Flannery O’Connor

A Planet of Playthings

While writing about Flannery O’Connor the other day, I made the half-serious, half-sardonic observation that dedication like hers is probably impossible to imitate today because of all the noise, electronic and digital, distracting us. This type of sentiment could, understandably, be interpreted as iredeemably self-indulgent. Borderline delusional even, the sort that seems so pervasive amongst the more sanguine if solipsistic literary types on today’s scene. I’m not hating, but I would hope not to include myself amongst their ilk. Chalk me up as someone not prepared to shed any tears (for anyone else, certainly not for myself) about how difficult all these distractions are for writers. Perhaps it would be nice, in purely aesthetic terms, to contemplate a more austere, less busy world where the lack of outside stimulation forced one to focus on quaint things like books, letter writing and one’s own work, because, simply put, there was nothing else to do. But admittedly skewed and sentimental longing aside, is there even a question about then vs. now? Please.

Allen Ginsburg said: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…looking for an angry fix. If all it took was heroin to lay them that low, imagine what Google would have done to them. Pussies.

Let me put it this way. Do you think, given the choice, Flannery O’Connor (of all people!) wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world with this genius, fully prepared for a negligible but oh so necessary infringement on her (otherwise unfettered) artistic vision? Hell yes, she would have.

And information overload cuts both ways. Sure, it takes bandwidth away from the pursuit of more old-fashioned type activities like sleep, chopping wood, and contracting tuberculosis. You have to take the good with the bad; then, or now. And who says the saturation of stuff available to all of us, eight days a week, via the Internet, is inherently bad? All that’s required of the overstimulated individual is to unplug, look away or take care of the business at hand (the multi-taskers can take care of the business in hand as well; the Internet is the cup that forever overfloweth). If given the choice between being forcibly removed from the possibility of endless diversion and an internal engine enabling me to pick and choose when and how I’ll be amused, it’s a no-brainer. Plus, it’s always preferable to attain the best of both worlds: all of that enticement out there can tempt as much as it can teach, and being able to manage this embarrassment of riches is a simple matter of evolution. Or, as the curmudgeonly but clearheaded Neil Peart famously opined: I will choose a path that’s clear–I will choose free will.

Put another, less pretentiously longwinded way, if I lived in a simpler time without an Internet filled with electronic apples to taste, I could never find things like this:

Pretty cute, huh? Well get a load of this site. The awesomeness of Fuck You, Penguin, from concept to execution is possibly unparalleled. Who could ever have thought of this? They did. And I love them for it (so too do quite a few other folks, Democracy at work!) Personally, I’d rather have the best and brightest creating content for the masses than working in war rooms coming up with advanced ways to incinerate entire populations. As Descartes said, Cogito, ergo sum (Rough translation: I blog therefore I am).

The weird wide web is the face that launched a thousand ships. Also known as websites. It is, taking the long view, a big landfill holding the detritus of our over-educated, over-stimulated and under-engaged minds. But it’s all recylcable; better in these green days to kill minds than trees. Plus, how else could we find things like this?

Shudder to think, there was once a world without that image. The possibility of living in that world terrifies me (Perhaps that is what Kurtz despaired about as he drew his last, tortured breath: The horror, the horror). Been on an airplane lately? In the air less than ten minutes and you see that collective panic attack amongst the people who can’t plug something in. Then, the second tires hit the tarmac it quickly becomes a contest to see who can turn on their phone first. How did people exist in the world before cell phones? Before e-mail for that matter? Before computers? I lived in that world. Recently. And I have no idea. But I do know this: that ship set sail and it’s never coming back to shore. My advice for anyone (the creatively inclined and the ostensibly more productive members of society) who bemoans the bad old days when our minds weren’t turned to mush by radioactive x-rays emanating from the lap-tops scalding our crotches? Go to sleep and dream about them. After all, that’s what you are invariably doing, eyes wide shut, as you spend those awkward hours in between your next Internet fix. As Thoreau said: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. At least before YouTube.

“In my stories is where I live.”

Of few writers can it more accurately be said that it is the work, not the life, that matters…That O’Connor was one of the great writers of the 20th century is now beyond argument.

What he said. He being Jonathan Yardley, writing in Sunday’s Washington Post (farewell Book World, hello expanded Arts & Living section) about Brad Gooch’s new bio of Flannery O’Connor here.

While I’m not certain that we need a 448 page biography of Flannery O’Connor, I’m not certain that we need another biography of any writer, no matter how many pages. Actually, that’s not fair. Who buys these types of books, after all, but people who have already read all (or most) of the works written by the author being dissected (this crucible that is equal parts operating table and shrink’s couch, also known as the contemporary critical biography). Still, I could probably be forgiven for making the unoriginal observation, again, that we exist in an era where the life outweighs the work. That cranky ground was well-trodden upon, and recently, so no need to revisit it.

Wait. The preceding paragraph, while applicable to most writers, does not apply to O’Connor. In point of fact, if there is any writer I would care to read about, and learn from, it would be her. Not surprisingly, her unwavering allegiance to her craft leaves little to the imagination: she wrote, she talked about writing, she thought about writing and she wrote about writing. Allegedly, she ate and slept on occasion. “In my stories is where I live,” she said, a statement applicable on a variety of levels. And so, the people who stand to be fascinated by this distinctly uneventful life are the very people who might be enlightened by reading about it: writers. O’Connor’s life, and her monk-like approach to her vocation could and should be a study guide for all aspiring scribblers. Never mind that dedication like hers is probably impossible to imitate today because of all the noise, electronic and digital, distracting us. There is also the inconsiderable reality that her work is inimitable. The style, the substance, the entire package is pretty much unparalleled in American letters.

I tend to feel uncomfortable throwing the G word around, unless I’m speaking about jazz musicians. But if any writer in the last 100 years could be called a genius, O’Connor is near the top of the short list. She did not manage to write the great American novel (though she may well have, had Lupus not stopped her at the insultingly young age of 45), but her best collected stories go toe-to-toe with any of the great white males (and females for that matter). She also happened to approach perfection on at least three occasions, with “Revelation”, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. It is the last of these three that most people know; like Beethoven’s Fifth and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, its ubiquity tends to diminish its actual import: it’s even better than most people realize (and most people, if for no other reason than that they are told, recognize these things as immortal).

What O’Connor manages to do, in less than twenty pages, is nail the essence of what Dostoyevsky and, to a lesser extent, Tolstoy grappled with in their biggest (and sometimes bloated) novels: the nature of man, the existence of God, the possibility of Grace and the symbiotic tension between violence and love. When The Misfit declares (ironically, truthfully) “It’s no real pleasure in life”, he is (O’Connor is) expressing, in remarkably succinct fashion, the fundamental philosophical and literary dilemma, post-Descartes. Beyond whether God exists (Tolstoy) or why God torments us (Dostoyevsky), and right to the heart of the matter: we may betray God, but God betrayed us first.

Anyway, O’Connor remains somewhat of a conundrum: one can learn a great deal by studying her stories. Has any other writer so consistently applied mechanical precision with such emotional heft? Has any other writer wrestled with the so-called big issues without using stick figures or preachy didactics? Take “Revelation”, for instance: O’Connor fits class issues, southern identity dilemmas, religious fervor, old-school bigotry and redemption into one story. In fact, she pretty much pulls it off on a single page (and that last page not only invokes, but obliges the use of such otherwise unforgivable words as “haunting”, “chilling” and “moving”). This type of writing, needless to say, is inspiring but is also intimidating. My initial (and in many cases, ongoing) reaction to reading an O’Connor story is to ask, in awe, “How did she do that?”

Yet aside from the singular example she sets, what is one, living today, to take from her hermetic life style in terms of practical application? Probably the same thing one might take from any worthwhile practitioner: whatever one can. It’s that simple, and it’s that unfathomable. For starters, one should be heartened (or, more likely, devastated) by the fact that even our greatest artists often struggle, and realize that the life they embark upon is likely to be painful and unprofitable. “What first stuns the young writer emerging from college,” she wrote in 1948, “is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome.” What she said.