Violence as the Road to Transformation: O’Connor’s
I. Introduction: The Controversy over the Religious Signification American Southern woman writer Flannery O’Connor (1925~1964) is famous for
Violence as the Road to Transformation: O’Connor’s
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Hsiu-chih Tsai National Taiwan University
I. Introduction: The Controversy over the Religious Signification
American Southern woman writer Flannery O’Connor (1925~1964) is famous for her direct comment on her own writings. A native of Georgia, she writes short stories and novels situated on the Southern landscape. She pictures her characters vividly and frankly in great resemblance to those living around her in the “Christ-haunted” world of manners and morals.16 O’Connor was frequently asked to delineate and comment on her own works. Most of the times, she would illuminate her readers by highlighting the religious implications, which she believed to be the very force and stimulant of her writing. She was always eager in pointing out to her reader the hidden meaning and the religious message of a salvation in the devastated South where, both in her opinions and as depicted in her works, the faith in religion wore out gradually. Therefore, O’Connor always believed that she had to fight her way out among the noises of non-believers in a direct or indirect response to the critiques that picked out the “wrong” side of her stories.She would make a clearance of those disquiets and looked at them with a strict and stern face that accepted no stray interpretations of religious significance. And all the
responses, explanations, and comments she made in her lectures are mostly pivoted upon the question of whether God’s grace is received by her characters at the end of the stories.
This strong attitude to direct the interpretation of her works is typically what O’Connor would like to preserve. This is part of the reason why many critics find her too “dominating.” She is always well prepared to fight for her belief and tries every
16 When talking about the inspiration and the primal setting for her stories, O’Connor frankly pointed out,
“Somewhere is better than anywhere,” (O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,”
Mystery and Manners, p. 200) and of course, this somewhere was always the South. She wrote, “The fiction writer finds in time, if not at once, that he cannot proceed at all if he cuts himself off from the sights and sounds that have developed a life of their own in his senses. The novelist is concerned with the mystery of personality, and you cannot say much that is significant about this mystery unless the
characters you create exist with the marks of a believable society about them.” (Mystery and Manners, p.198)
In 1951, when she was only twenty-six, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, a disease that had taken her father’s life in 1941, and the disease left her an invalid in her thirties. Her illness took away her health gradually and confined her to living with her mother at the small Milledgeville farm in Georgia, and “For the rest of her life, the next thirteen years, O’Connor lived with her mother at Andalusia, their farm home, a few miles outside Milledgeville on the road to Eatonton.” (Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor, p. 7) However, the local materials finally turn out to be the very supply of her writing resources. She called the South a “Christ-haunted” world and this world becomes the fountain home of most of her unique but sometimes grotesque characters.
possible method to force her way out of an “unfriendly circumstances.” Both the depiction of her grotesque stories and her interpretations and comments on the possible religious implications her stories might incur demonstrate such a persuading yet
unrelenting persistence and approach to the reader. Certainly, Flannery O’Connor could always demonstrate that there is God everywhere in her works and that His grace is flashed behind every scene in most of her stories; however, what troubles most critics who sympathize with O’Connor’s standpoints might not be the same as that questions those who disbelieve in her talk of religion and belief. Because it is the process and the violence that is being questioned, not the grace of God or the revelation of it
The controversy over the violence and religious belief17 presented in O’Connor’s fictions has a long history since the publication of the stories. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor’s title story18 of her 1955 collection, is such a text that accumulates critical ambiguities. This widely anthologized story is significant especially in its representation of O’Connor’s grotesque penchant in the narrative and in the textual delineation of religious elements. The violence in this story raises hot debates among critics on issues of grace and violence, and the intertwining threads of spiritual grace and physical violence keep bouncing incessantly within various minds: This [“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”] is perhaps O’Connor’s most famous story, …the most violent, the most psychologically harrowing to read, the most apparently godless, and, I would add, the most unremitting in its insistence on the reality of bodily grace (Thornton 128).
The violence is there inviting the possible reader’s attention to the wrestling question of the existence of God’s grace, and the responses vary. Debra Lynn Thornton is positive in her affirmation of O’Connor’s use of violence as the revelation and invitation of God’s grace, however, not all critics are so sympathetic towards O’Connor’s writing strategy. Stephen C. Bandy, on the contrary, after closely studying this short story, points out: “No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” Its message is profoundly pessimistic and in fact subversive to the doctrines of grace and charity, despite heroic efforts to disguise that fact” (Bandy 107).
It seems that O’Connor has set a gadget there in her story, and it intrigues two different understandings and interpretations. And it is always a matter of belief, just as Bandy would assure us: “None of “O’Connor’s stories has been more energetically theologized” than this one, and “for the true believer there can be no further discussion”
17 Unlike most authors, Flannery O’Connor usually took a strong stance in defending her own work and kept reminding her reader the religious implication and designation behind her writing. And she simply told her reader how they should interpret her work. She wrote, “One of the most disheartening
circumstances that the Catholic novelist has to contend with is that he has no large audience he can count on to understand his work. The general intelligent reader today is not a believer.” (“Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” Mystery and Manners, p. 181) Moreover, her correspondences with her friends, her lectures, and her remarks are more than often recited by her critics to support this religious zealous. But there are still some critics who would not succumb to this woman writer’s preach of religious
interpretation and use her own works to challenge her interpretation: “Criticism of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, under the spell of the writer’s occasional comments, has been unusually susceptible to
interpretations based on Christian dogma.” (Stephen C. Bandy, “ ‘One of My Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother,” p. 107)
18 This title story was previously published in Modern Writing I in 1953. (Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor, p. 43)
(Bandy 107). The dilemma is: if the reader would like to prescribe his/her position as a true believer, there is really no space for him/her to argue, nor can he/she question the signification revealed within the narrative. Nevertheless, if the reader would detain his or her religious belief, and contemplate the possibility between violence and grace, will there be a contradictory answer waiting to be revealed?
While reading O’Connor’s stories, the critics as well as the readers usually find themselves in such an ambiguous situation of tormenting between the two forces: the pursuit of the meaning through textual interpretation and the drag towards the author’s interpretation. Usually the second choice wins, because finding supporting evidences for O’Connor’s quick and sharp snap for her story’s ending seems to be a safe and satisfactory route for the reading quest. This is the reason why the critics’ controversy can never settle down. Actually, for a long time, D. H. Laurence’s advice—“trust the art, but not the artist”—is the most referred sentence as the excuse19 and justification when the critics of the opposite camp would like to resist O’Connor’s “authentic voice.” In a sense, O’Connor’s strong stance and her voice does reach the ears of her reader and believers. But it also hampers the possibility of allowing her work to be read in another light. However, the initiation that Roland Barthes proposed in textual reading—“the author is dead”—might offer us a new chance to re-read O’Connor’s story in spite of the piled-up authentic, religious and psychological interpretations.
When studying “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” critics like to interpret the moment that the grandmother reaches out her hand towards The Misfit as a moment of grace, and thus conclude that this gesture will become an epiphany that leads The Misfit upward to God’s grace. But others would argue that the grandmother does not show any sign of repent, nor does her last gesture a touch of God’s grace. However, I believe, with a semiotic analysis of the narrative, the questions could be approached and interpreted from a different perspective. In this paper, I would first analyze the textual narrative of this story, and furthermore, figure out a special set of semiotic modulations to offer an alternative interpretation of the fictional arrangement of violence and massacre.
From a semiotic viewpoint of textual analysis, the use of violence in a story is never a pure literary, accidental event. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the title story of O’Connor’s collection of stories bearing the same name, exemplifies how unruly violence could play in a world where people of no great faults die without any decent reasons. There are seven people who died in this collection and the title story contains six of them. The violence that O’Connor considers to be well equipped with religious meaning sends a whole family, three adults, two children, and a baby, into death without any delay in the narrative. Death is easy and weightless as depicted distantly by an unemotional narrator and the play of violence becomes a suggestion of the ending of a farce that life is to bear. Literally, the violence that causes so many deaths signifies the brutality embedded in man, but as signifiers drift, meanings disseminate and the mystery behind glitters through the interstices. At the cultural and symbolic level, this violence ceases to be a mere vicious act, and through the process of virtualization, the actants, those who enact actions, are allowed a chance of realization.
While setting up the epistemological framework of the semiotic modulations of the narrative, Greimas and Fontanille analyze the state of the subject of the narrative in terms of modalities. Through the interactions and transformations of these modalities, the subject might obtain a certain kind of cognition. Moreover, the linguistic and cultural relativity within the narrative can also be revealed through the analysis of the various modalities. According to Greimas and Fontanille, the main function of a textual
19 As many of his predecessors, Stephen C. Bandy also uses this maxim to start the proceeding of his analysis in “ ‘One of my Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother.” (107)
narrative is to delineate a world of existential simulacra where the flow of actions signifies and constructs a higher level of cultural and symbolic signification. Hence Greimas and Fontanille conclude that only when the subject of the narrative can take on actions, that is, when the subject is an actant, can he gain a certain sense of cognition of the existential world of textual simulacra. Moreover, this actant has to go through a process of thymic “sensitization” (an existential transformation trajectory) to really feel, sense, or touch things through the body, and then there is the possibility for this actant to reach the stage of existential development. Till then, “the universe of cognitive forms”
might arise before him (Greimas and Fontanille xxi).
In the following discussion, I will focus my analysis and interpretation on the existential trajectories that the two main characters in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—the grandmother and The Misfit—go through, especially on the transforming stages they experience during the very critical moment. First, I will take the family trip to Florida as a transformation trajectory for the grandmother, and thus divide the whole narrative into four different existential phases as the major transition stages that the grandmother experiences throughout the narrative. Second, I will focus on the analysis and interpretation of the two types20 of violence in the narrative—the physical violence of the massacre of the Bailey Family and the verbal violence that constructs the
framework and creates the tension of the narrative. Third, I would interpret and analyze the characters’ existential procedures so as to see whether the debatable transformation of the main characters is possible and could be justified.