Copies de concours: Littérature Agreg Interne 2006 - Copie 4

Note obtenue: 11,5/20

 

Fragmentation in Flannery O’Connor.

 

Flannery O’Connor lived a fairly short time(she was thirty-nine when she died) but she is commonly acknowledged to be a great writer of the American South. Her work only amounts to two novels, two collections of short stories and numerous lectures about the art of writing. Her ideas about writing in particular and life in general are also well-known, thanks to the many letters she sent to her friends and readers. After her death, theses letters were collected and assembled in a book: The Habit of Being. Her Catholic faith was an essential part of Flannery O’Connor ‘s life and she wanted it to show in her writing. However, she knew that she could not be so obvious about it since many of her readers knew little or none about Catholicism .So she used different ways of expressing her messages. One of them could be said to be the technique of fragmentation. Indeed, as we shall see, many elements, characters and perceptions are fragmented and as such distorted in her short stories. We may then wonder if this precise technique is a necessary writing device, allowing the writer to express a clearer perception of reality. Are Art and the artist meant to mould reality in their own way, fragmenting and distorting it so as to give a clear view of the truth? First we will show that Art is a construction, a re-ordering of different fragments of reality present in the mind of the artist. As a construction, it must retain some links with reality in order to be understood so we will show that Flannery O’Connor chose to keep some fragments of reality without distorting them. Finally, we will tackle the role of the Catholic fiction writer and the way Flannery O’Connor conceived it.

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            Art is undoubtedly a construction, an artificial creation made by an artist. Whatever the field, be it music, painting or sculpture, it is a careful assembling of different fragments to form a whole. The same runs true for writing in general and for Flannery O’Connor’s short stories in particular.
            In her writing as in most writings, three different perceptions are to be found.:  the narrator’s perception, that of the characters’ and that of the readers’. As we shall see, they are all fragmented. The narrator’s perception is never a detached one: it focuses on the characters, underlining some of their failings to the extent of ridiculing them, turning them at times into grotesque freaks. According to Flannery O’Connor: «the fiction writer states as little as possible.” Her narrators certainly state little but what they do is always revealing. For instance, the descriptions of the mother and of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is quite telling. The mother(who incidentally is never referred to by her own name but only generically as “mother”) is quite  briefly described. The economy of details define her as a single minor character(a minor fragment) in an elaborate short story. However the few details given by the narrator about her are all relevant. In Flannery O’Connor’s work, every detail counts and the fact that this character is associated with the color green and compared to a cabbage means that in the mind of the author the mother character belongs to the natural and as such sane world. Conversely, the grandmother is minutely depicted. The narrator makes fun of her, describing precisely the details of her clothes. She is another fragment but obviously an important one on which the story hinges. From the beginning she is associated to death (she dresses like a lady in order to be recognized as one in case of a car accident!) and this of course is a meaningful proleptic detail.  Thus the importance of the narrator as a revealing agent of significant fragments is paramount in all stories.
            Flannery O’Connor’s characters’ perceptions are generally widely fragmented. The author made great use of focalization to emphasize her characters biased views on themselves and on the world around them. These characters are so typically Southern that they are unable to have a view of the world which extends beyond their South. This is a first instance of their fragmented perception of the world. Everything revolves around them. Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” is a good case in point. One of her main mental activities is to classify the people around her, reassuring her in the process that she stands above all others. Like numerous characters in the short stories (Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley in “The Displaced Person”, the landlady in “Greenleaf”, Ruby Hill in “ A Strike Of Good Fortune”)  she is reminiscent of the Pharisee and the Publican in the gospel of St Luke (18.9-14). “I thank thee O God that I am not as all other men are.”. Eventually, Mrs. Turpin will be violently touched by grace and made too understand that “Everyone that exalteth himself shall be abased and everyone that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”(ibid). So the characters’ fragmented view of themselves and of the world is paramount in the structure of the stories and does not prevent them to be saved. On the contrary, it is because of this fragmented, distorted view that they can evolve.
            Deriving from the two precedent perceptions, the reader’s view can only be a fragmented one. For Flannery O’Connor, prophecy was “a matter of seeing near things with all their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing farther things close up.”  As we shall see later, the levels of meaning are numerous in the short stories. They are multi-layered and the reader must be a perceptive one to grasp all of them. According to his attention and his knowledge his view can remain a literal one or can develop into a more complete one. Whatever the author’s efforts and craft, this end of the issue does not rely on her. However, in order not to lose the reader and to give some verisimilitude to her stories, Flannery O’Connor chose to keep some links with the real world.

 

                        Fragments of reality are to be found recurrently in The Complete Stories. Her description of the real world, the setting in which we see the characters evolve is one of those. The countryside she depicted is always a realistic one, one that any reader can easily recognize. Woods, skies, fields, suns and moons are all natural elements of our world. To these she remains faithful, allowing her readers to be at ease in her fictional settings. The treatment of these elements however, is a highly symbolic one revealing a transcendent presence. But to reveal this presence she chose to remain as realistic as possible in her descriptions of the natural world.
            Other major elements are not distorted in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Evil and its corrolatives are always minutely detailed , in a very realistic way. For example, materialism which for the author was a direct cause of evil, is often alluded to in the stories. In “Everything that rises must converge” we learn that Mrs Chestny belonged to a rich family: her grandfather owned a plantation and a lot of slaves. Even though theses riches belong to the past, Mrs Chestny as well as her son Julian remain fond of the memory which is a founding one for them. To exist one must have or have had, that is why most characters despise the “have-nots” of the South, namely the blacks and white-trash people. The same can be said of the landladies of the stories as well as(and this is more surprising) of Sarah Ruth Parker’s unloving wife in “Parker’s back”. Even though she does not  seem to possess much materially speaking, she is so entrenched in her faith, in her belief , that she has no room left for love or  humility.  This kind of materialism of the mind is to be found too in Mrs. May’s sons in “Greenleaf” and in Joy-Hulga in “Good Country People”. According to O’Connor it was quite a common failing of her times so she felt that she had to describe it and use it in her novels as well as in her stories. As she put it: «The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.”
For Flannery O’Connor materialism, pride and the feeling of secular autonomy were all sins and direct consequences of evil.
            Finally another fragment of O’Connor’s reality was God and his transcendent presence in the world. This was her reality, the main driving force in her life. So she chose to describe his manifestations, his grace through violent epiphanies experienced at the end of her stories by her characters. These of course may not seem realistic to the reader but they were still part (at least allegorically) of O’Connor’s world and that is why she described them to such an extent. All the ends of her stories are violent revelations and that is what she was aiming at.

 

                        To fullfil her task as she understood it , that is to say as a Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor wanted to prove that all broken fragments in her stories as well as in the real world needed to be unified so as o be able to fuse in the perfect whole: God. Through her art she wanted to transcend reality (even though as we have seen it, she needed it in her story) so as to find her way to the divine world. The use of the grotesque was a way of achieving this aim. Caricaturing her characters, namely distorting one of their limbs and over-emphasizing it, allowed her to show their feebleness but also to underline their belonging to the Chosen People of God. The hermaphrodit in “A  Temple of the Holy Ghost” claims that it is the way that God made him and that he must accept it. In Flannery’s O’Connor’s world, freaks can be evil-minded or can represent God. Their presence is always significative and should be taken as such. Parker is another good instance of this  - his body is a representation of the whole world in itself , turning him into a strange picture. He experiences the work of grace in himself and is meant to be a medium for others to receive it. However, the Catholic faith considers that all men are free to receive God or to disdain him. As we have seen earlier Sarah Ruth as well as Parker’s friends refuse to understand the message conveyed by the image of Christ on Parker’s back.
            If Flannery O’Connor respects the cycle of events in her stories –they are told in a linear way and time is rarely disrupted – she makes extensive use of inner focalization but she artfully blurs the lines between the different localizers. A t some point the reader does not know (and has no way to know) whose perception he is presented with. This is another way of showing a superior presence in the stories, that of the writer of course who carefully manipulates her readers but mostly that of a transcendent Presence transpiring everywhere in the world showing that man is neither alone nor master of his destiny. Like Teilhard de Chardin, Flannery O’Connor strongly believed that there was a converging point –the Omega Point – where God and his creature were to meet. Both believed as well that there was a place deep in the soul of every human being which could be deemed divine. It is to show this that the author blurred the limits between the different points of view, echoing thus the multiplicity of “divine spots”.
            All these elements lead to the anagogic level of meaning in Flannery O’Connor’s stories. As we said before, everything counts in her stories and aims at discovering the One and Unique God. Natural elements must be read as symbolic representation of Him. Colours all connote different fields. Usually, red and purple signal to the presence of God, red meaning the blood of Christ as in “The River” but at other times the Devil like Red Sammy in “A good man is hard to find». Green and brown often stand for the earth and for the natural world while yellow, orange and white are often signs of the presence of God. The sun and the moon also testify of the Transcendent Presence in the first scene of “The artificial nigger” with the moon reflecting itself in the mirror of the dark but transformed bedroom and all along “Greenleaf” with the sun described several times as bullet-shaped. The trees play a great role too not only in “A view of the wood” where they are perceived as positive and essential elements by the members of the Pitts family but as threatening by Mr. Fortune at the end of the story, but also in numerous other stories such as “A circle of fire”, “A good man is hard to find”, “The enduring chill” and many others.  God or the devil can be found in all natural elements in Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. One must have a clear vision to see these universal truths behind all the fragments in her stories. To make sure that her readers would be more careful and insightful than most of her characters, she chose St Cyril of Jerusalem’s warning as the epigram of her second collection of short stories: “The dragon is by the road watching those who pass; beware less he devours you. We go to the  father of souls but it is necessary that we pass by the dragon.”

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                        As far as painting is concerned, we talk of figurative art as opposed to abstract art . As a writer, Flannery O’Connor could be said to belong to both ; Before succeeding  in fiction, she had been a cartoonist and this shows clearly in her work. As  we have seen, one of her habits was to exaggerate, to insist on details so as to better convince of her characters’ failings and need for Redemption. She loved oddities and the bizarre and used them with a vengeance to carry her point. So even though she kept a realistic setting in her stories, her view of human beings was clearly and willfully fragmented. This she considered essential for her writing and we may deem that, for her, the art of the fiction writer was much about fragmentation. Her distortion of reality was expressively meant to lead her readers to what she considered to be the Universal Truth: God. There is no denying that her writing touched and impressed numerous people in her life-time as well as after her death. However, we may wonder whether her religious message was so well understood by her readers. Whatever the answer, it can be said that one of her great achievements was to compel her readers to face and to ponder over some essential issues such as violence, death and Transcendence. She once said in a lecture that: “the concrete is necessary but mystery is essential”. It is to show mystery that she successfully used fragmentation in her concrete work and this can be said to be an essential aspect of her art.

 

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