I wrote here about Flannery O'Connor and the notebook of prayers she kept while a student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa. She was a Catholic from the deep South, a close observer of the fundamentalist Protestants who surrounded her, and the kick-ass effect of some of her stories comes, I think, from the way in which, either gradually or suddenly, you comprehend that the joke isn't on who you thought the joke was going to be on. John Updike, having quoted a few passages from the work of another author (Anne Tyler), remarked, "This is O'Connor cartooning without the cruelty, without the pinpoint tunnel to Jesus at the end of all perspectives." Cruelty, cartoons, fanaticism--Updike captured, in one sentence meant to describe Anne Tyler, an awful lot of Flannery O'Connor.
In a letter to a friend dated January 21, 1961, she expressed dissatisfaction with a story she was working on called "Parker's Back":
It is too funny to be as serious as it ought. I have a lot of trouble with getting the right tone.
She seems to have discarded it and then taken it back up in 1964--the year of her death, in August, at age 39, from lupus, with which she had been stricken in her mid-20s. She was a semi-invalid for most of her adult life, and was dying when she returned to "Parker's Back," but the humor that she was seeking to blend with her serious purpose remains in the finished story. It begins with an absurd courtship of a homely fundamentalist by the title character, O.E. Parker, a type of southern drifter and ne'er-do-well. Without understanding his own motives for courting her, he seeks to arouse her jealousy by describing his employer:
He had told her that the woman was a hefty young blonde; in fact she was nearly seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in anything except getting as much work out of him as she could. Not that an old woman didn't sometimes get an interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him the same way she looked at her old tractor--as if she had to put up with it because it was all she had.
Another of his methods is to show her his body, all festooned with tattoos. He suggests slyly that the best ones are where she can't see but she isn't impressed. Actually, he isn't either. In a virtuoso sequence, the back story of his life is related by way of the history of his attraction to tattoos. He quit school at sixteen, went to a trade school, quit that in favor of a job at a garage that allowed him to pay for more tattoos, and then joined the navy after his mother failed to get him interested in religion. Of course he got a lot more tattoos in the navy:
He had stopped having lifeless ones like anchors and crossed rifles. He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and liver were respectively. He did not care much what the subject was so long as it was colorful; on his abdomen he had a few obscenities but only because that seemed the proper place for them. Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it that had attracted him would wear off. Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study his overall look. The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched. A huge dissatisfaction would come over him . . . .
It's around about in here that the quite funny "cartooning" merges into something else suggested by "haphazard," "botched," and "huge dissatisfaction." It seems the hardscrabble loser O.E. Parker has in him something of the spiritual quester and that this accounts in some mysterious way for the attraction to tattoos and the plain fundamentalist woman whom he first courted and then married without knowing why. By this time in his life, the only blank canvas on his body is his back. He hadn't wanted any tattoos where he couldn't himself very easily see them, but now he becomes obsessed with filling up his last open body space with a work of tattoo art that Sarah Ruth--that's her name--won't be able to resist. It turns out that the title is a bit of a double entendre, since the obvious meaning refers to the back of Parker, the last empty space, whereas the more significant reading of "Parker is back" suggests that this story may be meant as a kind of religious parable of returning. Toward the end, Parker enters his favorite tattoo parlor and demands to see the book "with all the pictures of God in it." Then:
"Father, Son, or Spirit?"
"Just God," Parker said impatiently. "Christ. I don't care. Just so it's God."
The artist returned with a book. He moved some papers off another table and put the book down on it and told Parker to sit down and see what he liked. "The up-t-date ones are in the back," he said.
On this recommendation, Parker begins at the end, where he finds reassuring pictures of a friendly Jesus--the good shepherd, "forbid them not," the physician's friend, and so on. He thumbs backward toward the front of the book, back in time, to the less "up-t-date" specimens. As he progresses, the artistic renderings of Jesus become more and more austere, less reassuring. He passes one toward the front, hears a voice telling him to GO BACK--a bit more playfulness with the title, perhaps--and finds himself contemplating "the haloed head of a flat, stern, Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes." This is the one he chooses. If there is the under tone of a sneer in that reference to the up-t-date ones being at the back, it's the author's contempt for what has become of Christianity.
Notwithstanding his dim comprehension, the tattoo artist, over the course of two days, diligently reproduces the Byzantine Christ on Parker's back, and he must have done a good job judging by the effect it has on its first viewers: on his way back to Sarah Ruth, Parker stops by a pool hall, and when his friends, after some glad-handing, lift his shirt to have a look, "Parker felt all the hands drop away instantly and his shirt fell again like a veil over the face." When the pool-hall gang recovers, they try to make a joke of it, and a fight breaks out. They throw Parker out into the alley and
Then a calm descended on the pool hall as nerve shattering as if the long barnlike room were the ship from which Jonah had been cast into the sea.
This fleeting allusion to the book of Jonah, the closest thing in the Bible to a short story, may reveal quite a lot about what to make of "Parker's Back," which ends with Parker leaning against the pecan tree in his yard and crying after Sarah Ruth kicks him out of the house for having defiled himself with a graven image of God. This seems a deliberate echoing of the conclusion to the Book of Jonah, and in retrospect the silence of the pool-hall gang when they see what's beneath Parker's shirt is the analog for the heathen sailors who, when the sea ceases raging once they throw Jonah overboard, "feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows." Thus Jonah, against his will and without even knowing it, was a successful missionary for the God from whom he was trying to flee. Is there a suggestion that the pool-hall gang may also have been turned in a new direction?
The biblical book and O'Connor's story share the method of joining hilarity to religious purpose, as well as the theme of God hunting down stubborn sinners and using them to achieve his ends. Though Jonah's unending recalcitrance, which keeps his unintentional successes on the ship and at Nineveh from being over tidy, reminds us that in "Parker's Back" the Christian fundamentalist fails to recognize her own God in the flat stern gaze of the Byzantine Christ. Her sinning husband knew the face of God when he saw it near the front of the artist's book.
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