Richard Giannone. Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist. Urbana: Illinois UP, 2000.

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.

Flannery O'Connor--A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

A Good Man is Hard to Find is O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, which followed her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952.  This collection includes both “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” two of my favorite of her stories.  Its stories contain over references to what O’Connor referred to as the “Christ-haunted South,” such as the story “A River, in which a young white boy is taken to a river baptism by his babysitter Mrs. Connin.  The childish point of view in “A River” provides a sardonic and yet tragic take on charismatic religion, as the boy finds Mrs. Connin’s religious ceremony quite educational: “He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.  Before he had thought it had been a doctor named Sladewall, a fat man with a yellow mustache who gave him shots and thought his name was Herbert, but this must have been a joke….If he had thought about it before today, he would have thought Jesus Christ was a word like “oh” or “dam” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime” (160).  He is so inspired by the baptism that he finds his way back to the river to baptize himself, and the story ends with him being carried downstream alone.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” one-armed Mr. Tom T. Shiftlet from Tarwater, Tennessee, appears at the home of Lucynell Crater and her deaf adolescent daughter by the same name.  The one-armed man fixes things around their home, works on their dead car, and teaches the deaf girl to say words.  The mother arranges Mr. Shiftlet’s marriage to the daughter, negotiating a price for the Shiftlet to take her daughter, throwing in the car and the farm.  After their marriage at the courthouse, Shiftlet abandons the girl at a diner on their alleged honeymoon in a strange, short story which reverberates with the male abandonment in “Good Country People.” 

Several stories make reference to the effects of war, particularly WWII.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby deal with her shiftless brother Rufus, back from but seemingly unchanged by the European Theater.  In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby, like Shiftlet, contemplates the possibility of life without a heart as she denies her actual state of pregnancy.  The two women in “A Circle in the Fire” cite the atrocities in Europe as things to be grateful for are happening at a distance.  “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” follows General Sash, 104-year-old veteran whose appearance in his military regalia makes him a symbol of “old traditions!  Dignity! Honor! Courage!” (253).  The General was not actually a general, but a soldier in the Civil War, and has no memory of that, losing a son in the Spanish-American War, or other history than receiving his uniform twelve years ago for the premiere of Gone with the Wind.  And in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre struggles to cope with the changes wrought by the arrival of refugees from Poland.  She is able to adapt only to a certain extent, however; while she tolerates the idea of locals marrying Polish people in order to bring them over, when the displaced people try to marry local black people, a line is crossed.  She watches Mr. Guizac, the Polish man who attempts to arrange this marriage, be run over by a tractor, and fails to alert anyone to the accident before it happens. 

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” has an interesting vision of female ugliness:

All week end the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Tow, shaking with laughter and getting so read and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway.  They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses.  They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look a their legs. (197)

These girls are described as boycrazy morons, so once again, ugliness is a marker of female sexuality.  Although this is the judgment of the twelve-year-old narrator, she, too, is described as ugly, though more in her behavior than in her appearance.  After the cook asks why she must be so ugly all of the time, she connects her ugliness to her being too smart for her own good (203).  In this story, the older girls ridicule the notion of their bodies as “temples of the holy ghost” as their convent teachers insist; the narrator, on the other hand, in her interest in becoming a saint, contemplates her own body’s abilities to be an actual temple in her pursuit of sainthood.

“The Artificial Nigger,” like many of the stories in this collection, depicts country people unable to handle modernity.  Mr. Head, from a rural area of Georgia where they’ve run all of the black people out, takes his grandson Nelson to Atlanta in an attempt to introduce Nelson to the wonders of the big city.  They are so out of their element, however, that they become lost and desperate.  Nelson’s life in the country has been so sheltered that he has never seen a person of color, and he is overwhelmed by the black people he encounters in Atlanta.  At the end of the story, they see what to the reader is an offensive stereotype statue of a black man eating watermelon.  However, to Mr. Head and Nelson, this statue is terrifying; as Mr. Head notes, “They ain’t got enough real ones here.  They got to have an artificial one” (230).

Throughout these stories, themes of rural people who have trouble adapting to a changing world repeat.  The cultural clashes are often race-based (as “The Displaced Person” reveals, such race-based conflicts are not always Caucasian versus African-American), and the conflicts usually have extreme, grotesque results.  Certainly, there is a strong threat of dark humor which runs throughout, but it is a usually tied to the grotesque in some way.

Ellen Glasgow--Heroes and Monsters (1935)

            It is in this article that Glasgow is credited with coining the term “Southern Gothic”: I am not asking the novelist of the Southern Gothic school to change his material.  The Gothic as Gothic, not as pseudo-realism, has an important place in our fiction….All I ask him to do is to deal as honestly with living tissues as he now deals with decay, to remind himself that the colors of putrescence have no greater validity or our age, or for any other age, than have…the cardinal virtues” (4).  After decrying the previous “evasive idealism” from thirty years ago, in this article she decries the “aimless violence” of the current literature.  Glasgow says, “For all the weeds that grow and run wild in Southern soil, plain truth is the most difficult to serve without sauce” (3).  Discussing the contemporary Southern novel, which she describes as “the inflamed rabble of impulses in the contemporary Southern novel” (3).  To Glasgow, the modern age is recovering from its loss of superstitions.  Unable to fully recover, “the fantasy of abominations has stolen the proud stilts of the romantics” (3).  Glasgow is unhappy about this state of literature: “the literature that crawls too long in the mire will lose at last the power of standing erect.  On the farther side of deterioration lies the death of a culture” (4). 

            It was only one year later that Welty’s first short story, “Death of a Travelling Salesman,” was published, and her Curtain of Green collection came out in 1941.  At this point, Faulkner had published Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932).  It’s interesting to compare Glasgow’s decrial of the gothic in the mid-1930s with O’Connor’s embrace of the grotesque twenty years later in “The Grotesque in Fiction” and “The Fiction Writer and his Country.”  To O’Connor, her commitment to Christian orthodoxy made her more respectful of mystery; as such, everywhere she looked she saw “distortion.”  As what she thought of as distortions she assumed others saw as reality, so she felt it necessary to turn up the volume on the stories she told.  So, while Glasgow worries that the abominations of contemporary literature will cause cultural decay, O’Connor sees the portrayal of the grotesque as a moral imperative.

Flannery O'Connor--Wise Blood

Hazel Motes returns from the war (with an unnamed injury, something that the war had done to his insides, earning him a pension check every month) and anoints himself preacher in the Church of Christ without Christ.  He encounters the Hawkses, a man and his adolescent daughter who are sidewalk evangelists who use Mr. Hawks’s blindness to stir up support.  However, though their story relies upon Hawks’s self-immolation—blinding himself with lime—as their show of grand faith, it is revealed that Hawks lacked the courage to actually blind himself, and can actually see.  As the Hawkses are introduced alongside a street vendor hawking potato peelers, from the beginning their religious faith is suspect.

Hazel becomes obsessed with the Hawkses, however, and sets out to preach his own Church of Christ Without Christ as a way of making an impression on the alleged blind man.  He intends to seduce his daughter, Sabbath Hawks, and win believers to his Church in order to impress Hawks.  Unbeknownst to him, fifteen-year-old Sabbath Hawks has her eye on him as well, seeing him as her ticket out of life as a street evangelist with her father. Haze wants to seduce Sabbath as a way of confirming his own sin.  Sin and self-immolation for sin are the ways in which Haze confirms his identity: when asked why he rejects Jesus, for example, he says, “‘What do I need with Jesus?  I got Leora Watts” (31) (Leora Watts being the woman with the friendliest bed in town whom he first beds after his arrival). 

Along with Sabbath, Haze also attracts the attention of Enoch Emery, a young man new to the big city who claims to possess “wise blood,” a gift from God which he thinks directs him toward his destiny.  Enoch has been rejected by everyone he has encountered, and tries to attach himself to Haze.  Haze originally shows interest in Enoch, but only because Enoch claims to know the Hawkses.  Enoch, however, feels that his blood is drawing him to Haze and his new jesus; in fact, he steals a mummy from a natural history museum and delivers it to Haze (via Sabbath) in order to be Haze’s new jesus.  While Sabbath is shown with the mummy in an image of a grotesque pieta, Haze refuses the mummy and destroys it.  Enoch’s one positive encounter with another ends up being with a man in a gorilla suit promoting a movie.  This leads him to attack the man in the suit, steal the costume, and run away into the woods in the costume, happier than he has ever been.

Haze continues his evangelism of his Christless church and his own self-immolation from the hood of his Essex automobile, a key element of his ministry.  As he says in his preaching, "Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.  Where is there a place for you to be?  No place” (93).  However, he encounters competition from another would-be evangelical charlatan in the form of Onnie Jay Holy (real name Hoover Shoats); after he refuses Shoats’s offer to team up, Shoats recruits his own “prophet” who bears a striking resemblance to Haze.  Haze chases down this prophet and runs him over with his car, killing him.  Shortly after this, he is caught driving without a license by a police officer who pushes his car off of an embankment. 

After losing his car, Haze succeeds in blinding himself with lime.  His landlady, Mrs. Flood, takes advantage of his weakness to siphon off as much of his pension money as she can while he is such a vulnerable state.  However, she does eventually push him too far, demanding that he marry her, and he leaves, only to be found near death in a ditch by police.  They return him to Mrs. Flood and he dies.

            While I do adore this novel, it seems like it can’t decide whether it wants to be a short story or a novel.  It might have worked better as a collection of stories, some sort of Go Down, Moses, or Winesberg, Ohio, collection.  O'Connor truly is a master of the short story form, which is apparent in this novel.  As it is, the stories of Haze, Enoch, and the Hawkses don’t quite align in a satisfactory manner.  Although, the asymmetry of their stories and the lack of a satisfactory closure may be part of the point. 

Despite this, however, it is a fascinating meditation and exploration of the meaning of faith and sin and “justification.”  Reading it this time, I was struck by how important gender is in the novel and its understanding of faith.  As I was paying extra attention to the symbolism of the car in this reading (I’m writing a paper about the novel in conjunction with the industrial song “Jesus Built My Hotrod” by the industrial band Ministry, which samples dialogue from the movie version of the novel), it struck me as a very gendered symbol in the novel.  I think that at least part of Haze’s pursuit of a Church of Christ Without Christ is a pursuit of a masculine faith: as Haze puts it, “‘I believe in a new kind of jesus,’ he said, ‘one that can’t waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he’s all man and ain’t got any God in him.  My church is the Church Without Christ” (69).  Haze says this as he’s rejecting Sabbath’s offer of Christian salvation; I read this rejection as specifically rejecting a nurturing, feminine Christianity represented by Sabbath (and, in fact, all of the women in the novel).  As it is Hawks whom Haze seeks approval from, and it is his own father’s example of sexual pursuit of women (which his mother characterizes as sin in need of purification through self-immolation), I think one key to this novel is the bifurcation of faith into masculine and feminine arenas.