Channeling Flannery: Quetzalcoatl Returns

My first exposure to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor made my jaw drop. It revealed a world at once familiar and comfortable – the red clay banks and piney woods of rural Georgia, land of my forebears and my childhood – and at the same time startling, even frightening.

It was as if some rare and splendid plumed bird had alit on the pine-fringed Fall Line of the Appalachian Mountains, throwing an enormous and ominous shadow as it cast about its unfamiliar perch like Quetzalcoatl, the fabled avatar of the Spanish explorer Cortez conquering Mexico.

The first work of hers I read, a short story called “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” was of course prose, not poetry. Yet it made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Even when “recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth’s definition of art’s pity and terror), the story was impossible to describe using mere words, and much more physical in its effect.

I thought of Emily Dickinson’s famous definition of a poem: “If . . . it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry,” she wrote to a friend in 1870. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

That’s exactly the way “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” hit me, and there’s quite a bit of evidence that it hits most readers that way. In that respect, it is typical of her best work.

For many, however, who do not dig beyond the obvious, the shock value is all there is,. This has unfairly, I think, caused her writing to be dismissively described as Gothic and worse. By the same token, the writers of the quirky reality TV series Lost prominently displayed a copy of O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in its opening scene last season, a nonverbal nod to a fairly widely held view that she and her writing both are, well, quirky.

But I disagree. There’s more, much more, to Flannery’s world than meets the naked eye, and it repays the investment of effort.

For those who have never read her work, it defies convenient description. Its strength lies in the ironic tension between the writer’s somewhat cynical point of view and the outrageous facts of everyday life in a small Georgia town of the mid-20th century,  especially in the context of the writer’s apocalyptic world view, which is both girded by her religious beliefs and leavened by her native cynicism.

A cradle Catholic, O’Connor possessed both an apocalyptic vision of life and a seemingly contradictory view, jaded and cynical, of Catholics of every stripe, along with Protestants, foreigners and all other humans whose actions may be at odds with their spoken intent. She never fails to nail ‘em in her subtle but dead-on fashion.

In Flannery’s world, everybody’s got an angle. A classic example is the interchange between a wandering con artist named Tom T. Shiftlet and the equally predatory Lucynell Crater, who is looking to marry off her halfwit daughter, in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

Trying to insinuate himself into her household as a handyman even though the old woman tells him she has no spare rooms, Shiftlet jauntily replies,“Why, lady, monks of old slept in their coffins!” But Lucynell the elder is not to be bested. “They wasn’t as advanced as we are,” she informs him.

If O’Connor’s vision of sin is shocking, her humor is her salvation. Some of it is as subtly engineered through the use of dramatic irony as a suspension bridge, but some is broad and indigenous to her native soil. She takes almost childlike glee in naming some of her more outrageous characters, such as the smarmy faux preacher Onnie Jay Holy in Wise Blood. His real name turns out to be, far less glamorously, Hoover Shoats – “shoat” being a farm term for an adolescent swine.

Nearly half a century after her untimely death, Flannery’s relatively small body of fiction continues to have a disproportionately huge impact, sending shock waves to rising generations of new readers across the globe. Unfortunately, it seems to me, a great many of them fail to appreciate the populous and ultimately inspired and inspiring view of the O’Connor universe. They cast about for meaning in a world of seemingly random violence, but they give up too soon.

Conversely, some readers read far too much into the imagery of her work. As anyone who lives in Milledgeville can tell you, pine trees and dairy cows are facts of life, not necessarily literary symbols, in this neck of the woods.

Hers is an unsettling universe, nevertheless. One minute all is sunshine and buttercups and the next, people shoot and kill and steal one anothers’ wooden legs. One minute the fall line is merely a ridge overlooking an ancient shoreline and the next it is home to a fabulous and mythical bird looking for his dinner – opposites yoked together for dramatic effect and bearing the brunt of her complex message about will and choice and displayed against a canvas that is larger than not only life but death as well. (A short film based on one of her classics, “Good Country People,” conveys a little of that feeling.)

Which brings us to the peacocks.

It was in 1952 that Flannery brought peacocks (and their drabber mates) home and gave them the run of the back yard, exulting in their splendor and even writing an article, “Living With a Peacock,” for Holiday Magazine in 1961.

They remained on the farm long after her death three years later, but all had died out by the 1980s. As I began to think about writing this essay, I received the news from the keepers of Flannery’s fame that there are once again peafowl there.

Hard-scrabble ground against a fan of cobalt and scarlet feathers with golden eyes. The oxymoronic image is a perfect messenger for her words, and, in an eerie parallel, she restored the farm’s long-ago name of Andalusia, replacing the much less colorful and more indigenous contemporary name it had been given, Sorrel Farm.

Milledgeville has long been and basically still is two cities – the lushly landscaped antebellum Old Capitol, a stately and historic downtown area which is now home to two contiguous college campuses, and, in stark contrast, the previously infamous Central State Hospital, where thousands of criminally insane and not so insane inmates, the victims of involuntary institutionalization, lived and died for decades in a world where electroshock therapy and lobotomies were a way of life.

At one point, it was the largest mental institution in the United States and was the impetus for an Oscar-winning (and fairly terrifying) feature film about the horrors of mental illness, 1948’s The Snake Pit.

Central State is much diminished in scope and impact today, but the merest mention of Milledgeville to people in other parts of the state is still likely to cause them to shake their heads despairingly while drawing a small circle around the right ear with the index finger – an enduring gesture denoting insanity.

The two worlds, even now, are only a handful of miles apart and would have been all too familiar to Flannery, an alumna of the state college, known then as Georgia State College for Women. Between them are housing projects where blacks who seemingly have never heard about Martin Luther King Jr. or Brown v. Board of Education, live, propagate and die.

I’ve found my own middle ground here, and it was again because of Flannery’s influence.

The French have an expression for the hidden France that few tourists get to see: “la France profonde.” My domain, a little four-acre hideaway with a post-and-beam house and guest cottage, is bred in bone of that most profound Milledgeville, the deep, dark primeval countryside, a wild terrain of pines, hardwoods and outcroppings of ancient rock where wild turkeys cavort and pre–Revolutionary War tombstones are scattered like chanterelles among the ladyslippers and wild fern.

It’s neither town nor gown, it’s my France profonde, and I chose it because of one line in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled,” she writes in setting the scene for the murders of the star-crossed vacationers.

(The adjective “mean,” by the way, is Georgia-speak for ugly.)

Anyone who has ever spent a fall afternoon in rural Georgia knows that landscape – piercing green needles of pine on splintery stands of bark splicing a silvery cobalt sky – and understands that in its merciless verity, it is the dense and diverse landscape of Flannery’s world view, a world where good and evil are so intermixed as to be indecipherable except through an act of will. A world in which the rare plumed bird may at any moment enter the scene and change it forever.

That act of will, though, suffices, I ruminate, as I park on Jefferson Street and walk to the intersection of Hancock. On that corner stands Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the one she attended, and I steal inside, early for the vigil mass, and walk to the altar of the Virgin Mary. Making the sign of the cross, I slip my quarter in the slot and light a candle to say a prayer of thanks for her gifts of humor and wisdom and irony in the place that once was her sanctuary and now is mine.