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4. The American Novel Since 1945: Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (cont.)
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Professor Amy
Hungerford: I started last
time, and actually my whole
lecture existed under the rubric
of,
this quotation from Sabbath
Lily Hawks, and I'm just going
to read it to you again.
"I like his eyes.
They don't look like they see
what he's looking at,
but they keep on looking."
So, last time I suggested that
what O'Connor asks us to see in
her fiction is a theological
structure and a religious
message.
What I started to suggest at
the end of class--as I gave you
the catalog of body parts lying
around the text--what I began to
suggest is,
that if we actually see what
we're looking at rather than,
like Haze, not seeing what
we're looking at,
we begin to see something
that's harder to assimilate to
that neat theology that
O'Connor's letters and essays
point us towards.
One kind of question,
then, I was raising is:
what context do you use to read
any novel?
And today I'm going to suggest
two--actually,
well, yes--two additional
contexts that we can look to,
to read the novel.
And I will let you know what
those are when they come,
but be looking for that.
So, two hundred people show
up to see Asa Hawks blind
himself.
That's what we're told.
That's what the newspaper
clipping tells us.
We show up to see O'Connor take
her characters apart.
I began that catalog of body
parts.
Today I'm going to extend and
embellish the catalog of
suffering and distortion that we
see in this novel.
And, just to remind you of that
catalog, I just want to look at
page 43 in your edition,
47 in mine.
I noted that a lot of the body
parts that we see in her prose
are parts of women's bodies.
Well, the sense of the body as
grotesque goes beyond just
dismemberment.
There's a general ugliness of
women that pertains in the
novel.
And if you look on that page,
about in the middle,
this is Enoch describing his
foster mother:
"'This woman was hard to get
along with.
She wasn't old.
I reckon she was 40 year old,
but she sho was ugly.
She had theseyer brown glasses
and her hair was so thin it
looked like ham gravy trickling
over her skull.'"
Okay. It's funny a little bit.
It's a picturesque comparison,
hair and gravy,
but it emphasizes that
ugliness.
Now, if you look on page 80 (84
in my edition),
this is a woman climbing out of
the swimming pool.
Remember when Haze and Enoch
are in the middle of the park at
the swimming pool.
Enoch's hiding in the bushes,
spying on the women.
Here's one climbing out of the
pool:
First her face appeared,
long and cadaverous,
with a bandage-like bathing cap
coming down almost to her eyes,
and sharp teeth protruding from
her mouth.
Then she rose on her hands,
until a large foot and leg came
up from behind her,
and another on the other side,
and she was out,
squatting there,
panting.
She stood up loosely and shook
herself and stamped in the water
dripping off of her.
She comports herself like a dog
in this scene.
Okay.
So she shakes-- as if she had
fur to shake--but register the
weirdness of this sentence:
"Then she rose on her hands,
until a large foot and leg came
up from behind her."
It's as if they're sneaking up
behind her.
It's as if they're separate
from her, not part of her body
at all.
So, even when you see O'Connor
describing these emergence of a
body from the water--a moment
when you'd think the whole body
would be most on view,
or most pertinent to describe--
what you have is almost a
distortion of our senses,
a distortion of vision,
so that we see--even in a woman
climbing out of the water--her
legs,
her feet, as dismembered from
the rest of her body.
There is a critic at the
University of Michigan.
Her name is Patricia Yaeger.
She wrote a very compelling
argument about O'Connor's
fiction--not about Wise Blood
in particular,
but about her stories.
And in that essay she argues
that O'Connor's grotesqueness,
especially the grotesqueness of
the women figures in her novels,
is all wrapped up with the
culture of southern womanhood.
It's a culture of beauty that
requires all kinds of grooming
practices to form and shape the
body in such a way that it can
appear socially in a decorous
way.
So, Yaeger argues that what we
see in scenes like this is the
registration of the violence of
those practices of beauty.
So she does not let these
things sit in the text to be
assimilated to a theological
structure, but she brings them
out.
And by reading things like
contemporaneous autobiographies
from southern women that she's
chosen from the canon,
and just accounts of what was
required of women (etiquette and
so on), she weaves a reading of
passages like this into that
kind of context to suggest that
O'Connor's vision of violence
has more to do with being a
woman in the South than it does
with the stated religious
concerns that O'Connor talks
about in her letters.
Now, remember,
as I mentioned,
O'Connor suffered from lupus,
and she was disfigured by this
disease.
Especially, she was on crutches
for a long time,
and for periods of time could
not walk at all.
Her legs would swell up.
There's a lot of imagery of
swelling, of distortion and
distention of the body that some
critics point to her biography
to explain.
They look at her experience of
her own body and,
when you think about Yaeger's
argument--that kind of
distortion of the body in the
context of a social culture that
really emphasizes the control of
a woman's body--then you begin
to see the power of the tension
that we can read into moments
like this.
But I would suggest,
and actually Yaeger suggests
this too, that the violence of
southern culture goes way beyond
just the violence of the culture
of femininity,
the culture of the southern
woman.
And so, let's look a little bit
and extend the catalog.
Another category of
violence we have is murdered
children, murdered and also just
generally neglected or abandoned
children.
Enoch, if you'll recall,
was traded by his father off to
the Bible woman with the gravy
hair;
so that bespeaks the pain.
And last time I read you a
passage where Enoch begins to
tell that story in this very
pitiful way, getting no sympathy
from Haze.
So, clearly he feels the
abandonment from his father.
If you look at page 120 in your
edition (122 if anyone has
mine), this is a little story
that Sabbath Lily tells to Haze
while they are supposedly
seducing each other.
(Don't try this on your next
date;
I don't think it works very
well.) So this was her story:
"There was this child
once," she said,
turning over on her stomach,
"that nobody cared if it lived
or died.
Its kin sent it around from one
to another of them and finally
to its grandmother who was a
very evil woman,
and she couldn't stand to have
it around because the least good
thing made her break out in
these welps.
She would get all itchy and
swole.
Even her eyes would itch her
and swell up and there wasn't
nothing she could do but run up
and down the road shaking her
hands and cursing,
and it was twicet as bad when
this child was there.
So she kept the child locked up
in a chicken crate.
It seen its granny in hell fire
swole and burning,
and it told her everything it
seen,
and she got so swole until
finally she went to the well and
wrapped the well rope around her
neck and let down the bucket and
broke her neck.
Would you guess me to be
fifteen year old?"
she asked [seductively].
Okay.
Yes, very romantic story
Sabbath tells to our friend
Haze.
These images of babies
abandoned: here it's called an
"it."
Children are often called "it"
in O'Connor's fiction.
Especially, I would note,
if they are female children,
they're normally called "it."
Lily herself is a child who is
completely unloved by her
father.
Her father just wants to get
rid of her and is willing to
collude with her to try to make
Haze take her off his hands.
And remember the story of her
naming.
Her mother gave birth to her on
a Sunday and right after she was
born gave her the name Sabbath,
then turned on her side and
died.
So poor Lily is also an orphan,
at least in the emotional
sense, if not in actual reality.
Her father, of course,
had run off from her mother
right after she had gotten
pregnant, and then I suppose he
came back.
So, children are deeply abused
and neglected.What else do
we have?
On 231, just to add to this
catalog--we have murdered,
abandoned, neglected
children--we also have police
brutality.
(231. Now, let me see.
I may not have gotten the right
page number for you guys for
this one.) This is right when
Haze has been found in the ditch
by the two policemen,
and maybe you recall it.
Haze asks whether it's day or
night.
This is the bottom of 230:
"It's day," the thinner
one, the cop,
said, looking at the sky.
"We got to take you back to pay
your rent."
"I want to go on where I'm
going," the blind man said.
"You got to pay your rent
first," the policeman said,
"'ever bit of it."
The other, perceiving that he
was conscious,
hit him over the head with his
new billy.
"We don't want to have no
trouble with him," he said.
"You take his feet."
He died in the squad car,
but they didn't notice,
and took him on to the
landlady's.
She had put him in her bed,
and when she had pushed them
out the door,
she locked it behind them and
drew up a straight chair and sat
down close to his face where she
could talk to him.
Here this image of a
man--obviously an indigent found
on the road and then
gratuitously abused by the
police--echoes the earlier
moment when the policeman pushes
his car off the road and down
the hill.
These are instances where
police are using their power
utterly on their own authority,
with seemingly no checks,
with excess force.
Remember again:
this is the South.
We all know that these kinds of
violence, official violence,
were part and parcel of
southern culture toward African
Americans.
What I think O'Connor is doing
here is taking some of that
reality and injecting it into
Haze's narrative.
So, these are the kinds of
images that the Civil Rights
movement really brought to
light.
Here we see them in relation to
Haze.
But overt racism is there,
too, and if you look on page 67
in your book--and this is on 71
in mine--you will see that
O'Connor does not hesitate to
use the word "nigger" in the
dialog of her characters.
Now, the narrative voice does
not use that word,
but here it is on the bottom of
71.
Her characters are perhaps
typical poor southerners:
"Well,
what do you want to pay for
it?" the man asks.
[This is Haze buying his
Essex.]
"I wouldn't trade me a Chrysler
for an Essex like that.
That car yonder ain't been
built by a bunch of niggers.
All the niggers are living in
Detroit now putting cars
together," he said,
making conversation.
"I was up there a while myself
and seen.
I come home."
She's invoking,
in a very casual way,
the southern racism of the
poorer white working class.
This is just part of her
representation of the place,
part of her representation of
these characters.
It's a kind of realism,
of course.
Nevertheless,
there it is in front of us,
and again I call you back to
that quotation.
What are we going to see when
we look at the fiction?
Do we see what's in front of us?
So, this is one of the things
that O'Connor puts in front of
us.
On page 174--Again,
check and see if this is the
same in your edition.
Generally, annoyingly,
it's sometimes four pages'
difference earlier;
sometimes it's two.
So I tried to get them all,
but I think I didn't look this
one up;
this is Enoch stealing the new
Jesus:
He had darkened his face
and hands with brown shoe
polish, so that if he were seen
in the act, he would be taken
for a colored person.
Then he had sneaked into the
museum while the guard was
asleep and had broken the glass
case with a wrench he borrowed
from his landlady.
Then, shaking and sweating,
he had lifted the shriveled man
out and thrust him in a paper
sack,
and had crept out again past
the guard who was still asleep.
He realized as soon as he got
out of the museum that,
since no one had seen him to
think he was a colored boy,
he would be suspected
immediately and would have to
disguise himself.
That was why he had on the
black beard and dark
glasses.
Okay.
So, there's a certain sense of
humor here.
So, Enoch goes in black face to
commit the crime,
so that if he's seen he won't
be taken for white,
but then he realizes a black
person--just by definition--is
suspicious.
So he has to now disguise
himself from being a black
person.
This is partly Enoch's sort of
craziness, but the joke relies
on the fact of racial profiling.
It relies on the fact that it's
very plausible to think that at
this moment in the South to walk
down the street as a black
person,
to drive a car as a black
person, would be a risky
endeavor in some places in the
city.
So, it's a joke,
but it's a joke that rests on a
very dark reality.
So, what you have,
then, is a set of things that
are put before us,
that we are asked,
in a way, not to respond
to.
Let's look at one more example.
This is on page 159.
This is a silly example.
This is when Hoover
Shoates--and note in connection
with my lecture last time;
I talked to you about pigs,
and why there are pigs all over
a landscape--well,
Hoover Shoates:
a shoat is a little pig,
so she's continuing that
metaphor with his name,
or that trope with his name.
This is Haze being approached
by Hoover Shoates:
"My name is Hoover
Shoates," the man with his head
in the door growled.
"I know when I first seen you
that you wasn't nothin' but a
crackpot."
Haze opened the door enough to
be able to slam it.
Hoover Shoates got his head out
of the way but not his thumb.
A howl arose that would have
rended almost any heart.
Haze opened the door and
released the thumb and then
slammed the door again.
"A howl arose that would rend
almost any heart."
What you want to ask about all
these things that I'm putting in
front of you is,
"Are these supposed to rend our
hearts?"
I don't think we're meant to
feel much for Hoover Shoates
here.
He is a figure of critique.
He's a figure of satire.
He's the charlatan preacher.
We're certainly not meant to
identify with him or to
sympathize with him,
but here you can't help but
thinking about someone getting
their thumb smashed in a door.
And then it gets more intense
of course on page 206(and that's
204 in this edition),
when Haze commits murder.
So here we have the murder
scene:
"Take off that suit,"
Haze shouted and started the car
forward after him.
Solace began to lope down the
road taking off his coat as he
went.
"Take it all off," Haze yelled
with his face close to the
windshield.
The prophet began to run in
earnest.
He tore off his shirt and
unbuckled his belt and ran out
of his trousers.
He began grabbing for his feet
as if he would take off his
shoes, too, but before he could
get at them the Essex knocked
him flat and ran over him.
Haze drove about twenty feet
and stopped the car and then
began to back it.
He backed it over the body and
then stopped and got out.
The Essex stood half over the
other prophet as if it were
pleased to guard what it had
finally brought down.
The man didn't look so much
like Haze lying on the ground on
his face without his hat or suit
on.
A lot of blood was coming out
of him and forming a puddle
around his head.
He was motionless,
all but for one finger that
moved up and down in front of
his face as if he were marking
time with it.
Haze poked his toe in his side,
and he wheezed for a second and
then was quiet.
"Two things I can't stand,"
Haze said, "a man that ain't
true, and one that mocks what
is.
You shouldn't ever have
tampered with me if you didn't
want what you got."
The man was trying to say
something, but he was only
wheezing.
Haze squatted down by his face
to listen.
"I give my mother a lot of
trouble," he said through a kind
of bubbling in his throat,
"'never giv'er no rest,
stole theter car,
never told the truth to my
daddy or give Henry what,
never give--" "You shut up,"
Haze said, leaning his head
closer to hear the confession.
"Told where his still was and
got five dollars for it," the
man gasped.
"You shut up now," Haze said.
"Jesus," the man said.
"Shut up, now,
like I told you," Haze said.
"Jesus hep me," the man wheezed.
Haze gave him a hard slap on
the back and he was quiet.
How many of you when you read
that felt like a character who
mattered to you had died?
Just a few;
you guys are exceptionally,
exceptionally sympathetic.
I commend you.
It's hard to feel too much for
this prophet,
and I would argue that his
confession at the end is part of
what makes it quite difficult.
It's such a,
kind of, trivial set of things
that he begins to recite,
or, at least,
he recites them in such a
cliched way: "I gave my mother
trouble.
I was a bad boy.
I took some money to tell where
the still was."
These are such,
sort of, clichéd
southernisms that you start to
see this character as a
caricature.
He is very hard to see as a
human being.
And yet, I would contend that
the part about the Essex
actually running over him is
quite compelling.
At least I feel it when I read
it.
In a more abstract sense,
I feel the violence of it when
I read those passages.
So, there is a sense in
which you have to ask:
Is this meant to rend our
hearts?
If Hoover Shoates's thumb in
the door doesn't quite do it,
does this do it?
Does southern racism do it?
Does the dismemberment of women
do it?
What is the point of putting
these on the page?
And, if you think about the way
some bodies literally explode,
think of the new
Jesus--remember when Haze takes
that little,
shriveled body from Lily and
throws it against the wall,
the head pops,
and out comes dust and trash.
If bodies are exploding here,
why are we not asked to care?
And, if we aren't asked to
care, what is it that we're
asked to do, or to think,
in response to these things?
Now, Patricia Yaeger,
in her argument,
rejects what has typically been
offered up as a way to account
for these things,
and that's the religious
reading.
She says, to dismiss that
violence into an old and
comfortable theology is simply
not to see it,
not really to see it,
not to notice that O'Connor put
it there in such a sharp and
compelling form.
I want to change tack for a
minute, and now I'm going to
veer into that second kind of
context that I said I was going
to talk about today.
There is something else I think
we're meant to see that is
neither theology nor southern
context,
and I want to show you that now
by looking at chapter 7;
it starts on 115 in your book
(117 in this edition).
I just want to read the opening.
I'm going to treat this chapter
as a sort of microcosm of the
book, with respect to its craft.
Let's look at how this opens:
"The next afternoon when he got
his car back,
he drove it out into the
country to see how well it
worked on the open road.
The sky was just a little
lighter blue than his suit,
clear and even with only one
cloud in it, a large,
blinding white one with curls
and a beard."
Notice that image of the cloud,
the blinding white cloud.
It's very hard not to see it as
a symbol.
What kind of symbol is it?
Well, it's a God symbol.
It's even got that typical
children's book iconography of
the curls and the white beard.
Okay.
So this is like your children's
book representation of the
Christian God,
and there it is as a blinding
white cloud.
You wouldn't even need the
curls and the beard if you just
had the blinding and the white.
And, of course,
as we go on,
as I'll show you,
the curls and the beard are
pared away, and you're left more
with that blinding whiteness.
So, the blinding white
cloud begins this chapter.
And what happens of course
thereafter, as you'll remember,
is that Lily pops up from the
back seat: "Hi."
He didn't know that she was
there.
And she's got a handful of
dandelions, and she's painted
her mouth red with lipstick,
and she's trying to seduce him.
And he had, in fact,
given her this little sort of
seductive note earlier
suggesting that he wanted to
seduce her, too.
And he still has in his mind
that he should do this,
and his point is to do it so
that he will prove that he needs
no redemption and that there is
no sin.
The problem here is that Lily
is interested in the seduction
precisely because she sees it as
a kind of sin.
So, if the two enter into this
seduction, they do so agreeing
on the same act,
but completely diametrically
opposed on its theological
meaning or its metaphysical
meaning.
And so, what you'll notice
in this chapter is an extended
example--in one of the only
extended conversations of the
book--of that phenomenon I
talked about last time,
where the characters just don't
seem to register the existence
of the other person at all.
So Haze, as I argued last time,
is kind of insulated.
Even his senses are insulated.
He can't hear things.
He doesn't see what's in front
of him.
He doesn't seem to be in his
context physically at all.
He doesn't seem to register the
pain of other persons.
Sometimes, he doesn't even seem
to register the existence of
other persons.
Well, this is an example--this
conversation--of completely
missed signals between the two
of them.
Sabbath Lily tells the story of
wrestling with her identity as a
bastard, and on 119 you get her
account of her writing to the
advice columnist Mary Brittle
about the problem of being a
bastard and what kind of sexual
play is appropriate for a
bastard,
given the fact that the Bible
says a bastard shall not enter
the kingdom of heaven.
So she's trying to figure out,
really, whether she should
sleep with someone,
because what does she have to
lose?
She can't get in to heaven
anyway.
So she says:
"Dear Mary:
I am a bastard and a bastard
shall not enter the kingdom of
heaven as we all know.
But I have this personality
that makes boys follow me.
Do you think I should neck or
not?
I shall not enter the kingdom
of heaven anyway so I don't see
what difference it makes.'"
And then she writes back,
Mary Brittle:
"Dear Sabbath:
Light necking is acceptable,
but I think your real problem
is one of adjustment to the
modern world.
Perhaps you ought to reexamine
your religious values to see if
they meet your needs in life.
A religious experience can be a
beautiful addition to living,
if you put it in the proper
perspective and do not let
it--[I think this is a misprint.
Do you have "warf" there?
I think it's "warp," "warp
you."]
Read some books on ethical
culture."
Clearly, O'Connor is offering
us Mary Brittle as the butt of
her critique,
the shallow modern thinking of
the
"enlightened"--psychologically
and ethically--modern person.
Sabbath in this chapter is an
odd Christ figure.
She is a Christ figure.
Remember how she hides and
skips from tree to tree in this
scene, when she's teasing Haze,
towards the end of it.
Well, that tree is also the
image of the cross that is part
of Christian tradition.
There are lots of hymns that
talk about the tree as the
cross, or the cross as the tree,
for example.
But it's the figure,
the ragged figure that moves
from tree to tree in the back of
Haze's mind, that's the Christ
that won't let him get away.
So Lily actually embodies that
Christ-like figure.
So, for all her impurity,
O'Connor presents her in
contrast to Mary Brittle as
understanding something
fundamental about the world,
and what's important in the
world that much more plausible
people don't understand.
So, this is a moment when
Sabbath tempts Haze back to
belief, and Haze's meditation
on,
or his wrestling with,
the question in this chapter of
whether a bastard can be in the
Church without Christ.
And he comes to that point
where he says,
"No.
A bastard can't be part of the
Church without Christ because
the word 'bastard' would just
simply not mean anything,
so you can't say that."
And it takes him a long time to
wrestle with this,
as Sabbath Lily talks to him,
and he comes to this moment.
And so, when he comes to that
conclusion, he also rejects her
advances.
It's coming to that conclusion
that so preoccupies him that he
rejects her advances.
Sabbath, if she had been able
to seduce him--I want to
suggest;
O'Connor, I think,
is suggesting--would have drawn
him back into the realm of
belief.What leads Haze on
through this scene is that
blinding white cloud.
Here it is as they decide
whether to turn off the road and
enter the field where Sabbath
will try to complete this
seduction:
The blinding white cloud
was a little ahead of them,
moving to the left.
"Why don't you turn down that
dirt road?"
she asked.
The highway forked off on to a
clay road and he turned on to
it.
It was hilly and shady and the
country showed to advantage on
either side.
One side was dense honeysuckle.
The other was open and slanted
down to a telescoped view of the
city.
The white cloud was directly in
front of them.
So, here the city is at a
distance.
We're in a pastoral space,
a beautiful space,
and this is all sort of under
the guidance of this white
cloud, this blinding white
cloud.
And of course,
I don't have to say to you,
I'm sure, "Blinding
white cloud?
Why is this the blinding white
cloud?"
Well, this is all about
blinding, this book.
It's about Asa's failed
blinding of himself for Christ,
and it's about,
in the end,
finally, Haze's successful
blinding: a kind of blinding
that, I would argue,
we're meant to understand as a
final clarity of vision,
that to be blind is to see
properly.
So, the blinding white
cloud has this clichéd
God imagery--the curls and
beard--in the beginning.
It takes on this leading aspect
in the middle of the chapter,
and then, if you look at the
end,
this is at the very end of the
chapter, a few pages on.
This is after the man from the
filling station has given Haze
some gas and not charged him for
it, a very unusual act of
kindness in this novel.
Haze drove on,
leaving the man who has helped
him: "The blinding white cloud
had turned into a bird with
long,
thin wings and was disappearing
in the opposite direction."
There's a perfect circularity
to this symbolism.
It's at the beginning;
it changes in the middle,
and arrives at the end.
By the end it has changed from
the clichéd image of the
Christian God to a less
farcically clichéd image
of the Holy Spirit:
the bird ascending,
the white bird.
It's moving in the opposite
direction, suggesting that Haze
in this scene has missed his
chance.
It was presiding over Sabbath
Lily's attempts to seduce,
and he was so absorbed in the
question of whether a bastard
could be in the Church without
Christ that he doesn't follow
her into the sin that would,
in fact, be the catalyst for
his redemption.
And so, the cloud departs at
the end.
I have to say:
this is incredibly heavy
handed.
If we think about the religious
reading, and think about
religious symbolism,
this is hardly innovative.
And I would suggest to you that
O'Connor…well,
I don't know.
Did O'Connor know that it was
heavy handed?
It don't know.
What is true about O'Connor is
that she was trained to write
stories like this.
Flannery O'Connor--and this is,
again, that context coming
in--Flannery O'Connor was a
student at the Iowa Writers
Workshop,
a very prestigious writing
program.
Even then, it was a very
prestigious writing program.
There is a peculiarity for
writing in the second half of
the twentieth century,
and here I'm drawing on another
critic, from UCLA;
his name is Mark McGurl.
He has argued that what is
historically novel about this
period is that writers have
consistently been located in
universities.
They have been trained at
universities;
they have taught at
universities;
they have gone to creative
writing programs embedded within
universities;
they have held visiting
positions;
they've done readings;
and they have written books
whose primary readership is
around a seminar table or in a
lecture hall like this.
His argument is that a kind
of formal structure,
characterized by the principle
of unity,
a formal structure that was (in
that simplified version) at the
very heart of the most powerful
critical movement of the early
twentieth century,
and that is the New Criticism.
The New Criticism is a way of
reading that has its roots in
high modernism,
and it emphasizes the
writer's--usually the
poet's--ability to create a
beautiful,
whole, consistent,
internally structured literary
object that stands outside of
history in a certain way,
that is autonomous.
And so, this view of the
artwork--probably you have
experienced it if you've taken
other English classes,
and in fact I've been producing
it for you in my readings--this
mode of reading looks for those
tropes that unify a work.
It looks for that circularity
that I've described in this
little chapter,
tracks the symbols.
There's more to it than that.
It also looks for ambiguity.
O'Connor says about her symbols
that they should "keep on
deepening," that they should
never be reduced to a simple
equation,
X equals Y, cloud equals God,
that they should have a sense
of mystery about them.
Well, this was part and parcel
of what a New Critical reading
practice would look like,
and it's still extremely
powerful in our classrooms.
We do a lot of close readings.
Now, we put our close readings
to different kinds of uses,
and Mark McGurl has done
readings of lots of different
novelists that reveal (or,
his argument is that they
reveal) how the writing program
and its tenets have shaped
contemporary fiction in a
profound way.
The implications of this are
large and important for how we
understand the period.
So what you see in O'Connor
is, to borrow a phrase from
McGurl's title of his essay on
this,
"Flannery O'Connor,
B.A., M.F.A.," the product of a
mid-century American
institution,
the writing program.
I would suggest -- and this is
the third kind of context I want
to give you today -- that the
three I've given you--O'Connor's
letters,
her theological commitments,
southern context,
southern social context,
the New Critical writing
program,
the institutionalization of
modernism--these things are not
in fact separable from one
another.
Because in my own work,
I'm writing a book on religion
and fiction since 1960;
now, this is a little bit
before this period.
But what I have
discovered--what has really been
known for a long time,
but nobody's really made much
of it--is that the New Criticism
is deeply religious in and of
itself.
New Critical writers of theory:
many of them were,
in fact, Catholic,
and many of them were southern.
There are social and religious
elements that infuse their
literary theory,
so that to argue that the poem
is this unified whole,
and that what you should do
with the poem is show its
wholeness-- read it in order to
see its wholeness,
see how it embodies a formal
beauty, a formal order--this
looks very much like the kind of
metaphysical order that I was
drawing out of the Catholic
version of what O'Connor's doing
in her novels,
her version of what she's doing
in the novels,
where you have that
transcendent sky,
and there is this sense of an
ordering that seeps down in to
the material world,
that moment when Haze thinks
that he's somehow seeing
broken-off pieces of something
that once happened to him.
There is this latent order
everywhere.
And, for O'Connor,
it's part of this moral
religious order,
this redemptive order,
that Catholicism is for her.
The New Criticism sits in a
kind of deep analogy to that way
of thinking about religion.
That's why, I think,
O'Connor found it so
comfortable to learn and
practice the New Critical tenets
of formal construction of the
literary.
That's why she produced story
after story after story that can
be read in these formal ways
with these symbols that accrue
meaning and deepen and change
over the course of the novel or
the story.
So her commitment to the New
Criticism: McGurl argues that
O'Connor found the New Criticism
comfortable because Catholicism
had taught her to be obedient,
that it was a matter of
obedience to a formula that
allowed her to produce what she
produced on the page.
I would argue it differently:
that there is something,
in fact, religious about the
New Criticism that made it
particularly comfortable for
O'Connor to inhabit.
Now, I want to conclude by
pointing you towards Lolita.
Today the question of
torturing your own characters
has come up.
Yaeger calls it,
with respect to O'Connor,
an "aesthetics of torture."
I want you to think hard about
whether this is a way of
understanding Lolita when
we read it.
So, have that in your mind,
and think about the ways that
violence is or is not presented
to us in Lolita,
the way that we're asked
either to attend to language or
to see through it.
Ask those questions about
whether we're being asked to
identify with certain characters
or not.
How is the distance between
reader and character,
between reader and what's on
the page, how is that mediated?
How is that policed?
How is that structured?
So, think about that as you
start to read Lolita.
I'm going to stop there.
