Flannery O'Connor's Backtracking Muse

FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S BACKTRACKING MUSE A. R. Coulthard Appalachian State University When Flannery O'Connor completed The Violent Bear It Away in 1960, she wrote Cecil Dawkins, "I am glad it is not another Wise Blood. You can't repeat yourself."1 But O'Connor's stories lose some of their impressiveness when viewed en masse, for she did repeat herself with a frequency that seems inconsistent with her otherwise fertile imagination . O'Connor, whose orthodox Catholic persuasion is now widely known, meant it when she said that she believed "all good stories are about conversion. "2 In some cases the theme is more pronounced than in others, but in all nineteen of the stories O'Connor published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), the protagonist's spiritual redemption is the central issue. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "The River," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," and "The Artificial Nigger" of O'Connor's first volume and "Greenleaf," "A View of the Woods," "Revelation," and "Parker's Back" of her second are all designed to dramatize the main character's salvation. Seven other stories do not depict redemption but leave their protagonists frozen in "the shock of self-knowledge that clears the way for the Holy Ghost. "3 These Stories are "A Circle in the Fire," "Good Country People," and "The Displaced Person" from the first collection and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," "The Enduring Chill," "The Comforts of Home," and "The Lame Shall Enter First" from the later one. O'Connor said that "the mind serves best when it's anchored in the word of God. There is no danger then ofbecoming an intellectual without integrity, "4 and all four of the stories from O'Connor's second collection, plus the earlier "Good Country People," have protagonists who are cut off from salvation by intellectual pride, making this one of O'Connor's most frequent character types. In the remaining four stories, the protagonists either ignore or overtly reject the chance for grace. Ruby's sin is denying childbirth to save her figure in "A Stroke of Good Fortune," Shiftlet loses his soul in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" when he abandons the idiot girl he has married, and in "Judgement Day" the old man's ingrained racism leads to his meaningless death. "A Late Encounter with the Enemy" begins as a satire on the Souths romanticizing of the Confederacy but shifts to an emphasis on the one-hundred-and-four-year-old General Sash's spiritual condition toward the end. Though O'Connor was a consummate humorist, she wrote no purely comic stories. With "A Late Encounter," she almost did. 248Notes Intellectual or illiterate, O'Connor's protagonists suffer from the same sin of pride, probably because it is, as the girl in "Temple" says, "the worst one.'3 Many of the stories also end the same way: in death. When O'Connor let the sickly Asbury live in "The Enduring Chill," she said, "I have carefully not killed anybody off. ... I don't want to be known as a killer,"'' but ten ofthe nineteen stories lead to death, including such violent demises as murder, drowning, hanging, goring, even death by woman's purse in "Everything That Rises." Only the ancient General Sash of "A Late Encounter" is allowed to die of natural causes. Even some of the stories that do not kill off the protagonist conclude with a quasi-violence. Joy-Hulga is left humiliated and minus a leg in the barn loft of "Good Country People," Asbury is last seen cringing as "the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable , to descend (p. 382) in "The Enduring Chill," and in one of O'Connor 's "happy" endings, the redeemed protagonist's wife is raising welts on his back with a broom at the conclusion of "Parker's Back." If a theological conflict comes to be expected in an O'Connor story, so does an explosive resolution. Many stories incorporate a generation conflict into the larger theological issue. In "A Late Encounter," the sixty-two-year-old Sally...