Joyce Carol Oates reviews the recently published Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch, and, as is the custom with reviews in The New York Review, has as much or more to say about Gooch's subject as she does about Gooch's book. You can't argue with much of what she says. A fierce and devout Roman Catholic, O'Connor's stories are melodramatic cartoons written in the 1950s and 1960s, when the usual models were the carefully wrought and understated short fictions of Chekhov and Joyce. "To the hard of hearing you shout," O'Connor explained, "and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."
It is the sanguine unbelievers, and their similarly comfortable lukewarm Christian communicants, who require these large and startling figures. Sometimes it would be more accurate to dispense with "large" and "startling" in favor of "terrible" and "grim." You laugh and laugh and then wonder what you are laughing at. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," maybe her most frequently reprinted story, begins with an overly chatty grandma complaining that the car trip she's embarking on with her son's family should take a different route, the better to avoid the haunts of a notorious criminal who's been terrorizing the region. They go anyway, she keeps up a steady stream of inane commentary, for example agreeing with the proprietor of a roadside restaurant who says that these days a good man is hard to find, then there is an accident and--surprise!--the notorious criminal, known as The Misfit, arrives on the scene and kills them all, including the baby, who is in the story only so that it can be murdered. People hate it so when bad things happen to babies.
Oates directs attention to the conclusion of this story without mentioning the last word, which, though I once made a systematic reading of her slim collected works for a school project, is the one thing I will never forget from O'Connor's world. All the members of the family have been shot dead. The Misfit directs his helper, one Bobby Lee, to retrieve the old lady's corpse from the ditch and toss it with the others. He descends into the ditch "with a yodel" before declaring, "Some fun!" The story ends with the Misfit's retort: "'Shut up, Bobby Lee,' the Misfit said. 'It's no real pleasure in life.'"
So there for your consideration is one of the large and startling figures. Once, in a letter, O'Connor wrote:
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
That seems to shed some light on what is going on in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and, more generally, in the world according to Flannery O'Connor.
Oates takes up the question of whether "the art of caricature [is] a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety." She doesn't offer a final answer, but her catalog of the evidence, in a footnote, for O'Connor's rising stock on the Literary Reputation Index--the proliferation of book-length studies of her work, the Ph.D. dissertations, the way in which sales of the Library of America edition of her work surpass those of her fellow southerner Faulkner--suggest that academic toilers now esteem her startling figures more than, say, Faulkner's rich, complicated, comprehensive chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County. There is a certain irony here. O'Connor saw herself as an outsider, even as a kind of prophet to the comfortable and unconverted masses, but the source of her outsider critique is now what has made her a campus favorite. Think of all the Catholic universities and other Christian institutions of what is called higher education, their English faculties drowning in tenure-track earnestness. Catholics have tried to claim James Joyce, a passionate atheist, as a lost son of the Church. Imagine the enthusiasm generated by an actual orthodox believer.
One of the pleasures of literature involves what has been called "the thrill of recognition." O'Connor's large and startling figures do not provide it. Her fiction to me is news from another world, one inhabited not by human beings but by the unusual sensibility of Flannery O'Connor. I guess my vote is for what Oates calls an art of complexity or subtlety, not this harrowing tunnel always narrowing in on a medieval portrait of Christ. But you can't deny the kick.
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