Pass Us That Bottle, Will Ya?

In the last week, I’ve read almost 300 applications for a job here at MHC, graded two tests, and began the Christmas Season.  I am now terribly far behind in the book review department.  So, given the Season, I figured I’d start catching up by reviewing the book which is the least congruous with Modern Christmas Festivities.  I am immediately reminded of a nice little essay by Chesterton in which he discusses the Wrong Books for Christmas—a hit piece on some newspaper’s Christmas book suggestions which were all books with messages antithetical to the message of Christmas.  Thus, this post could have been entitled, “A book not to give as a Christmas gift.”

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find is a collection of deliberately bizarre short stories.  The stories here are best described as Grotesques.  In a Dickens story, every character is a caricature; in an O’Connor story, every character is a grotesque.  So, if you want to read the literary form of Grotesque populated by characters who are Grotesques, O’Connor is about the best you can do. 

What interested me most about these stories is that even the characters which appear quite normal are, upon reflection, grotesques in their own way as well.  Indeed, it is a pretty interesting matter to ponder.  Many of the stories have a character who is  manifestly evil.  Yet, when you stop to think about the characters upon whom the evil person practices his Nefarious Deeds, it doesn’t take long to realize that the seemingly normal person is also, in fact, quite Wrong.  There simply are no good people here.  And, so the stories become reflections on how fundamentally bad people really are.

We read the book for my tutorial, and none of the students were very happy with that realization.  It is a Truth universally acknowledged that people are basically good.  And actually, come to think of it, “basically” doesn’t belong in that last sentence.  So, what does one do when one is certain that people are good and you have a story in which people aren’t good?  The people in these stories aren’t lacking in goodness for some understandable cause which gives us a built-in excuse for their deeds; they are simply not good people, neither wanting to be good, nor acting as we might like a good person to act.  Their Wrongness is weirdly exaggerated and this oddity is what makes them the Grotesques they are, but they are weird in a strangely believable, yet a bit too exaggerated to be really believable, way.  They are, in other words, a bit too much like us for our own comfort.

If you start reading the stories knowing O’Connor was Roman Catholic, it’s not hard to put this together.  Here is the fundamental revolt against a world which abandons moral standards and pretends that nothing is wrong.  There is a collection of her essays  and speeches in the Library of America volume I read in which she, more or less, makes this point.  It’s an interesting point.  (Also interesting is how these novels do not read like the pabulum which generally passes as Christian fiction.)  And yet…I can’t say that reading these stories was all that wonderful of an experience.  On their own, many of these stories are classics—the sort of thing that you can give to high school students and ask them to write an essay on Irony or something.  (I had to read the title story in 9^th grade.  Our assignment was to write a different ending for the story.  What that assignment was supposed to teach me is completely beyond me.  But, oddly, I still remember the ending I wrote.  I remember almost nothing else from that English class, but I remember the revised ending I wrote.  Whenever I think of it, I cringe.  Believe me that you should be very grateful that I am not relating the revised ending I composed.)

My biggest problem after reading this book is that I cannot figure out what to make of O’Connor.  She is highly praised by the sort of people whose Praise is normally worth considering.  Yet, after reading this collection and Wise Blood a few years back, I am having a hard time seeing the Greatness.  She is good.  But Great?  These stories, for example are all too repetitive.  A few of them are much better than the others; I particularly liked “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”  But, on the whole, the individual stories seemed to me to be the “Read one, read ‘em all” type of thing.  In fact, looking back over the table of contents a couple of weeks after finishing the book, it is amazing how many of these stories have simply blurred in my memory.  Obviously I am missing something here.  I can’t decide whether I should just go ahead and read The Violent Bear It Away in an attempt to unravel the mystery, or put the book on my shelf until sometime in the future I discover an essay which explains the greatness of O’Connor.

To conclude, here is A Christmas Song which I like and which I suspect is the sort of song O’Connor would have enjoyed.