With all the resting and putting my feet up, I've been doing more reading for pleasure. A couple of weeks ago I pulled out and re-read The Habit of Being, the volume of collected letters of Flannery O'Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald. I am intrigued by reading somebody else's correspondence — maybe it is the sense of eavesdropping, maybe it is the mystery of only getting one side of the conversation, and having to fill in the interlocutors' questions and responses with guesswork, or else just let it go.
Re-reading THOB got me in the mood to read O'Connor's stories again, so I opened up my copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and again, having finished that, requested the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge from the library. I was struck again by the first impression I had upon reading straight through a volume of O'Connor's short stories: I do not think the best way to read them for the first time is several all at once. The overall impact is dulled. One can only be shocked by the grotesque so many times in one afternoon. (I remember this happening, too, with stories by Roald Dahl when I encountered them in junior high.) I think Flannery O'Connor deserves to be read one story at a time, at least the first time.
And yet, when you are coming back to them for the second or third or tenth time, there is an entertaining dimension to reading them all together. This time through it — with both AGMIHTF and ETRMC in hand, and able to turn back and forth from the earlier stories to the later ones over a period of several days while I let them percolate through my brain — I noticed the stories having a peculiar effect on me.
In many of the stories, Flannery's omniscient narrator is more omniscient than most. The protagonists of her stories are all deeply flawed people — everyone in the stories is deeply flawed, and if I had to guess I'd guess her point is that people in general are deeply flawed. They are also people who often have an inaccurate view of their own motivations. But it's so crisp and precise — it has taken me a while to put my finger on it, but I think the peculiar brilliance is that her narrator simply, objectively, and faithfully tells the inner monologue of the characters, completely nonjudgmentally, but in a way that lays bare to the reader all the character's flaws and prejudices and self-aggrandizements, leaving only the pure inner thoughts. You know what the character is thinking, and the character knows what she is thinking, but somehow you can know the character better than the character does. It is a clarity that burns away all the facades, the ones erected for others and the ones erected to protect the self from self-knowledge.
So, the effect on me. After reading some of these stories in a row (to name a few, the ones that have really stood out for me this time around are "Revelation," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "The Enduring Chill" especially, also my dearly beloved "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" which I didn't appreciate nearly as much the last time I read it)…
…I started to get this weird sense of my own mind being laid out like that on the page. I had a notion, a brief one, of what it would read on the page if Flannery's narrator were inspired with my own internal monologue. It was kind of horrifying to think what my thoughts would look like if I had the ill fortune to be a character in a Flannery O'Connor story. Because after reading a number of the stories in a row, I started to feel like I would fit right in among them. We can't all be Southern, and we can't all have artificial legs or hated overbearing mothers, but we can all be a little grotesque.
Just a brief, fleeting glimpse of "what if I could read Flannery's narration of my own inner thoughts?" followed by the chilling certainty that it would be, um, a purgatorial experience.
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