Flannery O'Connor and Her Grotesque Southern Characters
I was looking through the news and blogs trying to find inspiration of some sort so I could continue my usual onslaught against Obama. Stuff that Obama would call "chattering", and the things Michelle would say was "chirping". Anyways,I was on-line at The National Review and hit the bonanza...at least for myself. It wasn't political, but the article got me agitated just the same. I didn't know, but today is the birthday of Flannery O'Connor, the woman writer many of us read in short-story form from our sophomore lit classes. I thought O'Connor was a man until I learned differently much, much later...or maybe I just didn't listen too well back then.
So here we have Ralph C. Wood writing about the awful, grotesque, and depressing figures of the south that O'Connor built her stories upon. I hate to argue with Woods, because he is a professor of theology and English and has written "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" . After I finished reading Wood's article, I knew he was fascinated by her. But Woods began his article by stating that we are all repulsed when trying to read O'Connor. He also poses the question: Why do southern writers immerse themselves with such revolting characters and violent death scenes in so much of its writing? My answer would be that it probably stems from habit going back to the days when agriculture was the South's leading industry and provided a lot of leisure-at times. It's not so really long ago it was that way.
Rural areas are thinly spread with people and little entertainment on top of it...especially years ago. Any story had to be colored with a fascinating input of gore or violence to entertain the crowd anyone was talking to..even if it was a group of three or four. Religion? Church was the main meeting place, the only place of salvation and socialization. Southerners demanded to be entertained in Church, and to have colorful visions of hell. So for O'Connor to be Catholic,Irish, and southern would explain her gift of story-telling. When asked the question about her array of grotesque,immoral characters, she said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic".
To fully understand Flannery O'Connor, and how she was compelled to write about such unusual people or circumstances, demands that you have,as Woods points out,a clear understanding of what "normal" might be, in order to take the unsentimental view she had of her main characters. I do know she had a social awareness for she referred to the"Holocaust" and the racial issues of her time in her writings.
The proudest moment of O'Connors life is when she taught her pet chicken to walk backwards and appeared in the "Pathe News". The paper filmed her with her chicken to be shown in movie houses around the country. That was her first moment of celebrity, and she said that everything after that in life was "anti-climax". So, no wonder is it that we have these rich stories from a southern girl that trained her chicken, and later read St.Thomas Aquinas in bed before going to sleep.
O'Connor suffered from Lupus,just like her father did. She was diagnosed in 1951 and was only supposed to live another five years, but lived until 1964. She lived those last 15 years in Milledgeville,Ga. with her mother, and she continued to write her stories.
So to celebrate her birthday, I am going to pull out my collection of her short stories, and read from "A Good Man is Hard To Find, and Other Short Stories".
Happy Birthday,Ms. O'Connor. I wonder how you would write about Obama, and if you would have also been a Hillary supporter...... and please read Wood's article on O'Connor.
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