Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor

Alison Arant, Jordan Cofer, Alison Arant, Jordan Cofer

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496831811
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Lindsay Alexander, Alison Arant, Alicia Matheny Beeson, Eric Bennett, Gina Caison, Jordan Cofer, Doug Davis, Doreen Fowler, Marshall Bruce Gentry, Bruce Henderson, Monica C. Miller, William Murray, Carol Shloss, Alison Staudinger, and Rachel Watson The National Endowment for the Humanities has funded two Summer Institutes titled "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor, " which invited scholars to rethink approaches to Flannery O'Connor's work. Drawing largely on research that started as part of the 2014 NEH Institute, this collection shares its title and its mission. Featuring fourteen new essays, Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor disrupts a few commonplace assumptions of O'Connor studies while also circling back to some old questions that are due for new attention. The volume opens with "New Methodologies, " which features theoretical approaches not typically associated with O'Connor's fiction in order to gain new insights into her work. The second section, "New Contexts, " stretches expectations on literary genre, on popular archetypes in her stories, and on how we should interpret her work. The third section, lovingly called "Strange Bedfellows, " puts O'Connor in dialogue with overlooked or neglected conversation partners, while the final section, "O'Connor's Legacy, " reconsiders her personal views on creative writing and her wishes regarding the handling of her estate upon death. With these final essays, the collection comes full circle, attesting to the hazards that come from overly relying on O'Connor's interpretation of her own work but also from ignoring her views and desires. Through these reconsiderations, some of which draw on previously unpublished archival material, the collection attests to and promotes the vitality of scholarship on Flannery O'Connor.

PART 1

NEW METHODOLOGIES

Feather Method: Rereading O’Connor in the Age of the Object

GINA CAISON

You couldn’t hurt an angel but I would have been happy to know that I had dirtied his feathers—I conceived of him in feathers.

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BETTY HESTER, 17 January 1956

The peacock feather remains a frequently employed symbol associated with Flannery O’Connor’s life and work. In several instances she mentions sending peacock feathers to her friends and their families, and feathers appear on the covers of several editions of her works, including The Complete Stories (2008 edition), Everything That Rises Must Converge (FSG Classics edition, 1965), The Habit of Being (1988), and A Prayer Journal (2013).¹ A peacock feather also graces the cover of several biographies, critical works, and films about the author such as Jordan Cofer’s The Gospel According to Flannery O’Connor (2015), Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life (2010), Jonathan Roger’s The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor (2010), and Bridget Kurt’s documentary Uncommon Grace: The Life of Flannery O’Connor (2000). This association makes sense. After all, O’Connor raised peacocks, and she was a noted lover of birds from even her earliest childhood when she appeared on a Pathé newsreel, “Do You Reverse?” with her backward-walking chicken. In this chapter, however, I take up the feather as more than a talisman of the author’s creative legacy, and I attempt to think about the feather as more than a metonym of the bird. Rather than read the feather as a metaphor for the author’s work or life, or offer a cultural approach that might read feathers as only religious symbols, I attempt to use the feather as method—as a way to reconsider the author’s work. In short, I explore how and why feathers are continually associated with O’Connor, and I examine feathers as objects in their own right: as items that carry meaning, causality, and ways of understanding the world. I use these ways of meaning attached to the feather in order to reread several of O’Connor’s most popular short stories from across her oeuvre, including “The Displaced Person,” “Good Country People,” “Parker’s Back,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

To pursue this line of inquiry, I outline four characteristics of peacock feathers that might open up new approaches to these texts. These include ptilochronology (feather-time), coversion, sexual selection versus natural selection (and within this the “handicap principle”), and the use of structural coloration rather than pigment. I use these feather characteristics to outline a speculative approach to these selected short stories, and I explore how understanding a common and persistent object of O’Connor’s universe—the feather—offers an imaginative way into the works that a traditional narrative analysis may not. To begin, ptilochronology allows me to offer a reconsideration of the pacing of O’Connor’s stories such as “The Displaced Person” where biblical time seems to crash up against calendar time. While the story is marked by the appearance of regimented time via calendars, a more fluid temporality of what I call biblical time also pervades the text. This biblical time includes, but may not be limited to, the wildly productive temporality of the six days of creation, the cyclical order of the liturgical calendar, and eschatology. These competing temporal frameworks from secular calendars to biblical cycles exist in friction with the biological ptilochronology of the text. Furthermore, I consider how aesthetic coversion (the use of “covering” feathers for either physical or aesthetic purposes) offers a new way to consider O’Connor’s pairing of O. E. Parker’s audacious tattoos with the structure of his physical body in “Parker’s Back,” where his tattoos are like the peacock’s covert feathers. Following this, I turn to sexual selection, which, unlike natural selection, is the term for when females of a species seemingly choose males based on physically attractive, but evolutionarily detrimental, traits (e.g., a peacock’s tail). Using this concept, I consider how O’Connor’s women characters find men such as Parker and Pointer attractive despite their obvious flaws, and how O’Connor might have recognized the “handicap principle,” which is the term for when an animal is healthy enough to sustain the evolutionary drag of the supposedly useless trait. Given O’Connor’s frequent attention to disability, I pause on that phrasing, the handicap principle—the idea that the “useless” trait is not a signal of liability but of added health and strength over and above what may be initially diagnosed as weakness—to reconsider how various prostheses indicate characters’ relationships to ability and one another. I close by putting these readings in dialogue under the principle of structural coloration, which is when color appears to the human eye by refraction rather than reflection and is the mechanism by which peacock feathers appear as having iridescent colors beyond their brown pigment. This thinking calls on numerous other recurring O’Connor themes including illumination and the limitation of human sight in texts such as “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” This feather knowledge allows readers to consider the reality of what is seen and known within O’Connor’s works, and this, I posit, we might apply across numerous texts. My consideration of these O’Connor texts does not follow publication chronology. Rather, I think of the texts as reactive to one another via the act of reading. Just as I posit that the feather as object does work and achieves causality within the philosophical universe of the story, my method forgoes the assumption that meaning follows biographical development of the human author. Therefore, I move from questions of time through matters of structure into considerations of perception to demonstrate a recurrent and recursive possibility for reading O’Connor via a focus on a singular object.

The feather method I outline in this chapter draws from emergent ideas in object-oriented ontology. O’Connor’s writings both adhere to and trouble an object-oriented ontology that posits that all things—human, animal, mineral, natural, synthetic, et cetera—exist without any particular hierarchy of status. As Graham Harman outlines within this approach:

What emerges in its place is a ghostly cosmos in which humans, dogs, oak trees, and tobacco are on precisely the same footing as glass bottles, pitchforks, windmills, comets, ice cubes, magnets, and atoms. Instead of exiling objects to the natural sciences (with the usual mixed emotions of condescension and fear), philosophy must reawaken its lost talent for unleashing the enfolded forces trapped in the things themselves. (Tool-Being 2)

In other words, this object-oriented approach within O’Connor attempts to step around anthropocentrism into a philosophical space that might enliven critical possibility within O’Connor studies, or as Harman writes of philosophy, “a thought experiment, a process of smashing fragments of reality together to see what emerges” (Tool-Being 5). Object-oriented ontology attempts to imagine the interactions and causality transmitted by objects to objects. Within this view, humans, lamps, paintings, and trees all transmit causality into the world, and they bump up against one another, making meaning out of interactions that do not require a human recognition at the center.² This approach follows the logic that “Object-oriented philosophy proclaims that any relation between any two objects automatically produces distortion,” and it is this distortion that my readings of O’Connor’s feathers attempts to chart (Harman Speculative Realism 168). While this chapter uses an object-based approach to reconsider the author’s writing via the peacock feather, it also considers how O’Connor’s work may help us further theorize object-oriented ontology, particularly if twenty-first-century readers begin to approach O’Connor with an eye toward the objects of her work without imagining them as only symbols or metaphors. O’Connor continually challenged the construction of realism alongside religious thinking, and her work seems like a particularly robust place to consider the vibrations between real objects within a universe that is not entirely divorced from magical thinking.

While there are several veins of thought within object-oriented ontology, this chapter proceeds most directly from Timothy Morton’s work, which engages objects in their ecological capacity while eschewing ideas of romantic “nature.”³ As most scholarship in object-oriented ontology argues, objects are not merely metaphorical representations of reality determined by human phenomenology nor are they merely the sum of their parts or observable qualities. In fact, objects are precisely not their qualities. Rather, they produce effects and affects within and among themselves. The objects of O’Connor do work and create causality beyond our beliefs in authorial intent or reader response. Just as O’Connor continually questioned human arrogance and folly, a focus on reading for the causality of a singular object within her fiction—without reducing that object to mere symbol—pushes us toward a consideration of her work that imagines all objects as simultaneously linked to and imminently alienated from one another. In other words, object readings open up space to reconsider O’Connor beyond the biographical or religious without negating the importance of those two approaches. It asks that we pay attention to the meanings that detailed objects carry in the story without simply reapplying standards of “symbolism” or imagining that an object is only the sum of its parts or associations, focusing instead on what every object does—what distortion or vibration it might carry—within the carefully crafted universe of her work. As Morton outlines, “To say that existence is coexistence is not to say that things merely reduced to their relations. Rather, it is to argue that because of withdrawal, an object never exhausts itself in its appearances—this means there is always something left over, as it were, and an excess that might be experienced as a distortion, gap, or void” (113). This chapter reads with the distortion of one particularly common object of O’Connor, the feather, in order to reconsider the space between realism and what we might alternately call “religion,” “grace,” “theology,” or even “magic,” within her work.

If we think with the peacock feather, we see larger questions about aesthetics and use-value, questions that O’Connor herself queried in “King of the Birds,” when she says: “Many people, I have found, are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is ‘good for’—a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none” (836). In other words, O’Connor finds the question of the object’s perceived use-value in human terms as nonsensical. In her view, the bird does aesthetic work that one can either understand or not. Such a sentiment is largely consistent with Morton’s brand of object-oriented ontology that argues “causality is wholly an aesthetic phenomenon,” which is not simply “limited to interactions between humans or between humans and painted canvases or between humans and sentences in dramas” (19). While O’Connor might find such a philosophy incongruent with her religious beliefs or overly theoretical, I argue that this focus on the radical materiality of the universe of her writing creates new areas for investigation. Rather than imagine that each item in every story is merely a symbol that carries an abstract idea via its concrete reality, this reading highlights the concrete reality that each object inhabits on its own terms. That is to say, while my feather-reading may verge on the speculative, I am not interested in the abstracted associations of the objects as much as their embedded knowledge as physical objects with their own meanings that create their own potential distortions or reveal a void of knowing within the story. Indeed, O’Connor famously quipped that if the Eucharist was only a symbol then “to hell with it” (Habit 125). Of course, for the Catholic O’Connor the Eucharist may enjoy a special status, but its power, perhaps like any designated object, lies beyond its symbolic function. I propose, then, that we take O’Connor at her word, and consider the objects of her writing as neither pure metaphors nor symbols but as real things that have causal effect within her works that create meaning and open up possibility in their invocation.

One such place of possibility exists in the recognition that physical feathers record their own time. As Thomas C. Grubb explains, ptilochronology is the study of “feather-time,” which “concerns daily intervals” (i). Along the shaft of a feather, an observer will see bands, and each of these bands represents roughly twenty-four hours of feather growth. Much like the rings of a tree, these bands reveal information about the relative nutritional health of the individual. According to ptilochronology, wider bands indicate an overall more robust nutritional picture for the animal while thinner bands may indicate some deficiencies or stresses. Regardless of band size, however, the temporal concept remains the same: feathers count the days. Indeed, like many other species, birds operate primarily on seasonal time. However, when considering the fact that each feather on the bird reveals information about daily factors, including health and nutrition, and that this information is visible to both the human and avian eye, a speculative object-oriented ontology of the feather should ask us to consider a temporality where the daily and hourly intervals take precedence over historical scales of calendar months, years, or decades.

“The Displaced Person” represents one O’Connor story in which feather-time reveals itself as potentially significant for examining how competing temporal orders subtend the text’s action. The main characters in “The Displaced Person” frequently appeal to time as a measure of adaptation and change. Much of the text works within and against what Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity,” which she outlines as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” and “is a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts” where “schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate what the sociologist Evitar Zerubavel calls ‘hidden rhythms,’ forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege” (3) The text showcases the battle of temporal experience as each character competes to earn more privilege in their respective roles on the farm. However, while they seem caught up in human ideas of chrononormativity, the narrative consistently bends and adjusts temporal scales. The story occurs on a seemingly more extended time frame, at once both incredibly slow and action packed much like the first six days of Christian creation, than other O’Connor works, which often operate on daily intervals. In this way, one might argue that “The Displaced Person” is not the most obvious place to begin a feather-method reading of the author’s narrative timing. However, the story demonstrates both a preoccupation with the peacock feather and a continual referral to shifting temporalities. The story begins and ends with the farm’s lone peacock. O’Connor’s opening sentences recount, “The peacock was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand. Moving one behind the other they looked like a complete procession” (285). Somewhat paradoxically, this forward momentum of the opening hurls the reader into the slow-moving action of the story where silent observation characterizes many of the interactions of the characters. Following this introduction of the peacock, along with an extended description of his tail, the story proceeds to move simultaneously quickly and slowly as Mrs. Shortley and her husband Mr. Shortley (the white farmhands), the farm owner Mrs. McIntyre, the priest, the black farmhands, and the Polish “displaced person” Mr. Guizac, collide with one another in the most minute ways. And while on its face, the story might seem mostly preoccupied with a spatial geographic scale as the characters consider race and nationality, I argue that the continual appearance of feathers in the story might also signal its preoccupation with scales of time.

Throughout the text, time and feathers intrude into the narrative. The temporal scales at work in the first part of the story reveal the ways in which the various narrative orders compete across the text. Almost halfway through the story, Mrs. Shortley skeptically observes the priest’s behavior: “His visits irked her more and more. On the last one, he went about picking up feathers off the ground. He found two peacock feathers and four or five turkey feathers and an old brown hen feather and took them off with him like a bouquet” (300). Notably, the priest, who seems to have an obsession with the peacock across the whole story, does not only collect peacock feathers. In fact, the peacock feathers account for just a fraction of his entire bouquet. If we read the feathers as temporal indicators, the priest’s collection of them suggests not so much a bouquet as him assembling an alternate calendar to the secular one that Mrs. Shortley considers later in the story.

The priest’s feather-collecting scene occurs exactly between Mrs. Shortley’s resolve to be a more devout Christian and her apocalyptic vision. Immediately following her religious revelation, she sees the priest visiting with Mrs. McIntyre again and in order to avoid meeting them, she slips into the feed house where the walls are covered with old calendars. While hiding out, she overhears Mrs. McIntyre tell the priest that she will be giving Mr. Shortley his thirty-day notice the following day. As Mrs. Shortley processes this news she stares at a “gentleman on the calendar” across the wall. There is a human-dictated, secular calendar time that seeks to confine her as it papers the walls of her hideout where she learns of her husband’s impending dismissal, notably thirty days away. Her intervening end-times vision is interspersed with these scenes, and it leads the reader to question which temporality commands the action of the story: the human-delineated secular calendar time, the biblical time, or the twenty-four-hour index cataloged i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Recovering Interpretative Possibilities in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction
• Part 1: New Methodologies
• Part 2: New Contexts
• Part 3: Strange Bedfellows
• Part 4: O’Connor’s Legacy
• Afterword
• Contributors