O'Connor Good Country People and Other Stories

selected and introduced by Lauren Groff
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-39634-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 252 Seiten

The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives. We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children, gangsters, hypocrites, misfits and outcasts. These are characters marked by grotesque flaws, darkly humorous and oddly beautiful. Their complex humanity is revealed in apocalyptic moments of Gothic horror, absurdity and violence that transform all who witness them - and us, too, as we realise that nothing in our moral universe is black and white. Flannery O'Connor is the supreme tragicomic chronicler of these bodies and souls, her classic stories infused with the dazzling force of prophecy as one of the century's most visionary writers.

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Catholic parents. In 1945 she enrolled at the Georgia State College for Women. After earning her degree she continued her studies on the University of Iowa's writing program, and her first published story, 'The Geranium', was written while she was still a student. Her writing is best known for its explorations of religious themes and southern racial issues, and for combining the comic with the tragic. After university, she moved to New York where she continued to write. In 1952 she learned that she was dying of lupus, a disease which had afflicted her father. For the rest of her life, she and her mother lived on the family dairy farm, Andalusia, outside Millidgeville, Georgia. For pleasure she raised peacocks, pheasants, swans, geese, chickens and Muscovy ducks. She was a good amateur painter. Her Complete Stories was awarded the Best of the National Book Awards by America's National Book Foundation in 2009.

Autoren/Hrsg.

O'Connor, Flannery

Leseproben

Foreword
by Lauren Groff

Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are among the most American works of literature ever written. They speak of the hypocrisies of the American soul in microcosm; they are eruptions of the traumas of the Jim Crow South as seen by a brave, blazingly angry and mordantly funny observer. Her stories remain just as powerful today as when they were first published, between the 1950s and 1960s, despite the fact that the writer’s influence has seeped so deeply into contemporary American short fiction that it’s inescapable. If imitators of O’Connor abound, it is because it is hard for any writer to escape such force and originality in subject and structure; even those who are neither writers nor readers have been changed by the writer’s gimlet eye. The distorted and somewhat grotesque idea of the American South as it appears in popular culture is, in large part, her legacy.

That said, O’Connor’s influence is outsized for her output. She only published three books in her lifetime: her debut, the strange 1952 novel Wise Blood, and 1960’s The Violent Bear It Away, both of which were received by critics with ambivalence; and her second book, the story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Her other story collection, the brilliant Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously.

Born Mary Flannery O’Connor in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, she was a ‘pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’, as she later wrote of herself. Her family moved in 1940 to a working dairy farm called Andalusia in Milledgeville, which would be her home for the rest of her life. When O’Connor was still in high school, her father died of lupus, a painful and incurable disease in which the body’s immune system attacks healthy parts of the body. She began to write journalism for her high school paper, but her first truly creative calling was in cartooning, blocky linocuts – compositions of stark white lines on a deep black ground, not unlike her later fiction – which even then bore her singular wryness. She continued her journalism and cartooning at Georgia State College for Women, after which she attended graduate school at the University of Iowa to study journalism until she pleaded her way into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write fiction. When she was thirty-two, Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the same disease that had killed her father, and, for the rest of her life, save for a few trips to give lectures and readings, she lived quietly at Andalusia with her mother, going to daily Mass, writing and raising her peacocks. She would die of complications of her disease in 1964, before her fortieth birthday.

Although O’Connor was herself a Southerner, her work would not be nearly as good if she weren’t also an outsider, made all her life to stand in the chilly shadows because she was a highly educated (and highly critical) woman at a time when the gender roles of a soft and amiable Southern femininity were rigidly enforced. More importantly, she was an outsider because of her devout Catholicism in the largely Fundamentalist Protestant South. Her Catholicism was the deepest, most molten core of all of her work; as she says, ‘the stinking mad shadow of Jesus’. Every story she wrote hinges on her characters’ stain of original sin, and what grace they are sometimes allowed is hard won, fleeting and almost always too late to make much of a difference in the end. Her violence, which is the most shocking and immediate attribute of her work, is the violence of Catholicism, a religion in which the central symbol is a crucifix, an aestheticised rendering of the bloody, suffering, broken body of Jesus after he was nailed to a cross and left in the sun to die. She saw her Catholicism in opposition to the wishy-washy moral relativism of the mostly agnostic writers of her time. ‘You can’t indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment,’ she writes in an essay in Mystery and Manners.

And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about … The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe. One reason a great deal of our contemporary fiction is humourless is because so many of these writers are relativists and have to be continually justifying the actions of their characters on a sliding scale of values.

Only when you’re as immoveable in your beliefs as bedrock can you then become a subversive, O’Connor is saying here. Out of her Catholic moral centre comes her deep and roiling humour, which is just as seditious as her equally ostensibly ‘unfeminine’ violence. In many ways the humour makes the violence palatable. If a reader has no understanding of the comedy deep in the bones of the stories, said reader will likely not be able to swallow the stories at all. It was with a sense of outraged irony that she discovered that her German publisher – only a few years after the horrors of the Holocaust – wanted to pull a few of her stories from their edition because they would be ‘too shocking’ for German sensibilities. ‘I didn’t think I was that vicious,’ she wrote to a friend, dryly.

Comedy in O’Connor’s work manifests in countless ways: in tonal irony, in dialogue in which characters inadvertently reveal their moral lapses, in the perfect and telling detail, which is, I think, O’Connor’s greatest genius. When I remember the story ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’, I remember Pitty Sing, the querulous cat that causes the car accident; the mother’s cabbagey face under a bandana tied into rabbit ears; the father’s ‘yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it’; and most of all, I remember the poor chained monkey in the yard of Red Sammy Butts’s restaurant, whose small, suffering, flea-bitten body seems to contain in miniature form the emblem of all of man’s cruelty. So much of her humour resides in the perfect and telling detail: Hulga-Joy’s ‘yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it’ in ‘Good Country People’; the way in ‘The River’ the little boy Bevel believes that pigs are ‘small fat pink animals with curly tails and round grinning faces and bow ties’, until other boys play a practical joke on him and he’s pushed over and chased by a real pig, whose face is ‘gray, wet and sour’. O’Connor’s admirer, the poet Elizabeth Bishop, wrote that O’Connor’s ‘few books will live on and on in American literature. They are narrow, possibly, but they are clear, hard, vivid, and full of bits of description, phrases and odd insight that contains more real poetry than a dozen books of poems.’

If short stories are to live for decades, they must be flexible; they must bend and shift under the various pressures of the changing world, which the author at the time of writing couldn’t have foreseen. Since O’Connor’s death in 1964, we have become aware of the tremendous violence that a single word can contain, and a modern audience has to confront the fact that she frequently uses the n-word, one of the most hurtful and hideous epithets in the English language, meant to dehumanise Black people. It’s worse to see that the writer uses it with seeming relish. Some people may try to defend O’Connor by saying that when she was alive the word didn’t fully hold the freight it holds now, and that the word was commonly used in the South at the time and the use of it is in service of verisimilitude. But surely O’Connor, with her subtle understanding of cruelty and pain, knew how hideous the appellation was, how much violence it carries. The question of intended audience is important, and it seems clear from her non-fiction writing that she imagined her readers to be the white, male, mostly atheistic writers who filled her fiction classes at Iowa; it seems equally likely that it never struck her that she would be read by people of colour and that her choices could hurt them. Still, today’s audience is much larger than O’Connor had imagined it might be; and today nearly every reader will find the word painful to read. It should also be said that her very purpose in so many of her stories is to point out the savagery and hypocrisy of the racist and small-minded white people she is writing about. She wrote that, ‘Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy.’ The devil, according...