“MY KIND of COMEDY”: an Exegetical Reading of Flannery O’Connor As Medieval Drama

“MY KIND OF COMEDY”: An Exegetical Reading of Flannery O’Connor as Medieval Drama RUFEL F. RAMOS Irving, Texas “My Kind of Comedy”: An Exegetical Reading of Flannery O’Connor as Medieval Drama Written and published by Rufel F. Ramos © 2006, 2013, 2014 Rufel F. Ramos All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarship. Rowena’s World Irving, Texas www.rowenasworld.org DEDICATION For my family, my teachers, and my students. CONTENTS Abbreviations for O’Connor Texts vi Preface vii 1 Introduction: Previous Critical Sources and the 1 Argument at Hand 2 Four-Fold Sense of Medieval Exegesis: Scripture, Non- 22 Scripture, and O’Connor 3 Medieval Drama: Origins, Genres, Examples, and 61 O’Connor’s Fiction 4 The Geranium: Failed Lessons in the Tropological, or 101 Moral, Sense 5 The Modern Miracles: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It 114 Away 6 The Modern Moralities: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and 151 Everything That Rises Must Converge 7 Conclusion: Last Stories, Last Words 207 Afterword 214 Works Cited 216 ABBREVIATIONS FOR O’CONNOR TEXTS HB Habit of Being (collected letters) CW Collected Works (fiction, non HB letters, non MM essays) MM Mystery and Manners (collected essays) PG Presence of Grace (collected reviews) PREFACE I stumbled on O’Connor serendipitously as a bored undergrad, behind my college bookstore counter and going through the returned merchandise. That’s where I discovered Wise Blood. A few months later, in the spring of 1994, I would be reading all of O’Connor’s published fiction, in a grand research project that all senior English majors at my college – the University of Dallas – masochistically go through to get our bachelor’s degrees. It was then that I had my “Aha!” moment, connecting the medieval morality Everyman to Everything That Rises Must Converge. After various tangents into Creative Writing, the corporate world, and high school teaching, I returned to graduate school in 1999 with the sole purpose of studying O’Connor on the doctoral level. Seven years later, three of which were spent researching and writing my dissertation, I explored O’Connor’s entire written work – fiction and non-fiction – in the context of medieval drama and medieval exegesis. It was the comparative nature – medieval drama and exegesis – that gave me fits at first because I was and still am not a medievalist. But with the help of two annual pilgrimages to the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I got enough material and knowledge for me, a modernist, to be able to speak intelligently on medieval literature. At those conferences, I felt like a duck amongst horses, but at least I could “neigh” convincingly for a change. Nearly half of this study is about medieval exegesis and medieval drama as themselves, for many lengthy O’Connor studies (back in the early 2000s) did short shrift on those two forms, and I wanted to do justice to the medieval side of my research. Three years later, I had written this dissertation, and it passed muster -- just in time. Not too soon after, I would realize that I would not be a lifelong O’Connor scholar (nor a university professor, for that matter). But I am still proud of my final scholarly work of O’Connor, even after all of these years. -- Rufel F. Ramos, PhD 29 January 2013, Irving, Texas 1 INTRODUCTION: PREVIOUS CRITICAL SOURCES AND THE ARGUMENT AT HAND In a reminiscence of Flannery O’Connor, George W. Beiswanger, one of O’Connor’s undergraduate professors, recounts this telling memory: Flannery’s fall semester as a graduating senior coincided with my first semester on the GSCW [Georgia State College for Women] faculty. She enrolled in a new Humanities course… Introduction to Modern Philosophy… [which] took for granted that the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment set the western mind free from the benightedness of Medieval thought (from Thomas Aquinas, etc.[sic]). Flannery sat in class, listened intently, took notes, and without saying a word, it became clear that she didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. (qtd. in Cash, Life 67) One can imagine this scene: shy, attentive, diligent, and yet all the while skeptical of the “philosophic modernism that had blinded the western mind” (Cash, Life 67). Likewise, Paul Engle, O’Connor’s professor in the State University of Iowa MFA English program, remembers: “Sitting at the back of the room, silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers.... The only communicating gesture she would make was an occasional amused and shy smile at something absurd” (qtd. in Giroux viii). This sense of being apart from and amused by the modernity of her age, of 1 “MY KIND OF COMEDY” seeing modernity as absurd, is clear not only in the physical presence of O’Connor the student but also in the narrative presence of O’Connor the writer. Her fiction, like herself, has “a presence” that, without saying any fancy words, makes clear her skepticism towards modernity in pointing to the absurdity rampant within it. But even her “amused and shy smile” conceals a meaning as deep as a Byzantine icon, as compelling as Hazel Motes’ eye sockets, at which Mrs. Pool can only sit and stare. Even though I had read O’Connor’s short story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” as a sophomore in college, it was not until my senior year, when I saw the cover of Wise Blood – a pair of dark glasses peering out from the book – that I began to have an inkling of the depths behind those eyes. No matter that, on the cover, those glasses covered intact eyes that could not see truth, like Oedipus’ intact yet flawed eyes before his anagnorisis. Certainly, O’Connor’s fiction is narrow in its scope – it focuses on the post-World War II South and the freaks who inhabit that land. Indeed, it is narrow in its quantity. When O’Connor died at age 39, the body of her work consisted of The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories, her MFA thesis (published in The Complete Stories in 1971); Wise Blood, her first novel, published in 1952; A Good Man Is Hard to Find, her first short story collection, published in 1955; The Violent Bear It Away, her second novel, published in 1960; Everything That Rises Must Converge, her last short story collection, published posthumously in 1965; various uncollected letters, book reviews, and essays; and “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” the beginnings of a third novel “considered too fragmented to be published” (Scott xvii). But despite the small quantity of O’Connor’s creative work, written within the space of only fourteen years, her fiction is manifold in its meaning. The meaning is manifold because her fiction is serious, because it is comic, and, ultimately, because it is Christian. As novelist Alice Walker says, “After her great stories of sin, damnation, prophecy, and revelation... the stories one reads casually in the average magazine seem to be about love and roast beef” (79). But because the meaning is manifold, O’Connor criticism has become manifold and multitudinous as well, with room for various interpretive approaches. The body of criticism published during her life but especially after her death is, as critic Martha E. Cook states, “unusually large” (269). R. Neil Scott’s Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism by itself yields nearly 900 pages of annotated bibliographic material, and critics have added to this 2 AN EXEGETICAL READING OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR AS MEDIEVAL DRAMA material since that guide’s publication in 2002. In general, one can broadly divide the body of criticism into two categories: the nihilist- tragic and the Christian comic.1 The former arises from the often deadly violence found in her fiction, and the latter arises from O’Connor’s own theological interpretation of her work, as seen in her letters and her essays, as a remedy for the nihilist-tragic reading. NIHILIST-TRAGIC The nihilist-tragic interpretation occurs easily with an initial reading of any O’Connor story. As Katherine Hemple Prown relates of her first experience in reading Wise Blood, “I found myself unable to determine whether the novel represented an exercise in nihilism or in religious inspiration” (1). The world O’Connor portrays is ugly and distorted, and, considering the tragic and violent end most of her protagonists meet, one can easily interpret O’Connor as showing human existence in the modern world as meaningless. In the short story “Greenleaf,” a bull gores an old woman. In “A View of the Woods,” a man and his granddaughter kill each other. In “The Comforts of Home,” a man accidentally shoots his mother. As Preston M. Browning, Jr., states, “[T]he confused and sometimes hostile reaction of those... in the early and middle 1950s... saw in Flannery O’Connor a disciple of the nihilistic-deterministic writers spawned by the Depression and the Second World War and the spiritual and cultural stagnation which followed them” (11). Simply put, as Christina Bieber Lake points out, "Readers have always stumbled over the dead bodies in O'Connor's fiction" (14). But even with O’Connor’s known theological reading of her own work, many critics adhere to the nihilist-tragic category in their approaches. John W. Simmons declares of Wise Blood, “Nobody here is redeemed because there is no one to redeem” (20).

Load more