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.

Up and Down

Here are some sentences, from public information outlet wikipedia, about the Disney Channel Original Movie Read It and Weep:

After the prom, which was ocean-themed, Jamie invites everyone to eat at her parents' pizza parlor. When Lenny rushes into the kitchens to help cook the pizza, his jacket, which was covered in seaweed from the prom, accidentally lands on some of the pizzas, covering them in seaweed. They do not know this, but when the pizza is delivered to the customers, they discover it is delicious, and Jamie's father finally figures out the secret of how to save their business, ending the film on a happy note.

And here are some sentences from our friend Flannery O'Connor, who wrote the book that we're reading this (month-ish):

It was a hideous hat. A purple velvet flap came down on one side of it and stood up on the other; the rest of it was green and looked like a cushion with the stuffing out. He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

I, for my part, really really like all seven of these sentences. But it's good to see how they do what they are doing differently so that we can start to think about what Flannery O'Connor is up to (we will spend less time thinking about what whoever wrote the wikipedia entry for Read It and Weep is up to, I am sorry to say).

The first two of the wikipedia entry's three long sentences have "which" clauses in them, which serve to fill us in on information withheld in the preceding account of the movie and which get us crucial information to understand the third sentence, where we get our happy ending. They barrel along. The only adjectives in them are "ocean-themed" and "delicious", which I think is delightful. They are like subway cars, these sentences, on their one level and on their track and getting the job done. Getting the job done, though, is not what we want out of short stories. We want something else, and we get it from the title story of Everything that Rises Must Converge.

There is something about the sentences from people like Flannery O'Connor that makes them different from the kind of popcorn sentences that we read through at prodigious clips per minute. What I think one of the pleasures of those sentences is -- what I think makes the sentences I quoted upstairs from Ms. O'Connor different from the sentences I quoted above from wikipedia -- is their sense of moving not just forward, but up and down. A little bit earlier, describing the character Julian's reaction to his mothers less comical than jaunty and pathetic hat, and the prospect of taking his mother out in public generally, Julian is described as "waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to start piercing him". A long simile, but a delightful one. O'Connor does her work so delightfully by moving not just forward but up and down, in so many delightful registers. Is that an obvious thing to note? I think that the way in which O'Connor manages to flit between registers while maintaining the momentum we see in the wikipedia passage is one of the things, but only one of the things, that makes her so worth our reading. Read up and down and read slower.

That is what I took, anyway, out of the magnificence of the sentences in this our first Flannery O'Connor story. There will be more!