The first time I read Flannery O'Connor was in the very bad old days, when I didn't know anything. I had gone online and found NPR's list of the 100 best characters in fiction since 1900, and decided to get to know as many of them as I could (I'm up to 68, by the way). That summer, the summer of 2002, I read four books based entirely on the recommendation of this list -- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, the Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. The last of these I read first on a plane that went from Buffalo to Cleveland, and then on a plane that went from Cleveland to Boston, for the purpose ostensibly of investigating colleges and actually of hanging out with my aunts. There was a weird picture of Hazel Motes, the character who had made the list, on the cover of the copy I had from the Lockport Public Library, wearing his glasses that he acquires toward the end of the novel.
The next time that I got my hands on a Flannery O'Connor book was five years later, when my Uncle Dan sent me, on the occasion of my graduating from college, a copy of her collected works along with Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and a note that said that these books would help me adjust from college to Real Life. Now, I don't know whether Uncle Dan's real, non-collegiate life is full of women without the requisite number of legs or corrupt Bible salesmen or gigantic talking cats, or whether there were some other point he was trying to make, but there it was: I now had all four Flannery O'Connor books, a selection of her letters, and her uncollected stories and occasional writing. It was time for me, now in the not so bad old days, to get into Flannery O'Connor.
But it still took me a long time to get back to it-- I read Wise Blood again on a plane from New Orleans to JFK last year, I just recently read Everything that Rises Must Converge in and around New York, and I read A Good Man is Hard to Find sometime in between (it's one of the rare books on my "read" side of the ledger whose circumstances of reading I can't quite recall). Now I have read all of the collected Flannery O'Connor stories and one of the novels and my Flannery O'Connor arsenal can be said to not be doing so bad. What's strange is, the relationship that the ideas I never stopped having -- never, since I first ran into Hazel Motes and the legend of his maker on that list -- to the ideas I have about her work now.
There's a thing you can do, if you are a writer of short stories especially, I think, where you get really good at doing a particular thing over and over and you obtain a kind of geographically limited mastery. T. Coraghessan Boyle said once that Flannery O'Connor had achieved that kind of thing by creating a series of cartoon universes that managed to be suddenly poignant, and I think that he's absolutely right and that this is what makes her stories, in particular, of such lasting value. The characters in her stories begin life as cartoons -- the preposterously illustrated Parker in "Parker's Back", the comically behatted mother in "Everything that Rises Must Converge", the creepy yet insupportable intellectualism of Asbury in "The Enduring Chill" -- and somehow take on the set of overtones that one associates mostly with the Bible. This kind of creation of stakes is not easy to do, and it is especially not easy to do in a short story, where you have neither the naturally evocative mode of a poem nor the girth of a novel, and it is insanely difficult to do in a short story that also has the room for the kinds of silliness noted above. See the revelation of Mrs. Turpin, the protagonist of "Revelation" who has been called a wart hog from hell:
Then 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.
The kind of opaque, "abysmal life=giving knowledge" that Mrs. Turpin seems to find at the end of this story is mirrored throughout all of O'Connor's stories: there is some towering, invoked, unseen mystique at the heart of these grotesqueries that is in some way keyed into the core of significance, of signification itself. And it's mirrored again in the role that, to me at least, "Flannery O'Connor" the writer has, that unchanging signification that is felt without being totally understood. In a different way from the whodunits, O'Connor might be called a mystery writer; she is unique, and unwavering, in leaving the mystery of meaning unsolved.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Ventriloquists
Comes a time in a man's life when he has to take a good long hard look in the mirror and think about what he's doing. In fact, comes that time more often that one would hope. In further fact, maybe the frequency of that time a-comin' is one of those things that need be faced in the mirror. Ahem. So, look, I'm going to level with you: I love to write on this blog about the bad attitude and bad decisions made by Young Fat Schratz. He is always doing dumb things, and I am always able to sit and think about what a clever fellow I am now that I have wised up past him. Well, the reason that I have had to give the mirror good long hard looks and all, is that I got all excited to write, in this post, a Young Fat Schratz story, when I realized that the version of me protagonisting in the story is not all that much younger and not all that much fatter than the me as currently operating. The main guy in this story (which is still forthcoming), has much more in common with the me writing this in 2010 than he does with the YFS we've come to know and love, the one who hit on girls at the library with Greek-root puns and who failed to appreciate Wise Blood and who did all of those other things I had supposedly Risen Above. Nevertheless, I will face my shame and tell the story, and then keep talking. Which is, I hope, no less than you'd expect.
Not So Very Young and Not So Very Fat Schratz was once on an airplane flying from Boston to Buffalo, reading The Emperor's Children and thinking about what a grand success the previous National Poem in Your Pocket Day had been. In particular, I was thinking of a girl with whom I was soppily in love, and how the previous N.P. in your P. Day I had been the lucky recipient of hearing her read several of the poems that I and my hangers on had had in their pockets. What a voice! I thought. What poems! I thought. And, like an idiot, once I got bored with The Emperor's Children, high in the sky on my way back to my native land, I decided to write a poem, on the back of a receipt from the Logan Airport Hudson News.
For almost as long as I can remember, I have been soppily in love with a succession of girls who did nothing to deserve it. My grandfather once told us a mildly offensive piece of doggerel, and when we asked him where he picked it up, he told us that they said it all the time in the Service. When we asked him why, he said, "Well, we had to do something" which I think also explains my decades-long free-floating soppiness. And given that it has spanned the decades, it is something of a marvel that I have been able to restrain myself to writing as few soppy poems as I have. And yet this poem I was writing on the back of that receipt, if I still knew where it was, might strike me now as one of the soppiest. I believe it was built on the kind of conceit that would shame Abraham Cowley, with a bunch of guff about how when I read Shakespeare I imagine Kenneth Branagh's voice reading the parts, and when I read Dr. Johnson I imagine Professor Fix, who taught my Samuel Johnson class, reading it aloud, and how I, the poet, could think of few things in this vale of tears nicer than making her the default voice for poems in my head. Like I said, none of these women deserved all this sop, and I am sorry for it. But it's what I did.
And I've been thinking a lot about that poem I wrote half of and lost because I have been listening to stories in voices like never before. Since I have moved to Brooklyn, I have had no television, and since I have frittered away my loan money, I have had no netflix account, and so I have been exulting in the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which is the occasioning event for this post and which makes its appearance here, I believe, burying the lede). The way that podcast works is famous writer X reads a story published at any point in history by Famous Writer Y and then talks about it with Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. All of which is good clean fun, but it is making me think things like that every story by Donald Barthelme sounds like it's read by Donald Antrim, or that every story by John Updike is read by Roger Angell (the only writer on the podcast so far who has remained like unvoiced, when I read him later, is Nabokov, who's been read on the podcast twice). And check out this nutty piece of syllogism: I now think that Joshua Ferris sounds best like Monica Ali, that George Saunders sounds best like Joshua Ferris, and that Isaac Babel sounds best like George Saunders. That's right: now when I read Babel, I imagine it read with George Saunder's great Chicago accent flattening out all of those translated vowels.
It's a typical response at this point, when I go through these things in my head, to wonder who cares at all. Babel may sound like George Saunders, but it's not like this is making me think that Makhno's Boys took place near Lake Superior. But, after all, the problem of voicing once got me to write a poem on the back of a receipt, so maybe it means something. Voice can't be unimportant; once, it was all that stories had (and I'm not even going to get STARTED on the things I've thought of regarding this and Derrida's wonky take on voicing writing in Signature Event Context, because I thought about that once and it kept me up all night). The iterability (ok, just a little Derrida) isn't even the issue here, because whatever Famous Writer X sounds like is STUCK as what Famous Writer Y now sounds like to me. Like everything else, I think that what it comes down to is a defense against loneliness: it may be dire when it's just me and Don Delillo, but if Don Delillo sounds like Chang-Rae Lee, then, it's me and Don Delillo and Chang-rae Lee, and that makes a difference, I guess. It hurts your head sometimes reading, that you're alone with your gods, and it helps to have someone (and the promise of intelligent discussion with that someone and Deborah Triesman minutes away).
It occurs to me, as I finish it, that it is perhaps germane to this discussion that, when I imagine myself speaking, I imagine neither my actual voice (blech) nor my head voice (too clever by half!), but the impression that my brother Connor does of me, usually when he is making fun of me for being a mope. In fact, a lot like the way he would say it if he were talking about me writing those soppy poems.
Not So Very Young and Not So Very Fat Schratz was once on an airplane flying from Boston to Buffalo, reading The Emperor's Children and thinking about what a grand success the previous National Poem in Your Pocket Day had been. In particular, I was thinking of a girl with whom I was soppily in love, and how the previous N.P. in your P. Day I had been the lucky recipient of hearing her read several of the poems that I and my hangers on had had in their pockets. What a voice! I thought. What poems! I thought. And, like an idiot, once I got bored with The Emperor's Children, high in the sky on my way back to my native land, I decided to write a poem, on the back of a receipt from the Logan Airport Hudson News.
For almost as long as I can remember, I have been soppily in love with a succession of girls who did nothing to deserve it. My grandfather once told us a mildly offensive piece of doggerel, and when we asked him where he picked it up, he told us that they said it all the time in the Service. When we asked him why, he said, "Well, we had to do something" which I think also explains my decades-long free-floating soppiness. And given that it has spanned the decades, it is something of a marvel that I have been able to restrain myself to writing as few soppy poems as I have. And yet this poem I was writing on the back of that receipt, if I still knew where it was, might strike me now as one of the soppiest. I believe it was built on the kind of conceit that would shame Abraham Cowley, with a bunch of guff about how when I read Shakespeare I imagine Kenneth Branagh's voice reading the parts, and when I read Dr. Johnson I imagine Professor Fix, who taught my Samuel Johnson class, reading it aloud, and how I, the poet, could think of few things in this vale of tears nicer than making her the default voice for poems in my head. Like I said, none of these women deserved all this sop, and I am sorry for it. But it's what I did.
And I've been thinking a lot about that poem I wrote half of and lost because I have been listening to stories in voices like never before. Since I have moved to Brooklyn, I have had no television, and since I have frittered away my loan money, I have had no netflix account, and so I have been exulting in the New Yorker Fiction Podcast (which is the occasioning event for this post and which makes its appearance here, I believe, burying the lede). The way that podcast works is famous writer X reads a story published at any point in history by Famous Writer Y and then talks about it with Deborah Triesman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. All of which is good clean fun, but it is making me think things like that every story by Donald Barthelme sounds like it's read by Donald Antrim, or that every story by John Updike is read by Roger Angell (the only writer on the podcast so far who has remained like unvoiced, when I read him later, is Nabokov, who's been read on the podcast twice). And check out this nutty piece of syllogism: I now think that Joshua Ferris sounds best like Monica Ali, that George Saunders sounds best like Joshua Ferris, and that Isaac Babel sounds best like George Saunders. That's right: now when I read Babel, I imagine it read with George Saunder's great Chicago accent flattening out all of those translated vowels.
It's a typical response at this point, when I go through these things in my head, to wonder who cares at all. Babel may sound like George Saunders, but it's not like this is making me think that Makhno's Boys took place near Lake Superior. But, after all, the problem of voicing once got me to write a poem on the back of a receipt, so maybe it means something. Voice can't be unimportant; once, it was all that stories had (and I'm not even going to get STARTED on the things I've thought of regarding this and Derrida's wonky take on voicing writing in Signature Event Context, because I thought about that once and it kept me up all night). The iterability (ok, just a little Derrida) isn't even the issue here, because whatever Famous Writer X sounds like is STUCK as what Famous Writer Y now sounds like to me. Like everything else, I think that what it comes down to is a defense against loneliness: it may be dire when it's just me and Don Delillo, but if Don Delillo sounds like Chang-Rae Lee, then, it's me and Don Delillo and Chang-rae Lee, and that makes a difference, I guess. It hurts your head sometimes reading, that you're alone with your gods, and it helps to have someone (and the promise of intelligent discussion with that someone and Deborah Triesman minutes away).
It occurs to me, as I finish it, that it is perhaps germane to this discussion that, when I imagine myself speaking, I imagine neither my actual voice (blech) nor my head voice (too clever by half!), but the impression that my brother Connor does of me, usually when he is making fun of me for being a mope. In fact, a lot like the way he would say it if he were talking about me writing those soppy poems.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Here and Now and Time and Space
I'm reading a book of essays by Susan Sontag, called Against Interpretation and Other Essays, and I'm watching Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch. Dead Man is a movie about the Old West, created in the mid-90s; Against Interpretation and c. is a book of essays about other books, movies, plays, from the Sixties or the time immediately pre-Sixties, and presumably meant to be read in the Sixties or the time immediately post-Sixties. I'm agnostic I guess as to whether or not Dead Man was meant to be watched specifically in the mid-nineties (as a person who was alive and reading and caring in parts of the nineties, I have trouble thinking of it just yet as a Capitalized Decade; so much so, and is this strange?, that when I think of the capital-N Nineties I imagine the Gay Eighteen Nineties. That probably is strange). Whatever Jarmusch wanted, I am watching his movie and reading Sontag's essays in the very early twenty-tens or the very late twenty-oughts, depending on your numerology. And like you couldn't but do, doing these particular things, I am thinking about time and place.
When I was young and went to school in the mountains, I wrote a sixty-five page English paper about people trying to extend past their own particular time and place. Specifically, it was about the efforts of certain writers to shove the time and place to which they were relevant further into the future. Pale Fire, I wanted to say, did this in a way in which David Copperfield was not, and especially in a way that an essay by Susan Sontag about the lamentable lack of Georg Lukacs's work in English is not. That paper was about success: who had shoved their lives, or their relevances, or whatever, further than anyone else (Nabokov won on a judges' decision). Today I am wondering less about success (who got the most points in forty-eight minutes) and more about reasons (why bother getting nine other guys together and throwing that ball at a net?). Are people really trying to shove outward their time and place, and why do something like that?
Last night I drank a bunch of beer with my brother, and on the subway ride home I did a piece of furious underlining on the Q train: I underlined a sentence from one of those Susan Sontag essays about the then-current state of literature, because it was a claim about the then-current state of literature that I quite liked. And today I got full of nostalgia and compared one of my college friends to the Dude from the Big Lebowski -- he was just the man for his time and place. One of the facile pleasures of reading -- one of the ones easy to observe, I mean -- is that you can check in other times/places, like Sontag as the pulse of the Sixties.
I guess the thing that I'm thinking or worrying about now is: what is so great about now and here, among all the other times and places? In its way, it seems like those are the worst two coordinates to have: it's not as if one could be coherent and claim that someone was the man for his time and place RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, what the fuck other time are people angling toward? When Sontag expresses reservations that her book is a signpost of some mythic thing called the Sixties, surely she what concerns her is that consignment to the Sixties is consignment to irrelevance Right Now. This is probably something like a concern that the only way to make sense out of anything is to do it retrospectively (remember Hegel's Minerva's owl's flying only at dusk), which is I guess an old concern. But why do people push ahead to other right heres and nows?
And more importantly, if that goddamn owl is only flying when it's dark, what are we supposed to do in the daytime?
When I was young and went to school in the mountains, I wrote a sixty-five page English paper about people trying to extend past their own particular time and place. Specifically, it was about the efforts of certain writers to shove the time and place to which they were relevant further into the future. Pale Fire, I wanted to say, did this in a way in which David Copperfield was not, and especially in a way that an essay by Susan Sontag about the lamentable lack of Georg Lukacs's work in English is not. That paper was about success: who had shoved their lives, or their relevances, or whatever, further than anyone else (Nabokov won on a judges' decision). Today I am wondering less about success (who got the most points in forty-eight minutes) and more about reasons (why bother getting nine other guys together and throwing that ball at a net?). Are people really trying to shove outward their time and place, and why do something like that?
Last night I drank a bunch of beer with my brother, and on the subway ride home I did a piece of furious underlining on the Q train: I underlined a sentence from one of those Susan Sontag essays about the then-current state of literature, because it was a claim about the then-current state of literature that I quite liked. And today I got full of nostalgia and compared one of my college friends to the Dude from the Big Lebowski -- he was just the man for his time and place. One of the facile pleasures of reading -- one of the ones easy to observe, I mean -- is that you can check in other times/places, like Sontag as the pulse of the Sixties.
I guess the thing that I'm thinking or worrying about now is: what is so great about now and here, among all the other times and places? In its way, it seems like those are the worst two coordinates to have: it's not as if one could be coherent and claim that someone was the man for his time and place RIGHT NOW. On the other hand, what the fuck other time are people angling toward? When Sontag expresses reservations that her book is a signpost of some mythic thing called the Sixties, surely she what concerns her is that consignment to the Sixties is consignment to irrelevance Right Now. This is probably something like a concern that the only way to make sense out of anything is to do it retrospectively (remember Hegel's Minerva's owl's flying only at dusk), which is I guess an old concern. But why do people push ahead to other right heres and nows?
And more importantly, if that goddamn owl is only flying when it's dark, what are we supposed to do in the daytime?
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