Book Review: The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
When I decided to read Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, I went in cold, as I often do when exploring unpopular culture. On the one hand I was eager to read O’Connor, because literary people I respect, people who have forgotten more about literature than I’ll ever know, rave about her. Moreover, her reputation as one of the greatest all-time Catholic writers of fiction intrigued me all the more. On the other hand, my experience of other Southern writers, most notably William Faulkner, led me to believe O’Connor’s stories would be gloomy, depressing, and in general not much fun to read.
So I started in on The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, 31 in all — and almost gave up after the first third of the book. Depressing didn’t begin to describe my reaction to these stories. Technically, the quality of the writing was superb: unforgettable characters, brilliant descriptions and use of language, etc. But the plots and themes! Innocent children drowning, families being systematically executed, bad characters coming to bad ends. If O’Connor was trying to convert readers to Catholicism with these stories, it seemed to me she was instead inspiring them to run away from it as fast as possible.
By the end of the second third of the book, my attitude had changed, having had time to reflect on what her stories are really about, and also read scholarly analysis of each story. I began to see the method in her apparent madness. By the end of the book, I was in mourning that there were no more stories to read; hoping that 30 or 40 more would turn up in a long-forgotten safe deposit box or some such thing.
Of course, “her stories” is a somewhat misleading phrase, because O’Connor is really telling the same story over and over. O’Connor writes about redemption. This is her overarching theme. She presents us with protagonists who are utterly obtuse, confident in their ignorance, blithely marching toward destruction. The sins of these obtuse protagonists vary, though greed and pride seem to be at the top of the list. In addition to her protagonists being greedy and/or prideful, they are frequently morally ambivalent, intolerant, atheistic, sanctimonious, hypocritical, jealous, lustful, bitter, violent, wrathful, lazy, stupid, timid, duplicitous, and/or just downright mean. If these characters have any virtues at all, O’Connor doesn’t like to talk about them.
Switching to popular culture momentarily, Warden Samuel Norton in The Shawshank Redemption is the perfect O’Connor protagonist. Watch (less than two minutes) his confrontation with Andy Dufresene:
Andy gives the warden an opportunity for redemption, to do the right thing. But the warden is so confident in his superiority, so immune to the truth, that the opportunity passes him by.
Another poster child for obtuseness is, of course, Pontius Pilate, as depicted here in this portrait by Nikolai Ge, What Is Truth?
Pilate asks, What is truth?” when He is literally staring Truth in the face. Confident in the power of Roman arms, the power of his position, the power of his superior civilization, Pilate fails to see that all these things are just so much dust compared to the infinite love of our Savior.
Though Warden Norton and Pilate are both obtuse, it is only the warden who comes to a violent end. But as we see in O’Connor’s stories, whether the price of our redemption is a violent death is completely beside the point. All that matters is whether our souls are saved. Some of her protagonists are able to accept redemption; others are not. In almost all cases, the protagonists (as well as many of the supporting characters) are stripped of any redeeming qualities so that we forced to see only the delusion, the evil, and the unfolding train wreck. This quality is what makes O’Connor’s stories unpleasant; until you have some idea of what she’s up to, unless you see her purpose, you wonder how she could be so seemingly and relentlessly gloomy about human nature and still define herself to such a great degree by her Catholicity. I read the stories as they are presented in the book, in chronological order. Knowing what I know now, I would have started with The Lame Shall Enter First, one of her later stories. This one seems to me the most accessible, straightforward, and thoroughly explained presentation of the story she repeats over and over. Once you see what’s going on in this story, it becomes much easier to interpret all the others.
Unfortunately some will find O’Connor unpleasant and seek to (pardon the redundancy) mindlessly cancel her because of the brutally negative, prejudiced, and contemptuous way her white characters think about, speak about, and speak to, black people. While it is true that the majority of her characters are (by today’s standards) shockingly prejudiced, three rather important things struck me as I was reading. First, these prejudiced attitudes are O’Connor’s indictment of those characters who hold them rather than of those at whom they are directed. Second, attitudes of contempt are hardly limited to whites toward black; most of O’Connor’s characters show quite a bit of it to people regardless of color or creed. Third, O’Connor’s (arguably) most intriguing, complex, and noble protagonist appears in her last complete story, Parker’s Back — and he is black. O. E. Parker, unlike so many of her protagonists, is not obtuse. From the very beginning he is in search of something more, of something better, of something good — salvation. And although like all O’Connor’s protagonists Parker speaks and acts as if he absolutely denies there is anything good or true or beautiful, O’Connor is such a skillful writer that we can sense that he does not for a minute believe it. He hungers for redemption, whereas most other O’Connor protagonists seem driven to avoid it until death is upon them, and for some not even then.
I fear all this talk of redemption and obtuseness and death will leave you with the impression that O’Connor is without a sense of humor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her wickedly trenchant sense of humor is woven into the fabric of her narrative, though usually quite subtly and dryly. Once in a while she hits you over the head with it, such as in the case of Parker’s Back, a title which is an elegant pun with a deep second meaning. Here’s a passage from A Stroke of Good Fortune that illustrates O’Connor’s lighter touch as well as her gift for establishing characters with a minimum of words:
“She and Bill Hill hadn’t eaten collard greens for five years and she wasn’t going to start cooking them now. She had bought these on account of Rufus … When she asked him what he would like to have special, he had not had the gumption to think of one civilized dish — he had said collard greens. She had expected Rufus to have turned out into somebody with some get in him. Well, he had about as much get as a floor mop.”
Here is an exchange from A Circle in the Fire with a similar light touch:
“‘Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,’ Mrs. Cope said. ‘Think of all we have. Lord,’ she said and sighed, ‘we have everything,’ and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all be a burden she was trying to shake off her back.
“Mrs. Prichard studied the woods. ‘All I got is four abscess teeth,’ she remarked.”
Although her stories have so much in common thematically, O’Connor’s rogue’s gallery of characters, variety of settings, and unexpected plot twists seldom if ever repeat — making her stories anything but repetitive. When all is said and done, O’Connor forces you to examine your own life as she examines that of her characters, by stripping away all the gray areas and distracting virtues that obscure the one and only issue that determines your fate on earth and for eternity.
“My heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Next up for me is to read O’Connor’s letters and a prayer journal she wrote when she was young. By exploring these volumes I hope to gain more insight about what she’s driving at in her stories and why she goes about storytelling in the remarkably unique way she does.
