"All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical. . .Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers with certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority--if not all--of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create 'the real.'" alain robbe-grillet(Translation by Richard Howard)
every 10 years or so, someone "rediscovers" flannery o'connor. for the most part, all this really does is clarify just how undiscovered she still is. this was one tough cranky broad who responded to mary mccarty's equivocating "the eucharist is a symbol" comment by declaring, "if it's it symbol, it can go to hell." she meant it literally too. being a devout catholic, she very much believed in hell but, more importantly, she believed the sacrament of communion was all about transubstantiation, the flesh & blood of christ made real. this wasn't about symbols. it was about a fundamental belief system. flannery believed.
of course, she suffered for her beliefs. it's never been clear to me why a jewish writer, say, philp roth, can explore the various eccentricities of modern jewishness & be praised while flannery's work, say, "wise blood," that tremendously powerful novel can be described as "a work of insanity, the writer is insane" by no less of a respected reviewer than robert giroux, who actually was her initial editor. i think the issue here has to do w/a real & true belief in something. roth is a jew because he was born a jew. flannery is a true-believing catholic by choice.
that choice directly leads into her savage portrayal of her fellow southerners:
"whenever i'm asked why southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, i say it's because we are still able to recognize one. "
for flannery, anyone w/o christ is a freak & their behavior proves it. she's not kidding around. she truly believes what she says & that makes for problems in interpretation. her hard stance towards the modern world seems to be resistant to critics. they want to label her a "caricaturist" or an outlandish comedienne. they fail to consider what her aesthetic might be writing from her specific point of view & how true she is to that aesthetic & how "alive" the fiction produced is. this is not to try an insinuate the old "intentional fallacy" into the argument here.
most of her stories consider & present a non-believer possessed by some specific heresy. for example, in the story, "parker's back", parker's wife's flaw ends up being her dogged adherence to the "literalist fallacy": "no man shall see his face,"(god's &/or jesus') she keeps screaming at parker, who HAS seen his face & been reborn into a life of rejected prophesy. her one true moment of salvation isn't realized. nothing in the story is unbelievable or exaggerated. any comedic or grotesque elements are real & organic to the story. the fact that so many critics have missed this is a real crime.
below are two interesting versions of perhaps the same event. the first is from the only man thought to have kissed flannery. the second is from flannery's story, "good country people." i like to think of the first as her clueless critics & the second as her art's response to them.
"The first, perhaps, and last, perhaps, kiss she received from a man was in 1954. The man was Erik Langkjaer, a young and handsome college textbook salesman who described the event thusly: “As our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped. . . . I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.”
"The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind's control."
how could i not lust for this woman???
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