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3. The American Novel Since 1945: Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Professor Amy
Hungerford: We finished
Black Boy last time,
and one of the big questions
coming out of my discussion of
that autobiography is:
how do you manage the question
of context in reading a novel or
an autobiography--in reading any
text?
And we had a very complex
publishing history to think
about with that text.
Flannery O'Connor's work raises
questions of a similar kind,
but they look very different.
And so, my lectures on Flannery
O'Connor will highlight the
methodologies that we can bring
to any reading of a novel,
and it will highlight the
differences between different
methodologies and what they
allow us to see in a different
text.
Flannery O'Connor,
as most of you probably know,
is a Southern writer.
She is very often assimilated
to a whole group of southern
writers who were working in the
1930s and '40s,
the "Southern Agrarians."
She was friends with a lot of
the major figures of that
movement, especially Allen Tate
and Caroline Gordon.
She lived out her life mostly
in a small town called
Milledgeville,
Georgia.
She was born in Savannah in
1925.
She studied writing at the Iowa
Writers Workshop.
She lived in New York for a
short time, but she was
afflicted with lupus,
a very serious illness,
and she died at the age of 39
in 1964.
So, she lived a pretty short
life.
Over the course of that life,
she wrote mostly short stories,
and so she is very much known
for her short stories.
She has a couple of novels.
Of them, this is,
I think, the most successful.
O'Connor,
you may also know,
has been understood as a
religious writer.
She was a Catholic,
and she very much made her
Catholicism at the center of all
the things that she said about
her fictional practice.
And so, we're going to see a
couple of those things today.
Let's look--just to begin with,
if you brought your
books--let's look at the cover
of this book.
What does this cover say to you?
What does this image remind you
of?
What does it look like to you?
Do you want to answer that?
Student:
Is it the Sacred
Heart?Professor Amy
Hungerford: It's the Sacred
Heart, yes.
It's the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
In Catholic iconography of a
certain kind,
the figure of Christ is shown
usually parting His clothes and
His flesh and showing you His
Sacred Heart,
which is usually crowned with
flame and often encircled with
thorns.
So it's an image of Christ the
suffering godhead:
the very human,
fleshly person who will part
His own flesh in order to
connect with,
in order to redeem,
the believer.
So right in the packaging of
this novel that we have
today--this cover has changed
over time--nevertheless,
even today, that very Catholic
iconography is right on the
front of the cover.
And when you see Wise Blood,
that title,
right below the Sacred Heart,
you can't help but think of:
well, this blood is somehow the
blood of Christ.
That's the kind of blood we're
talking about.
It's already entered a sort of
metaphorical register,
religious register,
in the way this book is
packaged.
Then, when we open up the
front, we see the author's note
to the second edition,
and this was something O'Connor
added to the novel in 1962.
I just want to read that with
you today.
She says:
Wise Blood has
reached the age of ten and is
still alive.
My critical powers are just
sufficient to determine this,
and I am gratified to be able
to say it.
The book was written with zest,
and if possible it should be
read that way.
It is a comic novel about a
Christian malgré
lui, and as such very
serious.
For all comic novels that are
any good must be about matters
of life and death.
Wise Blood was written
by an author congenitally
innocent of theory,
but one with certain
preoccupations.
That belief in Christ is to
some a matter of life and death
has been a stumbling block for
readers who would prefer to
think it a matter of no great
consequence.
For them, Hazel Motes's
integrity lies in his trying
with such vigor to get rid of
the ragged figure who moves from
tree to tree in the back of his
mind.
For the author,
Hazel's integrity lies in his
not being able to do so.
So, right up front,
we are told that Hazel Motes is
a Christian in spite of himself,
that this is how we are to
understand this character who we
will come to know.
I also want to give another
layer to this understanding of
O'Connor as a religious writer
by looking at what she said in
her correspondence to one of her
readers who asked her some
questions,
and this is on the handout that
I passed around.
This is a letter to a man
named Ben Griffith from 1954.
So she had just finished
Wise Blood, and
people are starting to read it,
ask her questions.
She was a prolific
correspondent.
She was very generous in her
letter writing.
She would write to almost
anyone who wrote to her.
She would write back in a
substantive way.
I think it's in part that,
suffering from lupus,
she was very much confined to
her house in Georgia,
and the letter writing,
this kind of correspondence,
was certainly a way for her to
keep in contact with the world
of readers and other writers and
friends.
So he had written to her.
He was teaching writing at a
local college.
He's obviously been asking her
about the sources of some of the
images and characters and themes
in Wise Blood. So,
I want to point out a couple of
things.
This is the first full
paragraph:
I don't know how to cure
the sourcitis,
except to tell you that I can
discover a good many possible
sources myself for Wise
Blood,
but I am often embarrassed
to find that I read the sources
after I had written the book.
I have been exposed to
Wordsworth's Intimation
Ode, but that is all
I can say about it.
I have one of those
food-chopper brains that nothing
comes out of the way it went in.
The Oedipus business
comes nearer to home.
Of course, Haze Motes is not an
Oedipus figure,
but there are obvious
resemblances.
At the time I was writing the
last of the book,
I was living in Connecticut
[actually very close,
here at Yale,
and one of the people who is
still at Yale,
Penny Laurens--I don't know if
you've met her--she was married
to Robert Fitzgerald,
and she knew Flannery O'Connor].
When I was living in
Connecticut with the Robert
Fitzgeralds, Robert Fitzgerald
translated the Theban Cycle
with Dudley Fitz,
and the translation of
Oedipus Rex had just come
out and I was much taken with
it.
Anyway, all I can say is I did
a lot of thinking about
Oedipus.
This is very typical in tone
for O'Connor.
When she talks about education
or learning--and if you read
more in this letter (I won't go
through the whole thing),
you will see that--she's very
self-deprecating.
She says she has "what passes
for an education in this day and
age."
She says that she has read a
little bit of Kafka and "doesn't
know what to make of him,
but it makes you a bolder
writer."
She reads a little Henry James
because she thinks that makes
her a better writer,
somehow, but she doesn't quite
know how.
There's always this veneer of
innocence, or lack of learning,
or lack of sophistication;
so, she is presenting herself
as a simple person.
I think that's important,
although not directly connected
to her presentation of herself
as a Catholic person.
I think it does factor into her
sense that the truth she is
accessing, or the truth that she
is trying to present to the
world in her stories,
is one that even a child might
be able to understand.
And that fits very comfortably
within a New Testament
understanding of the teaching of
Christ.
So, Christ is that one to whom
the little children can come,
and I think she cultivates that
childlike sense in her
self-presentation.
But then there is this very
explicit discussion of her
Catholicism, a little further
down:
My background and my
inclinations are both Catholic,
and I think this is very
apparent in the book.
Something is usually said about
Kafka in connection with Wise
Blood, but I have
never succeeded in making my way
through The Castle or
The Trial,
and I wouldn't pretend to know
anything about Kafka.
I think reading a little of him
perhaps makes you a bolder
writer
…And so on.
If you turn over,
this is another letter to Ben
Griffith written fairly shortly
after this first one.
She expands a little bit on
this sense of her Catholicism.
This is in the middle of the
page:
Let me assure you that no
one but a Catholic could have
written Wise Blood even
though it is a book about a kind
of Protestant saint.
It reduces Protestantism to the
twin ultimate absurdities of the
Church without Christ or the
Holy Church of Christ without
Christ,
which no pious Protestant would
do, and of course no unbeliever
or agnostic could have written
it because it is entirely
redemption centered in thought.
Not too many people are willing
to see this, and perhaps it is
hard to see, because Hazel Motes
is such an admirable nihilist.
His nihilism leads him back to
the fact of his redemption,
however, which is what he would
have liked so much to get away
from.
When you start describing the
significance of a symbol like
the tunnel, which recurs in the
book,
you immediately begin to limit
it, and a symbol should go on
deepening.
Everything should have a wider
significance.
But I am a novelist,
not a critic,
and I can excuse myself from
explication de texte on
that ground.
The real reason of course is
laziness.
There is that characteristic
self-deprecation.
With letters like this--which
were published copiously in a
beautiful edition that Sally
Fitzgerald edited--with letters
like this,
or her frequent essays and
lectures, which are collected in
a book called Mystery and
Manners,
she was expounding a
certain reading of her fiction,
even while she was still
writing it.
And those who were close to her
have picked up that
understanding of her fiction and
promulgated it.
And there's a huge critical
industry around Flannery
O'Connor, and at the core of it
is a body of criticism that
finds and articulates and
explains the religious meanings
of her texts.
With that in mind,
I want to point up to the two
quotations that I put on the
board to start us off today:
"'I like his eyes.
They don't look like they see
what he's looking at,
but they keep on looking.'"
This is Sabbath Lily Hawks.
And then, a character you
haven't met yet if you stopped
at page 100, Onnie Jay Holy:
"'I wouldn't have you believe
nothing you can't feel in your
own hearts.'"
These two quotations seem to me
a kind of rubric under which we
can start to think about what it
means to read this novel,
and what it means to read it in
the light of the religious
context that O'Connor herself,
critics, marketers,
have built up around her work.
The first quotation from
Sabbath Lily of course focuses
on the eyes, and it is not hard
to read into Haze Motes's name
that the trope of sight is going
to be important.
"Haze Motes."
There is that famous passage in
the New Testament (or is it--oh,
gosh--now I'm going to forget
if it's New or Old Testament;
someone will correct me):
"Do not try to remove the mote
from your neighbor's eye before
you have removed it from your
own,"
or "lest you fail to remove the
mote from your own eye."
So there is this sense of
occluded sight;
"Haze," that haze.
Somehow, something is wrong
with Haze Motes's eyes,
something wrong with his sight,
or rather there is something
important about his sight that
we're going to have to unpack.
But what I want to take out of
Sabbath Lily's comment about
Haze is this sense of what you
look at.
What does Haze look at and what
does he see?
What do we look at when we read
this novel, and what do we see?
Those are questions that are
going to frame the two lectures
that I give on this novel.
The second quotation,
from Onnie Jay Holy,
raises the question of
sentiment.
This novel--as you will soon
see, once you get to the parts
where Onnie Jay Holy begins to
preach--this novel is very much
a critique of sentimentality.
If Richard Wright's ideal
response to his fiction was
that, for the reader,
the words would disappear,
and all they would be left with
is their emotional response,
for O'Connor it's precisely
that kind of response--to any
call: be it textual,
be it an act of reading,
an act of audition,
hearing someone preach--that
kind of response is precisely
not the one you are
supposed to have.
And so I would ask you to think
about a couple of simple
questions as you move through
this book, and as you think
about what I have to say about
it.
One of them could begin with a
reflection like this.
Would you ever want to sit down
to dinner with any of the people
in this novel?
I see people shaking their
heads.
They are quite unlikable,
and this is consistent pretty
much across O'Connor's fiction:
short, long,
medium, whatever.
Her characters are not very
endearing.
So you want to ask yourself why
that's so.
This is a conscious decision on
her part, and you want to think
about that decision.
If there is any character
who seems kind of endearing,
at least for me,
it's probably Enoch.
And we'll talk a little bit
more about him:
not today, but in the second
lecture and in section.
So, with these questions in
mind, I want you think about how
we can see the novel and how we
can think about it in the face
of the interpretation that's
already layered on to it.
And what I want to do is now,
kind of just descend in to the
text, and read with you the
passage when Haze first takes
the Essex out for a spin:
his wonderful car,
the Essex.
So, this is on page 73,
is about where it begins,
and I'm going to read through
the next two or three pages.
And I'll skip around in the
book as things come up that I
want to show you in other parts
of the book.
So let's think about seeing and
theology and all the issues that
are already on the table for us.
I'm going to begin at the
bottom of 73:
"When the car was
ready…."-- If you have
your book, go ahead and open it
up.
"When the car was ready,
the man and the boy stood by to
watch him drive it off."
(Is it the wrong page numbers?
Shoot.
Oh, dear.
Sixty-nine.
Okay.
So, it's four off.
Thank you for telling me.
You rely on publishers and then
they let you down.
Okay. Does everyone have it?)
When the car was ready,
the man and the boy stood by to
watch him drive it off.
He didn't want anybody watching
him because he hadn't driven a
car in four or five years.
The man and the boy didn't say
anything while he tried to start
it.
They only stood there looking
in at him.
"I wanted this car mostly to be
a house for me," he said to the
man.
"I ain't got any place to be."
"You ain't took the brake off
yet," the man said.
He took the brake off and the
car shot backwards because the
man had left it in reverse.
In a second he got it going
forward and drove off crookedly
past the man and boy still
standing there watching.
He kept going forward,
thinking nothing and
sweating.
I just want to stop there for a
minute.
Haze sees the car as a kind of
home.
Well, how are we meant to
understand the meaning of that?
It has the feeling of a rare
moment of explanation from Haze.
He almost never explains
himself to other people.
Here he is accounting for his
need for the car.
Now, of course,
O'Connor was very good at
imbuing her writing with
repeated symbols that grow and
accrue meaning across the text.
So we've already seen the trope
of the house.
And if you look back at 24 (oh,
no--try 20;
see if we can find it here.),
when Haze describes--or,
we sort of know through his
consciousness--the story of his
time in the Army,
this is what we learn about how
he felt there,
after he's wounded:
He had all the time he
could want to study his soul in
and assure himself that it was
not there.
When he was thoroughly
convinced, he saw that this was
something he had always known.
The misery he had was a longing
for home.
It had nothing to do with Jesus.
When the army finally let him
go, he was pleased to think that
he was still uncorrupted.
All he wanted was to get back
to Eastrod, Tennessee.
The black Bible and his
mother's glasses were still in
the bottom of his duffle bag.
He didn't read any book now,
but he kept the Bible because
it had come from home.
He kept the glasses in case his
vision should ever become
dim.
O'Connor has already put in
place in the novel through that
little passage the sense that
the longing for home and the
longing for redemption--or the
resistance to redemption--these
things are very close to one
another.
You can mistake--here we find
out about Haze--you can mistake
the longing for Jesus for the
longing for home,
or vice versa:
the longing for home,
for the longing of Jesus.
The Bible that he carries
around is important to him
because it comes from home.
I want to suggest to you that
the fact that it's the
religious book for him,
for his culture,
for his family,
is not of course incidental to
the fact that it's what reminds
him of home.
It's not just that you can
mistake the longing for home for
the longing for Jesus.
You can in some ways see
religion and home as conflated.
And this gets to a traditional
Christian notion of the believer
as not being at home in the
world: that the believer somehow
belongs to God's kingdom,
and that this is either
countercultural--at odds with
the general world in which he or
she would find herself--or it is
totally incompatible with the
world in which we live.
The Bible is a physical
manifestation of the proximity
of the spiritual and the
material in this world.
So what makes him feel close to
home, in a way,
has to make him feel close to
the religion he's trying to
reject.
That conflation is part of what
makes it impossible for Haze to
escape the question of
redemption,
even if he wants to answer it
in a way that's at odds with
how, for example,
his grandfather,
the preacher,
would answer it.
This is why he's continually
mistaken for a preacher,
no matter what he does.
Remember he goes in to the
prostitute's house,
Mrs.
Watts's, and he's got a hat on,
and the hat just makes him look
like a preacher.
There's nothing he can do.
He says, "I'm not a preacher,"
and she says,
"That's okay if you're not a
preacher."
It's just something that's in
his body;
it's physical.
So the car--going back to
the passage that I was talking
about before with the Essex--the
car (even though religion is not
mentioned directly right here),
the sense of home that it
embodies, carries with it all
that sense of unhousedness.
And, because it's a moving
house, it carries the sense of
the wandering believer with it
as well.
And you get that reinforced on
the very next page (if you just
skip over about a page from
there): "A black pickup truck
turned off a side road in front
of him.
On the back of it,
an iron bed and a chair and
table were tied,
and on top of them a crate of
Barred Rock chickens."
So other cars on the road
looked like houses,
mobile houses,
as well.
It's not just Haze's Essex that
is imagined as home.
So O'Connor is giving us a
version of the road,
and I want you to keep this in
mind because of course we're
going to read On the
Road,
and we are going to see
a major road trip in Lolita,
actually two of them.
So the iconography of the
American road is something that
is going to come back to us.
Well, here is our first example.
This is the road of the
unhoused, of the spiritually
seeking, of the wandering,
of the lost.
People wander in search of some
kind of coherent meaning.
I want to now move down a
little bit and observe how
landscape is presented to us.
This is after that,
"since he was going very
fast…":
The highway was ragged
with filling stations and
trailer camps and roadhouses.
After a while,
there were stretches where red
gullies dropped off on either
side of the road,
and behind them there were
patches of field buttoned
together with 666 posts.
The sky leaked all over all of
it, and then it began to leak in
to the car.
The head of a string of pigs
appeared, snout-up,
over the ditch,
and he had to screech to a stop
and watch the rear of the last
pig disappear shaking into the
ditch on the other side.
He started the car again and
went on.
He had the feeling that
everything he saw was a
broken-off piece of some giant
blank thing he had forgotten had
happened to him.
So what do we notice about this
landscape?
First of all,
it's very much constructed.
It's buttoned together with
posts, as if someone had built
it, and--what's more--these are
described as 666 posts.
I think this is probably a size
of lumber, but you can't get
away from the mythology of that
number.
In the Book of Revelation it's
the number of the beast;
it's the number of the devil.
It's also a landscape that is
full of pigs,
wandering pigs,
so if the people are wandering
through this road,
the pigs are equally wanderers
throughout these fields.
They're unconfined;
they seem to cross the road at
will.
The sky, the world above,
is really bound up with the
world below.
There is very little
separation, even if there is a
sense that the sky is impinging
on the earth and not the other
way around.
"The sky leaked over all of it."
It's really,
in a sense, the physical image
is of rain;
it's raining,
so it's leaking all over it.
But there's more than that.
There is this sense of the
concerns of the sky somehow,
the concerns of the above;
the concerns of the
transcendent are seeping their
way in to the concerns of the
material world below.
And then you get that sort of
lyrical moment of
interpretation:
"He had the feeling that
everything he saw was a
broken-off piece of some giant
blank thing he had forgotten had
happened to him."
Now this is where the
omniscient narrator comes in
quite forcefully,
and gives us something to work
on as we analyze Haze and we
think about who he is as a
character and where he finds
himself.
This connects I think with
a whole host of other passages
that have to do with
nothingness.
And one of them is right above
on that page,
and I read it a little earlier:
"thinking nothing and
sweating."
It's as if "thinking nothing"
is not a passive activity,
but an active one.
So that, to think nothing is
something you have to work at;
it's something that you can be
preoccupied with.
And similarly,
if you look back at 37--this is
again a description of
landscape--you can see this
connection between (or,
well, somewhat of a
disconnection between) the above
and the below,
another description of sky.
This is Hazel walking in
Taulkinham: "The black sky was
underpinned with long,
silver streaks" (this is the
very beginning of Chapter 3 if
you're trying to find it):
…that looked like
scaffolding and depth on depth
behind it were thousands of
stars that all seemed to be
moving very slowly,
as if they were about some vast
construction work that involved
the whole order of the universe
and would take all time to
complete.
No one was paying any attention
to the sky.
Here that omniscient narrator,
as when that narrator looks in
to Haze's mind,
offers you a reading of the sky
and its separation from the
minds of the characters that
suggests,
or makes you look for,
kinds of structure.
Here, it's the construction
work;
she actually uses that word.
But you get scaffolding;
you get depth or perspective:
counting thousands of stars,
"moving…as if they were
about some vast work that
involved the whole order of the
universe."
It vaults the very concrete
materiality, the physicality,
of these characters and their
circumstances.
It vaults that discussion into
a much larger,
metaphysical,
transcendent context,
the whole order of the
universe.
It's moments like these
when that omniscient narrator
lives up to its name,
that sense of omniscience that
we might associate with God.
Another example is at the very
opening of the book:
The train was racing
through treetops that fell away
at intervals and showed the sun
standing very red on the edge of
the farthest woods.
Near the plowed fields curved
and faded, and the few hogs
nosing in the furrows looked
like large spotted stones.
Mrs.
Wally B.
Hitchcock, who was facing Motes
in the section,
said that she thought the early
evening like this was the
prettiest time of day,
and she asked him if he didn't
think so too.
"Pretty" is not exactly the
word that comes to mind--at
least not to my mind--when I
read this.
It's more like "heavy" or
"saturated," and there's again
pigs running around.
Again there is a biblical
iconography behind this.
There are two instances that
come to my mind.
When demons are cast out by the
apostles and sent into a herd of
pigs, and the pigs go running
off a cliff and die;
that's one image.
Another is the admonition not
to throw your pearls before
swine, not to preach to those
who can't hear,
or won't be perceptive.
So these moments of
landscape description offer up
that consistently
Christian-inflected theory of
the universe,
that sense of transcendence as
structure, as something that's
moving inexorably,
that will take all time to
complete.
It has a project;
it has a teleology.
So, that's present in all of
these moments,
but--equally present--I want to
get back to this sense of
blankness.
There is a vagueness to this
language that I think is quite
calculated, and it relates,
in Haze's case,
to his determination to not be
converted to evil,
but to nothing.
When he's in the army,
he says--he decides--he can get
rid of Jesus by converting not
to evil, but to nothing,
to believe in nothing.
So what O'Connor does,
is she presents a sense of the
world imbued with structure and
meaning,
but a structure and meaning
that looks essentially blank.
And I think the task of the
novel is to fill that structure
in.
The last thing I want to
point out, in this passage from
here to the end of the chapter,
is the way that Haze's senses
are described.
We already talked a little bit
about his name and the occlusion
of sight.
The trope of sight is obviously
extremely important here.
We have the blind preacher.
There are more things,
which I won't reveal,
that happen at the end of the
novel to do with this.
If you haven't read,
I won't give it away.
But here, there are simpler
examples: when the truck pulls
up in front of Haze and starts
moving very slowly,
"Haze started pounding his
horn, and he had hit it three
times before he realized it
didn't make any sound."
He keeps doing this.
When he comes to the roadside
sign, "Woe to the blasphemer and
whore monger.
Will hell swallow you up?"
it says "The pickup truck
slowed even more,
as if it were reading the sign,
and Haze pounded his empty
horn.
He beat on it and beat on it
but it didn't make any sound."
He doesn't at first hear the
horn fail to blow,
and then later,
when a truck pulls up behind
him, he fails to hear a horn
that does blow:
He was looking at the
sign, and he didn't hear the
horn.
An oil truck as long as a
railroad car was behind him.
In a second,
a red, square face was at his
car window.
It watched the back of his neck
and hat for a minute,
and then a hand came in and sat
on his shoulder.
The driver's expression and his
hand stayed exactly the way they
were, as if he didn't hear very
well.
These two characters are as if
there is a wall between them,
a wall of foam.
They can't hear each other.
They're insulated from
understanding what the other is
preoccupied with.
In Haze's case,
he does this over and over and
over again.
And the most pitiful example of
it is on 57.
Poor Enoch!
I feel so bad for him in this
passage.
Enoch is trying to hang out
with Haze.
This is on the bottom of 56,
probably your 52.
Haze is trying to get rid of
Enoch:
"Listen," Haze said
roughly, "I got business of my
own.
I seen all of you I want."
He began walking very fast.
Enoch kept skipping steps to
keep up.
"I been here two months," he
said, "and I don't know nobody.
People ain't friendly here.
I got me a room and there ain't
never nobody in it but me.
My daddy said I had to come.
I would never have come but he
made me.
I think I seen you somewheres
before.
You ain't from Stockwell,
are you?"
"No."
"Melsey?"
"No."
"Sawmill set there- set up
there once," Enoch said.
"Looked like you had kind of a
familiar face."
They walked on without saying
anything until they got to the
main street again.
It was almost deserted.
"Goodbye," Haze said.
"I'm going thisaway too," Enoch
said in a sullen voice.
On the left there was a movie
house where the electric bill
was being changed.
"[And then I'm going to skip
down.]
"My daddy made me come," he
said in a cracked voice.
Haze looked at him and saw he
was crying, his face seamed and
wet and a purple-pink color.
"I ain't but 18 years old," he
cried, "and he made me come and
I don't know nobody.
Nobody here'll have nothin' to
do with nobody else.
They ain't friendly.
He done gone off with a woman
and made me come but she ain't
going to stay for long."
Okay, and so on and so on.
Poor Enoch!
Does Haze care?
No;
not at all.
"Haze looked straight ahead,
with his face set."
Poor Enoch.
Nothing can penetrate Haze's
imperviousness to other human
beings.
If Haze is busy looking at
something, what he's looking at
is manifestly not the
person in front of him.
He can't hear major elements of
the soundscape:
the truck horn behind him.
He can't hear his own horn,
whether it blows or not.
He can't hear the voices of
other people.
What he sees is a mystery.
As Sabbath Lily says,
"his eyes, they don't look like
they see what he's looking at."
What is he looking at, then?
I think we're meant to
understand that he is so focused
on the question of redemption
that he fails to see anything
else;
he fails to see anyone else in
his preoccupation with that
problem.
Now I want to switch gears,
just for the last couple
minutes, and ask you:
what do you see when you read
this novel?
And I'm going to suggest to you
something to think about.
I see body parts.
When I read this novel,
I see a lot of dismembered body
parts.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let's take a look.
On page 32(try 28;
see if you can find it),
this is Haze coming to the
house of Leora Watts:
"He went up to the front porch
and put his eye to a convenient
crack in the shade and found
himself looking directly at a
large,
white knee."
And what's she doing?
She's cutting her toenails.
"Mrs.
Watts was sitting alone in a
white iron bed cutting her
toenails with a large pair of
scissors.
She was a big woman with very
yellow hair and white skin that
glistened with a greasy
preparation.
She had on a pink nightgown
that would have better fit a
smaller figure."
That large,
white knee: the way this
narration allows us to see
through Haze's eyes begins to
take the whole body apart,
so what he sees is not Mrs.
Watts;
he sees a large, white knee.
We saw a version of this also
in the passage I was reading
just before, where "a hand"
comes in the window and
rests--"lands"--on Haze's
shoulder.
"A square, red face."
And then these things,
these body parts,
are then referred to with the
pronoun "it";
"it," the hand,
did this or that.
Take a look at page 18.
This is Mrs.
Hitchcock in the train;
it's Haze bumping into Mrs.
Hitchcock:
Going around the corner,
he ran in to something heavy
and pink.
It gasped and muttered,
"Clumsy."
It was Mrs.
Hitchcock in a pink wrapper
with her hair in knots around
her head.
She looked at him with her eyes
squinted nearly shut.
The knobs framed her face like
dark toadstools.
She tried to get past him,
and he tried to let her,
but they were both moving the
same way each time.
Her face became purplish except
for little, white marks over it
that didn't heat up.
It's that she's rotting;
there is mushrooms growing on
her, figurative mushrooms
growing on her head.
Her face is purple except for
the white marks.
The white marks are little
scars, acne scars perhaps.
She is a sort of mass of flesh.
As Mrs.
Watts, that pink
wrapper--actually two pink
wrappers, too tight on their
bodies--suggest the excess of
their corporeality,
they"re big hunks of flesh.
On 62, we get an account of
Haze's childhood sin.
He goes into the freak show at
the fair, and he joins the crowd
where his father also is.
"They were looking down into a
lowered place,
where something white was
lying, squirming a little,
in a box lined with black
cloth.
For a second he thought it was
a skinned animal,
and then he saw it was a
woman."
On 15 (I'm going to skip back
to the train;
I'm just going to rack these up
for you, and then we'll think
about them), this is Haze
waiting to be seated in the
dining car of the train:
Haze hesitated and saw
the hand jerk again [the hand of
the steward].
He lurched up the aisle,
falling against two tables on
the way and getting his hand wet
in somebody's coffee.
The steward placed him with
three youngish women dressed
like parrots.
Their hands were resting on the
table, red speared at the tips.
He sat and looked in front of
him--[I'm skipping down a little
bit], glum and intense,
at the neck of the woman across
from him.
At intervals her hand holding
the cigarette would pass the
spot on her neck.
It would go out of his sight,
and then it would pass again
going back down to the
table.
What do we make of these odd
moments of description?
Why all these body parts
hanging around?
Why this sense of disgusting,
excessive body matter?
It's often women who appear in
this guise, but it's not always
women.
What I want to suggest to you
is that, when we actually look
at the sentences on the page,
when we look at the words that
O'Connor chose in the moments of
the narration,
we see something that becomes
more complicated than the
"Flannery O'Connor is a Catholic
writer";
"Haze Motes is a Christian
malgré
lui."
That's a kind of focus.
If we think about this,
analogize it to how Haze looks,
it's a way of looking at
O'Connor's fiction that sees
nothing but the theology behind
it,
that sees nothing but the
Christian iconography.
And I want to ask:
what is it that we don't see,
when that's all we see?
What do we miss?
I've begun to point out a
few things that I think we miss:
the fragmentation of bodies.
Why are bodies consistently
fragmented--not just
here--everywhere in O'Connor's
fiction?
People are always losing a
wooden leg and having parts of
their limbs fall off.
It's very hard to keep a body
together in O'Connor,
hard to keep body and
soul…well,
I won't get in to that.
So why is that?
What kind of methodology for
reading would allow us to have
something to say about that?
Is it something we need to have
something to say about?
Is it in the same register of
importance in our reading as
some of these more theological,
structural considerations that
have been offered to us in her
letters, in her preface,
and in the very overt symbology
of the landscape scenes,
of these other scenes that I
was reading to you today,
in that image of the unhoused
believer trying to find a home
in an alien world?
So, in my next lecture,
what I'm going to do is pretty
much contradict most of what I
said today.
I'm going to set aside theology
as the lens through which I
read.
And, if you felt you were
convinced by my reading of that
iconography in these passages,
then you want to think about
why that's convincing.
You want to think about how
much attention and primacy we
should give to an author's
statements about what her work
mean--as readers.
Maybe you want to say,
"You can't argue with that;
we have to accept that.
That's really what the writer
intends to say,
and that's what we should see,
and that's what we should
strive to understand."
Well, I'm going to offer you
two different ways--actually
more like three different
ways--to look at the novel in
the second lecture.
So, finish the novel for next
Wednesday, and we will go from
there.
