3 by Flannery O’Connor offers up the most renowned stories by this notorious Southern Gothic author. These stories are grotesque and well-calculated to unsettle the reader. O’Connor was a devout Catholic and most of what she wrote could be interpreted as a religious allegory of some sort or other. That does not mean you need to be religious to feel the horror of her works.
The first story in the book is Wise Blood, her classic novelette of dark humor. The symbolism and meaning of the story are opaque and difficult to interpret but keeping the concept of “eyesight” in mind will go a long way in breaking down what she intended to say. The central character is Haze Motes, a young man returning from the war with a mission to preach his new theology of The Church Without Christ. This bizarre individual talks at, around, through, and over people so that makes two-way conversations are an impossibility. He probably has Asperger’s Syndrome although he never has any trouble attracting attention from nubile women.
As the name “Haze Motes” suggests, he has trouble with his vision. The word “haze” means “blurry vision” and “Motes” refers to the New Testament passage that says “Do not criticize the speck in another’s eye if you have not removed the mote from your own.” At the start of the book, he returns to his dead mother’s abandoned house and takes her old glasses; later it is revealed that they make his bad vision worse. The next night he goes downtown and meets up with a blind street preacher named Asa Hawks and his teenage daughter who gets infatuated with Haze Motes. This encounter with Asa Hawks foreshadows what Haze does later in the story. As it turns out, the preacher is a conman who tried to blind himself with lime to prove his faith in God. To Haze, he and the other street preachers in the town are the epitome of everything fake and false about religion because all they do is lie and take people’s money. Haze Motes is right in calling out their insincerity. In life, he is after what is true and real.
Another character that Haze Motes meets on that night is Enoch Emery, a dull-witted teenager who tries to make friends with everybody but they all seem to hate him. He latches on to Haze and later they meet up again when Haze wants help in finding Asa Hawks and his daughter. While Haze represents nihilism, atheism, and the inability to believe in a god he cannot see, Enoch represents blind faith and faulty intuition. While not religious himself, he follows his gut feelings without questioning their validity, something that leads this dim character to do some strange things he himself can not comprehend. He steals a mummy from a museum and brings it to Haze and Asa Hawks’s daughter while they are in bed together. Then he beats up a guy and steals his gorilla suit. Enoch Emory has faith in his mission but he has no intellect and no common sense. And he despises animals, too.
While Haze Motes does not have faith in religion, he does have faith in one thing: his car. He buys a jalopy that barely runs in the belief that it is going to take him places, something that God is unable to do. But everything changes in one hilarious passage where a strange cop destroys the car. Everything he believes in is gone so he goes back to his boarding house and begins torturing himself.
His landlady at first is only after his money but she begins to have feelings for him when she wonders why he is such a masochist. She offers to marry Haze Motes and take care of him. If he can not believe in God he can have the next best thing which is unconditional love. But Haze has blinded himself to prove that he is true. He cannot believe in what he cannot see so in the end he can believe in nothing because he can see nothing. The nihilist Haze Motes can only self-destruct because he has nowhere else to go.
While Wise Blood is a darkly comic story that, in the end, makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, The Violent Bear It Away takes on a more serious and even darker tone. The narrative of this novelette revolves around a teenage boy named Tarwater who had been kidnapped and raised by his lunatic great uncle, a religious fanatic obsessed with baptizing all the members of his family so they can become prophets when they get older. Tarwater is caught between this great uncle and his uncle Rayber who was also kidnapped, raised, and baptized by the great uncle. Only Rayber escaped, went to college, became a teacher, and decided to dedicate his life to undoing what he considers the family curse of religious fanaticism.
Tarwater lives with his great uncle on a farm and when the old man dies, a mysterious friend appears and begins giving him advice. Is this stranger Satan or is he merely the boy’s conscience? We never really find out but this stranger convinces Tarwater to burn down the great uncle’s shack and move to the city and follow out the orders the old man had given him. Uncle Rayber has a son who was born mentally disabled and Tarwater’s assigned task is to baptize the boy whose name is Bishop. When this is accomplished, the prophecy that Tarwater will become a prophet, seeking disciples in the town, will be fulfilled.
The story line is that Tarwater, single-mindedly, wants to baptize Bishop while Rayber tries to take him in and raise him as the son he never had a chance to have. Rayber is the most complex character in the story. Bishop is mentally stuck in infancy and the sullen Tarwater is stuck with the brainwashing he received at the hands of his great uncle. But Rayber is stuck at an intellectual impasse and fraught with moral dilemmas. He feels ashamed of Bishop’s mental deficiencies but is unable to persuade Tarwater to abandon his mental slavery to religion and become a part of the secular world. As Rayber’s thoughts progress, it becomes apparent that this do-gooder is motivated by deep feelings of insecurity and anger, a lot of which is rooted in the abusive treatment he got when the great uncle kidnapped him, baptized him, and tried to brainwash him into becoming a disciple and prophet. Rayber wants to redeem himself from the guilt he feels for going along with the religious game when he was young. Bishop is his greatest obstacle and Tarwater is his greatest chance for redemption. But in the end this is all about Rayber and not about anybody else. His motivation to do good is purely selfish.
In a private conversation, Rayber tells Tarwater that he wishes Bishop had died at birth. The meaning of this statement is ambiguous and Tarwater, at a crossroads himself, has to decide whether he should baptize or drown Bishop.
It is difficult to interpret what this story is actually about. Rayber’s psychology is secular, complex, frustrating, and full of irreconcilable contradictions. It would be easy to say O’Connor is simply trying to portray the shortcomings of a life without religion. But Rayber is not the main character and his confusion is a subplot to the story of Tarwater. The only sympathetic thing that can be said for Tarwater is that his great uncle’s religious indoctrination prevented him from becoming a part of the real world but his chance at redemption gets bypassed in favor of carrying out his great uncle’s evil plans. He could have redeemed himself by becoming R ayber’s adopted surrogate son but he chooses a darker path in the end. O’Connor seems to be saying that blind devotion to fundamentalist religion can only lead to disaster. On the other hand, the modern, secular life might be an appealing alternative on the surface but does not address morality at a deep enough level to reach full human potential. Neither option has a legitimate church to provide guidance to those who need it. O’Connor, the Catholic intellectual, appears to be advocating for a moderate middle road between the two extremes.
You do not have to be religious to get something out of this story. The events, plot twists, and interactions between the characters are distressing enough to make this a provocative piece of writing regardless of what you believe.
The third and final section is a collection of short stories called Everything That Rises Must Converge. The title is entirely appropriate because all the stories are about a social leveling off, the shifting of social positions, and the equalization, most often disastrous, of different classes of people coming to terms with each other be it by chance or force. Flannery O’Connor wrote these stories during the Civil Rights Movement and most, but not all of them, deal directly with racism.
Among the strongest stories is the first one with the same title as the collection. It tells the story of a white woman with an ugly green hat who encounters an African-American woman on a city bus. The white woman looks down on Black people but the African-American woman is wearing the same green hat which draws a common link between them. After a while on the bus, she speaks with condescension to the Black woman’s son who is with her. This leads to an ugly and aggressive confrontation between the two women and the white women is knocked off her high horse in the end.
Another strong story, “Revelation”, involves Mrs. Turpin, a farm owner who thinks she is superior to everybody else, especially African-American people. While she is sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, she gets into a conversation with another woman and freely expresses her feelings about everybody she perceives to be beneath her. Another patient gets angry and attacks her. The physical violence is inconsequential but is it her pride that is most wounded. After she returns home she sulks until she has a vision at sunset in which a line of people are ascending up to Heaven. She sees herself in the line and realizes that her place in the world is not where she thinks it is.
Still another strong story is “Parker’s Back”. It involves a poor man who is heavily tattooed; he marries a woman who is strict in her religion. She doesn’t like his tattoos and when she gets angry and locks him out of the house, he attempts to make amends by getting a crucified Jesus tattooed on his back. When he returns home and shows it to her, things do not go as planned.
The strongest, and most disturbing, story is “The Lame Shall Enter First”. It is similar in theme to The Violent Bear It Away since it tells the story of a secular do-gooder named Sheppard and his son Norton. The son is a normal child but Sheppard is chronically disappointed with him. The father is a social worker in a juvenile detention center and he decides to bring home a disadvantages boy named Rufus Johnson. This boy has a club foot, a high IQ, and a mean streak to rival the worst that humanity has to offer. Sheppard wants to save Rufus from himself but he also has the ulterior motive of turning him into the admirable son that he thinks Norton can never be. Rufus has other plans; he does everything he possibly can to ruin Sheppard’s life. His big conspiracy involves teaching Norton about Christianity and Heaven. The two boys spend their time together in the attic using a telescope to look at stars while Rufus explains that Norton’s dead mother is somewhere out there on one them and Norton will join her when he dies. The ending is one of the most emotionally brutal stories written by this author.
Flannery O’Connor has been criticized for portraying racism in her stories but this criticism is unfair. She portrays racism as ugly and the racist ideas come from the minds of ignorant people. Most of them get put in their place at the end and even, predictably, many of them die. She did not glorify racism. She knew that American society was changing in her day and she also was prescient enough to see that there were going to be some rough spots as it changed. Her intention was not to entertain people or celebrate what stupid white people were doing but rather to raise awareness of what they were doing wrong.
On the other hand, a lot of people have lionized Flannery O’Connor for her intricate and detailed writing style as if to say that the racism she depicts is justified because she was such a great artist. From my point of view, this is not such a great argument. Her writing tends to be labored and unnecessarily dense. Sometimes, like in The Violent Bear It Away, it is not always clear who the protagonist is meant to be. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that her writing style is less significant than the stomach-churning and ugly side of American society that she portrays. Her themes are hard pills to swallow but that swallowing needs to be done. Nobody ever said great art is meant to be fun.
Most of these stories are religious in nature but that should not put a secular reader off reading them. A lot of them are transgressive and could be considered borderline horror stories. Even if you don’t accept Flannery O’Connor’s religious beliefs, you can still get a lot out of her writing just by trying to interpret the difficult symbolism. If you have really understood them, you probably will never forget them even if you sincerely want to.
O'Connor, Flannery. 3 by Flannery O'Connor. Signet Books, New York: 1983.
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