It has been a while since I have been taken with a writer like I have recently become with Flannery O'Connor. She mystifies me with the worlds she shines light on in her stories and novels and she disturbs me with her raw and clear eyed focus on these worlds. The characters that you discover in her writing are made up of all kinds of half crazy religious prophets, cold blooded sociopaths and psychopaths, societal rejects, con men, freaks, and country people from strange southern backwaters. While many of the people you come across in her stories are extreme and grotesque they are never less than fascinating, fully formed, and heartbreakingly human.
I heard O'Connor's name mentioned through out my life but never read any of her work in school or out and came across her sort of by chance. I'm a reading whore and read all genres and styles and varying levels of quality. I went out on a limb and pulled a book from the library that some guy (I don't remember his name) had written about struggling as a writer and being published and blah blah. It wasn't bad but it was incredibly conservative, at times obvious, and just frigging mediocre to be honest. I gave it back to the library about half way through (if something sucks you drop it be it books, movies, relationships, etc.) but before I did I couldn't help but notice that the guy mentioned the name Flannery O'Connor over and over again. He dropped her name when he wanted to bring up a writer who was a master of the short story, when he wanted to set the bar high ("we can't all be Flannery O'Connor), and he brought her up when he mentioned the Writer's Workshop in Iowa because they were both students there.
Although I didn't care for the man's book I could tell from the things he wrote that the author himself was a fan of good writing and his outspoken allegiance to O'Connor intrigued me. I looked her up on the old internets and found that that she had lived a life marred by illness that was finally cut short by lumpus when she was thirty nine years old. She was a devout Catholic and much of her writing is awash with her beliefs as she puts together startling portraits of the "Christ haunted" protestant south. The internets described her short stories as often dealing with the "grotesque" and called some of her work falling into the horror story category in some cases. She didn't seemed to agree and was quoted as saying:
"The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Due to my scepticism and ever increasing disinterest in organized religions (and organizations in general) the many mentions of Catholicism in regards to O'Connor's work was a turn off for me but I was still very much intrigued. I went to the library and got my hands on her Complete Works in one thick volume and immediately was sucked in by her novel Wise Blood which is dark, disturbing, strange, and does a fancy little switcheroo in perspective towards the end of the novel that throws you for a bit of a loop that I thought was masterful. The first short story I got to was A Good Man is Hard To Find which knocked me over the head and left me sitting there staring down at the page for some minutes after I finished. I'm not going to describe what happens in the story except to say it is one of the darkest, most horrific things I have ever read, and this is something that was first published in 1955. If a desensitized thirty one year old man in 2011 can be moved like that how the hell did people react back then?
Her other novel The Violent Bear it Away is included along with all her other short stories (Good Country People is by far my favorite so far), a few essays, and 259 letter that O'Connor wrote to her friends, acquaintances, critics, fans, and pretty much anybody that wrote her. The letters are a true joy. While much of O'Connor's work is dark and deals with the physically and spiritually grotesque she herself was incredibly brave and very funny which comes through clear as day through her correspondence. She is very candid and is never afraid to discuss her faith, her thinking, her fears, and everything else under the sun. She was sill a young woman when the lumpus began to effect her body and she had to begin using crutches but her letters never reveal a bitterness or cynicism in her thinking. Plenty of sarcasm and irony in her letters but no cynicism.
I'm hoping that I might talk someone into reading one of her works and then discussing it so we can post it here on Dublin's World. So far none of our regular contributors are willing to take part. Robert Fong doesn't read fiction, Melissa Gafton is too busy with school, DJ Undacut doesn't really read, and Robert's neighbor Paul is out of town. So, if there is anybody out there that would like to read some of the work of Flannery O'Connor and then discussing it with me or at least send me a page or two of your thoughts then please, shoot me an email at dublin@jazzmafia.com.
I would like to take us out with one of my favorite bits from one of O'Connor's letters in which she shares her thoughts on bad taste. This is one that she wrote to Eileen Hall on March 10th 1956. I hope you enjoy it and have a great Thanksgiving.
"About bad taste, I don't know, because taste is a relative matter. There are some who will find almost everything in bad taste, from spitting in the street to Christ's association with Mary Magdalen. Fiction is supposed to represent life, and the fiction writer has to use many aspects of his life as are necessary to make his total picture convincing. The fiction writer doesn't state, he shows, renders. It's the nature of fiction and it can't be helped. If you're writing about the vulgar, you have to prove they're vulgar by showing them at it. The two worst sins of bad fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment. You have to have enough of either to prove your point but no more. Of course there are some fiction writers who feel they have to retire to the bathroom and the bed with every character every time he takes himself to either place. Unless such a trip is used to further the story, I feel it is in bad taste. In the second chapter of my novel, I have such a scene but I felt it was vital to the meaning. I don't think you have to worry much about bad taste with a competent writer, because he uses everything for a reason. The reader may not always see the reason. But it's when sex or scurrility are used for their own sakes, that they are in bad taste." Well said.
-Dublin 11-20-11
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