Roland Allen

Her characters are haunted by the glory of God, "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus," and thus lead bloody horrible lives and, like Jesus, die grotesque deaths. Their lives recall Jonah's, who ran from God at his own peril. O'Connor's vision of faith, according to Dark, is much more in keeping with the apocalyptic faith of scripture than is the sentimentalized spirituality heard on Christian radio. Salvation is terrifying precisely because it is apocalyptic--it radically changes our lives, prevents us from living comfortably, and opens our eyes to transcendent reality. O'Connor's stories portray a world where grace is terrible, mercy comes unbidden and the fear of God is real and warranted.

- This quote is from Melissa Jenks' review of David Dark's: Everyday Apocalypse: the Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons.

I was talking to my Stanford friend, Matt, on the phone yesterday and he told me that he had just reread Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Turkey. He also said that this has become his favorite O'Connor story.

As Matt described the story I realized that I didn't know it. So I got my collection of O'Connor short stories, headed to a coffee shop and read the story, which is absolutely fascinating.

I had totally overlooked The Turkey.

The Turkey is near the front of O'Connor's collection of short stories. It was one of the stories in her masters thesis at Iowa. While I've read most of her stories, I've paid less attention to the stories at the front of the book because some of them (like The Train, The Peeler, and Enoch and the Gorilla) are more maturely reworked in her novel Wise Blood and elsewhere in her later work.

The Turkey is about an eleven-year-old boy, Ruller, who chases down a wounded turkey and captures it. But, in the encounter with the turkey, he goes to deeper places and has a first encounter with the mystery of God and reconsiders the religious teaching and traditions of his family, and he toys with a sense of "calling." He also encounters the attraction of pride and sees consequences of following pride over taking a simpler path.

There are many themes in this short story that introduce the reader to themes that dominate O'Connor's later work.

I enjoyed reading The Turkey.

I also thought about other O'Connor themes and her prose. One collection of O'Connor prose is called Mystery and Manners. I talked to Matt about the concept of "mystery" as a theological idea. O'Connor says that "mystery" is an uncomfortable concept. I see that and have long thought about what she means by "mystery." Mystery is not a tidy concept in theology or literature.

I was also thinking about reading as I was driving home last night. I've had a recent encounter that left me thinking: "I bet that those people don't read." I'm not writing this to be mean, but I'm convinced that people who lack imagination do so, in part, because they don't read. So, they're left with a view of the world that is narrow and flat.

Posted by Roland at 07:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I held an appointment as a senior staff member in the undergraduate admissions office at MIT from 1993-1998. Those five years were great. I loved being at the Institute (or, The 'Tute, as it's informally called) and I continue to have great affection for MIT.

I remember a comment a colleague made in staff meeting one day about the web browser, Mosaic. He said, "This Mosaic thing could be something big." At the time, Mosaic was the web browser used on the Athena environment than ran on the workstations that were all over MIT's campus.

Prior to going to MIT I had worked at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California and at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The computer staff at Westmont came to the admissions office in the late 80's and talked to us about getting messages on computers. There were only a couple of personal computers in the office at the time and I had never used one. "Using a computer" meant leaving the office and going to a tech center, which was an overly airconditioned region with a massive mainframe computer at the core. The term "E-mail" wasn't in use at the time and the concept seemed like a waste of anyone's time. I learned more about E-mail when I left Santa Barbara and moved to Maine.

When I arrived at Colby College in August of 1990 there was a large box on my desk that contained an Apple Computer. I don't remember the model, but it looked like the smiley face Mac that pops up when OS 9 and earlier versions start up. I spent my first weekend at Colby going through the uer manual, and I learned how to use a mouse and the only application that looked useful to me, which was Word.

We used E-mail at Colby. By my second year at Colby there was a laptop in the office that could be used for travel, but connecting was a chore using dial-up lines and often expensive because it usually required a long distance telephone call.

I moved to Boston and to MIT in the summer of 1993. That's when I was introduced to the Internet via Gopher. I also had my own laptop at the time, but going online was still tedious and very very slow. I continued to use dialup at home and at work we used a so-called high speed ISDN dial up. It wasn't until midway through my tenure at MIT that we had direct high speed connections at our desks in our offices. The students, of course, had powerful workstations at their disposal as a result of MIT's partnershp in Project Athena.

The Internet grew quickly. As a sidenote, only recently did MIT officials get use of "www.mit.edu". That was taken by students before the Institute got hold of it. For years the official web address for MIT was "web.mit.edu".

However, it wasn't until I left MIT and went to work in a tiny private high school in Marin County, California (The Branson School) that my work environment had advanced technology. The entire campus was wireless and the school replaced laptops and workstations every two years. Every faculty member had a laptop. The school benefited from having a parent who had been part of the early stages of Netscape with Marc Andreessen.

Another side note is that Apple's hold on educational institutions was evident throughout my career. It wasn't until I took a position at Stanford University that I had ever touched a Windows machine or used one for work. All of the other institutions I had worked at prior to Stanford, including MIT, issued Macs to administrators. I think that Gates and Company owe Michael Dell "thanks" for making Windows machines affordable for educational institutions.

Indeed, my MIT colleague was right. The "Mosaic thing" did turn into something big. Netscape Communications grew out of Mosaic. Microsoft got into the browser business. And the rest is recent enough history that you can fill in on your own.

This brief history of the Internet was sparked by an article I read this morning about the world wide web turning fifteen years old.

Posted by Roland at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've talked about Matt Sargent, my good buddy during the Stanford days, and the Word of Whenever page on his website.

His current WoW is taken from a Flannery O'Connor story, The Lame Shall Enter First. This is significant because Matt just completed reading all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories.

That is very cool.

Matt's posted some pretty cool words, like his post of 5/30/05 1:43 pm - BICAUDAL: (adj. zoology.) Having two tails.

Matt recalled one of the words this past August when he was down visiting and we saw Venus and Jupiter in the sky above Laguna Beach: 8/29/05 9:35 pm - SYZYGY: (n.) The straight line configuration of 3 celestial bodies (as the sun and earth and moon) in a gravitational system.

We only saw Venus and Jupiter and not syzygy, nonetheless, it's a cool word.

Here is, by the way, something interesting about Matt: Even though he's from Seattle, he does not drink coffee.

Posted by Roland at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's just after 6:00 AM here in Tampa. I'm flying to Los Angeles through Phoenix this morning.

I rarely comment on airports, however, Tampa's airport is worthy of comment.

This airport is very well organized and "user friendly." Orange County's John Wayne Airport (SNA) is easy to use because it's so small. However, Tampa's airport rules over SNA for a few reasons:

1. Free Wireless
   
2. Plugs: If you've never noticed, John Wayne has VERY few electrical outlets. And the few they have are along the hallway wall. You have to sit on the floor in the hallway aisle to use a laptop at John Wayne. (Actually, that's a complaint at San Jose International, as well - and that's the gateway to the Silicon Valley.)
   
3. Tampa's airport doesn't have a super sized statue of John Wayne. (Apologies to my cowboy friends, if I have any.)

This morning's taxi cab ride from my hotel to the airport was a treat.

Somehow the taxi cab driver had ascertained that my eternal salvation might be in jeopardy and, taking no chances, decided that I was in need of hearing the Gospel for the duration of the 12-minute cab ride we had together that began at 5:25 this morning.

The driver’s enthusiasm took off quickly – after all, he had only twelve minutes to get me saved.

I knew what was coming at the front end of the introductory story about why he was working on Sunday instead of taking his family to church and the recounting of having to sleep in the top bunk at last weekend's retreat with his grandson.

Because he only had a few minutes to work on me, he took few breaths, and I heard a survey of the Gospel from Genesis to somewhere in Paul’s letters, just shy of The Apocalypse.

I also learned that he was a member of the Church of God and that ours was a "divine appointment."

The driver was so dedicated to sharing his message that he missed the signs for my airline and we got to the wrong terminal. However, there was plenty of time to get things straightened out and no harm was done.

God bless my good-hearted Taxi Driver.

The short story collection I’m reading on this trip (the ten year anniversary of the Flannery O’Connor Award - almost every story speaks to man's fallen nature) has me ready to hear the Gospel.

Posted by Roland at 03:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Darrin in Wheaton, IL found this link and sent it on to me this afternoon. I missed this particular program from NPR's Speaking of Faith with the topic: Faith Fired by Literature.

This particular program is a conversation with Paul Elie who wrote The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which tells the interwoven stories of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy.

Posted by Roland at 05:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When O’Connor heard the old canard that Northerners discuss ideas while Southerners merely tell stories, she replied starchly that this narrative habit of discourse proves the innate superiority of the Southern mind.

There's talk of inviting Ralph Wood to Orange County for a Flannery O'Connor conference. I hope that it happens.

Here are some quotes from his book, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South:

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

—Flannery O’Connor
The Habit of Being, p. 90
Quoted by Ralph Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, p.1

Something, it appears, has gone wrong with the Western world, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens. It did not take a diagnostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of meaning itself, the very ways people see and understand themselves. What is called into question…now is the very enterprise of human life itself. Instead of writing about this or that social evil from a posture of consensus from which we agree to deplore social evils, it is now the consensus itself and the posture which are called into question.

—Walker Percy
“The State of the Novel: Dying Art or New Science?” in Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway, p 141.
Quoted by Ralph Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, p.9

O’Connor honored the Bible-centered faith of fundamentalists because, as we have seen, it gave them a storytelling cast of mind. Stories were not for her mere devices for entertainment; they were vehicles of moral and religious truth. Whereas Catholics have the teachings of the church to guide their behavior, Southern Protestants have the biblical narratives as the mirror wherewith to measure themselves and their world. These character-laden stories were greatly superior, in her view, to propositional abstractions. When O’Connor heard the old canard that Northerners discuss ideas while Southerners merely tell stories, she replied starchly that this narrative habit of discourse proves the innate superiority of the Southern mind.

—Ralph Wood , Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South p.37

Posted by Roland at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a repost of an entry from my former TypePad blog. I wrote it when I lived in Washington DC. I've been thinking about Flannery O'Connor today for a couple of reasons:
I was asked by an English teacher to lead a class discussion through O'Connor's signature story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and I may be involved in planning an O'Connor conference here in Orange County.

But, on to The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

Yesterday I read Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

It's haunting, possibly because O'Connor freely borrows key images from a number of her other stories: For example, the image of the car as a vehicle of freedom and justification is used in Wise Blood (with its main character Hazel Motes noting that a man with a good car doesn't need salvation); and the notion of Catholicism as a dismissable unadvanced and "old" religion by a character who hasn't the patience to think deeply about spiritual things is used in The Displaced Person and other places. And, as is common, the story includes a widow with an invalid or idiot adult daughter who is unmarried. (It's interesting how often O'Connor uses this image since she was a physically afflicted, unmarried adult daughter living with a widowed mother. It's self-deprecating, perhaps, and brings recognition of her own need for grace to the forefront of her stories.)

I’ll try to explain my on-going response while reading the story. I began reading it on the subway going to work yesterday morning. I finished it last night on the return home. I’ve been thinking about it this morning and decided to pull out one of my FO’C commentaries (not intentionally a biblical reference, but it’s helpful to have someone else’s reflections and insights when reading Flannery O.)

But, back to the visceral response: As I began to read the story, I realized that I didn’t know it, which was nice because I’ve re-read so many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. As I got into it, I wanted the story to get along. I wanted it to make progress. I had the impatience common to her characters and I didn’t care for the two main characters, Tom Shiftlet (which appropriately rhymes with Shiftless and he is a scoundrel) and Lucynell Carter, the widow-mother who owned the place that Shiftlet happened upon, who has her own selfish purposes as well. I didn’t like Shiftlet and I didn’t care for his long-windedness, although that’s a usual characteristic of Flannery O’Connor characters – they cover their brokenness by talking a lot about their all-knowing perspective on the world.

Sidenote: I think that I wanted the characters to be more humorous. Like the Grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard To Find, I wanted characters that made me laugh. None of the five characters in this story entertained me. They were uncomfortably odd.

Shiftlet is physically broken. Although he has skills, he is a carpenter and he fixes Lucynell’s car later in the story, he is a one-armed man, who early on in the story stretches out both arms in a way that signals the redemptive nature of where the story is headed: "He swung out both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross." But the image is lost on Lucynell and her daughter:

“The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists.”

The story goes on with Shiftlet making references to deep things that disturb his thinking and that Lucynell thinks are plain foolish. For example, Shiftlet talks about a surgeon in Atlanta who had “taken a knife and cut the human heart” and “studied it like a day-old chicken.” Shiftlet is correct in concluding that the motives of the heart are beyond science. And he makes a reference to European monks who sleep in coffins, a reference O’Connor borrows from a James Joyce story, “The Dead,” but the reference is lost of Lucynell who responds that “they wasn’t as advanced as we are.”

Later Lucynell has Shiftlet marry her daughter in a civil ceremony. But, although it’s "legal," it’s not satisfying to Shiftlet even though it “satisfies the law” as Lucynell tells him. Shiftlet responds that “it’s the law that doesn’t satisfy” him – which expresses a deeper spiritual need that he is currently not aware of.

There’s so much more to the story that I won’t cover here. He ends up in a café called The Hot Spot – where he feels more uncomfortable, and later he picks up a boy (note: good deed to cover up guilt and sin), a hitchhiker, who quickly recognizes Shiftlet as a moral liar and calls Shiftlet’s bluff on his waxing and jumps out of Shiftlet's car in disgust. (Hint: The boy becomes the vehicle of grace in the story.)

I hope that you’ll read it. If so, let me know how you respond to The Life You Save May Be Your Own.

Posted by Roland at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Y)ou have to make your vision apparent by shock: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
- Flannery O'Connor (In her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country" found in Mystery and Manners.)

Posted by Roland at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been reading Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism by Henry T. Edmondson III, a book I've mentioned in an earlier post.

To say that I'm a Flannery O'Connor fan is a mild term. I'm devoted to her writing and characters.

Edmondson's book is a great read and it's incredibly insightful into Flannery O'Connor's intellectual and spiritual development, through her reading of Thomistic philosophy and her response to Nietzsche, nihilism and the concept of the Superman or Overman.

Like me, Edmondson is a Southerner. There are nuances to being a Southerner that are not easily communicated. However, O'Connor draws large comedic characters in her fiction that I readily understand. More often than not the characters are tragic; however, their tragedies produce moments of grace that are transforming.

As an example, in O'Connor's short story, The River, a story I've puzzled over in this blog, a child drowns himself in search of the transformation of Baptism. Edmondson quotes Walker Percy, another favorite author,

How else can one possibly write of baptism as an event of immense significance when baptism is already accepted but accepted by and large as a minor tribal rite somewhat secondary to taking the kids to see Santa at the department store?

Edmondson quotes O'Connor's response to a request that she write about nicer people: "The world of near-perfection seldom makes good fiction."

O'Connor's characters are freaks, drawn dramactically, largely and shockingly. But, in honest moments, I can't help but seeing some of their prideful self-deception in my own life.

Posted by Roland at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm very proud of my Deep South heritage. However, I've never understood the bad rap that grits get. Grits are the morning hot cereal staple that most Southerners are raised on. Grits are a very nutrious and healthy grain, which is simply ground white corn cooked like most hot cereals, in water. The same product in Italian is polenta. The mention of grits causes most non-Southerners to turn up their noses. Yet, when grits are called polenta, they make the gourmet page of the New York Times!

I think that a lot of non-Southerners see the South as filled with unsophisticated freaks. But, as Flannery O'Connor says about freaks in the South: Southerners are still able to recognize one.

Posted by Roland at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This links to Flannery O'Connor's signature and most famous story, A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Posted by Roland at 03:23 PM | Permalink

Again, I'm not sure how this movie made it onto my Netflix queue. It was probably a recommendation from the stuff that I pick on my own. Regardless, I'm glad that I watched it.

The Believer is a powerful portrait of a Jew who becomes a skinhead. It's part religious-psycho drama, part social-commentary. The main character's flashbacks to his childhood religious training is deep, and provides insight into his growth and development.

The movie is a masterful adaptation of the true life and death story of Daniel Burros who was a Jew who became a Ku Klux Klansman and committed suicide when the New York Times published his story.

Unlike the true story, this movie provides a distinctive redemptive moment of grace when Danny Balint, the main character, connects to his heritage.

I think that I'm drawn to this movie/story because the similarity to a Flannery O'Connor character who lives life independent of a sense of community or grace but connects with Truth at a significant, albeit tragic, point in life.

If you watch this movie, be aware of very strong language. (Probably not a good "date flick.")

Danny Balint is a powerful character, not unlike the Nazi character played by Edward Norton in American History X.

Posted by Roland at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

I have to bring light to a comment I received on an entry I posted in January on how I began to love the works of Flannery O'Connor.

Here is the comment:

I have a hazy recollection dating back to my Catholic grade school days of learning that one of Flannery O'Connor's personal favorite works was a poem by Delmore Schwartz called 'The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me' because it captured her feelings about her own body and the life limitations imposed upon her by the ravages of her illness. Can anyone confirm / refute the accuracy of this memory?

If anyone has information that could be helpful to the commenter, please respond to her.

Posted by Roland at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My good friend, Darrin, who is spending the summer in Split, Croatia, sent me this article from GodSpy: A Good War Is Hard To Find.

The article provides insightful reflections on Abu-Ghraib. But, for a student of Flannery O'Connor, it appropriately uses Abu-Ghraib as a backdrop for a discussion of O'Connor's world-view.

If you've not read A Good Man is Hard to Find, please follow the hyperlink to an online version of O'Connor's most famous story.

Posted by Roland at 05:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It is only

... in these days when we are afflicted with the doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature by its efforts that the vision of the freak in fiction is so disturbing [because] he keeps us from forgetting that we share in his state.

The time he should be disturbing is when he is held up as a whole man.

Flannery O'Connor
Mystery and Manners

Posted by Roland at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I read Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Crop, on the flight to Los Angeles last week.

Briefly, it's about Miss Willerton, a would be writer. Early on we get a sense that she's not a terribly reflective or creative person as she thinks about writing her next story while cleaning crumbs from the dining room table:

It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being. First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing.

As O'Connor tells the story, The Crop moves into the story that Miss Willerton is writing, and it's a very good story. Miss Willerton's story is complex, interesting and filled with passion.

However, at an advanced point in writing, Miss Willerton leaves her story and goes grocery shopping, where she encounters a couple who are very much like to fictional couple she had created in her story. She's disgusted by these people and abandons what is probably the best writing of her life.

The point that O'Connor makes is the foolishness of a pride that unjustifiably leaves us thinking that we're better than the everyday life that surrounds us.

Of course, this is too simplistic of a conclusion. But O'Connor often points to the blindness of those who think that they see.

Posted by Roland at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, OK, OK, here you go.

Following the lead of Doug, then O and The Jackhammer:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Page 23, Sentence #5: He walked slowly, thinking what he was going to say in the shop and now and then stopping to look absently at a store window.

(In case you're wondering, the book I have with me right now - I'm at a coffee shop - is: Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories. This quote is from her story, The Barber.)

Posted by Roland at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

"...you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

- Flannery O'Connor (In her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country" found in Mystery and Manners.)

Posted by Roland at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of Flannery O'Connor, here's one of my favorite FO'C quotes:

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Posted by Roland at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received an e-mail today from Brian Collier who has a well-maintained Flannery O'Connor site: The Comforts of Home.

Posted by Roland at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

NOTE: I've re-posted entries on Flannery O'Connor that were first posted on my TypePad Blog.

Flannery O'Connor's words fit with my thoughts on place in the post below. This is from her talk, "The Regional Writer" (in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose), on receiving the Georgia Writers' Association Scroll for her novel, The Violent Bear It Away.

The best American fiction has always been regional. ...

Every serious writer will put his finger on it at a slightly different spot but in the same region of sensitivity. When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, "Because we lost the War." He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence -- as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country.

Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having the means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening it at every point, has been another history. Menchken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. In the South we have, in however attenuated a form, a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols. This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer in Hollywood or New York. It is the knowledge that the novelist finds in his community. When he ceases to find it there, he will cease to write, or at least he will cease to write anything enduring. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Posted by Roland at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This was in the NYTimes yesterday. Darrin sent it my way.

-------------------------------------

February 1, 2004
The Sincerest Form of Flannery
By FLETCHER ROBERTS

Bill T. Jones is no stranger to controversy. A few years ago, in support of an N.A.A.C.P. boycott protesting the flying of the Confederate flag atop the statehouse in South Carolina, he refused to perform at the Spoleto Festival. His "Still Here," a performance piece that included photographs of people suffering from terminal illnesses, was famously criticized in a 1994 New Yorker essay by Arlene Croce, who called it "victim art." She declined to see the production.

Starting on Tuesday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company will present the New York premiere of a 45-minute work provocatively titled "Reading, Mercy and the Artificial Nigger." It is based on "The Artificial Nigger," a complex and beguiling short story by Flannery O'Connor, which is read aloud during the performance. (Susan Sarandon and Mr. Jones will be the readers on opening night.)

The story opens with its main characters, Mr. Head and his 10-year-old grandson, Nelson, who live together in rural Georgia, preparing for a trip to Atlanta. Mr. Head sees the trip as an opportunity to teach his grandson a lesson about the sinful ways of the city, in hopes that he will never want to return. Nelson views the trip as a chance to see the place where he believes he was born. As Nelson becomes more infatuated with the wonders of the city, Mr. Head grows more distressed, and eventually abandons his grandson, both physically and emotionally. On their way to the train for the trip home, they encounter a mysterious plaster figure, a black boy about Nelson's size from which the story takes its title, and in a moment of revelation, they find the grace to restore the bond between them.

Continue reading "Sincerest Form of "Flannery"" »

Posted by Roland at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

you have to make your vision apparent by shock: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
- Flannery O'Connor (In her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country" found in Mystery and Manners.)

This has been a difficult post for me to write because the story is so complicated - not the story line, but theologically complicated. (A reviewer called it "theologically puzzling.") One of the multiple "bottom-lines" of the story is that Harry Ashfield, a boy, who is four or five years old, drowns himself in the "River of Life, made out of Jesus' blood." At a certain point near the end of the story, "his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn't know he'd been looking for. Then all of sudden he knew what he wanted to do." Which was, "He intended not to fool with preachers any more but to baptize himself to keep on going ... until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river."

There are other characters:

Mrs. Connin is the baby sitter who takes Harry to a healing and baptism service at the river. She is a practical woman, who expresses her distaste for the abstract art in the Ashfields' apartment. The art on the walls of her house are filled with pictures and calendar, including a picture of a man who "had long hair and a gold circle around his head and he was sawing on a board while some children stood watching him."

In a few ways, Mrs. Connin reminds me of Mrs. McIntyre, the woman who owned the farm in the story, The Displaced Person because neither has a tolerance for nonsense over practical things.

Mr. Paradise is the most interesting character, in my mind. He isn't a Believer but he goes to watch the "healings" because he isn't healed. He has a cancer on his ear. (Is this O'Connor's sign of his hardness of hearing?) He watches Harry head to the river and sees him jump in and eventually drown. He's horrified by the sight.

I wonder if Harry's moment of grace - being taken by the river - is the same moment of grace for Mr. Paradise. I wonder if his seeing Harry go to Paradise, leads him there too.

This wonderfully engaging and puzzling story is well worth the read.

Posted by Roland at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. (Good Country People)

The peacock was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other, they looked like a complete procession. Her arms were folded and as she mounted the prominence, she might have been the giant wife of the countryside, come out at some sign of danger to see what the trouble was. She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy blue points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything. (The Displaced Person)

Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his head between the wall and the curtain he looked down on the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the little slut were getting out of it. (The Comforts of Home)

Her doctor had told Julian's mother that she must lose twenty pounds on account of her blood pressure, so on Wednesday nights Julian had to take her downtown on the bus for a reducing class at the Y. The reducing class was designed for working girls over fifty, who weighed from 165 to 200 pounds. His mother was one of the slimmer ones, but she said ladies did not tell their age or weight. She would not take the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated, and because the reducing class was one of her few pleasures, necessary for her health and free, she said that Julian could at least put himself out to take her, considering all she did for him. Julian did not like to consider all she did for him, but every Wednesday night he braced himself and took her. (Everything That Rises Must Converge)

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. (A Good Man is Hard to Find)

The doctor's waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look even smaller by her presence. (Revelation)

Calhoun parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to his great-aunts' house and got out cautiously, looking to the right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to have a lethal effect upon him. (The Partridge Festival)

Flannery O'Connor: How did it start?

I'm from the South. As an undergraduate in university, a number of my professors were Jesuit priests who had known Flannery O'Connor. [One, on another note, was responsible for Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, being noted by a publisher. Percy was a visiting professor at Loyola my senior year.] I've kept a copy of Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories with me for years.

What grabs me about O'Connor? Well, in the first place, her stories are funny. Second, the characters "ring true" in ways that affect me deeply. O�Connor said that she was embarrassed reading her stories because she would laugh at how funny the characters were written.

I think that what fascinates me most about Flannery O�Connor is that she brings so many elements of her life into her stories. Many of her main characters are highly educated single women with a physical affliction who live with a widowed mother on a farm. That, in a nutshell, describes Flannery O'Connor. She was dying of the same disease that claimed her father's life. She was aware of her illness and of her impending early death, and looked it straight in the face.

Also, she often used physical violence or a violent death as a vehicle for grace in her stories. This element confuses a lot of readers. But, that's where the liveliest discussions take place.

I will write more about Flannery O'Connor in subsequent posts.

Posted by Roland at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Darrin sent me the link to a review of Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O'Connor's Response to Nihilism, a new book by Henry T. Edmondson III. The review provides an excellent summary of O'Connor's writing and themes, particularly her view of the spiritual poverty of modernity.

Posted by Roland at 10:04 AM | Permalink