Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction (review)

Flannery O'Connor's mastery as a writer centers largely on parallel sets of binaries on different levels of theme, character, and narrative: divine/human, mystery/manners, belief/skepticism, romance/realism, narration/dramatization, telling/showing, revelation/rationalism. So the problematic question central to her fiction is the nature of the new knowledge that transforms not only the participants in the plot but her readers as well. The writer who openly proclaimed her mission to be writing for the "deaf" and the "blind" has challenged her readers for the last half century to solve the epistemological riddle.

Almost all major O'Connor scholars have attempted to probe the peculiar nature and source of this knowledge. Frederick Asals, for instance, locates it in the dialectic play of radical extremities of faith and doubt; Robert H. Brinkmeyer uses the generic terms "art and vision of Flannery O'Connor" to describe it; John Desmond finds it in figures of speech triggered by phrases such as "as if"; Marshall Bruce Gentry traces it to the grotesque, even the unconscious, psyche of her characters, even to a dialogical tension between the narrator and the characters; Ruthann Knechel Johansen sees it in the triangular interplay of thematic, structural, and stylistic elements; Richard Giannone takes us back to the Jesuit hermitic tradition.

Donald Hardy's book, Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction, is a welcome study on the subject from a socio-linguistic and stylistic perspective. Hardy's focus is not just how this knowledge is gained but, more important, why it is incomplete and even incomprehensible. Hardy offers a taxonomy of the manifested forms of this knowledge—spiritual, rational, and emotional—making the question more problematic than the traditional one of Aristotelian "recognition." Complicating his taxonomy is the participant in this transforming experience: the narrator, the narratee, the characters, the readers, and in some transcendent terms even the author herself. Who knows how much, when, how, and why remain incongruously at odds, given O'Connor's well-known distrust of "innerleckchuls."

For his analytical method Hardy draws on stylistics and semantics, focusing on O'Connor's employment of recurring linguistic devices—he calls them "syntactic and semantic-pragmatic patterns"—such as dependent clauses, negations, and participials. He concludes that these grammatical patterns consistently serve, respectively, to render presuppositions explicit, to block suppositions, and to bring out implications. As is to be expected in a linguistic analysis, the author makes use of visual graphic tools such as figures and tables for quantitative study. The book offers nine figures identifying linguistic elements such as intensifiers, comparators, explicatives, correlatives, and other similar markers, and thirteen tables computing the frequencies of grammatical relationships such as non-negative and negative words, verbs of perception, "see class" verbs, "smell class" verbs, "hear class" verbs, and "feel class" verbs.

An example of Hardy's analysis of a paragraph from "Judgment Day" illustrates both the virtue and the vice of close linguistic analysis of fictional texts in general, and of O'Connor's narrative in particular. Here is the paragraph:

The Negro stopped and gripped the banister rail. A tremor racked him from his head to his crotch. Then he began to come forward slowly. When he was close enough he lunged and grasped Tanner by both shoulders. "I don't takeno crap," he whispered, "off no wool-hat red-neck son-of-a-bitch pecker-woodold bastard like you." He caught his breath. And then his voice came out in the sound of an exasperation so profound that it rocked on the verge of a laugh. It was high and piercing and weak. "And I'm not no preacher! I'm not even noChristian. I don't believe that crap. There ain't no Jesus and there ain't no God."

(Everything that Rises Must Converge, 263)

Hardy points out that this passage "contains examples of all three sources of background information—that which is explicit, that which is presumed to be...