Cool. A NYT travelogue of Flannery O'Connor landmarks. I love her stories but I don't think I've read her correspondence - for instance , I didn't know she was nearly incapacitated with illness, or that she wrote for three hours each day...interesting stuff.
This is a good description of notable O'Connor characters ( I have helpfully added the story titles w/ links) :
O’Connor’s characters shimmer between heaven and hell, acting out allegorical dramas of sin and redemption. There’s Hazel Motes('Wiseblood'), the sunken-eyed Army veteran who tries to reject God by preaching “the Church of Christ Without Christ, where the blind don’t see, the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Hulga Hopewell ('Good Country People'), the deluded intellectual who loses her wooden leg to a thieving Bible salesman she had assumed was as dumb as a stump. The pious Mrs. Turpin('Revelation'), whose heart pours out thank-yous to Jesus for not having made her black or white trash or ugly. Mrs. Freeman, the universal busybody: “Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”
( Also GCP, here's the entire short story-ed.)
The writer of the article lacks O'Connor's eye. The next paragraph continues with this:
People like these can’t be real, and yet they breathe on the page.
Later, the writer is describing his own travels through the 'modern' American South-(emphasis mine):
Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)These are the kind of characters and stories that O'Connor wrote about- the author of the travelogue denies their existence in one paragraph and describes them in the next.
He's surrounded by the modern version of O'Connor's world and he doesn't recognize it.
People like that can be real- they are real- and they are all around you: at work; in stores; at school; in mirrors- they are everywhere- if you know how to look.
3 comments:
I really enjoyed your blog today (and the NYT article), maybe because that part of Georgia is close to my heart and where my family is from. My dad was raised in Madison, which is just outside of Milledgeville. In fact, Oliver Hardy attended the same grammar school as my dad (and his mother, and her mother!) attended, the “Madison Graded School”. Another coincidence, my mother attended the same college as Flannery O’Connor, and was born in Savannah (as I was, as well).
And like Flannery, I have always had an interest in the broken, unwanted, and seemingly unredeemable, while at the same time being bit wary of “decent” people who often are not what they seem to be. Not very many famous people have come from this geographical area, but there are a lot of interesting people!
I agree with you, I see “Flannery’s” world all around me, even here in Fallentown. Maybe especially here, where we have city representatives that keep getting arrested for dealing drugs, a mayor (who was also a minister) that financed his mistress with an elderly parishioner’s credit card, or another minister that was arrested for being a transvestite prostitute. His parish stood by him until they published his mug shot (in full tranny regalia) on the front page of the Metro section.
I think we all are made up of a myriad of “characters” (at least those of us who are even mildly interesting). And sometimes, when everyone’s behavior is so outrageous, making fun is the best coping mechanism.
Great post! My guess is that the author couldn't see the characters because he is yankee. Not a knock against them, I was born one but have lived in the South for most of my life.
I think whimsicalnbrainpan is right..you have to be southern ...yankee's don't get our people..I really believe that..you all in the south grew up with flannery and saw though her eyes what you already knew to be real...how lucky is that..great post sweetcakes..
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