A Good Man is Hard to Find
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."
It's the beginning of the story, but O'Connor doesn't introduce the characters.
"The grandmother" makes her sound anonymous but also symbolic of grandmothers.
"...her connections": this is the grandmother's language, probably meaning her relatives, but also mocks her gently as if she were an important person who would have "connections" - which she's not. The sentence - "She wanted to visit... and she was seizing" - is paratactic, because neither part is logically subordinate. "...she was seizing" - this unusual word summarizes the old woman's stubborn character.
Any time you have parataxis, the author appears more present. Because the unspoken connection between facts is in the author's (and reader's) mind, making that mind part of the story.
"He was sitting on the edge... bent over the orange sports section..." "Edge" and especially "orange" stand out in this paratactic sentence, because they seem completely unnecessary. Sitting on the edge of the chair is not something one does deliberately, so it emphasizes the character's lack of self-awareness. "...her thin hip" - "his bald head": the paratactic sentences contain few details, so the ones O'Connor included sound almost facetious. Thinness and baldness - decay - characterize this world and its people. She "rattles" the newspaper - an impossible sound to imagine in this situation, but one that underscores her snakelike quality. This is O'Connor's gothic minimalism.
The parataxis and sense of randomness communicate the disorder of the South, or the South of this story. Every paratactic style creates a space for the author's presence, as I said, and O'Connor's presence is gently mocking. The odd details sprinkled in the passage drive this tone home.
I wonder what you think of the argument that O'Connor wasn't in fact a "grotesque" writer but a realist who accurately portrayed the poor rural South. O'Connor herself denied the tag of "grotesque" but also was difficult sometimes just to be difficult. I guess I have to ask what "grotesque" in literature means. Is it simply the physically grotesque? If that's so, I suppose some characters in her stories are grotesque, but I'm still not wholely convinced she herself is a "grotesque" writer. That word gets thrown around a lot concerning "Southern" writers and I think to an extent it means "Not Northern."
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe "gothic" is a better term. I'm on your team about the southern-bashing among literary folk. Plus, everything from the south just tends to get over-southerned. (i.e. People tend to see it as southern and nothing else.) In O'Connor's story "Revelation" when a woman sits in a doctor's office thinking how disgusting everyone else is and then gets called a "wart hog from hell" and then actually starts behaving like a wart hog from hell - it seems like a grotesque moment. Generally, it means that the author exaggerates the ugly side of things.
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