Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers & Joyce Carol Oates

 From A History of American Literature, by Richard Gray. (The American Century, pp. 590-94).

 

"Ours is the century of unreason," Eudora Welty declared once, "the stamp of our behavior is violence and isolation: nonmeaning is looked upon with some solemnity." Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) would have agreed with some of this, but not all. What troubled her was not lack of reason but absence of faith. "The two circumstances that have given character to my writing," O'Connor admitted in her collection of essays, Mystery and Manners (1969), "have been those of being Southern and being Catholic"; and it was the mixture of these two, in the crucible of her own eccentric personality, that helped produce the strangely intoxicating atmosphere of her work—at once brutal and farcical, like somebody else's bad dream. A devout if highly unorthodox Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant region, O'Connor interpreted experience according to her own reading of Christian eschatology — a reading that was, on her admission, tough, uncompromising, and without any of "the hazy compassion" that "excuses all human weakness" on the ground that "human weakness is human." "For me," she declared, "the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ"; and to this she might well have added that she neither saw humankind as worthy of being redeemed, nor Redemption itself as anything other than a painful act of divorce from this world. With rare exceptions, the world she explores in her work—in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) and her stories gathered in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything that Rises Must Converge (1965) — is one of corrosion and decay. It is a world invested with evil, apparently forsaken by God and saved only in the last analysis by His incalculable grace. It is a netherworld, in  fact, a place of nightmare, comic because absurd, and (as in early Christian allegory) the one path by which its inhabitants can travel beyond it is that of renunciation, penance, and extreme suffering.

O'Connor herself was inclined to talk in a distinctly equivocal way about the relationship between the two circumstances that shaped her life, her region and her faith. Sometimes, she suggested, it was her "contact with mystery" that saved her from being stereotypically Southern and "just doing badly what has already been done to completion." In the Bible Belt, after all, Roman Catholics wre and still are in a distinct, occasionally distrusted minority. Other times, she argud that there was a perfect confluence, or at least congruity. "To know oneself," she said once, "is to know one's region." And her region, in particular, enaled her to know herself as a Catholic writer precisely because it was "a good place for Catholic literature." It had, she pointed out, "a sacramental view of life": belief there could "still be made believable and in relation to a large part of society"; and, "The Bible being generally known and revered in the section," it provided the writer with "that broad mythical base to refer to what he needs to extend his meaning in depth." Whatever the truth here—and it probably has to do with a creative tension between her education in Southern manners and her absorption in Catholic mystery — there is no doubt that, out of this potent mixture, O'Connor produced a fictional world the significance of which lied precisely in it apparent aberrations, its Gothic deviance from the norm. Her South is in many ways the same one other writers have been interested in — a wasteland, savage and empty, full of decaying towns and villages crisscrossed by endless tobacco roads. And, like Twain, she borrows from the Southwestern humorists, showing a bizarre comic inventiveness in describing it. Her characters — the protagonist Haze Motes in Wise Blood, for instance — are not so much human beings as grotesque parodies of humanity. As O'Connor herself has suggested, they are "literal in the same sense that a child's drawing is literal": people seen with an untamed and alien eye. Where she parts company with most other writers, however, is in what she intends by all this, and in the subtle changes wrought in her work by this difference of intention.

O'Connor herself explained that difference by saying that "the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him." His or her audience, though, will find those distortions "natural." So such a novelist has to make his or her vision "apparent by shock." "To the hard of hearing you shout," she says, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Her figures are grotesque, in other words, because she wants us to see them as spiritual primitives. In order to describe to us a society that is unnatural by her own Christian standards — and to make us feel its unnaturalness — she creates a fictional world that is unnatural by almost any accepted standards at all. O'Connor's characters are distorted in some way, social or physical, mental or material, because their distortions are intended to mirror their guilt, original sin, and the spiritual poverty of the times and places they inhabit. That is only half the story, though. From close-up, these characters may seem stubbornly foolish and perverse, ignorant witnesses to the power of evil. But ultimately against their will, they reveal the workings of eternal redemption as well. They are the children of God, O'Connor believes, as well as the children of Adam; and through their lives shines dimly the possibility that they may, after all, be saved. So an extra twist of irony is added to everything that happens in O'Connor's stories. Absurd as her people are, their absurdity serves as much as it does anything else, as a measure of God's mercy in caring for them. Corrupt and violent as their behavior may be, its very corruption can act as a proof, a way of suggesting the scope of His extraordinary forgiveness and love. As, for instance, O'Connor shows us Haze Motes preaching "the Church without Christ" and declaring "Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar," she practices a comedy of savage paradox. Motes, after all, relies on belief for the power of his blasphemy: Christ-haunted, he perversely admits the sway over him of the very faith he struggles to deny. Every incident in Wise Blood,  and all O'Connor's fiction, acquires a double edge because it reminds us, at one and the same time, that man is worthless and yet the favoured of God — negligible but the instrument of Divine Will. The irremediable wickedness of humanity and the undeniable grace of God are opposites that meet head on in her writing, and it is in the humor, finally, that they find their issue, or appropriate point of release. What we are offered on the surface is a broken world, the truth of a fractured picture. But the finely edged character of O'Connor's approach offers an "act of seeing" (to use her own phrase) that goes beyond that surface: turning what would otherwise be a comedy of the absurd into the laughter of the saints. 

 A writer whose fictional world wa as strange yet instantly recognizable as O'Connor''s was Carson McCullers (1917-1967). "I have my own reality," McCullers said once toward the end of her life, "of language and voices and foliage." And it was this reality, her ghostly private world that she tried to reproduce in her stories (collected in The Mortgaged Heart (1971)), her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951), and her four novels: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Clock without Hands (1961). She gave it many names, over the years, and placed it consstently in the South. Southern though its geographical location might be, however, it was like no South ever seen before. It was another country altogether, created out of all that the author had found haunting, soft, and lonely in her childhood surroundings in Georgia. It was also evolved out of her own experience of melancholy, isolation, and occasional if often illusory happiness. "Everything that happens in my fiction has happened to me," she confessed in her unfinished autobiography (Illumination and Night Glare (2000)). Her life, she believed, was composed of "illumination," moments of miraculous insight, and "night glare," long periods of dejection, depression, frustration—feelings of enclosure within herslf. So are the lives of her characters. The people she writes about may seem or feel strange or freakish because of their anomalous desires, aberrant behavior, or grotesque appearance. But in their freakishness they chart the coordinates of all our lives; their strangeness simply brings to the surface the secret sense of strangeness all of us share in what McCullers sometimes called our "lonesomeness." So, for example, The Ballad of the Sad Café revolves around a dance macabre of frustrated love, thwarted communication "There are the lover and the beloved," the narrator tells us, "but these two come from different countries." Similarly, The Member of the Wedding is an initiation novel in which the lonely, sensitive, 12-yar-old protagonist, Frankie Adams, is initiated into the simple ineradicable fact of human isolation: the perception that she can, finally, be "a member of nothing." At the heart of McCullers's work lies the perception Frankie comes to, just as the protagonist of Clock Without Hands, J. J. Malone does when he learns that he has a few months to live. Each of us, as Malone feels it, is "surrounded by a zone of loneliness"; each of us lives and dies unaccompanied by anyone else; which is why, when we contemplate McCullers's awkward and aberrant characters, we exchange what she called "a little glance of grief and lonely recognition." 

Whereas McCullers published only four novels in her short life, and O'Connor only two, Joyce Carol Oates (1938-) has produced more than fifty. In addition, she has written hundreds of shorter works, including short stories and critical and cultural essays, and several of her plays have been produced off Broadway. Often classified as a realist writer, she is certainly a social critic concerned in partiular with the violence of contemporary American culture. But she is equally drawn toward the Gothic, and toward testing the limits of classical myth, popular tales and fairy stories, and established literary conventions Many of her novels are set in Eden Country, based on the area of New York State where she was born. And in her early fiction, With Shuddering Fall (1964) and A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) she focuses her attention on rural America with its migrants, social strays, ragged prophets, and automobile wrecking yards. In Expensive People (1968), by contrast she moved to a satirical meditation on suburbia; and in Them (1969) she explored the often brutal lives of the urban poor. Other, later fiction, has shown a continued willingness to experiment with subject and forms. Wonderland (1971), a novel about the gaps between generations, is structured around the stories of Lewis Carroll. Childwold (1976) is a lyrical portrait of the artist as a young woman. Unholy Loves (1979), Solstice (1985), and Maya: A Life (1986) cast a cold eye on the American professional classes. You Must Remember This (1987) commemorates the conspiratorial obsessions of the 1950s; Because it is Bitter, and Because it is My Heart (1991) dramatizes the explosive nature of American race relations. Blonde (2000) is an imaginative rewriting of the life of the movie icon Marilyn Monroe, while My Sister, My Love (2008) reimagines an actual murder case, focusing on how ambitious parents alternately push and ignore their unhappy children. Her fiction is richly various in form and focus; common to most of it, however, including recent works like Missing Mom (2005) and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), is a preoccupation with crisis. She shows people at risk: apparently ordinary characters whose lives are vulnerable to threats from society or their inner selves or, more likely, both. In Oates's much anthologized short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1970), for instance, the central character, Connie, is an all-American girl, fatally at ease with the blandness of her adolescent life. She becomes the helpless victim of a caller, realistically presented yet somehow demonic, whom she mistakes for a friend. Her sense of security, it is intimated, is a dangerous illusion. The stories and novels of Oates are full of such characters. Some, like Connie, find violence erupting from their surroundings; others, frustrated by the barren or grotesque nature of their lives and social circumstances, erupt into violence themselves. With all of them, there is the sense that they are the victims of forces beyond their control or comprehension. Whatever many of them may believe to the contrary, they are dwellers in a dark and destructive element.

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