Giannone performs close readings of O’Connor’s work through the
lens of the ascetic experience. Beginning with Wise Blood, he works his way through her fiction and nonfiction and
considers her work in light of the teachings of the fourth century Christian
hermits who followed in the tradition of the eremitic Anthony the Great.
He reads the stories in A
Good Man is Hard to Find in two eremitic modes: stories such as the title
one which take place in a desert environment, where the barrenness of the
wilderness allows for a transformative encounter with the demonic; and stories
such as “A Circle in the Fire,” where a forced encounter with the void (through
her loss of property through fire—a fire instigated by her dwelling in a “dry
place”) provides an opportunity for the Mrs. Cope to experience the “freedom
that follows detachment” (79). I am particularly intrigued by his reading of “Good
Country People,” which is an extended reading of what he characterizes as Hulga’s
“perverse asceticism.” Giannone observes that, “Hulga Hopewell is an outcast
living in a desert; and she is at war, not against her besetting demons but
against her body and life. Anger is the trajectory of her desert life. Wrath
seals her alienation and sustains the
momentum of her willful battle”(80). He describes her as having a “temperamental
lopsidedness that is far more pronounced that the hobble made by her artificial
leg” (80).
I’m also interested in his observation that “Hulga’s passion
implicates her in the age’s wrath. In making ire the ground of her intellectual
integrity, she shares in the belief that anger is a sign of strength and a
vehicle of truth. Frightening when multiplied en masse, as it has been this
century, anger in Hulga is also funny and delights the reader in the teeth of
larger meanings. And it is those wider consequences (gas chambers and racism,
for example) that O’Connor repeatedly invokes to make us understand, as Hulga
does not, that anger is chilling and destructive” (82). I think this is related
to my larger argument about why punk musicians find so much of O’Connor’s work
appealing, even as they miss her larger point about the significance of this
anger: she paints this picture so well that they ignore the second half of her
statements. Giannone observes that “The lesson to be learned is that demons are
not to be played with but cast out” (85): for those who identify with the
demons, however, there is certainly a powerful portrait painted here. Also, it
isn’t all nihilistic punk singers who are attracted to her work. Certainly, U2’s
The Joshua Tree reflects a similar eremitic
impulse in art; I might even try to draw a line between O’Connor and Howard
Finster in their approach toward the religious impulse and the South and art.
Does this explain the primitivist impulse, then?
I disagree with his characterization of Hulga, however, that “most
readers understandably come away from ‘Good Country People’ with the judgment
of Hulga as a dumb blonde with a Ph.D. whose dreamy sexuality ends up pathetic before
Pointer’s refined fetishism” (83). I apparently take a much more sympathetic
view of Hulga (and I’m not sure that she’s blonde). I am interested, however,
in his observation that “Hulga’s erotic desire is a demonic as Pointer’s. For
both, the sexual game is about contempt and mutilation” (83). There’s a lot to
unpack there—and not just that he refers to Hulga by her first name and Manley
by his last. His contention that “The intellectual removes the body; the rake dispenses
with the spirit” is intriguing (84).
This perspective allows him an interesting reading of The Violent Bear It Away: “Whereas the
clinician Walker Percy diagnosed the institutionalizing of death as the
thanatos syndrome, and the cultural observer Don DeLillo later saw the proliferating
technologies swell into a cult of death, the ascetic O’Connor defined the
malady as an inner extinguishment. For the hermit novelist, the vortex of
political and psychological turmoil is the inborn center of the person, of the
spirit” (149). One of the most important aspects of Giannone’s study is his
point that O’Connor’s characters lack any “lofty spiritual aims.” Rather, “Her solitaries
never lose contact with the world. They seek no strange contemplative powers.
Their gift is to recover in ordinary human life the essential self that
provides a relation with God” (238)—and it is in the very ordinariness of her
characters that a great deal of her force resides.
