Flannery O’Connor – Mysteries and Manners

Limitation and Freedom

November 7, 2019

On my LinkedIn newsfeed, a Nike advertisement popped up with an image of a man finishing a race and the following inspirational message:

“I run to prove to any human in this universe that there are no limitations.”

The man in the picture, and the origin of those words, is Eliud Kipchoge, who recently became the first person to run a marathon in under two hours.

This accomplishment, even despite the fact that it was not done “under race conditions” and even included other time-optimizing elements, is nonetheless astonishing. His average mile was under 4 minutes and 34 seconds!

But his observations on his feat have given me pause.

“I run to prove to any human in this universe that there are no limitations.”

As a teacher who has admired the work of Carol Dweck on mindset and the importance of cultivating in my students (and in myself) the sense that my mental capacities and abilities are malleable–that intentional practice and effort does make a difference–this statement feels inspirational and motivating. I have seen so many students trapped by their perceptions of their lack (or, oftentimes worse, their surplus) of talent. Students who have decided at fourteen that they “just don’t like reading” or they “can’t write”. Or, conversely, that they have always been “A students” and need to maintain that confining, impoverished, grade-based identity. And I look at someone like Kipchoge and his example gives me hope. I remember what many of us were often told when we were young: “You can be anything you want to be.”

“I run to prove to any human in this universe that there are no limitations.”

But then, I start to wonder.

To be a creature is to be limited. To be a human being is to be confined by one’s biology, location, health, intellectual assumptions, cultural milieu, prejudices, anxieties, talents, desires, wounds.

And, to be clear, we aren’t just minds trapped in bodies, free except for these unfortunate physical constraints on our consciousness. We are our bodies, for all the frustration they sometimes cause us. It’s through the body that we see and touch and taste and love and desire and think.

To be embodied is to be bound by time and space. We grow old. We get tired. We get sick. Eventually, we die. There are limitations.

And as much as the human person continually strives to overcome these–to go farther, faster, deeper, higher–in ways that are often awesome and admirable, I think that some people have discovered a different kind of liberation, an expansive freedom in limitation.

Chesterton has this great image that illustrates the tension I’m talking about:

We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. (Orthodoxy, Ch 9)

Without walls of some kind, we actually lose our freedom. Limitless autonomy is a kind of horror.

Is it just me, or are women especially attentive to this kind of freedom in limitation?

Emily Dickinson, unrecognized for the genius she was in her lifetime, self-confined to her Amherst house as the mysterious “woman in white”, describes the expansiveness she finds within the boundaries poetry imposes:

I dwell in Possibility – (466)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

She names poetry “possibility”—even though her poems were written on little pieces of paper, on tiny notes to friends, and only a few were published during her lifetime. Her “narrow Hands” are nonetheless capable of “gathering Paradise.” Life itself, fleeting and fragile, is stretched between possibility and poverty:

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much – how little – is within our power

For Dickinson, literature, despite the humble pages upon which we grasp it, is by its very limited-ness and focus on a particular story, a particular character, a particular life, able to transport us toward infinite horizons:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

I have my doubts that the new show, “Dickinson,” will be attentive to this important part of Emily’s self-understanding.

My dear friend Flannery O’Connor, to whom I often refer in this blog, was limited by her community, her illness, her prejudices, her sin, but she saw her limitations and the kind of freedom I am describing more clearly than most. Throughout her twenties and thirties (she died at 39) she hobbled about on crutches and lived with a mother who loved her but did not often understand her and a Catholic community that often regarded her stories with incomprehension and dismay. She found her freedom in her vocation as a writer, but as her stories attest (they are all about strange, wounded and distorted characters encountering violent intrusions of grace in the rural South) she embraced the boundaries of her knowledge and of her talent:

A novelist is, first of all, a person who has been given a talent to do a particular thing. Every serious novelist is trying to portray reality as it manifests itself in our concrete, sensual life, and he can’t do this unless he has been given the initial instrument, the talent, and unless he respects the talent, as such. It is well to remember what is obvious but usually ignored: that every writer has to cope with the possibility in his given talent. Possibility and limitation mean about the same thing. It is the business of every writer to push his talent to its outermost limit, but this means the outermost limit of the kind of talent he has. (“Catholic Novelists and Their Readers”, emphasis added)

What she says of artists could be applied to all of us insofar as we recognize our own lives as a kind of art:

The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists. He must first of all be aware of his limitations as an artist—for art transcends its limitations only by staying within them. (Ibid)

Isn’t this, really, what it means to be a saint? Saints are often trail-blazing and controversial and provocative, to be sure, but not at all in the way that celebrities are. Francis binds himself to poverty, Dominic to homelessness and preaching, Benedict to a particular place, Edith Stein to the cloister, Dorothy Day to the worker community, Mother Teresa to the untouchables of Calcutta, John Paul II to the burden of the papacy, Gianna Molla to the life of her unborn child, Therese to her littleness.

They have, of course, Jesus as their model—Jesus, who imposed upon himself the limitations of our nature, who was born in an obscure village, belonged to a conquered and beleaguered people, “never travelled two hundred miles from the place he was born,” who wed himself, finally, to the cross.

And yet, as James Allan Francis observed a hundred years ago:

All the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever were built, and all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that One Solitary Life.

And so I wonder about the limitations in my own life. To what extent do I resist them? Which ones am I called to break, and which ones am I called to embrace as doorways to a deeper freedom?

Questions of work and identity, especially for teachers

October 2, 2019

There’s been a lot of discussion in the past few years in Catholic circles regarding problems with perpetual discernment–a phenomenon among many young people influenced by both a genuine desire to follow the will of God and an oft-cited anxiety around commitment that seems to afflict millennials more than previous generations.

As a result, many of us find ourselves continually discerning but never deciding. Or we try new things but do not fully invest in them–we go on a retreat here or there, we explore Catholic dating sites (well, I don’t), we try out a young adult’s group or bible study, we test out the waters, wondering when they’ll calm down a bit and stop seeming so stormy and treacherous…

*Jesus walks on water*, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1888)

Oh, right.

But there’s another problem going on here regarding discernment, and the best way I know how to get at it is to explore it from a (former?) teacher’s perspective. But even that parenthesis indicates my problem:

I was a teacher for eight years. Am I still, even though I no longer teach high school, even though I no longer have a classroom and grade papers and lesson plan? You see, there’s this part of me that wants to justify still holding some kind of claim to that title. Perhaps, because: if I’m not still a teacher, then who am I?

Not everyone defines herself by her job description, and some jobs seem more intimately tied to one’s sense of self than others. But if we think of doctors, police officers, soldiers, writers, poets, carpenters–and teachers–we might realize that a lot of folks see their jobs as outer expressions of their inner personalities.

And so the paralysis of perpetual discernment is not only afflicting those trying to decide whom to marry or those trying to decide whether to join consecrated life; it also seems to afflict many more people now in their professional choices. Many of us were told when we were young you can be whatever you want to be even more often than we were fed Disney love stories. The latter seems to involve fate or Providence–but the former, the loneliness of choice.

I’ve recently been auditing a seminar on Work and Vocation for undergraduates, led by my boss and colleague. He notes that many young people today are overwhelmed by a sense that they must find meaningful work–not just dignified work. That is, they feel they must search for a career that is not only lucrative but also engaging, that calls upon their creative capacities, talents, and interests–that somehow affords them an authentic expression of themselves. He contrasted this experience with that expressed by Lars Svedson’s description of his father in the mid-twentieth century:

My impression was always that he, for the most part, enjoyed working at the shipyard. Yet he was also eager to leave at exactly 3:30pm every single workday, and as a child I usually met him at the gates of the shipyard before we walked home together. There was a very strict distinction between work and leisure, and my father had limited contact with his work colleagues outside the workplace. If a particularly close colleague had fallen ill, he might pay him a visit in the afternoon, but otherwise work and leisure were strictly isolated social spheres. Questions as to whether his job was “meaningful” or whether it was an expression of his “true self” do not seem to have occurred to him. (Svedson, Work 1)

That’s the kind of work/life distinction I always idealized as a teacher, but it was never one that made sense to me if I remained being a teacher.

You see this conflation of job and identity a lot in the teaching profession, and I think it is intensified in Catholic circles. Not only am I a teacher, I am also a disciple of Christ, commissioned to invite other disciples. I’m not just supposed to teach a subject, I’m supposed to form persons.

My experience of being a teacher is wrapped up in my experience of discipleship, of following Christ, of serving the Church. If I stop being a teacher, what happens to all that?

I left teaching in large part because it felt like being in an unhealthy relationship with a bad boyfriend who was super demanding and not very good with boundaries. That could indeed be part of why I and (I believe) many other teachers who leave the profession struggle with questions of identity afterwards. But setting co-dependency and other issues aside, I think there is something beautiful about the connection between work and identity; the sense that your work was an authentic expression of your unique interests and gifts. There was something truly unique in teaching that called to you, and calls to you still, even if you are discerning out of it for whatever reason. Most people enter teaching out of a profound desire to do some good, to do something meaningful, to share a particular love of a discipline or even a way of life with others. That desire doesn’t just go away when you leave, nor should it.

I remember during my first and second years of teaching a lot of my friends were getting married and having kids. And I remember thinking to myself, as I sat behind my desk watching a group of my first seniors take their final exam, with a sudden surprise, “I haven’t been given that right now, but I have been given this; I have been given these kids.”

It’s hard to leave an experience like that.

But should I approach my work in that way—in the way many people in the modern Church talk about Vocation with a capital V?

Well, I suppose Flannery O’Connor did. In her Prayer Journal, she wrote,

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today.

Writing for her, and for most people who are truly great writers, isn’t a job. It’s a vocation in the sense of calling. Writers through the ages from Homer to Milton have cited the gods or muses that called forth from them the opening lines of their epic works–they talk about the experience as if they almost did not have a choice but to write down what they “heard.”

And though I can’t say I felt quite that way as a teacher, I think the experience is more akin to that than to landing an executive director position at a big corporation.

But if work is tied up in vocation, it’s also tied up in the questions of discernment with which we began. And in addition to struggling with discernment, whether one is discerning one’s way into the water or out of it, I think a lot of us struggle with questions of work and identity, or work as identity. And not in a workaholic kind of way (though maybe that, too) but in a quasi-spiritual kind of way.

It would be easy to say, “Well, obviously you are more than what you do!” It’s just as easy to say, “Obviously what you do shapes who you are!”

Whom you marry, or what religious order you join, or what job you accept determines, to a large extent, how you’ll spend most of your time. So how are you going to spend it? And how is that shaping who you become?

I can’t shake off this question: To what extent ought we to identify ourselves with our work?

Flannery, again—as a graduate student, wrestling with her vocation:

Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work. I have the feeling of discouragement that is. I realize I don’t know what I realize. Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted. That is so far from what I deserve, of course, that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it. […] All boils down to grace, I suppose. Again asking God to help us be sorry for having hurt Him. I am afraid of pain and I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing. (Excerpts in the New Yorker)

I mean, you read that–“give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord”–and you think of her life, and you realize with fear and trembling that God said yes.

Her very next entry reads,

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.

So–again, I ask whomever may be reading this, to what extent ought we identify ourselves with our work, especially if that work is something like writing or teaching?

I have no straightforward answers, actually.

But I find it interesting that even though Jesus called Peter and the others to leave their day jobs and fishing nets behind, to embark on a completely new way of life of preaching and healing and miracle-working for which they were completely unprepared, he still said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19).

Their work was still to identify them somehow, to be characteristic of the radical new life to which he called them.

James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). *The Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew (Vocation de Saint Pierre et Saint André)*, 1886-1894.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

November 26, 2014

“[I]t all brings me to thanksgiving, the third thing to include in prayer. When I think of all I have to be thankful for I wonder that You don’t just kill me now because You’ve done so much for me already & I haven’t been particularly grateful.” (Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal)

She wrote that somewhere around 1946 when she was just 21 or 22 years old. Flannery’s Prayer Journal, which was never intended for publication and which I finally read only with great trepidation and shyness, has so much to say about thanksgiving, and grace, and vocation.

In the journal she is continually begging for the grace to be a writer. She is sure, at this early stage in her life, that this is her vocation – that this will be her way of giving herself to God.

Her cause for canonization should have been underway for years, in my opinion, but as far as I am aware it is not.

I’m sure, if she heard me say that, she would send me some incendiary remark in a wryly composed letter with lots of “innocent spellings”.

She continues, “My thanksgiving is never in the form of self-sacrifice — a few memorized prayers babbled once over lightly.”

Thanksgiving as self-sacrifice. Like the Eucharist.

They say the saints are more keenly aware than the rest of us of sin.

What’s so interesting, reading this journal, is looking at it with the perspective of the years of suffering Flannery was about to endure. She did not know, at this time, that she would contract the disease that killed her father and eventually die from it at only age 39.

And yet, when you read some of the prayers, it’s almost like God answered them by sending her lupus. And that she knew, even in her early twenties, that the life of holiness she so desired was only possible via suffering. And that her longing to be a good writer would never really have been fulfilled had she not suffered.

G. K. Chesterton also has some beautiful things to say about Thanksgiving. I saw this on the IgnatiusInsight page a couple of days ago, and immediately I thought how Flannery-O’Connor-like he sounds here:

A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.

turkey — source: Ignatius Press facebook page

Flannery has similar things to say about peacocks.

The beautiful thing about giving thanks for things is that you really only begin to understand them when you notice how grateful you are for them. Like the turkey. You could pass by a turkey farm, but if you stopped, got out of your car, and gazed at a turkey like Chesterton suggests, the beauty and absurdity of this strange-looking animal might start to dawn on you. The longer you looked, the more mysterious this bird would seem. The fact that it has become the traditional sacrificial lamb of our yearly American holiday would only increase this sense of strangeness. And if you looked long enough, you would finally forget about yourself and you would just be totally given to the being in front of you.

The turkey’s goodness is very much tied to its death and consumption by us. It’s very humbling, because of course we do not deserve it.

Chesterton also says,

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

I think that what Flannery and Chesterton are getting at is that the gesture of gratitude and thanks is actually the truest response toward life. No matter how little we may initially feel we have to be thankful for, and no matter how irritating cliches about ‘be thankful for what you have’ and ‘you don’t know what you have until it’s gone’ can be, if you stop and seriously look around you, at the couch you are sitting on, or the hum of the heater in your house, or the cup of coffee by your elbow, you may begin to see it.

It is an act of sacrifice to give thanks, because you have to give up your sense of discontent, your sense of wanting other things, of wanting some other life or some other place, and ultimately you have to give up even your sense of yourself. When you are really thankful, you are not thinking about yourself at all anymore, but the goodness of being.

Even babbled thanksgiving “once over lightly” is better than none at all, and I am going to really give it a try this year.

“It’s Really Baffling”

March 17, 2014

A few days ago, I wrote a post about the one thing I would love to teach about writing, if I could.

I was thinking about Flannery O’Connor’s advice: “Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

It takes a lot of courage to write like that. To be really truthful – especially when you’re in over your head.

And then a friend of mine who teaches 5th graders sent me a paragraph, composed by one of his students, that shows so perfectly what I was trying to express about good writing I was absolutely amazed.

Here is the poem this student was writing about:

A Patch of Old Snow

by Robert Frost

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten —
If I ever read it.

One is tempted in all sorts of literature to over-analyze, to impose, to project–but most of all to do such things (to) poetry, because it’s so elusive. So many high school students (I was one myself) dislike poetry because of its difficulty. As my favorite UD professor says, poetry demands you to develop “the skill of life” which is “the capability of always acknowledging that condition of dereliction out of which alone we can know the preciousness of what we love” (Gregory, “Lyric and the Skill of Life”).

Good writing always comes from humility before what is true.

What would you say if you had to write a paragraph about Frost’s poem?

This is what my friend’s 5th grade student said:

I think (I don’t know) that Robert Frost is trying to remember a day in the past. The simile “It is speckled in grime as if small print overspread it” doesn’t mean a lot until it said “the news of a day I’ve forgotten if I ever read it.” It gave me the idea he’s trying to remember the past. It’s almost as if he has lost his mind and can’t remember anything from that day. It’s really baffling though. That’s what I think about the poem.

I think that is so beautiful. Flannery would be proud. So would Frost.

If I could Teach One Thing About Writing…

March 3, 2014

… this is what it would be. I don’t know how I can really teach this, or rather, impart it. I do not know even if I have grasped this myself really.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.” – Flannery O’Connor

I had a conversation the other day with someone asking my opinion about Ayn Rand. Suppressing an (involuntary) shudder, I replied that if you’re vocation is propaganda, go into advertising, not novel-writing.

But Ms. Rand is just an extreme example of what most bad writers do. They come at a work with an “idea” they wish to impart– a “meaning”– or, much worse, a “moral“. You see this especially in bad fiction, but also in bad essay writing where the essay is supposed to be concerned with drawing out the meaning of a poem or work, and instead imposes a meaning upon it like a straightjacket.

You hear it in the worst English classes: “water means baptism, renewal. the sun means energy, new life. green always means X, and red Y, and this that, and blah blah blah….”

I want to tell my students: life just isn’t like that. Stop trying to impose your own patterns on it and let the God of all patterns show you His strange and forever-suprising designs. They might not be what you think. And if He doesn’t show them to you, so be it. It is okay. You don’t have to know.

It’s better to say, “I don’t know” than to pretend like you do.

Even in essay writing. Even in English class.

Some of my favorite essays I have ever read express an honest uncertainty– not a cop-out-I’m-too-lazy-to-think-about-anything– but rather a truthful and painful acknowledgement of inadequacy before the truth: “It seems like Dickinson could be saying … although it is possible that she … and ultimately this ambiguity shows the reader that …”

Flannery got it right when it comes to fiction. As much as she was (and is) an opinionated and ornery Southern lady, she was also a humble Christian and knew when to shut her own mouth and let the mystery speak for itself–whatever it meant to say.

The hard thing is literature is like life–and tells us about life. Life, too, is far beyond our silly pattern-making. I know several people (including myself) who love to “discover” patterns in their lives and thus ascribe different meanings and morals and oh now I get its, but these are just silly.

How do I tell you that writing reveals the secret?

It is better–far better– to discover a meaning in your writing, in your reading, in your life than to impose one.

And, as Flannery says, don’t be afraid. Nothing you write–or live– will lack meaning, because the meaning is in you.

There is the Holy Spirit, who “breathes in us sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

Book Review: Someone

December 29, 2013

I have been meaning to read Alice McDermott’s work for several years now– my father has been continually recommending her–but it was only a few days ago that I finished her newest novel, Someone.

In fact, I started it and finished it within twenty-four hours; it engrossed me in a way no other book has in many, many years.

Like most of her stories, Someone is about an Irish Catholic family living in the Bronx during the first half of the twentieth century. Well, actually, it’s about one family member in particular, but in a recent interview McDermott tells us that her novel did not start out that way.

Originally, the novel was going to be a much “bigger” project, but towards the very end of writing it, McDermott realized she had missed something. She wanted to tell the story of Marie–a rather plain and nondescript character, especially in comparison to some of the others. But in order to do that she had to change the narrative pretty radically:

[…] [T]his is the first time in my writing career that I wrote a novel mostly in third person, and then very, very close to finishing the novel, I thought, no one’s listening to her and neither is her author. […] I need to give her the first person. I need to let her tell her own story that directly. (PBS Interview)

And Marie does tell her own story. The details are sometimes breathtakingly intimate–the ordinary events of her private life laid bare for us to witness in beautiful but sometimes relentless detail. The two main love affairs of her life ring–painfully–true. Her experience as a child, the slipping away of years, her aging, all described so movingly not because they seem “universal” but because they seem so specific. She is not just “anyone”–as the title suggests.

What I love about the story is how the setting is so lovingly drawn–it is as essential to the plot as the characters are. And in this sense McDermott does what Flannery O’Connor does. (You knew the comparison was coming.) The setting is not incidental, but central, to the action of the story–and the careful description of physicality in the novel is not a materialistic explaining-away of mystery, but rather a profound hearkening toward it. Like here:

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back. The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening. Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty, city light. It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses. It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the dining room table where the cloth–starched linen expertly decorated with my mother’s cross-stich–had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood. (McDermott, Someone 10)

This description of the family apartment will be revisited later in the novel as the years go by. McDermott weaves together Marie’s memories and sometimes moves us forward and then backward in time, though the thrust of the main narrative is consistent.

O’Connor, I think, would appreciate that this novel is so deeply entrenched in a particular time and place. It isn’t hovering vacuously in a vague American somewhere, with “universal” characters untouched by their birthplace and their family. There are even, I noticed with some surprise, a couple of rather “grotesque” characters, whose physical and emotional deformities remind me of a few O’Connor characters. And there is a lot of emphasis on the human body in this novel, in all of its manifestations: living, beautiful, ugly, sick and dead. This also reminds me of O’Connor and other “sacramental” writers (whether Catholic or not).

Yet McDermott is not of the “violent intrusions of grace” school of Catholic literature. The grace she intuits is far more subtle and easy to miss–rather like the sort present in most of our own lives: ignorable but nonetheless persistent.

I think it would be easy to think of this as a gentle story. In many ways it is. But I think if you read it and close it and say to yourself, “How lovely and touching that was,” you’ve rather missed the point. Though I believe anyone who has really confronted death and lost someone they loved would not say such a silly thing.

If you’re interested in this novel or in Alice McDermott, read this fascinating piece she wrote ten years ago about her own fiction and the rather troublesome label, “The Catholic Writer.”

“The Lunatic in the Pew” by Alice McDermott

A taste–that I believe Flannery would savor:

[O]urs is a mad, rebellious faith, one that flies in the face of all reason, all evidence, all sensible injunctions to be comforted, to be comfortable. A faith that rejects every timid impulse to accept the fact that life goes on pleasantly enough despite all that vanishes, despite death itself.

What I have to say about being Catholic, then, is simply this: Being Catholic is an act of rebellion. A mad, stubborn, outrageous, nonsensical refusal to be comforted by anything less than the glorious impossible of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. (McDermott)

McDermott’s characters will accept nothing less.

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Sufjan Stevens

November 12, 2013

There are only three short stories that I distinctly remember reading in high school:

“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter
“A Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

I have found, in conversations with friends, that at least two of these are very frequently remembered by others as well. The last two. But sometimes the first as well.

*Spoiler alert.*

High school English teachers often use Porter’s “Weatherall” story to teach “stream of consciousness” when they’re covering a modernism unit. I don’t remember what my junior English teacher told me about any of that, but I do remember being transfixed by the story itself. I was borne through the wandering and failing mind of the protagonist as she shoos away her concerned children at her deathbed. She is an old woman who is dying and remembering fragments of her life–in particular the “jilting” she experienced as a young woman. Ironically, at the end of her life, she realizes she is being “jilted” by another Bridegroom, God. In astonishment at the nothingness that awaits her, she blows out the candle of her life.

Porter wrote this story long before she converted to Catholicism, so it’s treatment of death is particularly arresting. I was haunted by it for years, and still am.

Oddly, though, it’s one of my very favorite stories.

“A Most Dangerous Game” involves a young man trapped by a hunter of big game. The hunter is bored with animals, and eventually settles upon Man as the truly worthy prey. It’s creepy and really suspenseful. Even kids who don’t like to read usually like this story.

I mention these other two stories, despite the subject of my post, because somehow I feel as though they appropriately contextualize what I am about to say even though I could not clearly explain to you exactly why that is.

For, of course, then there is Flannery.

If you read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in high school, you probably remember it with unease and distaste.

If you haven’t: Go read it. There’s no use reading what I say here unless you have read it.

Or if you prefer, you could listen to Flannery reading it to you. You may be startled by her voice – I was, at first. Quite the experience:

What bothers people about this story isn’t so much as the violence (we are certainly used to that) as the purposelessness of it. Most readers just don’t “get it.” What the heck is O’Connor trying to say? What’s the message? What’s the theme? And what does she mean by “A Good Man,” anyway?

The feeling often is — why did she put us through all of this?

My answer is: I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know.

I think that if you think you know, you are probably wrong or deluding yourself.

And that is precisely what I have come to love about this story.

When I was in high school, I was pretty ticked off by the whole thing — much like my own students. It puts you through so much humor (if you read it right) and so much suspense (if you read it at all) and then it shoots you in the face.

If you’re Catholic, and you’ve heard of Flannery’s Catholicism, you’re probably thinking you might get it. If you’re an English major, and you’ve read a lot of literary criticism, you’re probably pretty confident you can get something out of this story. I am both of these things, and I have realized the error of my ways.

I would venture to say that if a reader is honest with herself, she will admit to her utter perplexity.

Flannery accomplishes in this story a profound gesture at human nature and its mystery. That’s why it bugs us. It won’t fall into conventional Christian or literary categories. It’s like she saw something and she wrote what she saw, and that was that. It was true and nothing else.

If you read it and think you’re reading propaganda or proselytism of some kind, you are sorely mistaken. You are reading literature on par with Sophocles and The Iliad — literature that does not attempt to explain life and death, but simply to show it.

The Gospel of Mark has a similar feeling, especially if you stop at 16:8, where most scholars think the original fragment ends. In that reading, the Gospel ends the empty tomb and with fear: ἐφοβοῦντο γὰρ, “for they were afraid.”

O’Connor’s story of the family’s miserably comic road trip should ring true to anyone who has been in the car for more than six hours with their parents or siblings:

When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and June Star said he didn’t play fair, and they began to slap each other over the grandmother. (O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”)

I was reading the Gospel of Mark today and was struck by its similarly matter-of-fact tone. He tells you about the Transfiguration like you would mention what happened to you at work today.

Later, Flannery relates the death of the grandmother in much the same way:

She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them. (Ibid)

She touches the man who has murdered her son, her daughter-in-law and her three grandchildren because she recognizes him as her lost son. This recognition is too much for The Misfit, and he reacts in the only way he knows how.

If you want to hear O’Connor’s own remarks on this work, go listen to her speak about it before she gives a reading of this very story:

“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

Many critics have realized, since reading Flannery’s letters in The Habit of Being, that Flannery O’Connor is writing about the violence of grace– that grace is not the stuff of fuzzy Christian consolation, but the terrifying love of God that seeks after what was lost no matter what cost to Himself–or the sheep in question:

I suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world. (O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”)

I have found, in short, from the reading of my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil. (Ibid)

Perhaps that is all that can really be said about a story like this.

Sufjan Stevens wrote a song called “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” On this album, he also includes a track entitled “In the Devil’s Territory.” Both are nods to O’Connor.

Perhaps, sometimes, only art can explain art.

Indeed, his whole album, entitled “Seven Swans” provides a very O’Connor-esque perspective on life and faith.

So go check out Sufjan’s response to O’Connor’s story:

“Endeavor[ing] to Balance Myself”

September 4, 2013

Happy September. A poem for you – and perhaps an especially poignant one, especially in light of ongoing events in Syria:

September, 1918

by Amy Lowell

.

This afternoon was the colour of water falling through sunlight;

The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves;

The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves,

And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows.

Under a tree in the park,

Two little boys, lying flat on their faces,

Were carefully gathering red berries

To put in a pasteboard box.

Some day there will be no war,

Then I shall take out this afternoon

And turn it in my fingers,

And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,

And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

To-day I can only gather it

And put it into my lunch-box,

For I have time for nothing

But the endeavour to balance myself

Upon a broken world

(Source: The Poetry Foundation)

On Sunday at the cathedral in Denver, the vicar of the Archbishop gave a beautiful homily on humility. And in a gesture of humility, he read to us the entire text of Pope Francis’ Sunday Angelus – which you should also read, in full. Here is a taste:

With utmost firmness I condemn the use of chemical weapons: I tell you that those terrible images from recent days are burned into my mind and heart. There is a judgment of God and of history upon our actions which are inescapable! Never has the use of violence brought peace in its wake. War begets war, violence begets violence.

[…]

I repeat forcefully: it is neither a culture of confrontation nor a culture of conflict which builds harmony within and between peoples, but rather a culture of encounter and a culture of dialogue; this is the only way to peace. May the plea for peace rise up and touch the heart of everyone so that they may lay down their weapons and be let themselves be led by the desire for peace.

.

To this end, brothers and sisters, I have decided to proclaim for the whole Church on 7 September next, the vigil of the birth of Mary, Queen of Peace, a day of fasting and prayer for peace in Syria, the Middle East, and throughout the world, and I also invite each person, including our fellow Christians, followers of other religions and all men of good will, to participate, in whatever way they can, in this initiative.

(Pope Francis, Angelus of Sept 1, 2013)

After reading us the full text, the vicar noted that, in honor of our Pope’s request, there will be Eucharistic Adoration and Prayer for Peace at the downtown Cathedral in Denver. Likewise, many other diocese are doing the same. Please go, even for a little while. Even if you aren’t Catholic. Go anyway and pray.

And on a different note:

I have begun teaching my favorite thing to teach ever – essays! I’ve revised the essay unit I have taught over the past two years, and I’m really excited to share it with my kids. Today, we learned about the differences between opinions, facts, “universal truths” and cliches.

I’m trying to find ways to additionally challenge and stretch my honors students. However, since I want to do this with ALL my students, sometimes I have a hard time differentiating and offering different assignments. I think all of them are important! To be honest with you, I don’t 100% believe in “Honors” classes, as much as I benefited from these in my own high school career, and as much as I benefit from them now as a teacher (totally makes it easier to teach).

ANYWAY –

A good friend of mine suggested this interesting blog post to me, and I thought I would share it with you. I am requiring my Honors class to read it for Thursday and to thoroughly annotate it.

Words Fall Short: A meditation on the limits of human language and thought by Msgr. Charles Pope

A taste (don’t you love tastes? They really make you want to click those links, don’t they?):

Yes, words are wonderful things, a kind of shorthand. But words can also get in the way, especially when we think that because we have named something, we have fully described or comprehended it. Not so, reality is always richer than the words or thoughts that we “reduce” it to. It is perhaps necessary for us to do this sort of reduction in order to manage, and not be overwhelmed, but, again reality is always richer than the thoughts or words we reduce it to. (Msgr. Charles Pope)

Okay, yes. But then he goes on to say:

There’s yet another old saying, likely from the far East, which says, “Those who know do not say, those who say do not know.” That is, words for fall short of the reality of what is known, and the wise person grasps this.

One of the Eastern fathers, when asked to explain this saying to his disciples said, “How many know the smell of a rose?” And all of his disciples raised their hands. But when he said to them, “Put it into words” everyone remained silent. (Ibid.)

I guess I’m causing my kids some “cognitive dissonance” with this one, because I just spent today introducing them to Flannery O’Connor’s intriguing description of her own creative process: “I write to discover what I know.”

In other words, despite my student’s common protest, “I know what it is, Ms. Shea, I just can’t put it into words”– Flannery would probably reply,

“Nope. Until you can put it into words, you don’t really know it.”

I want to side with Flannery here, although I agree that there are some things (most especially in the realm of grace) that human language cannot grasp or even remotely gesture toward. Nonetheless, “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1) and there is something of that fundamental desire (and ability!) to articulate in all of us, and in all of our languages. One of the first things Adam did, after all, was to name all of the creatures of the Earth (Genesis 2:20). God gave him that dignity, and that gift.

And it’s that same ability to speak that lets me teach – that allows me to communicate with my students.

And it’s that same ability that allows political leaders to wage war, and seek peace, and kill thousands, and save millions. The word indeed, in many ways, is “mightier than the sword,” though perhaps not in the way that Edward Bulwer-Lytton meant it.

Cliches and the Death of Thought

July 23, 2013

Okay, that title might be a little overly dramatic.

But it definitely captures my feelings about cliches.

One of the biggest struggles my students have in writing is succumbing to cliches and / or what I like to call “universal truths.”

A cliche is

a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse, as sadder but wiser, or strong as an ox. (Dictionary.com)

A “universal truth” is the same thing really, only it applies more to ideas than to particular words or phrases. The way in which the idea is expressed may or may not be cliche, but the idea itself is. For example: “Family is important” “Love helps you overcome difficulties” “Perseverance leads you to success” etc.

So, a typical high school student’s thesis statement begin something like this:

“In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare shows how love can overcome great evils through his use of…”

Hold it right there. Everybody already knows “love can overcome great evils” and nobody would disagree that this idea is present in the play. Therefore, there is no point in writing an essay about it. As I taught my kids, the heart of an essay has to be an opinion that can be argued for and against, not a universal truth that everybody believes already.

But where did students learn this fallacious approach to writing?

Well…

From English teachers, of course.

In middle school and often the early years of high school, most English teachers do a unit on “theme.” Students learn how to pick the “theme” out of a story, and to support their choice by using evidence.

And what is theme, you may ask?

The underlying message or lesson that the author is trying to convey to the reader. These often include universal values dealing with life, society or human nature. (www.readworks.org/lessons/concepts/theme)

In other words, theme = universal truth / cliche / overused idea.

So, students learn to approach literature as a process of theme-hunting. What’s the underlying message? Or, a favorite among my students–the “deeper meaning”?

In other words:

What is the over-used, boring, universally known idea that I can find in this work of literature and slap into my thesis statement so I can say something half-way true and uncontroversial about this book so I don’t have to do any real thinking?

Flannery O’Connor puts it this way:

I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction. (“Writing Short Stories,” Mystery and Manners)

I have heard people say things like, “Oh, I loved my high school English class. We learned all about symbolism and deeper meanings, like how water represents cleansing and purification and how the color red is usually a symbol of passion.”

To which I can only respond:

You think you’re feeding the chickens with talk like that, but actually you are choking them to death with boredom.

Today I was helping out with the English Content ACE class at Notre Dame, full of second-year high school and middle school teachers. We were talking about establishing a writing vocabulary with your students, among other things, and this whole idea of cliches and universal truths came up.

One of the middle school teachers had a really insightful question about whether or not we should teach theme at all, since it does encourage students to think in cliches. But she added that for her kids, coming up with “friendship involves being loyal in tough situations” in Harry Potter is actually a big discovery for them a lot of the time. Kids need to learn these messages.

Here’s my thought: in middle school, go ahead and teach theme, even if it means teaching your kids to think in cliches. Push and challenge the stronger students on it if you can (“well, that’s what lots of people would believe about this story, but how could you go deeper?”) but don’t worry too much. Developmentally, universal truths might be age-appropriate for middle schoolers.

But they are not age-appropriate for high schoolers. Or anyone older than that.

For me, cliches are the death of real thought. Where cliches begin, thinking ends. When a high school student says, “Well, I guess that story just really shows us how important it is to be loyal to your friends,” they have, in effect, stopped thinking. They have stopped the conversation. They have resorted to safe and hackneyed ideas that nobody can possibly disagree with. They have closed the book. Even Worse, they have closed their minds.

Flannery again:

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you experience that meaning more fully. (“Writing Short Stories,” Mystery and Manners)

Now try to wrestle with that, and you’ve got an essay.

Teaching and World-Making – Or, the Importance of Setting

May 14, 2013

So I’m finishing up my unit on short stories with my sophomores. Our last lesson has a relatively simple goal, but it gave me a lot to think about: SWBAT analyze the effects of setting on plot in short stories.

We define our terms first:

Plot = what happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…)

Setting = when and where the plot happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…)

This is what Eudora Welty has to say:

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?…

Eudora Welty was a photographer as well as a writer. This is “Home by Dark.”

I don’t think we often think about this potential power of place over character and action. Setting is one of the things all teachers talk about in English class, along with plot, characterization, exposition, climax, resolution, etc. But I think it is sometimes left in the background.

(Pun intended. Go back if you didn’t notice it… )

Yet Welty insists upon the importance of setting, and even that events and characters somehow depend upon it. Or, as my students had to write down in their notes: setting defines the logical possibilities and limitations of plot.

It defines what can or cannot happen in a story.

I think Southern writers have a particular sensitivity to the importance of place or setting. The setting IS the story. Think of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury. Or Katharine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (the setting is both exterior, the rural South, and interior, the wandering mind of Granny). Or Flannery O’Connor in “Revelation” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor, largely due to her sacramental view of reality, expands the traditional notion of setting so that it transcends the physical:

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. (O’Connor, Mystery and Manners)

I gave my kids a different example that I thought might work better for them. The reason why the Harry Potter series works so well, I believe, isn’t so much because of the plot and the characters (although of course these are important). The plot and the characters work because Rowling spends so much time in the first book carefully developing her setting, creating her place, defining the possibilities and limitations of the Muggle world and the Wizarding world.

Think about the detail given to describing Privet Drive, and Diagon Alley, and of course Hogwarts itself. Her world is magical but consistent – it has it’s own logic and it’s own rules. Indeed, really what made me read book two, and three, and all the others was this sense of wanting to return to that place. Yes, I cared about Harry – but I cared about returning to Hogwarts even more.

I think one of the very best examples – that really sets itself apart from any type of comparison to other stories – is Tolkien’s Middle Earth. What is so good about The Lord of the Rings isn’t just the wonderful characters, the stirring struggle between good and evil, the languages, the recalling of myth. Rather, it’s the fact that all of these things are at home in Middle Earth itself, – a world we believe in, and want to return to, or learn about, because it feels like our own history. I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of time when I was little just looking at the maps in the opening pages of the book.

There is Narnia, too. What we really desire, why we keep reading, is because we want to go back to that place created by Lewis. I checked every closet in my house, several times, just to be sure. “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.”

I was thinking about all of this as I sat in my empty classroom during 5th hour, normally the seniors’ class. I was sitting in one of the student desks in the middle of the room. I like to sit in the student desks sometimes so I don’t get completely locked into my teacher-desk perspective. The room looks pretty different out there.

And I realized that teachers are engaged in world-making, too. We create a setting – our classrooms. And, in a way, we help define what is possible in our classrooms by creating a particular environment, unique to our personalities and our teaching style, but also hopefully open to our students’ personalities and their learning styles.

This year I have worked hard to make my classroom more accessible. Places for papers, folders, essays, are all labeled. I try to keep the space as clean and organized. This is a setting for listening and discussing and writing and reading and writing and revising and writing and writing and writing… and the classroom has to reflect that just as much as my words and actions do. My kids need to know that as soon as they walk through my door they have entered a place for learning.

I have substituted this year in many rooms where there a papers on the floor, dirty desks, and bare walls. I remember my own classroom last year – “disorganized” is a gentle way to describe it. And I think such classrooms limit the possibilities for students. Carelessness, even in the details, suggests a lack of thoughtfulness and purpose. A question I found myself unable to answer a lot last year was, “Ms. Shea, where do I put this?” “Um… I’ll just take it for now…” This year, I love when the kids don’t have to ask me that any more. They know where to go, where to put things, when to do it… setting setting setting.

Anyway –

To what extent does the setting affect the plot in your favorite stories… in your classroom… in your home?

If you really want some tough but tasty food for thought on setting, you should go read O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person.”