal story-telling, perhaps).

Hartmann points out, p. 6, that the work of Ker, Chamber, and Grumere (on the epic and romance, medieval drama, and the ballad, respectively) "showed that all literature was governed by similar conventions." Northrop Frye, in his encyclopedic work Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), seems to be moving in a similar direction, intimating that archetypal and mythic elements form the underlying structure of literary compositions and that to identify and show relationships between the archetypes and myths gives one a more unified picture of literature and tells one a good deal about man himself. In a different yet related sense, as Hartmann notes, p. 6, Marxist criticism has emphasized that the structure of a work is more significant than the content in showing "the collective vision of certain social groups"-- 125 the orthodox Marxists. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn:

Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), on the other hand, talks about structure in a way that restricts the term more to the work itself.

It is more in the architectonic sense that Brooks uses this term that I shall employ it in this paper.

2 Brooks, pp. 195, 203.

3 Miles Orvell, Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery

0 * Connor (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1972), p. 15.

4 John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green,

Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, n.d.), p. 55.

5 Dorothy Walters, Flannery 01Connor (New York: Twayne,

1973), p. 27.

6 Flannery O’Connor, Flannery O'Connor: The Complete

Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), p. 313.

All subsequent quotations from the short stories will be from this edition. Page numbers will be placed in the text within parentheses.

7 Orvell, p. 100.

8 Cited in Kathleen Feeley, Flannery 0'Connor Voice of the Peacock (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press> 1972), p. 91. 126

9 Melvin J. Friedman, "Flannery O’Connor’s Sacred Objects,"

The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery 0'Connor,

eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York: Ford­

ham Univ. Press, 1966), p. 196.

10 Walters, p. 134.

11 Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, 2nd ed. (New York: Noon­ day Press, 1962), p. 113.

12 Stanley Edgar Hyman, Flannery 0'Connor, Univ. of

Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 54 (Minneapolis:

Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1966), p. 19.

13 Gilbert H. Muller, Nightmares and Visions: Flannery

0'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of

Georgia Press, 1972), p. 41.

CHAPTER TWO

1 Walters, p. 22. / 2 See also: John F. Desmond, "The Lessons of History:

Flannery O'Connor's 'Everything That Rises Must Converge,'"

The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 1 (1972), 40-41.

. 3 Feeley, p. 108. 127

4 Carter W. Martin, The True Country; Themes in the

Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ.

Press, 1969), pp. 23-24.

5 Stuart L. Burns, "'Torn by the Lord's Eye': Flannery

O'Connor's Use of Sun Imagery," Twentieth Century Literature,

13 (1967), 154.

6 Agreeing that Mr. Guizac is a Christlike figure, Orvell, p. 150, notes that he is not Christlike in every respect:

"He is hard-working, but not forgiving; he is mechanically skilled, but not a teacher of men; he is impatient and short- tempered in the face of others' blunderings. In one respect, however, he shares something of Christ's nature and experience, and in a way that is beyond the comprehension of Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre: he has suffered."

7 Feeley, pp. 175-76.

8 Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O'Connor

(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 124-25.

CHAPTER THREE

1 Hyman, p. 4 4.

•’ 2 Hyman, p. 17.

3 Orvell, p. 139. 128

4 Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and

Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961),

p. 90.

5 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 44-45.

6 Martha Stephens, The Question of Flannery O'Connor

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 162-63. .

7 Martin, p. 139.

8 Muller, p. 54.

9 W.H. Auden, "The Quest Hero," Perspectives in Criticism:

A Collection of Recent Essays by American, English, and

European Literary Critics, ed. Sheldon Norman Grebstein (New

York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 375.

10 Muller, p. 54.

CHAPTER FOUR

/ 1 Stephens, p. 18.

2 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 111-12.

3 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 113.

4 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 111-12. 129

5 See also: Jane Carter Keller, "The Figures of the

Empiricist and the Rationalist in the Fiction of Flannery

O'Connor," Arizona Quarterly, 28 (1972), 263-273.

6 Feeley, p. 74.

7 O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, pp. 111-12.

8 Hendin, p. 149.

9 For example: Martin, p. 167, says that the "grand­ mother's recognition of the Misfit as her child is her moment of saving charity . . . Feeley, p. 73, states that "her heart embraces the criminal in a movement of perfect charity"; and Orvell, p. 133, says that the "grand­ mother is given her moment of grace."

10 Stephens, p. 28.

11 Hendin, p. 150

12 ' . ’ Thomas M. Carlson, "Flannery O'Connor: The Manichaean

Dileinma," Sewanee Review, 77 (1969), 256.

13 Stephens, pp. 17-36.

14 Frederick Asals, "The Mythic Dimensions of Flannery

O'Connor's 'Greenleaf,'" Studies in Short Fiction, 5 (1968),

320.

15 Feeley, p. 37. 130

16 Because of the salutary nature of the statue, it does

not "represent Satan, and through him, the sin of pride," as

Peter L. Hays, "Dante, Tobit, and 'The Artificial Nigger,"'

Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968), 267, asserts in his article.

Rather, the statue should be taken as being "hierophanic," as Melvin J. Friedman, "Flannery O'Connor's Sacred Objects,"

The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York: Ford­ ham Univ. Press, 1966), p. 199, citing Mircea Eliade's definition—the "manifestation of the sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree"—suggests in his essay.

17 William Wordsworth, The Complete Poetical Works of

Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George (Canbridge, Mass.: River­ side Press, 1932), p. 281.

18 Wordsworth, Works, p. 791.

19 Stephens, pp. 17-36.

20 Robert Drake, "Flannery O'Connor and American Literature,"

The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, 3 (1974), 14-15. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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.______' "Flannery O'Connor and the Demonic." Modern

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"'Parker's Back': Flannery O'Connor's Icono­

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Burns, Stuart L. "'Torn by the Lord's Eye': Flannery

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