I’m looking forward to your insights about her.  Her willingness to face off with the dark, ugly side of human nature seems courageous to me, and not just in a thrill-seeking way.  When a writer depicts the human heart as only a bruised thing, then the reader can only expect “there-there” assurance that everything will be alright.  But, O’Connor calls the reader down into corruption (it seems to me) so that we might have a shot at being called up–higher up than we started. What do you think–am I in the ballpark with this, or is this a stretch? Don’t tell me I have to wait till June…?

Tim, I think you’re more than in the ballpark. I think you’re somewhere around the pitcher’s mound. I wrote this biography for all those people who have heard they’re supposed to be getting some spiritual meaning out of O’Connor’s stories but just can’t get there. Your remarks get close to the heart of what O’Connor is doing in these awful stories (awful, you’ll remember, meant ‘filled with awe’ or ‘awe-inspiring’ before it meant ‘terrible’; I’m drawing on all those meanings here).

So you won’t have to wait until June, here’s a relevant tidbit from the introduction to The Terrible Speed of Mercy:

Blessed are the freaks and the lunatics, who at least have sense enough not to put any faith in their own respectability or virtue or talents. The freaks in O’Connor’s stories stand for all of us, deformed in so many ways by Original Sin. All of us, as the old hymn says, are “weak and wounded, sick and sore…lost and ruined by the Fall.” The freakishness and violence in O’Connor’s stories, so often mistaken for a kind of misanthropy, turn out to be a call to mercy.

In O’Connor’s unique vision, the physical world, even at its seediest and ugliest, is a place where grace still does its work. In fact, it is exactly the place where grace does its work. Truth tells itself here, no matter how loud it has to shout.

People are offended by Flannery O’Connor’s stories, and they ought to be. They’re offensive. I’m reminded of what Peter said about Jesus: he was “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.” Jesus’s parables would offend us if we hadn’t heard them so many times–or if we were paying better attention. After acting like a complete jerk, the Prodigal Son comes home, welcomed into his father’s arms. The older brother,who has been behaving himself, keeping his nose clean, takes offense, and we can all understand why. It’s a little shocking to realize that Jesus presents the older brother as just as big a jerk as the younger brother–much more shocking for Jesus’s original audience than for those of us who know what we’re supposed to think about the story. The parables, in my understanding, are driven by that dissonance between the truth and the way we feel about the truth. Jesus shows us what the kingdom of God looks like; if we allow ourselves to be offended by that vision, we begin to see what needs to happen in our hearts. I claim to love grace, but I’m bothered by the fact that the vineyard workers who showed up an hour before dark get paid the same amount as the workers who started at daybreak. I can either reject that parable altogether, or I can think about why my heart doesn’t line up with the things I say I believe. But it would be a big mistake to explain away the offense–to say it’s not really that offensive.

O’Connor’s stories are offensive and shocking in a different way; they were, to borrow her imagery, startling figures drawn for the almost-blind. But I do believe she was working from Jesus’s storytelling playbook, using shock and offense to show us something about our hearts. To quote again from the introduction to my book,

If the stories offend conventional morality, it is because the gospel itself is an offense to conventional morality. Grace is a scandal; it always has been. Jesus put out the glad hand to lepers and cripples and prostitutes and losers of every stripe even as he called the self-righteous a brood of vipers.

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” it is painful to see a mostly harmless old grandmother come to terms with God and herself only at gunpoint. It is even more painful to see her get shot anyway. In a more properly moral story, she would be rewarded for her late-breaking insight and her life would be spared. But the story only enacts what Christians say they believe already: that to lose one’s body for the sake of one’s soul is a good trade indeed. It’s a mystery, and no small part of the mystery is the reader’s visceral reaction to truths he claims to believe already. O’Connor invites us to step into such mysteries, but she never resolves them. She never reduces them to something manageable.

O’Connor speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet in her stories. She’s like an Isaiah who never quite gets around to “Comfort ye my people.” Except for this: there is a kind of comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That’s what happens in every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories: in a moment of extremity, a character—usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character—finally comes to see the truth of his or her situation. He is accountable to a great God who is the source of all. He inhabits mysteries that are too great for him. And for the first time there is hope, even if he doesn’t understand it yet.

If you keep asking questions, Tim, I might end up cutting and pasting the whole book into blog posts. Thanks for asking.

At Hutchmoot 2011, Andrew Peterson and I hosted a session about story and place. This post is the first half of the talk I gave at that session. The second half, which concerns itself mostly with Flannery O’Connor and a little bit of Marilynne Robinson, will come in the not-too-distant future.

Shepherds from the village found him at the bottom of the ravine and carried his broken, lifeless body back to the village. When his fiancée saw them, she burst into a long, emotional lament full of mythological references reaching back before the beginnings of history, as if her sorrow were the oldest sorrow in the world. That lamentation forms the main body of the ballad.

Part of the folklorist’s job, of course, is to try to figure out where such stories and ballads come from. This one, the villagers told him, was very old, passed down for who knew how many generations. But the folklorist kept asking, and somebody remembered that the fiancée in the ballad—the one who sang the original lament—was still living in the next village up the road. So maybe it wasn’t as old as all that, the villagers agreed.

“Wait a minute,” I can picture the folklorist saying. “You’re saying that the whole thing with the mountain fairy happened just up the road?”

“That’s right.”

“And it happened recently enough that the fiancée in the story is still alive?”

“That’s right,” said the villagers. “She’s the one you ought to talk to if you want to know more about the ballad.”

So the folklorist did. He traveled to the next village and there he found a woman in her late fifties or early sixties who said, yes, she was the fiancée from the ballad.

“So what happened?” the folklorist asked.

“Well, it was about forty years ago,” the woman said. “I was engaged to be married, but the day before the wedding, my fiancé fell off a cliff and died.”

“Fell off a cliff?” the folklorist said. “You mean was pushed off a cliff? By a mountain fairy?”

“Oh, I don’t know about any fairy,” the woman said. “I’ve heard about her in the ballad, but before that, all I knew was that he fell off a cliff and died the day before we were supposed to get married.”

“But what about the long, soulful lament with all the mythological references?”

“I mourned him,” the woman said. “It was a sad thing, losing a fiancé the day before the wedding. But I couldn’t have made up all that business that’s in the ballad. I was a simple village girl. I did the regular mourning that you would expect, but then I tried to get on with my life.”

After talking with the woman, the folklorist headed back to the first village. “Hey, I talked to the woman in the ballad,” he told the villagers. “She said there wasn’t any fairy. She said her fiancé just had an accidental fall the day before their wedding.”

“Pitiful, isn’t it?” said one of the villagers, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. “The poor woman was so crazed with grief that she couldn’t even remember the fairy who pushed her fiancé to a horrible death.”

There are about fifteen things I love about that story. One of the biggest is the villagers’ vision of the world they inhabited. “You think these are podunk villages?” they seemed to be saying to the folklorist. “Oh no, friend, there are big things afoot here in these villages—more than meets the eye. And these peasants here—they’re full participants in the eternal.” They believed that their mundane world interpenetrated with a world of transcendence.

In his Port William novels, Wendell Berry is doing something very similar to what those Romanian villagers were doing with their story of the jilted fairy. Berry writes of a forgotten little place, and in so doing demonstrates that there are vast things afoot—much more than meets the eye.

Certain religious traditions speak of “thin places”—places on earth where the veil between the seen and the unseen is particularly thin, where mortals are more likely to see the goings-on of the spirit world. Perhaps those Romanians viewed the fairy’s cliff as a thin place. The point of Wendell Berry’s whole project, it seems to me, is that every place, if you settle down and look at it, if you pay attention, is a thin place. After he finished his education in California, Wendell Berry moved back to the Kentucky County where both sides of his family had lived for five generations, and he said, “I’m going to keep looking at and listening to this place—this landscape, these voices, these folkways, these old stories—until it gives up its secrets.”

I’m not trying to be especially mystical here. I think I’m talking about a pretty straightforward truth that Christians claim to believe. C.S. Lewis put it this way in an oft-quoted passage from “The Weight of Glory”:

It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

The job of a storyteller, you might say, is to make thin places, places where we can see truer things than we normally see in the world around us. To do that requires that we pay attention to the world as we find it. We need to look and keep looking, confident that the truth will tell itself.

Big, eternal truths are pulsing and surging just below the surface of things, forever threatening to bust through. And the surface of things is scarcely adequate to conceal them.

It is also worth noting that Peanut’s girlfriend was along for the hunt, which is one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard. She also got an alligator tag in the DNR lottery, so the two feechie lovebirds will be going on another outing later this month. Below is the news report, which shows Peanut and the guide and the alligator (still alive, I think) but, alas, does not show Peanut’s girlfriend.

(If you prefer to read the story, here is the link. ).

When Gilgamesh was written, civilization was still a relatively novel concept in the Fertile Crescent. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the central conflict/friendship of the epic should be between a civilizer (Gilgamesh) and a suspiciously feechiefied fellow named Enkidu. Two-thirds god and one-third man, Gilgamesh is stronger than anyone else in the world. When he becomes king of Uruk, he oppresses his people, taking whatever he wants because no one can oppose him. When the cry of the people of Uruk goes up, the gods order the goddess Aruru to make his equal. So she pinched off some clay and dropped it in the wilderness, and up came Enkidu:

His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman’s; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samuqan’s, the god of cattle. The was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land. Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.

Civilization didn’t come easy for Enkidu. When friendly shepherds tried to give him a meal, he didn’t know what to do with himself:

All the shepherds crowded around to see him; they put down bread in front of him, but Enkidu could only suck the milk of wild animals. He fumbled and gaped, at a loss what to do or how he should eat the bread and drink the strong wine.

When at last Enkidu comes to the city of Uruk to meet the heretofore unrivalled Gilgamesh, the two become friends in a most feechiefied manner: by fighting first and shaking hands later.

Mighty Gilgamesh came on and Enkidu met him at the gate. He put out his foot and prevented Gilgamesh from entering the house, so they grappled, holding each other like bulls. They broke the doorposts and the walls shook. Gilgamesh bent his knee with his foot planted on the ground and with a turn Enkidu was thrown. Then immediately his fury died. When Enkidu was thrown he said, ‘There is not another like you in the world. Ninsun, who is as strong as a wild ox in the byre, she was the mother who bore you, and now you are raised above all men… [or, as Dobro Turtlebane would have said more succinctly, 'You got what it takes, Civilizer!]…So Enkidu and Gilgamesh embraced and their friendship was sealed.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh go on to have many adventures together. More than once Enkidu gripes about having given up his wild life and gone civilized.

All that to say, feechie stories have a very long and august history, going back as far as Western literature itself. And yet, as a genre, feechie stories don’t always get the respect they deserve. Would you believe that there isn’t a single university in America with a Feechie Studies department? Not one! Maybe we should start a movement–or at least circulate a petition.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” John read.

Pow! Pow! Pyoing!

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside the still waters…”

Bang! Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a! Pow!

It wasn’t going so well. Things had reached the point where I would have snatched the Lego guns out of the boys’ grubby fists and made them sit on their hands while I gave them an earful of the peace of God. But John, as it turns out, is a wiser sort of Sunday school teacher. He looked at the gunmen and said, “I’ll tell you what. We’re going to be sheep. You’re going to be the shepherds. I want you to use those guns to protect us from any wolves or lions that might be a danger to us.”

The boys couldn’t believe their good fortune. John and the other students got down on all fours and foraged around the Sunday school room while the two boys with the Lego guns secured the perimeter, blazing away at wolves and lions and sheep rustlers. That done, the boys led the sheep to green pastures and still waters.

Seated at table with the king, dressed in a suit of clothes with a napkin at his neck, he repelled his host with his complete lack of manners. He refused bread, but gorged himself on vegetables, fruit and rare meat, greedily grasping at the dishes and eating noisily from his hands, until he was ordered to be taken away.

Peter the Wild Boy became an instant celebrity and the subject of a number of philosophical essays. But the fickle public soon lost interest; Peter the Wild Boy never got the hang of living among civilizers, though he lived into his seventies. You can read his sad story at History Today.

Bonus Wild Child reading recommendation: The narrator of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place is a Bronte-esque young governess who finds herself in charge of three children who, having been raised by wolves, are now in the care of a wealthy landowner. It is extremely smart and hilarious.

Author’s Note: I hope you’ll forgive my absence the last week or two. I’ve been getting ready to teach in the fall, for the first time in many years, and the preparation–along with a few other commitments–has pushed the blog in the direction of the back burner. But I’ve missed you. It’s good to be back.

This morning I was reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. I must not have been ready for Augustine last time I read him, because I don’t remember him having a huge impact on me. But his insights, his understanding of the gospel as it played out in his own life, is just astonishing. I didn’t realize how much he has influenced the way I think about the world–mostly indirectly, I suppose. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, once boasted, “The things I was doing twenty years ago, other people be doing today.” I thought of James Brown as I read Augustine. The things Augustine was saying 1500 years ago, other people be saying today.

I was a little surprised, however, to see how little Augustine valued drama. He considered it mostly to be a waste of time. He was especially down on the tragedies that he loved in his youth:

I was much attracted by the theatre, because the plays reflected my own unhappy plight and were tinder to my fire. Why is it that men enjoy feeling sad at the sight of tragedy and suffering on the stage, although they would be most unhappy if they had to endure the same fate themselves? Yet they watch the plays because they hope to be made to feel sad, and the feeling of sorrow is what they enjoy. What miserable delirium this is! The more a man is subject to such suffering himself, the more easily he is moved by it in the theatre. Yet when he suffers himself, we call it misery: when he suffers out of sympaty with others, we call it pity. But what sort of pity can we really feel for an imaginary scene on the stage ?The audience is not called upon to offer help but only to feel sorrow, and the more they are pained the more they applaud the author.

I am hardly qualified to argue with St. Augustine, but I have to say I value tragedy more highly than he does. I have written elsewhere on this blog about the value of sad stories. One of the big benefits of a sad story is its capacity for strengthening the empathy muscles of the reader or audience member. At least as important, is the fact that tragedy is an important means of coming to terms with the situation we find ourselves in apart from the gospel, which itself is bad news before it is good news. I love what Frederick Buechner has to say on in a chapter called “The Gospel as Tragedy” (in a short book entitled The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale):

Before the Gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it–meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful–but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery…after the silence that is truth comes the news that is bad before it is good, the word that is tragedy before it is comedy because it strips us bare in order ultimately to clothe us.

Not that preparing us for the gospel is the intent of every writer of sad stories, or even most of them–but as Flannery O’Connor said, the Devil is forever accomplishing ends other than his own.

I was still thinking about St. Augustine’s view of dramatic sadness when I ran across a very interesting article about sad movies. Psychologists looking to study emotions face an ethical dilemma: how do they make people sad (or fearful or angry) without deceiving them or otherwise putting them in emotionally harmful situations? One very helpful way is to show them movies or certain scenes from movies. But even that’s not easy, since most really sad movie scenes also evoke other emotions besides sadness. Researchers looked high and low for the movie scene that would most reliably evoke unalloyed sadness in their subjects. They finally settled on the scene in the mediocre 1979 movie, The Champ, in which nine-year-old Ricky Schroder sees his father die and cries, “Wake up, Champ!” It has become the go-to scene for scientists seeking to study the behavior of people under the influence of sadness. Here’s the Smithsonian article I read, which also includes a list of movies used to evoke other emotions and mental states, from happiness to surprise to disgust. And here’s the academic paper that was the basis of the Smithsonian article.

And here’s a link to that scene from The Champ. (I can’t embed it, so if you follow the link, you’ll be exposed to some less than polite comments at YouTube. You’ve been warned.)

And it got me to thinking. Food and feasting aren’t just important in Lord of the Rings. They’re important in all kinds of stories. Dickens loved to describe meals. So did Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes and C.S. Lewis. And then there are the great food movies, like Ratatouille and Babette’s Feast.

What are your favorite meals in fiction, and why? Since I’m getting this up so late on Friday, we’ll let this APF hang around until Monday. Bon apetit!