Copies de concours: Littérature Agreg Interne 2006 - Copie 2  

Note obtenue: 10,5/20

Fragmentation in Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories

Flannery O Connor’s Short stories are peopled with grotesque and often farcical characters  who evolve in a South which is more a symbolic setting than a geographical place. It is the postlapsarian south torn apart by two wars, falling into pieces, holding a mirror to the fall of mankind. Likewise the characters in the stories are falling apart, their whole universe is crumbling and they are fragmented, disjoined, they have lost the force, the energy, that gave them a sense of wholeness, or rather a relative wholeness as the transcendent wholeness of man was lost in the garden of Eden. The fragmentation of the characters and their universe is, in the short stories, a process accelerated by modernity and individualism. Thanatos has taken over Eros, the unifying force. Fragmentation acts as a picture, a snapshot  displaying the stark naked reality , a close up which aims at making the reader aware of the disruptive force at work both in the story and the real world . Yet, just like St Augustine who was optimistic in his exposing his “exitus et reditus” theory, according to which man goes away from god the better to return to his creator, thus forming a circle , finishing a cycle , O’Connor’s stories convey the message that there is a way back from fragmentation, there is a process of re-union powered by divine Grace. We may therefore wonder how Flannery O’Connor handles both the dynamic frangmentation and its representation in “startling figures”  in order to show the way to move backwards, to a reditus, to the re-union of man with himself but above all with God, his creator.  We shall therefore study what is fragmented  in the short stories, and the working of the force that brings about fragmentation. Next we shall consider fragmentation at the narrative level in order to make out the different ways Flannery O’Connor managed to make the invisible fragmentation visible. And then we shall study the way the characters are driven from fragmentation to re-union.

 

The fall from the garden of Eden marked the first fragmantation mankind had to undergo. By losing his transcendent  divine nature, man was made a fallen creature doomed to toil, to die and to suffer in childbirth. In the short stories a second fragmentation has taken place because not only have the protagonists lost sight of god but they also have forgotten their true nature, their true valueless , humble meaning as human beings. In Good Country People, Hulga Joy epitomizes the fragmented character. Her name (her true identity)  is fragmented, she is split between who she is and who she thinks she is (who she would like to be). She is a grown up woman yet she dresses like a child, she asserts her superiority, yet she is weak (she is disabled and has a weak heart) , she wears a wooden leg, glasses and acts “ugly”. All those fragments of different identities form a grotesque  puppet and are the consequences of her rejection of God and of her affirmation of  intellect over religion. She is a nihilist but she is “nihil” , nothing. Other characters in the shortstories try to reject their  humane nature and end up in further fragmentation, as in The Comfort Of Home when Thomas  refuses to recognize that  Sarah Ham Drake Star, the misfit – dragon of the story,  represents the part of evil that is inherent to any human creature. He endeavours to get rid of it while it is a part of himself , and consequently his blindness brings about his fall from his earthly paradise, from his Eden, with Sarah Ham / his evil, forever as his accomplice .

Fragmentation is also obvious in social relationships  . It goes along with a disappearance  of bonds. In the stories the settings are often farms or large houses , an enclosed domain in which the protagonists strive in vain to find shelter, protection from the outside. They live in secluded places in which they are isolated even from the people who work for them. Furthermore  those farms are symbols of a strong hierarchical society so typical of the south, with the landowners at the top and the “niggers” at the bottom of the scale.
The hierarchy in human “values” goes along with a sense of overweening pride which fragments the long chain of humanity that Ruby Turpin saw in her vision in Revelation. Men share the same common lot of humanity, they should be united, not fragmented.
In Late Encounter With the Enenmy, General Sash , a fragment of character ( for he is half dead and is compared to a “dry spider”) is “displaced” in history. History itself is fragmented, reduced to processions and parades. Time is fragmented. The weather too is fragmented in the short stories since there is no winter, always the same hot weather. We may wonder if it does not imply that the protagonists are closer to the fire of Hell than to a warm and soft heavenly breeze.

Yet fragments sometimes have a positive function in the stories. In the River we can read that fragments of the sun plunge into the river, the same river that is going to take away Harry/ Bevel on his way to salvation as the catholics view it. The fragments of the sun, of the holy sun symbol of God, are like pieces  of Host, divine sparks that underline that the river can be a true river of baptism and salvation for those who truly believe it.
It is a “fragment” of the mystery , a glimpse of the invisible but it is only available for those who accept the working of the cooperating grace. And it is Flannery O’Connor, as a catholic writer, as a  prophet, who tries to make us grasp the invisible through the concrete thanks to her narrative technique.

As far as the narrative technique is concerned, fragmentation lies at the core of the binary oppositions found in the stories. People are either black or white, either good white or white trash, either haves or poors, they are either misfits or do gooders. There is no “in between”. In the same way there is an almost moral opposition between the city and the country. The same pattern is at work in characterization. The protagonists fall into a few set types (we might even say clichés) : the misfits, the niggers, the farmhands, the landowners, the failed writers... This is quite a fragmented representation of mankind.
Furthermore the characters are described with a great deal of grotesque through one or several  physical characteristics. It is often the weight  that makes ladies look like mountains, fragmenting them and making them appear as a huge belly. It can be a peice of clothing such as a hat that stands for the character because of the savvy details or the long descriptions given by O’Connor (their grotesque is emphasized by the mirror effect of hats) .
Because of her fragmentations Hulga is ugliness made woman. It would seem that the human creatures thus estranged from god are pieces of flesh, infected flesh, swollen flesh, unhealthy flesh.

O’Connor hands the reader a sort of magnifying glass to deliver a message. The most effective way is to show the parts where the different fragments join , or rather meet. For instance, Mr Guizac in the Displaced Person , is a christ like fragment, made a fragment and not a human being by Mrs McIntyre and Mrs Pritchard’s feeling that he was above all a stranger. As a stranger you can’t join and that is what keeps them fragmented , apart from the great chain of humanity .

As far as the focalization in the shortstories is concerned Flannery O’Connor used multiple focalisation, thus giving the reader a fragmented  vision because he enters the stories through one of the characters’ consciences and therefore gets pieces of fragmented vision like pieces of jigsaw puzzle . It creates humour because of the implicit gap  between what the characters think they are and what we perceive them to be. This gap brings a further impression of disjunction, of fragmentation and we grasp the long way they will have to make to recognize  their true human nature and to get rid (and get cleaned) of their sins.
In the same way bodies are sometimes morcelled , as in Good Country People thus creating an impression that , for instance, legs, are holding a conversation. Legs are no better or worse than heads or hearts to deliver an empty message .. This further emphasizes the sense of isolation and grotesque.

In the short stories there is also a fragmentation in the different readings  that can be made of the texts. There is first a litteral meaning, then a symbolic one, and most importantly an anagogical meaning which is really at the core of the stories and which sums up O’Connor’s message. The anagogical level deals with the relationship between man and god. But to be able to decipher  the text and to grasp this meaning the reader has to think, to re-read the text , it requires efforts on the part of the reader, just like O E Parker has to do a long and painful deciphering work to understand the meaning of OE and of the drawing on his back, to understand that he is a servant of god. The short stories can therefore either be read in a fragmented way or as an anagogical whole, revealing a fragment of mystery to the reader. The whole narrative technique points to the gap  between what is seen, shown or depicted, and what should be; a little like Mrs Connin in the River who is described as a skeleton while she should be a full flesh abd blood human being. This technique paves the way to a deeper anagogical question: she is a skeleton, she should first become human to achieve the next stage. But how?

Nevertheless, for all the characters’ ugliness, in spite of their being fragmented, isolated, estranged from god and grotesque, O’Connor’s vision is optimistic  because the process of fragmentation can be reversed as exemplified by Julian’s mother  in Everything that rises must converge. The “inocent” lady with intense blue eyes who has wings of hair around her head leaves the harsh world in which she was frightened , lost and despised by her son,  to be re-united into the Paradise of the childhood in an antebellum prolapsarian image of the south.
For Flannery O’Connor the move to god, to re-union, is the chance  our creator offers us  to redeem ourselves, to wash away the original sin  so as to  retrieve the transcendent nature that is ours since we are creatures that god endowed with the grace of life.  In the short stories some characters have no difficulties to overcome their fragmentation . They are the innocents among whom we find Julian’s mother. They do not need a violent revelation to be saved because they are true to their nature.
Innocents who are bound to be saved are of the Greenleaf breed. They recognize that they are dual (like the twins who are “the same spirit in two skins” ) . They seek otherness (they marry French wives, Mrs Greenleaf unites with the earth, with the mineral)  and at the anagogical level it implies that they understand that there is an “otherness” in every human being, the divine transcendent part of mankind.
But they are not the only ones. There is a recurrent symbol that bridges the gap between the concrete and the invisible : the peacock. It is for Flym a symbol of transfiguration, that is of re-union. It is both earthly  (with its horrible shriek and its bad mood , if we are to believe Flannery O’Connor who had a few of them at her farm) . Yet their tails bear circles that look like suns or eyes (both symbols of god) Their neck is blue and green, blue symbolizing heaven and green, nature.
Yet it requires a psychological journey  to be able to see their transcendence. Mrs Pritchard in The displaced person can’t see them as bridges between the visible and the invisible but as “pea chicken”. She further misinterprets the vision she has in which  the transfiguration of a peacock appears in the sky, she reads it as the prophecy of a threat while it is quite the opposite, the promise of a re-union. Mrs Prittchard being herself a displaced person ( a fragment, a disjoined part) as she is soon to discover during a moment of revelation, is to be “re-united” to her “true territory”.
Most characters in the stories are like Mrs Pritchard. They require shock therapy to escape their state of fragmentation. They are such sinners , they are such a long way from the recognition of their human condition that a shock is the necessary  vector of grace. Mrs May is gored by a bull, the grandmother is shot, but it is not violence for violence’s sake . As O’Connor put it “to the hard of hearing you shout and to the blind you draw large startling figure”. It is part of the re-unification process.
Yet all the characters do not accept to be reunited, to lose their fragmentary state. Grace is a gift that can be accepted or refused, as exemplified by the grand father in A view of the woods who murders his grand daughter. By hitting  her head on a rock , he refuses the means of salvation she represented. Shiftlet in the life you save may be your own also rejects reunification. . He abandons Lucynell, his “angel of gawd” and flees to Mobile, not to be , literaly, united.

 

In Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories fragmentation is much more than a narrative device. It is not a mere symbol to reflect the characters’ estrangement from god or from their part of humanity. It is mostly the sign of a world shattered, threatened with destruction by the arch evils that are individualism and the loss of religion. As a catholic writer O’Connor thought she was endowed with a mission, to point the means of reverting to a state of re-union by submitting to god’s grace. Her stories aim at delivering a message to the reader, the importance of religion with its rites and dogma at the core of human lives as a safeguard agaisnt fragmentation. Yet her readers  might be like the young writer in The enduring chill who dismisses the dogma “don’t smoke “ and “don’t drink milk” as empty nonsense, rules to be overuled. Yet, had he not questioned them his life would not have fallen apart.