Why Read - Flannery O'Connor
I wrote the following several years ago when I was beginning to piece together my book on teaching. It was part of a series on great writers that I have only recently returned to. Today, in our Covid blindness, Flannery O’Conner seems more prescient than ever. Refusing to wear a mask is an act of moral and communal blindness. Not listening to health experts, “firing” the WHO and insisting on being the only person in America who can hold a mass rally are acts of moral blindness. Conspiracy thinking is nothing more than a blinder to complexity. Flannery’s faith in her Catholic God illuminated for her just how vulnerable we are to the sins we seem both born with and drawn to. The recent firestorm over a racism that she seemed to share with her friends and neighbors but never leaked into her writing provides contextual perspective but in no way should interfere with her place in our literature. To embrace such an argument, to “cancel” Flannery, is to be as blind as any one of her characters.
In a world where maybe 2% of Stanford University’s undergraduate students major in either English Literature or History, I am often asked by those around me, why read serious literature. While my answers have varied over the years as has, I must admit, the conviction that lies behind them, there is one answer I return to with greater frequency and surety each passing year. Serious literature, in all its forms, keeps one awake. Like Robert Frost’s protagonist in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, we all seek at some level the peace that comes with that “sleep”. While in that poem, the “sleep” suggests death, it can also be the respite we seek from the anxieties, fears, longings and doubts that come with our terribly temporal lives. Very often, all too often in our distracted modern world, that respite takes the shape of a “blindness” to the unanswerable nature of our human condition. This “blindness” is a shape-shifting mindset that may drape itself in political, ideological or theological certainties. It may inject its way into your corporal being through any number of obsessions: money, sex, drugs, alcohol or food. Often the “blindness” is shrouded in virtue and good intentions as smokers are made to be pariahs and almost anything can be done on the back of protecting the children. The “blindness” can have the textual support of the Constitution or the Bible or the laws of science – all shape shifting in their very essence. These blinders are a mandatory part of getting through modern life, as unavoidable as the fears and doubts they are designed to assuage. Serious literature, like effective counseling, is an opportunity to open your eyes to life on the other side of the blinders. It is a private and intimate opportunity to get a snapshot of perspective before returning to a daily life held together by a complex mix of personal and communal “blinders”.
To read Flannery O’Connor is to traffic a world where “blindness” distorts everything. The grandmother’s vanity and self-absorption in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” leads her family into the path of the Misfit who will have each one shot while saving the best for last as he shoots the old lady only after she finally recognizes her terrible sin. The lame daughter in “Good Country People” will hand her leg to a stranger in a barn hayloft in the middle of nowhere and watch him walk away with it because she thought she knew all the answers. The mother in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, hands off her daughter and her car to a one-armed stranger who will abandon the former while race away, cackling at the encroaching storm, in the latter. The sun is described as a “hole” in the sky. A thunderstorm is a “turnip” and a city’s towers are “warts”. Throw in Flannery’s devout and tortured Catholicism and many of my students, my father’s book club, most people with structured, disciplined, responsible lives, flee her strange stories like a scientist avoiding art, an atheist refusing a Biblical parable or a Republican not reading The New York Times. To walk away from Flannery is, in fact, to be one of her characters. In her great faith, she believed we lived enshrouded in our sins and our lives are distorted by our efforts to remain blind to them. It may be tough medicine and it may come in the form of esoteric and uncomfortable story telling but … is she wrong?
The grandmother’s certainty in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the vehicle for terrible, unimagined consequences. What about the certainty of those who took us into Iraq and unleashed a Pandora’s Box of horrors that continues to morph from one terror into another. What about the certainty of the climate change deniers who avoid all data and evidence to the contrary as they fiddle with the fate of the future of mankind let alone their grandchildren and great grandchildren. What about those who defend the right to own guns designed expressly to kill other people. There are facts everywhere telling us how much more likely we will kill someone we know if there is a gun in the house. There are histories out there illustrating the fatal hubris behind misbegotten wars. There are letters, diaries and every form of human testament reminding us that war is only hell. Every day we sin – at least in our thoughts. The rich withhold, the powerful abuse, the trusted betray. We know this. We watch it in our television shows, read it in our books and drown in it with our addiction to non-stop news, tweets and alerts. And, yet, more often than not, we think that all of that messy, selfish, sinful disturbance around us is not us. Our blindness is as well developed as any other part of our mortal being. It is in equal measure a tool equipped for self-preservation and a weapon we employ in our own destruction. To read Flannery’s stories is to inhabit the very perversity and distortion that is our own lives.
A high school student may know this more clearly than the determined, focused parent at home. The parent has cut her deals, chosen her blinders. High school is where the child turning adult is given training wheels and asked to experiment in a life that demands layers of denial and obedience. We give them driver’s licenses and let them loose in one of the craziest things we as humans do each day – speeding by each other at high speeds, inches above the concrete roadway, surrounded by glass and steel, trusting that all around us are paying proper attention to this daily dance with death. We clearly have constructed a world where we have no choice. To not drive in America is either an admission of a serious handicap or an act of Thoreau-like withdrawal. Flannery’s characters are utterly oblivious to the madness of their thoughts and the world around them. They hand off their children to strangers, believe in crack-pot preachers and conjure up places and people from their past that were never there. An adolescent mind suspects that the adult world might be just such a place. The suspect it because the fall from innocent belief and faith is so dramatic that for a brief moment in one’s lives one is flying without the blinders securely in place. It is the space between the blinders of childhood and those of adulthood.
