Flannery O’Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge

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When Julian Chestny, college grad in Flannery O’ Connor’s “Everything That  Rises Must Converge”, states that “he is not dominated by his mother”, the reader already has enough information to think “yeah right”.  The tension between mother and son is apparent in their discussion as they board a city bus so she can take an exercise class at “the Y”.

While the contentions between them are numerous, the one that rears it’s ugly head on the bus ride is racism.  The story takes place just as city buses in the South are becoming integrated.  Keep in mind, though, that this is Flannery O’Connor and I’ve found that it’s not uncommon to find myself laughing hysterically at situations that are also very disturbing.  As several African-American  passengers board the bus, a scene of musical chairs (or seats, rather) plays out as well as anything in a Marx Brothers movie.   It amazes me how brilliant physical comedy can be written in a book.

Julian’s mother says that it is fine for “them” to rise as long as they “stay on their side of the fence”.  That is the closest to the story’s title being mentioned, but a convergence does occur.  Some may want to mistake O’ Connor’s political incorrectness for outright racism.  I would point them to the end of this story as proof otherwise.  I highly recommend this story!

My Deal Me In 2014 list can be seen here.  DMI is sponsored by Jay at Bibliophilopolis.

 

The Violent Bear It Away

Last week, I was sitting at my kitchen table eating breakfast getting in a couple of pages of The Violent Bear It Away when Rayber, the schoolteacher in the novel, flashes back to his attempt to commit an horrific act of violence toward his idiot son.  Thinking about it for the rest of the day, it was a reminder that Flannery O’Connor is not for the faint of heart.  She’s not for the politically correct, either.

Prior to the flashback, Rayber muses about his feelings for his son, Bishop:

He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt.  The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love.  Anything he looked at too long could bring it on.  Bishop did not have to be around.  It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk.  If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him – powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise.  It was completely irrational and abnormal.

In O’Connor’s world, one human being can encompass the capacity for incredible love and intense hatred.

In her world, the bushes burn and the crazy become prophets.

In her world, an old man can lay in his handmade coffin telling his grand-nephew how to bury him – making the scene morbid and funny.

Yeah, that’s O’Connor’s world: morbid and funny.

I wish she had been able to write more.

 

Classics Club: Favorite Literary Period

The monthly meme question at The Classics Club for March happens to be the question I submitted so I thought I would take a stab at answering it:

What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?

It’s not difficult for me to pick my favorite literary period.  In coming up with a list of my favorite books, by and large, they fall into the category of “Early Twentieth Century”.  Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack London always come to mind when determining favorites, as do J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesteron, Evelyn Waugh and John Steinbeck.  Recently, I’ve discovered Willa Cather and Edith Wharton – while Cather could be included in favorites, the jury is still out with Wharton.   And I can’t forget Margaret Mitchell and her one great novel.

I don’t know who decides which years “Early Twentieth Century” encompasses but I would ask to be allowed to include J. D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut and Flannery O’Connor in this period, as well as James Baldwin, whom I just read for the first time last week.  These authors all published something in the 1940’s and/or 1950’s which I will still include as “Early” even though several of them continued publishing into the “Later Twentieth Century” and in some cases into the “Twenty First Century”.

Why is this time period my favorite?  That’s the more difficult part of the question to answer.  In some respect, it’s simply that these were the authors I read when I first discovered literature during the summer before 10th grade.  They were the first authors I read when I discovered that there was something more to reading than just an exciting plot – that there was something about the words chosen and the way they were put together.  But one could learn this with any literary time period.

I think another reason would be that from my historical perspective, the “Early Twentieth Century” is on the edge of the old and the new.  It’s far enough in the past to be intriguing but yet close enough to the present to see direct connections and influences to the world in which I live.

Just curious, do you have a favorite literary period?

Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood

In Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor takes the reader on a comically spiritual ride through the wreckage and muck of humanity- throwing in a gorilla suit for good measure.   She holds up a sign for American Christianity that says “Welcome to the Freak Show” – or at least it seems that way on the surface.  I sense she has a deeper meaning buried somewhere underneath everything.  A small introduction by the author in my edition reveals a few clues.

O’Connor’s protagonist, Hazel Motes, reminds me of something C. S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy.  As a young man, Lewis decided that God did not exist and he promptly became angry at God for not existing.  Motes strikes me as just such an angry young man.  He appoints himself preacher of the Church Without Christ and preaches on the hood of his Essex in front of movie theaters that his church has the better way: forget Jesus.  For Motes, Jesus is a “wragged figure swinging from tree to tree” and while Hazel promotes blasphemy as a better life, he can’t seem to shake the idea that he needs to pay some sort of penance – for something.  Guilt just doesn’t flee that easily.

Various secondary characters wander across Motes’ path.  Enoch Emery consistently proved to be my favorite.  An 18 year-old working at a zoo with a circus-like museum, Enoch chases a few women, drinks a few chocolate malts at a few drugstore counters and has a life change half-way through the novel.  While this change doesn’t get fleshed out in great detail, O’Connor manages to convey enough of Enoch’s change through his endeavor to polish his bed frame until he could see the gold.

Motes’ landlady, Mrs. Flood, enters the scene at the end of the story.  An older woman who eventually takes pity on Motes, in spite of her general lack of compassion, gives a running commentary on Motes.  The kind of commentary the reader has yet to encounter.  Pulling Mrs. Flood out of the blue would have ruined or at least bogged down another story but O’Connor pulls it off brilliantly.

I’m finding that Flannery O’Connor’s stories are almost always funny but almost never fun. I’ll be mulling this novel over in my mind for quite a while.  Did I mention the gorilla suit?

A Good Man Is Hard To Find: the rest of the stories

When the profane and the beautiful collide, you get a Flannery O’Connor story.  When human depravity is depicted in all it’s “glory”, you get another one.  And then if you read real closely and carefully, you find a small flicker of hope, of grace, of mercy, of redemption – but then you realize you found it in a story with a racial slur in the title.

I finished reading O’Connor’s short story collection A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories.  I posted about the first four here.  As a whole, I would say that her stories took my breath away, but it’s really more like they knocked the wind out of me.  I couldn’t help but laugh when Joy (she renamed herself Hulga), the female atheist with a Ph.D in philosophy and a wooden leg, meets up with a Bible salesman.  I wasn’t sure who would swindle who, but I wasn’t counting on what actually happened.  In another story, an ancient Civil War veteran appears at a movie premier in Atlanta.  O’Connor never reveals the movie, but I did the math and it could very well have been the premier of “Gone With The Wind”.  At another point, boys who could have been so innocent infest a farmhouse like cockroaches while a hired hand simply states “You can’t do a thing about it.”

After I finished it, I realized the collection ends in much the same way it began.  Whether it’s The Misfit or The Displaced Person, everyone in O’Connor’s stories seems to be a little (or a lot) out of sync.  Every once in a while, Jesus comes along and “throws everything out of balance”.

Summer Reading Plans

It may not  be officially summer, but with Memorial Day weekend behind us, I started thinking of what I will potentially be reading for the next few months.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick has taken me longer than I had planned.  I am on page 506 out of 536.  Look for a final post within the next few days.

Non-fiction tends to always be a little scarce on my reading list so I am going to start out the summer with two non-fiction titles that I’ve wanted to read for a while.  One of them is Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.  Over the last year, this title seems to pop up frequently.  As I’ve heard that Cain’s focus tends to be introverts in the business world, I’m very curious about what she has to say.

The other non-fiction title I have on my list is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.  This book is perhaps the book that has been recommended to me the most that I still have not read.  I also thought it would coincide well with our family vacation to Philadelphia and New York City in about a week.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

It’s also time for my third annual summertime Heinlein/Hemingway match-up.  I started this tradition inadvertently during the summer of 2011 prior to blogging.  A friend of mine recommended Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and my then book club The Indy Reading Coalition had selected Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as our book for June of that year.  I didn’t think anything of it until last summer (2012) when I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land just before rereading Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls.  It was then that I decided to do the same thing this summer.  My plan is to read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and reread Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.  I’m looking forward to both of them.

I also want to finish Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and read Kurt Vonnegut’s collection Welcome to the Monkeyhouse.  

I could possibly throw in a newer book such as Khaled Hosseini’s And The Mountain’s Echoed.  I enjoyed his novel The Kite Runner a number of years ago.  I want to at least read one of Salman Rushdie’s novels this year.  The summer might be a good time to do that.  Midnight’s Children is the one I’ve got my eye on.

As usual, the best-laid reading plans can change in an instant, if a different book catches my interest.  We’ll see how the summer plays out.  How about you?  What are your plans for reading this summer?

Four from Flannery O’Connor

Occasionally I hear the expression “better angels of our nature”.  When I read Flannery O’Connor’s stories, I think of that expression – not because it represents her characters and plots but because she seems to write about characters and situations that reflect the EXACT OPPOSITE of this phrase.

I finished reading the first four stories in her well-known collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories.  Her characters are not necessarily likable, but I couldn’t help but get drawn into their thoughts and feelings.

I had read the title story prior to now and remembered the chilling ending.  Knowing how the story ended made everything about the rest of the story a foreshadowing of what would happen – which made the ending even more chilling.  Feeling both sympathy and anger for the grandmother during her continuous yammering made the story unsettling.  I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the Misfit criminal’s own yammering about how Jesus “threw everything out of balance”.  I’ve realized that O’Connor uses a significant amount of Christian imagery in her writing but these are by no means your typical Sunday School stories.  While I was reading “A Good Man is Hard To Find” , I kept thinking that Joel and Ethan Coen could probably make a great film version.

“The River” continues with more religious ideas as a small boy gets taken by his babysitter to be baptized.  O’Connor weaves themes of blind faith and reasonable doubt into the preacher and the crowd that the boy encounters at the river.  The ending was not unexpected as the boy takes the preacher’s religious language literally with some unpleasant results.

I couldn’t help but like Lucynell, the old woman and Mr. Shiftlet, the vagrant worker in spite of what they did to Lucynell, the daughter, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”.  As the story progressed, I’d ask myself “Why would I like these people?”  Maybe O’Connor wants readers to ask that question?

I think one of the longest climbs up a flight of stairs occurred in “A Stroke of Good Fortune” .  Thirty-four year-old Ruby, while she climbs the steps, lets the reader know about her younger brother, Rufus, returning from war, her husband, Bill Hill (I liked that name), and Madame Zoleeta, who has predicted her physical ailment will end in “a stroke of good fortune”.  The reader never fully understands Ruby’s problem; however, several physical conditions are thrown around.  By the time Ruby gets to the top of the steps she is rather winded – and so is the reader.

Of these four, I believe the title story was my favorite.  I’m looking forward to reading more of Flannery O’Connor’s stories in the near future.  Have you ever read any of her stories or novels?  What are your thoughts?  What was your favorite?