I've been reading. There's a stack of (wow!) seventeen books ready for review.
I found something more interesting to me... a paper I wrote in 1992 reviewing two of my favorite books by two of my favorite authors.
I reread the two books I read before I wrote the paper, and decided to publish the paper here as my "review."
Two Christian Authors and the End of the World:
Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy Amidst the Ruins
by Kari Hoglund Kounkel
A Senior Project in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
of the Honors Program
THE COLLEGE OF ST. CATHERINE
October 22, 1992
(As written)
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my Project Advisor, Dr. Anne Maloney. Her suggestions for my reading list provided me with stimulating material. I thank her for reading all the drafts and for responding to them very promptly. Her comments and suggestions guided me to this final copy. I thank her especially for her dedication to the Project and especially for offering me inspiration when I was sure I would not be able to finish the Project.
I would like to thank my Project Committee: Dr. Gayle Gaskill, Professor Robert Grunst, and Sr. Margery Smith. They offered excellent comments and suggestions. I thank Dr. Gaskill expecially for her help with the new MLA guidelines. Professor Grunst gave me some very helpful suggestions for the Percy section of the paper. Sr. Margery pointed out that my focus was much too narrow for the multi-cultured world we inhabit. I hope I have incorporated their comments as they intended them.
Finally, I would like to thank my husband for all his support. He was and is a great "single" father, at times taking on in the last few months more than his half of the parental duties so that I could finish this Project.
Twentieth century novelist and essayist Walker Percy opens "The Message in the Bottle" (1975) with a series of rhetorical questtions, a free-ranging menu of nearly plaintive queries:
Why do people feel so bad in the very age when, more than in any other age, they have succeeded in accumuluating the wealth necessary to satisfy their needs and have discovered the technology to make over the world for their own use?Percy opens his essay with these questions because he knows what Flannery O'Connor knows, what the French existentialist Gabriel Marcel knew a half century ago: something has gone terribly wrong in "Christendom" - in the Judeo-Christian west. As Marcel put it,
Why have people entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century when they had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and harmony?
What do people do when they find themselves living after an age has ended and they can no longer understand themselves because the theories of humanity of the former age no longer work and the theories of the new age are not yet known, and so everything is upside down, people feeling bad when they should feel good, good when they should feel bad?
Where does one start with a theory of humankind if the theory of humanity as an organism in an environment does not work and all the attributes of humanity which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: the soul, mind, freedom, Godlikeness, grace, love?
Why is it all but impossible to read Shakespeare in school now but will not be fifty years from now when the Western world has fallen into ruins and a survivor sitting among the vines of the Forty-Second Street library spies a moldering book and opens it to The Tempest?
What is humanity? Entered into a new age, we are like children who see everything in the new world, name everything, know everything except ourselves (Message 3-9, passim).
A broken world? Can we really endorse these words? And are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world had a heart?... Certainly, it would be rash to attempt to put one's finger on some epoch in history when the unity of the world was something directly felt by men in general. But could we feel the division of the world today, or could some of us at least feel it so strongly, if we had not within us... at least the nostalgia of it? (Marcel 22)The contemporary era, yet unnamed, is the most scientifically, economically, and politically advanced era in human history. It follows the age of Christianity in which authors were able to name, and people were able to understand, an event or a problem through a common language and system of beliefs.
Even in bad times, major writers had major roles - like Langland, Chaucer, Milton, Whitman. Because, bad as times were, there was still a concensus of sorts. Symbols signified. A people could be rallied, consoled, entertained, told stories to, or at least affirmed in their unhappiness. A dirge, a lament, even a jeremiad, implies an intact society. (Signposts 156)Percy believes that contemporary society is no longer capable of understanding the symbols, and many modern novelists have already disposed of God, humanity, and the world (Message 104). Contemporary novelists are faced with reinventing symbols and language because they know that contemporary society is no longer whole, that there is no consensus. With no consensus, how can people relate to other people?
As Percy points out, the western world may be more scientifically, economically, and politically advanced, but it is also the most murderous century in human history. "The triumphant secular society of the Western world, the nicest of all worlds, killed more people in the first half of this century than have been killed in all history" (Message 105). As we view the remains of this murderous activity, we talk about how horrible and inexplicable these catastrophes are, but we feel very far removed from the actual events - they do not affect us personally.
Perhaps the violence that shocks so many first time readers of O'Connor's fictions seems so unpalatable because it is so personal. We encounter violence daily, but most often at a distance. O'Connor conteracts the desensitizing effect of remote violence by forcing it upon us in a form we cannot escape... O'Connor pushes her readers to the brink over and over again. "The kingdom of heaven," she writes, "has to be taken by violence or not at all." (Baumgaertner 12-13)Flannery O'Connor suggests that we in the post-Christian West must confront the world's daily violence personally in order for it to end. Her answer, and Walker Percy's answer, is to push us over the edge, to figuratively shoot us in the face with reality, so that we can take the kingdom of heaven. Although these two authors present an answer that is Christian, they both begin with the same problem, the problem stated here: the post-Christian Western world has lost touch with the most meaningful realities - words like "love" and "grace" are harsh realities and we treat them as warm fuzzy blankets that protect us from reality.
Inhabitants of the previous age, the age of Christianity, shared a common experience: people had faith in realities like the soul, mind, freedom, Godlikeness, grace, love. The words they used to describe those realities meant something more than a nice feeling, a warm fuzzy blanket. Contemporary writers, on the other hand, are "writing for an audience for whom the Incarnation ha[s] little meaning, and yet [the] fiction over and over again show[s] common people encountering the terror, mystery, and beauty of the Word made flesh" (15). Without a shared belief in the mystery of Christ, or at least a basic understanding of the person of Christ, people in Christendom no longer have a common set of referents or system of beliefs about what is right and what is wrong, and what is wrong no longer has the power to move us:
It is the century of good times, instant media, large numbers, and telephotos of stacked corpses.This, as Percy will tell us, is the post-Christian age. People living in this era of diversity and subjectivity no longer understand themselves or their place in the world. For the past two thousand years, people have thought of themselves as ensouled creatures under God, and believed salvation rested in the Christian mystery: the entrance of God into human history as Jesus Christ. In this post-Christian age, Christianity no longer provides the answers that people seek because its language is dead. Percy argues that the central tenants of Christianity no longer mean what they did:
The times are actually crazier than this, because it is not as if this were simply another dreadful century like the fourteenth, the century of the Black Death - which everyone knew was a bad time. But what is one to make of a century which is not only the worst but also in some ways the best.
Because it is in some ways the best. The advance of science and technology is little short of miraculous. It is the first time in history that a poor man, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, could free himself from a lifetime of grinding poverty, disease, and early death.
To add to the difficulties of the novelist in such peculiar times is the breakdown of the consensus, of a common language, a shared discourse denoting a common set of referents. (Signposts 157)
So decrepit and so abused is the language of the Judeo-Christian religions that it takes an effort to salvage them, the very words, from the hustks and barnacles of meaning which have encrusted them over the centuries. Or else words can become slick as coins worn thin by usage and so devalued. One of the tasks of the saint is to renew language, to sing a new song. The novelist, no saint, has a humbler task. He must use every ounce of skill, cunning, humor, even irony, to deliver religion from the merely edifying. (Signposts 306)Although the Christian novelist is aware that the contemporary era has problems, these problems are difficult to define because the language and symbols of the former era have no common meaning. The first step to correcting the problem is finding a way to once again make language and symbols have meaning. Two American Christian writes of the twentieth century, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, offer a solution to the problems confronting the contemporary era. They believe we can recreate meaning in human life by recreating meaning in the language and symbols of Christianity. Both authors use the same emphasis and focus. They write about the saving power of Christian grace and Christian love. They each take a slightly different approach though.
O'Connor attempts to make the language of Christianity meaningful by portraying the mysteries of faith in both humorous and grotesque ways. Says Jill Baumgaertner in her book exploring O'Connor's work, "How could prose simultaneously make me laugh and scare me so deeply?" (xiv). O'Connor uses humor to demonstrate the "fundamental meaningless [of language]... once the conventional vision has been thoroughly destroyed, she usually suggests that the experience of shock, horror, or death has stripped her characters of their pretensions and brought them into contact with a fundamental order grounded in divine mystery" (McFarland 17). O'Connor's characters and their activities are distorted - purposefully - because, as she is often credited with saying, for the near-deaf, one must shout (Kennedy 17). O'Connor diagnoses the problem of contemporary society in her short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find.". This work shows what happens when, in a world devoid of value both in what we mean and what we say, people are sometimes brutally confronted with the grace of God.
"Good Man" is about a family of six: the grandmother and her son, Baily; Bailey's wife; their two children, John Wesley and June Star; and their infant. The family is going on their annual vacation. Their destination is Florida. The family stops for lunch, meeting Red Sam, whom the grandmother thinks is a good mand, and his wife. After lunch, the family makes a detour to visit a house from the grandmother's past. While on the detour they have an accident. They think they are being rescued when a hearse-like automobile approaches, but discover that the driver is The Misfit, a psychopath who has just recently escaped from prison. Far from saving the family, he orders their executions. The grandmother converses with The Misfit while her family is executed. They talk about the saving power of Christ and the grandmother offers it to The Misfit. The Misfit, wanting no part of Christianity, shoots the grandmother in the face.
Early in the story, before the family left on their annual holiday, the grandmother had attempted to change Bailey's plans because she wanted to vacation in Tennessee and "visit some of her connections" there (9). She uses a newspaper account of The Misfit's escape as a reason to avoid Florida, saying to her son, "I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did" (9). Her conscience, however, did allow her to use The Misfit's escape for her own purposes in trying to get to Tennessee by "seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind" (9). She does not realize the utter destruction and violence The Misfit is capable of, and so for her, his escape is simply an event to read about in the paper and, if at all possible, to use for her own purposes. O'Connor uses the nice, ladylike, "good" old woman to show us how contemporary Christians behave; the grandmother works very had to appear to be nice and ladylike, but at heart she is selfish and silly. O'Connor says that, like the grandmother, contemporary Christians think of faith as a warm fuzzy blanket, when in reality, true faith is about the brutal, ugly suffering of Christ on the cross.
The morning of the trip, the grandmother is the first one in the car with her hidden cat, Pitty Sing. The grandmother is meticulously attired in a "navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet" (11). Her careful attention to detail in dress is her guarantee that "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady" (11). The grandmother wanted to be thought a "good" woman at all costs. She would define herself as a good woman; she has genteel manners and is nice in a polite, law-abiding way: "She fancies that gentility and refinement can save her soul" (Drake 24). Her mistake is in thinking that outward appearances and platitudes sufficiently portray her as such.
At lunchtime, the family stops and meets Red Sam. The grandmother thinks Red Sam is a "good man" because he gives gas on credit to boys who "looked all right to [him]" (15). The grandmother tells Red Sam that he gave out the gas, "Because you're a good man!" (15). Her comment is loaded with irony; Red Sam is not generous or kind in his interaction with his wife. He tells his wife, "to quit lounging on the counter and hurry up with these people's order" (15) while he sits and converses with the grandmother. He talks about criminals, but when his wife attempts to join the conversation, he sends her out of the room with an abrupt and harsh, "That'll do" (16). A man who treats his wife with such a lack of generosity is clearly not a good man. The entire exchange between the grandmother and Red Sam is empty and meaningless, but their words "underscore the main themes of the story; the fact that the world is, indeed, out of joint, and the question of what consitutes a good man (or a good woman)" (McFarland 18). The conversation leans heavily on the grandmother's conviction that she herself can easily identify what makes a person good or not.
As evidence that she is not truly good, the grandmother manipulates her family, first while reading the news report about The Misfit, but also during the trip. She is more successful the second time than she was the first time when she tried to convince Bailey to go to Tennessee. When the grandmother wants to see the house from her past, and she knows "Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house" (Good Man 16). She enlists the aid of the children by lying to them, knowing that her son will bow to the loud demands of the spoiled children. "'There was a secret panel in this house,' she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing she were" (16-17). John Wesley and June Star yell and kick until Bailey says, "All right,... but get this: This is the only time we're going to sop for anything like this. This is the one and only time" (17). The grandmother directs Bailey to the turn off for the house. Her careful manipulation of her son and his children reveals a nature that is ultimately not good.
What follows is one of O'Connor's most comic and, in light of succeeding events, tragic scenes:
"It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder.
The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat - gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose - clinging to his neck like a caterpillar.The grandmother's genteel comment following the accident, "I believe I have injured an organ" (20) is not only her attempt to avoid Bailey's wrath, but also her attempt to maintain her identity as a lady since her disheveled appearance no longer does: "her hat still pinned to her head [with] the broken front brim standing up at a jaunty angle and the violet spray hanging off to the side" (19). Lacking a genteel, ladylike appearance, all she has left is her ladylike speech and manners. The grandmother's notion that a good outward appearance is the sole definition of a good person is an important theme in O'Connor's story. The theme gives the reader a sense for what has gone wrong in the contemporary world. The grandmother seeks goodness - albeit, her superficial style of goodness - in people, and thinks herself a good woman, while she repeatedly manipulates her family for selfish purposes. Caught in her own superficiality, she wrings her hands over the violence in the distant outside world, but the violence is essentially meaningless until she is confronted with it when it comes calling in the person of The Misfit. O'Connor teaches that it is not enough to give voice to the language of Christianity; we must embrace Christianty and value what it teaches us to value.
As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee. (18-19)As The Misfit steps out of his hearse-like automobile, the grandmother immediately recognizes him:
The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she'd known him all her life...Earlier, while angling for her trip to visit her connections in Tennessee, the grandmother had told Bailey that she could not answer to her conscience if she took her children within The Misfit's reach, yet it is her very scheming that brings her family - her son - into the presence of The Misfit. The grandmother is also the only one to recognize The Misfit. He tells her, "it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me" (22). Her initial recognition of his identity seals the family's death warrant; her later recognition of him as a fellow human being - a fellow sufferer - seals her death warrant.
The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring, "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!" (21-22)
The grandmother is completely unprepared for her meeting with The Misfit... with evil... with death. O'Connor says the grandmother "is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely" (Mystery 110). As she pleads for her life, The Misfit carries on a civilized conversation as he calmly, almost absently, orders the murders of first Bailey and John Wesley, and then those of the mother, infant, and June Star.
According ot the grandmother's criteria, The Misfit seems to the "good man" of the story. He knows the social rules and is acutely conscious of and embarrassed by his lack of shirt, telling them, "I'm sorry I don't have on a shirt before you ladies" (Good Man 24). The description of him suggests a distinguished, scholarly looking gentleman: "He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-timmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look" (21). He looks and speaks like a good, nice man, as he...
demolishes conventional order, and the terror he creates is all the more chilling because he retains the forms of polite behavior in the midst of the most inhuman acts. His actions demonstrate a complete lack of essential connection between conventional behavior and some fundamental standard of good and evil that is assumed to lie behind it. (McFarland 19)Without a standard of good and evil, The Misfit has no basis upon which to build order in his life, so he chooses to seek pleasure by indulging himself, taking whatever he wishes to have, including the lives of fellow human beings.
The Misfit knows and uses the language of Christianity better than does the grandmother. O'Connor reveals that at some point The Misfit had been active in the church as a gospel singer. His problem with Christianity is that he cannot reconcile Christ's suffering on the cross with the form of Christianity practiced by people like the grandmother - the hypocrites. As the grandmother pleads for her own life, she does little more than pay lip service to the saving grace of God. She tells The Misfit, "If you would pray... Jesus would help you" (26), yet her pleas are not to Jesus, but to The Misfit: "I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady" (28). When she does call the name of the Lord "the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing" (27). The Misfit's responses to the grandmother's pleading suggests that he has done a considerable amount of thinking about what it is that Christianity has to offer:
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead... and he shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can - by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness. (28)The Misfit knows how high the stakes are, that real faith is not for the faint of heart. Real faith is throwing down everything and following Christ. He deliberately chooses not to accept the grandmother's prooffered grace and a possible connection to humanity through her because he thinks Christians are hypocritical. He knows that if being a Christian is being like the grandmother, he wants no part of it. It is ironic that it is The Misfit who is first "endowed with a greater religious sense than [the grandmother], indeed he sees the world-shaking importance of Jesus' intervention in human history, and that one's central choice in life is to follow Him or to pay the hellish price" (Salter 35). The grandmother only comes to realize the harsh reality of grace in the moments before her death. Ultimately, Jesus works through her; The Misfit needs to accept the grandmother and God's saving grace. The Misfit's rejection of the grandmother, and through her, of Christ, condemns him to pay the hellish price - and to continue his endless pleasure-seeking lifestyle.
Having already chosen to reject the grace of God, The Misfit recoils from the grandmother when she reaches to touch him, and shoots her three times. The "climactic killing of the grandmother who offers forgiveness and love symbolizes the crucifixion and the refusal of grace... The Misfit knows that he has to choose between God and himself as lord" (Eggenschwiler 46-47); he chooses himself. Had he chosen God, he would have been able to become a man of profound faith, a good man, because he would have been compelled to throw away everything to follow Christ. Having said "no" to God because, in a world inhabited by people like the grandmother he could not be sure Christ did what He said He did, the absence of grace means he can never be a good man. He thinks the only way to enjoy his life is by taking pleasure "by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meaness to him" (Good Man 28). Yet his murder of the grandmother gives him no real pleasure; after The Misfit shoots the grandmother, he says, "It's no real pleasure in life" (29). He continually looks for but cannot find satisfaction in his chosen life because he has no basis for order or meaning in life.
Confronted with and realizing his need for truth and order even as he threatens to shoot her in the face, the grandmother reaches out to him offering love and forgiveness. In reaching out, the grandmother is transformed into a true Christian - she offers charity and love as she recognizes The Misfit's need:
The grandmother is at last alone, facing The Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture. (Mystery 111-112)For the first time, the grandmother clearly sees and reacts to someone else's need; even after the accident, seeing her daughter-in-law with a broken left arm, the grandmother has no reaction as she's trying to find ways to avoid Bailey's anger. In reaching out The Misfit she offers to share his suffering and the harsh reality of God's grace which has been bestowed upon her by God. "[T]o be truly human - to be a 'good man' - it to accept one's mortality and one's solidarity with all human suffering" (McFarland 22). The Misfit rejects the grandmother, Christ, and his place as a member of the human family. He is so afraid of the grace he recognizes her offering him, he shoots her in the face.
The grandmother realizes what Christianity has to offer when she sees, with blinding clarity and through the grace of God, that The Misfit is one of her own babies, one of her children, a fellow sufferer. She had recognized him as hers at first glance: "his face was as familiar to her as if she'd known him all her life" (21). Just before her death, the grandmother recognizes in The Misfit the kindred desire to belong to the human family. "Long dismissed as foolish by her only son, Bailey, and his family, the grandmother senses that she, too, has been a misfit... She loves The Misfit because she has discovered their common lonliness" (Salter 35). She desires love and respect, not forthcoming from her family and hard to find anywhere else.
The final image of the grandmother is one of a woman who has chosen the grace of God: "Hiram and Bobby Lee returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky." (29). In this final image of the Grandmother,
... there are faint suggestions of the Crucifixion as the grandmother lies [dead]. From The Misfit's point of view, the association between the old lady and Christ is emphatic: he recoils from her touch and forgiveness because it challenges the obsessive defiance of God he strains to preserve; he kills her as another rejection of Jesus. From an objective point of view, her illumination is a natural sign of grace; such love, like faith and hope, is possible only through God's mercy. (Eggenschwiler 92)O'Connor makes clear that grace is absent from The Misfit's life not because God did not offer it, but because The Misfit has rejected it. He desires sure knowledge that Christ raised the dead: "I wisht I had of been there... It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady... if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now" (Good Man 29).
O'Connor wrote often of grace and its function in human lives. In her collected letters, The Habit of Being, she writes,
Grace, to the Catholic way of thinking, can and does use as its medium the imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical. Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, requiring a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul. The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes through the old lady when she recognizes him as her child, as she has been touched by the Grace that comes through him in his particular suffering. (Grimshaw 5)The grandmother only sees her Christian relationship to The Misfit as he threatens to shoot her in the face. The Misfit remarks, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (Good Man 29). Though The Misfit denies the saving grace and Christ, he is the channel of God's grace for the grandmother. In her final moments, she sees for the first time that grace in its true form is not for the faint of heart. In the closing paragraphs of her story, O'Connor makes her point: if our Christian language, a language of values, is to mean anything, someone has to figuratively shoot us in the face, push us to the edge of grace. Then we will find a way to make our words and symbols have meaning again, to make them worth dying for, but more importantly, to make them worth living for.
To Be Continued...
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