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re: "The Train" by Flannery O’Connor

R/T — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 15:25:00 +0000

The sixth and final story in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 master’s thesis collection, “The Train,” is a somewhat gothic tale in which nineteen-year old Hazel (Haze) Wickers suffers social awkwardness and nighttime terror during a train ride for undisclosed reasons to Taulkinham. O’Connor readers will recognize Haze, with his last name changed to Motes, as the protagonist who will reappear in the novel Wise Blood; in this short story appearance, however, Haze—like his later incarnation—proves himself to be on the run from something in his past but now finds himself agitated by his surroundings and other people.

Confronted and inexplicably annoyed by everyone else on the train—including Mrs. Wallace Ben Hosen (on her way to visit her daughter in Florida) and the porter (a black man from Chicago even though Haze recognizes him as someone from his own hometown of Eastrod, Tennessee)—the hypersensitive Haze is most perplexed by his mother whose spectral influence disrupts almost every aspect of her son’s experience on the train. A confused Haze remembers that he traveled as a little boy with his mother, a woman who “always started up a conversation with the other people on the train,” but then he also recalls that his “mother had never talked much on the train; she mostly listened.” Readers should not construe this contradiction as an author’s error; Haze’s mixed memory is symptomatic of the young man’s disordered mind, and Haze’s bewilderment is intensified when he conflates his claustrophobic entrapment in his sleeping berth with his mother’s closed coffin.

“The Train” stands out as one of the best stories in O’Connor’s thesis collection. Most remarkable is the young author’s management of the central character’s grotesque, unstable personality. Even if readers are unfamiliar with Haze’s later appearance in Wise Blood—a most highly recommended novel featuring Motes as “a Christian in spite of himself”—readers will appreciate “The Train” as a powerfully successful portrait of a disturbed young man who appears as someone who is in desperate need of being saved from complete chaos. Clearly, the haunted and disturbed Haze Wickers cannot function very well on his journey (i.e., a pilgrimage of sorts) without something or someone else.

Coming Soon: Flannery O’Connor

R/T — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 14:47:00 +0000

More than half a century has passed since Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), intrigued readers and baffled most critics. O’Connor, in her brief life (1925-1964), went on to publish another novel (The Violent Bear It Away, 1960) and a collection of short stories (A Good Man is Hard to Find, 1955). Another collection of short stories (Everything That Rises Must Converge) was posthumously published in 1965.

Also, Sally Fitzgerald (O’Connor’s close friend) edited and published Mystery and Manners, a collection of O’Connor’s “occasional prose” (i.e., articles, speeches, and essays), and The Habit of Being, a collection of O’Connor’s correspondence. Moreover, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—in 1971—published The Complete Stories, and The Library of America published O’Connor’s Collected Works in 1988.

In the last thirty to forty years, critics and scholars have offered up thousands of books, articles, and dissertations that have a single purpose: understanding and explaining the fiction of the singular author from Milledgeville, Georgia, a town that H. L. Mencken would certainly have disparaged as being at the center of the “Bible belt,” a community that Ralph C. Wood has embraced as being part of the “Christ-haunted south.”

Now, with all of that having been noted (and with an acknowledgement to someone who has urged this project), I humbly plan on occasionally using this blog as a forum for offering a bit more to the aforementioned single purpose: understanding Flannery O’Connor’s stories and novels. As I do so, readers will discover that I work within certain subjective limitations: (1) I am congenitally opposed to post-modern literary criticism (i.e., feminist and gender criticism; Marxist criticism; cultural studies; new historicism; post-structuralism and deconstruction, etc.), although that opposition may be an advantage in reading O’Connor; (2) I am not Roman Catholic but a lapsed (formerly fundamentalist) Methodist, and that is very much, I think, a disadvantage in reading O’Connor; (3) and I am unabashedly fascinated with everything written by O’Connor.

So, with the preface now having been offered, I invite you to “stay tuned” for more about the southern writer whose remains—in my opinion—the most important American author in the 20th century.

And Here is Something Special From the United States’ Social Security Administration

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 22:29:00 +0000

According to statistics and projections available from the United States’ Social Security Administration (an organization with a big stake in accurate predictions about longevity), I can look forward to 20.28 more years (and 243.36 monthly supplemental retirement payments) before reaching the end of the road. Of course, any number of variables could either extend or shorten that number.

Even though I would like to be optimistic and cheerful about all of this, the sobering reality of it all causes me to reflect on a wide number of issues, but one of the more light-hearted and intriguing issues is simply this: Assuming that I will read about one book a week, which is a fairly accurate assumption based on my reading speed and other factors (i.e., daily distractions and part-time teaching duties, with the latter necessary if I want to keep creditors at bay), how many more books do I have time to read? My third-grade math skills tell me that I have something like 1054.56 books left to read. (Note: Someone please tell me if my math is wrong.)

This number forces me to consider the next logical questions: Which books must I include among the 1054.56? Should I allow myself the pleasure of rereading previously read books? Or should I restrict myself to books that I have not yet read?

Going further, I recognize that some books cannot be completed in a week (e.g., Holy Bible, a book that I have not completed from cover-to-cover), and some books can be completed more quickly (e.g., Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a book that I have read more times than any other book in existence). You can see how complicated this can become.

So, even though others may scoff at my absurd preoccupation with this life-and-death dilemma, I nevertheless think it high time that I come up with a systematic reading plan. Therefore, in full recognition of the peculiarity of this request, I turn outward to others for their recommendations.

Thus, feel free to recommend either 1 or 1054.56 books that I ought to read before I reach the full measure of the Social Security Administration’s allotment of 20.28 more years. I look forward to your suggestions.

Books Into Movies?

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:10:00 +0000

I have been pondering this question: What movies stand out as good versions of good books or short stories?

The answer to this question, of course, becomes subjective for more than a few reasons, but one reason stands out: an individual’s definition of the qualifier (good) complicates the question. The answer is also complicated by the reality that no one person has either read every good book or seen every good movie.

Nevertheless, setting aside the considerable difficulties and subjectivities associated with the question, I shall briefly offer my own answer (with an important caveat): only a couple of movies (and television films) and books come to my mind – Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on the Train; Laurence Oliver’s Hamlet; Orson Welles’ Macbeth; John Huston’s Moby-Dick; John Huston’s Wise Blood; John Huston’s The Dead; Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold; Fred Zinneman’s The Member of the Wedding; Henry King’s The Sun Also Rises; Fernando Birri’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings; Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman; and the television version of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels and stories.

I know my list is really short, but the reason, you see, lies in the caveat: I very rarely go to movies or watch such programs on television. So, I guess my contribution to the discussion is rather meager, which means I must turn to you for the answers.

Tell me about what movies (or television films) stand out as good versions of good books or short stories?

Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Thirteen)

admin — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 08:09:00 +0000

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Thirteen: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All (Continued) –

(Note: Previously posted installments of this series have included bibliographies in the form of endnotes for the text’s parenthetical citations; however, hence forth, the bibliographies will be omitted (to save space and time) but are nevertheless available to any reader who requests the complete bibliography for this series.)

Text

Within Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her fascination with death seems to metastasize exponentially from the infrequently mentioned cells isolated in her personal experience.

Jennifer H. Profitt, author of “Lupus and Corticosteroid Imagery in the Works of Flannery O’Connor,” observes that O’Connor was twenty-five years old when her health began to deteriorate, and at that time she was incorrectly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis; later, in 1951, her diagnosis changed to disseminated lupus, but she was not told about this revised diagnosis until eighteen months later (Profitt 76). Nine years earlier, O’Connor’s father had died of the same disease (Profitt 85). O’Connor comments, “My father had it [. . .] but at that time there was nothing for it but the undertaker” (O’Connor Habit 57). These facts, among others, have led Dorothy Walters, with whom I agree, to the conclusion that both O’Connor’s father’s terminal illness and her own ongoing battle with the same disease were responsible for the powerful presence of death [and its abject quality] in O’Connor’s writing (Walters 16). To extrapolate a bit further, however, and say that O’Connor’s own medical condition influenced Wise Blood would be simple chronological error as the time-line of the novel’s composition cannot support any such conclusion. However, consider the following excerpt from a letter to “A” dated November 25, 1955:

I was five years writing that book [Wise Blood], and up to the last I was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was finished I came down with my energy-depriving ailment and began to take cortisone in large doses and cortisone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued. I was more or less living my life and H. Motes’s too and as my disease affected the joints, I conceived the notion that I would eventually become paralyzed and was going blind and that in the book I spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book. (O’Connor Habit 117-18)

This cannot be considered O’Connor’s prescience, and we cannot look at her concerns and experiences with her own health as matters after the fact so as to characterize them as influences upon Wise Blood. But, it remains essential, for purposes of understanding abjection in Wise Blood, to view the novel in terms of O’Connor’s awareness of and experience with her father’s medical condition. To the extent that her father’s condition influenced her outlook on her own health prior to her diagnosis, either as conscious or unconscious influences, and to the extent that any such influence can be stated with certainty remains impossible, although the speculation remains seductive.

WITH THIS INSTALLMENT, THE SERIES OF ARTICLES ON

FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S WISE BLOOD

WILL BE SUSPENDED UNTIL SOME LATER DATE.

Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Twelve)

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:55:00 +0000

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Twelve: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All (Continued) –

Text

Now, a brief look at the relationship that exists between parent and child as a central concern in O’Connor’s works.

Wise Blood, like many of O’Connor’s short stories (with “The Enduring Chill” being notable among them for this discussion), creates what Sue Walker views as an ironic version of Kristeva’s view of the abject and the mother-child dyad; with O’Connor we encounter the death-bearing mother whose excessive control leads to death; discussing O’Connor in “The Being of Illness: The Language of Being Ill,” Walker notes that for Kristeva, “abjection shows up as a struggle on the part of the child to separate from the mother. Having been at one with her body, the body, upon separation, becomes abject—just as the mother must be made abject if there is to be separation from her” (Walker 46). This, of course, points back to Kristeva’s understanding of abjection within the Freudian model of the Oedipus complex. The death-bearing mother in O’Connor’s fiction, however, does not go away; the separation between mother and child remains incomplete, and the “enduring chill of the mother’s overbearing presence” continues to invade the sanctity of the subject (Walker 47). In Wise Blood, not even death can silence the death-bearing mother. But more of that later.

As a foil to the maternal figure, O’Connor’s use of the paternal figure also demands attention. Turning to O’Connor’s personal correspondence for further insight about her family, especially her father, there is the obvious fact that she seldom mentions her father, still, her strong attachment to him is revealed in a latter she wrote to “A” on July 18, 1956: “I am never likely to romanticize him because I carry around most of his faults as well as his tastes. I even have the same constitution: I have the same disease. This is something called lupus” (O’Connor Habit 168). And while O’Connor writes very little about her father’s role in her life, no account of her father’s actual death (when she was a young teenager) is included among her letters (Walker 38). In a 1958 letter to Maryat Lee, however, O’Connor says, “You didn’t know I had a DREAD DISEASE didja? Well I got one. My father died of the same stuff at age 44” (O’Connor Habit 266). Here, outside of her fiction, O’Connor, masking it with blithe humor, enters into a conversation about the abject territory of disease. She acknowledges abjection and death. Within her fiction, her fascination with death seems to metastasize exponentially from these infrequently mentioned cells of personal experience.

TO BE CONTINUED

Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Eleven)

admin — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:50:00 +0000

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Eleven: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All –

Epigraphs

He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother would rest easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came looking any time at night, she would see. He wandered if she walked at night and came there ever. She would come with that look on her face, unrested and looking; the same look he had seen through the crack of her coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting the top on her. He had seen the shadow that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself; but they shut it. [. . .] He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from the closing, fly out of there, but it was falling on top of her, closing down all the time. (O’Connor Wise Blood 26-27)

[. . .] the Bible was the only book he read. He didn’t read it often but when he did he wore his mother’s glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop. (O’Connor Wise Blood 23)

His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. [. . .] He moved behind a tree [. . . but] he could feel her watching him through the tree. [. . .] She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. [. . .] “What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said. “I never ast him,” he muttered. She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. (O’Connor Wise Blood 62-63)

Text

As Julia Kristeva points out in her study In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, “Freud saw religion as nothing less than an illusion, [. . .] a rather unrealistic construct of the reality of its subjects’ desires” (11). Unwittingly following Freud, Flannery O’Connor in writing Wise Blood, especially as she implicates the object she calls God, and as she imbues her text with parts of her self, exacerbates and celebrates that utmost of abjection: death. O’Connor, of course, would not likely agree with Ana-Maria Rizzuto, author of The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study, who argues that “God, psychologically speaking, is an illusory transitional object” (177). O’Connor, the devout Roman Catholic, would also have had difficulty accepting Kristeva’s views. Kristeva, for example, assesses Catholics as people who “put up a formidable resistance” to psychoanalysis; “Catholics count only for themselves: hostile to transference, more narcissistic or perverse than other patients, they are relative newcomers to analysis who pose new problems for the analyst as well as new avenues of research” (Kristeva In the Beginning 52). Because of O’Connor’s authorial intrusions into Wise Blood, particularly as they related to the problem of abjection, some analysis of O’Connor herself is called for in this study.

O’Connor—being unaware of her debt to him—joins Freud in his conclusion: “The idea of a single great god—an idea which must be recognized as a completely justified memory, [. . .] has a compulsive character: it must be believed” (qtd. in Rizzuto 212). O’Connor’s failure to apprehend these concepts paradoxically intensifies abjection’s power. She unconsciously serves as the perverse proselyte of the abject domain of death. This becomes a bit clearer upon closer inquiry into O’Connor’s biography. Along with some thoughts on parent-child relationships, some information from O’Connor’s life helps mark out ways in which the abject acts upon the text and then projects itself beyond the boundaries of the text. Next, a brief look at the relationship that exists between parent and child as a central concern in O’Connor’s works.

TO BE CONTINUED

Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Ten)

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Ten: Configuring the Abject (Continued) –

Text

This study before you does not pretend to be an analysis of narrative strategies. But I do need to pause long enough in the next few postings to look briefly at the ways in which O’Connor’s own language demonstrates the text’s, the narrator’s, and the author’s complicity in the erasure of distances and borders. Such erasure exposes subjects to the abject forces. My own vulnerability to the text occurs especially as the text focuses upon the human body: the corpse.

The corpse, after all, as previously noted, “seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” (Kristeva Powers 4).

Personal Reflection: Tuesday morning. The doctors do not tell me very much. Neither do the nurses. Three pounds two ounces. Under-developed lungs. Serious breathing difficulties. Too soon to tell, they say. But she seems like a fighter, says the doctor. Let’s just remain confident, he goes on. Would you like to see your daughter? the nurse asks. I am led into the glass-enclosed world of neonatal nightmares. On the incubator someone has attached a card: Baby Girl Davis 07/06/76. You can touch her if you want to, says the nurse. I put my hand into my daughter’s sterile, heated, Plexiglas world. Tiny perfect fingernails, a million wrinkles on skin barely covering the millions of microscopic blood vessels, tight eyes closed. Purple skin the color of children’s hands stained with blackberries. Time to go now, says the nurse. I pull my finger free from my daughter’s frightened grasp. Her name is Sarah Elizabeth, I say to the nurse. Thursday morning arrives. A small opening is dug into the earth. A few baskets of flowers surround the opening. The undertaker, thinking Sarah Elizabeth’s father will not notice, opens the rear of the hearse and retrieves a small, plain wooden box. Time passes quickly, and absurdly empty words spill out over the small box and the earth. “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.” And now, so much later, the grasp from the grave remains.

And so I know for certain—at that moment like too many others—that the abjection of death destroys us all.

TO BE CONTINUED

Question from the Forest

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:52:00 +0000

I admit that I am having another one of those days that I suppose bloggers must occasionally experience. So, with that minor, self-conscious confession out of the way, I further admit that this posting falls (pun intended) under the wide-net category of the well-known riddle involving the tree having fallen in the forest and the sound it may or may not have made:

(1) Has anyone been reading my series of postings on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood?

(2) Does anyone have any interest in seeing it continue?

(3) Does anyone have any recommendations for improvements or changes?

Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Nine)

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:23:00 +0000

Making the Abject Body Count(s):

An Autobiographical Reading of

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

– Part Nine: Configuring the Abject (Continued) –

Text

The intellectual relationship between Kristeva and Lacan is complex and deserves attention beyond that which is possible in this study of O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Instead, to look briefly and clearly at the Lacanian notion of jouissance, for purposes of understanding Kristeva’s adoption of it, and hoping to avoid confusion in the process, I will—in the next part of this series—draw upon Darian Leader’s and Judy Grove’s condensed analysis in Introducing Lacan. Jouissance is

anything which is too much for the organism to bear. [. . .] It is real, [. . .] something outside symbolization and meaning, constant and always returning to the same place to bring you suffering. [. . .] It is working silently and invisibly to bring about its destructive aims. [ . . ] It is identified in the Other. [ . . . Jouissance is] outside the register of image and symbolic. (140-49)

This is the foundation upon which Kristeva builds. For Kristeva, the relationship between jouissance and the abject becomes rather complex. Kristeva points out that the subject upon whom and within which the abject works, exists as an outcast, one who is separated and excluded rather than one who recognizes himself; this subject is one who wanders instead of one who desires, belongs, or refuses (Kristeva “Approaching Abjection” 130). The person by whom and through whom the abject exists is a deject who situates himself, separates himself, and strays rather than getting his bearing (Kristeva Powers 8). “The outcast never stops delimiting his own universe, the fluid confines of which—because constituted by a non-object, the abject—constantly puts at issue his solidity and incites him to start again. An indefatigable builder, the outcast is in sum a lost soul” (Kristeva “Approach Abjection” 131).

This wanderer, this builder persists. I reality, I persist. I, like the wanderer, continue as a “voyager in the endless night. He has a feeling of danger, of the loss represented by the pseudo-object which attracts him [me]” (Kristeva “Approaching Abjection” 131). The “deject [as wanderer, as outcast, as self] is in short a stray” who remains necessarily preoccupied with the question, “Where am I” instead of “Who am I?” (Kristeva Powers 8). “Wandering on excluded terrain,” the subject draws his jouissance (Kristeva “Approaching Abjection” 131). Moreover, “the abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered”; but it exists as a land of oblivion in which the “clean and proper (in the sense of the incorporated and incorporable) [. . .] becomes filthy”; and, with equal power, “the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame” (Kristeva Powers 8). Time collapses paradoxically into a place wherein the “time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth” (Kristeva Powers 9). This is an unstable, paradox-burdened border of knowing and ineffability. I arrive at a border of my comprehension, an ambiguous border of conscious and unconscious involvement, a place involving the realm of object relations beyond and through which jouissance and abjection become operative.

As in Lacanian jouissance, wherein I am faced with something outside symbolization and meaning, a something which works silently and invisibly to bring about its destructive aim, abjection points to annihilation. Jouissance and abjection: where the subject is swallowed up; where the Other—an alter ego—keeps the subject floundering; where the “I” of the self disappears into the ambiguous frontier where there is nothing either objective or objectal to the abject; where victims of the abject become fascinated victims, submissive and willing victims (Kristeva Powers 9). Abjection’s borderland, permeable and unstable, “while releasing a hold, [. . .] does not radically cut off the subject [my person as self] from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger” (Kristeva Powers 9). Abjection and jouissance move against me and within me, in spite of myself and because of myself. To the extent that this points to the inevitability of the abject, the unavoidability of jouissance, then Kristeva’s analysis arms me with insights that help me understand my reactions to O’Connor’s Wise Blood, the role of jouissance and the abject, and the theme of death. The ways in which the gaze, jouissance, and the abject conspire within Wise Blood disrupt my involvement with the text. They add to my discomfort, unease, and dizziness.

In O’Connor’s real world, her confrontations and afflictions with the powers of abjection often fracture the otherwise finely bordered space between author and text. The fracture occurs to such an extent that the psychological and physical health of the author disguising herself as narrator becomes an important consideration. This happens because of O’Connor’s narrative projections and authorial intrusions—usually theological, sectarian, and emotional—notwithstanding some critics’ arguments (and O’Connor’s own protestations) which assert narrative distant and objectivity. This study before you does not pretend to be an analysis of narrative strategies. But I do need to pause long enough in the next sections to look briefly at the ways in which O’Connor’s own language demonstrates the text’s, the narrator’s, and the author’s complicity in the erasure of distances and borders. Such erasure exposes subjects to the abject forces. My own vulnerability to the text occurs especially as the text focuses upon the human body: the corpse.

The corpse, after all, as previously noted, “seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” (Kristeva Powers 4).

TO BE CONTINUED