Revelation of the Mysteries

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.