Flannery O'Connor's Tattooed Christ
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
Spring books Flannery O'Connor's Tattooed Christ By Stanley Edgar Hyman Flannery O'Connor's death last August, at the age of 39, was the crudest loss to our literature since the death of...
...Another such theme is Nay to the World...
...Warren Coffey, in the Esprit issue, says that Miss O'Connor's novels suffer from "an excessive violence of conception...
...The Lame Shall Enter First," which I will discuss later, is one...
...Several stories in the book are flawed...
...The one least like anything Miss O'Connor (or anyone) has done before is "Parker's Back," about a young man named O. E. Parker whose only distinction is a passion for having himself elaborately tattooed...
...In addition, the Winter, 1964, Esprit is a memorial issue, devoted to Miss O'Connor's work...
...Grotesque her fiction is, certainly (as she admitted, as our lives are), but it is never gratuitous...
...Miss O'Connor published two marvelous novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and a remarkable volume of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955...
...The melodramatic "The Comforts of Home'" seems to me wrong from the beginning...
...Here I am wholly with Fitzgerald, although I think that I understand Sister Rose Alice's difficulty: Miss O'Connor's humor is always disquieting and often heartbreaking...
...when his father gets him upset, he vomits it all up in "a limp sweet batter...
...Then there is the charge of violence...
...Block in "The Enduring Chill" tells As-bury: "I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood...
...Turpin in "Revelation," which earns her a vision of the hellfire reserved for the smug...
...in Sheppard's similar efforts to play what Rufus calls a "big tin Jesus...
...But so is all great humor...
...An abyss similarly separates the human and the divine...
...But this is Sheppard's interpretation, not the author's...
...To judge Miss O'Connor by any criteria of realism in fiction, let alone naturalism, in short, is to misunderstand her...
...Two other stories are quite as impressive in a more familiar fashion...
...then it falls into an unnecessary and Jacobean double death...
...Miss O'Connor's imaginative universe consists of extremes separated by an abyss...
...He is then literally christophoric, Christ-bearing, "witnessing for Jesus" on his hide...
...In Commonweal, March 7, 1958, William Esty wrote scornfully of Miss O'Connor's "cult of the Gratuitous Grotesque...
...I don't need no new shoe," Rufus Johnson insists in "The Lame Shall Enter First," with his club foot barely covered by the old torn shoe...
...such secular communions as racial integration come off no better...
...These lies are a higher truth, the truth's of the spirit that contradicts the weakness of the flesh...
...Judgement Day," the one story set outside Georgia, is a magical and compelling account of the death and absurd resurrection of an old Georgia man in New York City...
...It is sometimes positively illustrated, as when Dr...
...A View of the Woods" is a perfect comic story about a conflict between a grandfather and a nine-year-old granddaughter just like him, up to its natural ending after the first paragraph on p. 80...
...Sister Rose Alice, in "Flannery O'Connor: Poet to the Outcast," in Renascence, Spring, 1964, paraphrases the story's action: "The repulsive good defeats the urbane evil...
...Finally, there is the grotesque...
...One is the real presence of Evil, unrecognized, denied, and painfully learned in story after story...
...The Lame Shall Enter First," the book's principal reworking of the Rayber story in The Violent Bear It Away, furnishes the handiest illustration...
...Whatever is not Christ is anti-Christ, as Rufus reveals to the do-gooder Sheppard when he says that if he repented he would become a preacher: "It's no' sense in doing it half way...
...Unlike almost all fiction written today, these stories have villains, although the villains are seldom the first suspects...
...Take the matter of humor...
...She is a symbolist and fantast in the tradition of Melville and Hawthorne (that violent whale, those grotesque blood curses...
...Miss O'Connor's own reading, I believe, is far more challenging: not Rufus but Sheppard is the type of Satan, taking over God's prerogatives in His assumed absence...
...On a more profound level, Rufus is not a poor deprived cripple, but evil, demonic, a type of Satan...
...Few contemporary writers have been as much misunderstood, wrongly praised and wrongly damned, as Miss O'Connor...
...only its Negroes fail to ring true...
...the consequence is Norton's suicide...
...garish, out of fashion, ludicrous—for the burden of Redemption is uncanny and perfect, a true metaphysical conceit...
...Miss O'Connor's meanings are as desperate and as radical as her dualism...
...Her fiction does not reflect the social issues, particularly the racial problems, which beset the South during her lifetime," says John J. Clarke in Esprit...
...So it does not, explicitly, and more than that, her Negro characters are often travesties...
...The other is "The Enduring Chill," a devastatingly funny, if ultimately serious, story of a pretentious young man whose dramatic coming home to die turns out badly...
...she had a comparable multiple alienation from the dominant assumptions of our culture as a Roman Catholic Southern woman...
...The story mows down its targets with general ruthlessness: the Church is wickedly satirized in a scatterbrained and irascible old priest, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear...
...Fitzgerald calls her "often hilarious," while Sister Rose Alice says, "Nor does she write with humor, as some critics have asserted...
...I'm a born Catholic and death has always been brother to my imagination," she told an interviewer in Jubilee in June, 1963...
...This is thoroughly repulsive, and no less repulsive to the author, but it is entirely functional and necessary: It perfectly symbolizes the indigestible mess of Sheppard's enlightened views, which Norton will similarly be unable to keep down...
...Melodrama is the problem, not violence...
...The writer Miss O'Connor most resembles in method (not in scale) is Dostoevsky...
...Her themes are the themes of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, but the emphasis, for reasons that may ultimately be pentecostal but make all the difference esthetically, is on their more dramatistic elements...
...Spring books Flannery O'Connor's Tattooed Christ By Stanley Edgar Hyman Flannery O'Connor's death last August, at the age of 39, was the crudest loss to our literature since the death of Nathanael West, who so much influenced her, and who similarly died in his late 30s at the height of his powers...
...The writer she most resembles in vantage point is West...
...Like him she created a deeply-understood Enemy out of her own liberal and enlightened dreams: Julian in the title story and Sheppard are the true heirs of Rodion and Ivan...
...Her fiction is nevertheless the truest portrait of the South today that I know...
...Superficially, it is pathetic sociology: a well-meaning but unimaginative widower, Sheppard, neglects his son Norton, mainly because an older boy, Rufus, club-footed and criminal, seems much more in need of help...
...This is Fitzgerald's reading in the introduction, encouraged by the statement in the story that finally Sheppard "saw the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts, leering at him from the eyes of Johnson...
...Now a posthumous volume of nine more stories has appeared, Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 269 pp., $4.95), with a biographical and critical introduction by Robert Fitzgerald...
...Revelation" is a wonderfully funny apocalypse for the Laodiceans that goes on too long...
...The best of the stories in the new book are as masterful as the two I think outstanding in the earlier volume, "The Artificial Nigger" and "Good Country People...
...and Rufus is the true prophetic voice of Judgment, saying, of Sheppard, "He thinks he's Jesus Christ!," and, to Sheppard, "Satan has you in his power...
...At the end, the only characters we can admire are a small, walleyed Guernsey and the Holy Ghost...
...in Thomas in "The Comforts of Home" asking himself "what the attitude of God was to this, meaning if possible to adopt it...
...In the first scene of "The Lame Shall Enter First," Norton eats a piece of chocolate cake spread with peanut butter and ketchup...
...As for violence per se, the only necessary defense was made by West in his essay on the subject: it is the natural language of America...
...and Sheppard has learned of these entities to his cost...
...It is more often negatively illustrated: in the sanctimonious self-righteousness of Mrs...
...Thus these stories are certainly concerned with Christian humility...
...I believe every bloodcurdling event in the novels to be entirely justified, but in my opinion Miss O'Connor did come to rely on death too often to end her stories...
...Mary Fortune, the little girl in "A View of the Woods," denies that anyone has ever whipped her or ever could, although her grandfather has just seen her whipped...
...An example is in order...
...Miss O'Connor seems to have arrived at her Jacobean finishes as a result of one of her rare confusions of theology with aesthetics...
...A few naturally dramatistic Christian themes pervade the new stories...
...I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or in its foreshadowings...
...He saw deeply and prophetically because he was an outsider as a Jew, and doubly an outsider as a Jew alienated from other Jews...
...Under this coloration Parker is transformed and reborn, resuming the Old Testament names he has always concealed behind his initials, and suffering a Punch and Judy martyrdom as he passively allows his wife to punish his "idolatry" by beating him with a broom until "large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ...
...The story is simultaneously uproarious and deeply moving, and the metaphor of tattooing —bloody, painful, indelible...
...Thus her two novels deal centrally with the mystery of Christian vocation, not in terms of the gentle discovery by a saintly spirit of a calling toward the contemplative life, but in terms of prophetic initiation in blood and fire, blasphemy and fanaticism, murder and rape...
...In an accommodation to his wife's Fundamentalist piety, Parker has a Byzantine mosaic of a staring Christ reproduced on his back...
...Despite these errors of judgment, Miss O'Connor's critical intelligence was quite as remarkable as her imaginative gifts...
Vol. 48 • May 1965 • No. 10
