Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist

3. Sporting with Demons

3 Sporting with Demons Examine yourself, then, my brother, and see if you have not been the sport of the demons, for you have lacked perception in this matter. -Macarius the Great, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers Vigilance, self-knowledge and discernmentj these are the guides of the soul. -Poemen, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER on Wise Blood, we saw that renunciation guides Hazel Motes to integrity. By facing out his unbelief through bodily mortification, O'Connor's nihilist saint finds a consoling wholeness in solitude that is denied him in the broken modern world. The insights that Motes gains in solitary warfare clearly take firm hold of O'Connor's moral imagination, for as we turn to A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), her first book of short fiction, we see the tantalizing desert of the East that Motes carried back in his spirit after World War II merge with O'Connor's South. Here in ten "stories about original sin" (HB 74), as O'Connor with an elder's heuristic moralism calls the collection, the desert life of solitude and trial provides the ideal against which O'Connor judges the heart-wounding dissensions of American life. Such a comprehensive use of ancient spirituality to throw modern life into relief may seem improbable, because we tend to think of the desert mothers and fathers as women and men of a different stamp from ourselves , persons of a remote age bred in a rarer atmosphere, searchers some65 66 Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist how tougher and larger than we and therefore summoned to a greater destiny. But O'Connor brings us to another view of their-and our-calling . In doing so, she shows how deeply she plumbs the modern condition and how greatly she cares about our fate. Our age, O'Connor believes, can avail itself of the dignity and wisdom of the past. Despite the political and cultural differences between twentieth-century American democracy and the late Roman Empire, the intrinsic predicament of the desert-dwellers and their motives to struggle against the poverty and vastness of inner solitude remain as they have always been. The commands heard and answered in O'Connor's South reverberate with mandates received and obeyed in the ancient East. It turns out in A Good Man Is Hard to Find that O'Connor's plain country people are expected to face the same sufferings and confess God and die before God as did the primitive hermits. Those who are not heroic are the ones O'Connor chooses to share the lot of God's legendary warriors in the battle against evil. Given the faithlessness of the modern age, the demons' perpetual trickery, and the desert's sheer hardship, the odds are against the footsore and weary southerners O'Connor mobilizes into combat. Her stories do not falsify this inequality . In the deserts of this volume, triumph over evil is as hard to find as it is difficult to recognize a good man or woman in a gulch or farm off Georgia 's dirt roads. If you find one, you will find the other. Survival entails, as will be shown, the habits of humility, self-scrutiny, and prayer. These virtues develop from a rigorous discipline that is difficult to practice in a world that rewards egotism, betrayal, and power. All the protagonists of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, are unwitting solitaries; they are forced out of their social relations and into aloneness. Like Motes, these solitaries malgre eux set their private wills against that of God. Never one to minimize the tempting power of evil, O'Connor frequently shows her besieged solitaries succumbing to the gratification of their personal desire. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is as sternly realistic about spiritual struggle as are the desert Sayings and Lives, which frankly depict the fall of some ascetics who seek God. Fully five of the ten stories in O'Connor's first volume end with the heart of the protagonist vanquished by the demonic temptation to love her or his own desire above the good of another character or above the will of God. This subjection into satanic thrall marks "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "A Stroke of Good Fortune," "A Circle in the Fire," "Good Country People," and "ALate Encounter with the Enemy." There are hints in these stories...