Reading “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”

Posted on May 10th, 2010

As the eighth story in Flannery O’Connor’s first published collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” invites readers to contemplate what many have perceived as the American south’s preoccupation with the region’s defeat during the American Civil War.

First, before a more direct encounter with O’Connor’s short story, however, readers might want to consider an important moment in another story by another writer from the American south: William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Near the end of Faulkner’s superb gothic tale, a story that is frequently and justifiably anthologized in college-level literature survey course textbooks, the narrator makes this perceptive observation about the old men who come to a funeral: “[A]nd the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.” Remember the metaphor—meadow for memory—when reading “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”

Second, further postponing our encounter with O’Connor’s story, consider first southern writer Walker Percy’s explanation for why the American south produced so many good writers: “Because we lost the War.” O’Connor, responding to Percy (in her essay entitled “The Regional Writer”), expands upon Percy’s theory by suggesting that the American Civil War had a profound effect upon the collective psyche of southerners: “What he was saying was that we have had our Fall[. . . .] We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence—as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country” (Mystery and Manners 59). Elsewhere, in a letter to Cecil Dawkins (November 8, 1958), O’Connor expands on this statement: “The South in other words still believes that man has fallen and that he is only perfectable by God’s grace, not by his own unaided efforts.” Percy’s and O’Connor’s comments should also be considered when reading “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.”

Now, ready to focus specifically on “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” the reader will notice that General Tennessee Flintrock Sash, age 104, is actually named George Poker Sash, and his role in the American Civil War was simply as a major (not a general), and even those “facts” ought to be skeptically received. Supplementing Sash’s considerable though confused ego, and supplementing his meadow-like memory, his granddaughter’s misplaced enthusiasm for her grandfather’s dubious biography remains unaffected by realities: “‘See him [she says]! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing up for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!” (The Complete Stories 135). The granddaughter is not alone in her support of the aging and questionable symbol of the southern past, especially the south’s preoccupation with its understandings of dignity, honor, and courage. Moreover, at the granddaughter’s long anticipated graduation from college (at the age of sixty-two), one of the ceremony’s speakers, with the elder Sash sitting in a wheelchair on the stage, warns the audience: “‘If we forget our past [. . .] we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won’t have one’” (144). The paradox (or is it irony) involved in that statement deserves careful consideration.

Throughout the story, a cautionary tale much preoccupied with the thread-bare past (as represented by the decrepit man who lays claim to having been a Confederate officer, though the story reveals his considerable confusion about the actual facts of his involvement), readers will notice the conspicuous focus on personal egos, flawed memories, and—perhaps most significantly—the absence of God, except when mentioned in the old man’s complaint: “‘God damm every goddam thing to hell’” (140). The curmudgeonly veteran at the end of the story, however, has been wheeled off the stage and waits in his chair as an inert and finally silent “corpse, in the long line at the Coca-Cola machine,” somewhere at the end of a flagstone path outside the auditorium where he has had his final encounter with the enemies of time and death. Does this mean that the old traditions of Confederate recollections are now (or should be) inert and irrelevant?

So, beyond the foregoing question, what is the reader supposed to think of “A Late Encounter with Enemy,” one of O’Connor’s stories that seems simply secular—one without much references to anything either spiritual or religious? I would invited readers to consider carefully the several points previously offered: consider Faulkner’s statement about the “meadow” of memory; consider O’Connor’s development of Percy’s comment about the American southerner’s psyche after the Civil War; and consider—perhaps most carefully—everything the characters say in O’Connor’s story because, as I have elsewhere argued in a previous posting, O’Connor would remain that she, as the writer, is “speaking with character and action, not about character and action” (Mystery and Manners 75). The reader may discover that “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” is one of O’Connor’s most subtle and effective elaborations upon the theme she offers in her response to Walker Percy.

Tags: American Civil War, Bottleneck, Collective Psyche, Confederate Uniforms, Confusing Time, Course Textbooks, Flannery O Connor, Level Literature, Literature Survey, Miss Emily, Old Men, Preoccupation, Profound Effect, Regional Writer, Southern Writer, Southerners, Survey Course, Walker Percy, William Faulkner, Writer Walker
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