On Reading Fiction (5)

Thanks to Scot McKnight for co-blogging with me on this topic.  Scot’s jesuscreed.org is one of the best web sites out there.

 Last time I asked about how readers are seeing the end of the story.

Here’s my take on what is going on. Mrs. Turpin, as she stands in the pig sty yelling at God, sees herself very much as a “Job” at this point in the story. Unlike the prodigal son, she has not yet come to her senses. She cries out, not so much asking for an answer as telling God off (much less eloquently than in Job 31:35), “Who do you think you are?” The cry goes out and echoes back at her, as if in answer, “Who do you think YOU are?” She is answered, so to speak, from the whirlwind. This answer addresses her initial self image that has been dissembled by the events of the story.

The vision she has of the bridge stretching from earth to Heaven, upon which the souls walk, I think answers your question, Scot, on what Mrs. Turpin means by “Put that bottom rail on the top. There’ll still be a top and a bottom!” Look carefully at the order of the souls on the bridge—who is in front, and who is at the back of the line. At the back are people who, it seems to me, are still allowed to enter Heaven, but by the skin of their teeth. Mrs. Turpin sees them as people like her—they after all, are the only ones who are even singing on key! But the shock she experiences is not that God has “leveled” the status of heaven’s citizens, but that he agrees with her. There is still a top and a bottom—it’s just that she didn’t expect herself to be part of the bottom rail.

I’ll leave it to you and your readers to work out the theology of this. It’s interesting that O’Connor seems to be playing with the implications of the Lord’s declaration that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. The end of the story also seems to be echoing stories that Christ tells about those who have little here (the rich man and Lazarus) and the Beatitudes. The problem addressed, though, is coming to judge your worthiness by your material self (as opposed to your spiritual self) in this world.

So the story is for those outside the church, and those inside it as well who perhaps have bought into a different material façade—one of Christian conduct and language, church membership and status, rather than the health of the spiritual beings we really are—what will be left when, as O’Connor suggests, all the rest has been burned away.


Author: | Category: Reading Fiction | Comments(2) April 2008
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On Reading Fiction (4)

Scot, there’s a lot in your questions and a lot going on in the story, so I want to back us up a little.

First, back to the waiting room. What’s going on here, I think, is a slow stripping away of Mrs. Turpin’s carefully built façade. The façade is so well built, indeed, that she believes it and has lost track of who she really is inside. O’Connor once wrote, in another context, the following. These lines precede those quoted in Bob’s comments on post #2 for this thread:

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as unnatural to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural…”

In the waiting room, there’s a clear difference between Mrs. Turpin’s “good church woman” façade and the thoughts (distorted and repugnant) which are running around in her head. I think that Mary Grace sees this disconnection between the inner and outer confessing Christian, and it drives her to attack Mrs. Turpin and proclaim her “a wart hog from Hell.” This shock, the attack and pronouncement that turn Mrs. Turpin’s world upside down, results in two things.

Reflection: she becomes pre-occupied with how she can be “from Hell and saved” at the same time. Also, the façade begins to break down. She is no longer polite, or even in control of her biting remarks. Her “Jesus talk” that is exhibited in the prayer just before the attack dissolves into brutal honesty—in the sense that she has lost her “filter.” What is on the inside (her hatred of Blacks, of “white trash”, of people with no social graces, her disappointment in her husband, her general anger at God and the world He has created) leaks into her speech.

This reaches its height in the pig sty, where Mrs. Turpin ends up, ironically as you point out, to be with her own kind. The language coming out of her mouth here is painful and honest. Who is she talking to, exactly? God. All her questions, and the reality of her condition, come pouring out like the stream of water she aims at the pigs. This transparent conversation has her asking God why, with all the “unacceptable” people in the waiting room to choose from, He selected her for criticism. She makes the statement you quote, which I’ll get to momentarily, which is “Put that bottom rail on the top. There’ll still be a top and a bottom!” Then she yells out, quite astonishingly across the fields at God, “Who do you think you are?” The answer she receives will be her epiphany, her “revelation.”

I’d like to hear how you and your readers read the rest of the story.


Author: | Category: Reading Fiction | Comments(0) April 2008
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On Reading Fiction (3)

Dan deRoulet is my instructor in this series on how to read fiction. We are looking at Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” He’s asked me two questions — which parables do the exposition and crisis evoke, and where was Mrs. Turpin when she got her epiphany?

Your questions are good ones, Dan. They lead me to ask things I would not have asked of this short story.The first parable that came to mind for me, in light of how the parable ends — with the right people going down into hell and the wrong people going up into heaven — was the parable of the workers in the vineyard, or the parable of the marriage guests because both of those parables are shocking instances of reversal of expectations. I can see those themes in Flannery O’Connor’s short story.

I will also admit that what came to mind for me when I read this story was Matt 23, Jesus’ intense excoriation of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and scribes.

And, esp since you brought this up Dan — I hadn’t thought of it all, by connecting parable to where Mrs. Turpin is for the epiphany of her own soul, I went to the parable of the prodigal son for he also was in a pig sty when he realized the state of his own soul.

And, now that you bring me to see this Dan, I have to admit the scene in which she washes off pigs, with a little frustration, and comments on who she is — well, this is classic O’Connor “irony” — isn’t it? Mrs. Turpin needs the cleaning; she’s been called a “wart hog”; and here we finding her cleaning hogs; wondering how she could be called a wart hog. The irony is so thick I felt pity on the woman. “How am I saved and from hell too?” Wow, that’s potent stuff out of the woman. “… blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.” Strong stuff again.

Question: What does she mean by “Put that bottom rail on top. There’s still be a top and bottom!” Is this O’Connor anticipating eternal reversal? Or is this just Mrs. Turpin saying … what?

“She gripped the rail of the hog pen …” again. Wow.


Author: | Category: Reading Fiction | Comments(0) April 2008
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On Reading Christian Fiction… (2)

Dan replies:

 Scot sells himself short on “not knowing how to read fiction.”  After
all, he and his colleagues such as Kline Snodgrass teach their students
about the parables of Jesus–some of the most difficult stories to read
well.  I’m in the midst of peddling a second book project called, Fear
Not:  Why the Church (and Everyone Else) Needs Dangerous Christian
Fiction.  Flannery O’Connor’s works are at the top of the list.
 
Scot correctly summarizes O’Connor’s “Revelation”– I’ll emphasize a
couple of other plot points in a moment.  A good way of reading short
fiction is to look at and for a few key elements of a story’s structure:
its exposition (the opening scene where the setting, characters, and
conflict are keys); the crisis (where the story’s protagonist has his or
her view of the world usually turned on its head); and a following
period of frustration and reflection leading up to the “epiphany”–the
moment for the protagonist where the answer to the problem is made
clear.  Jesus’ story of the prodigal son follows this pattern:
exposition (conflict between the father, younger son and older brother);
crisis (where the son, thinking all will be well if he could just
exercise his will, leaves his father’s house in anger and wastes his
life in riotous living); and epiphany (where the prodigal recognizes, as
he communes with the pigs and lusts after their food, what he had and
has given up by leaving his father).  This parable, by the way, is not
insignificant for O’Connor’s story.
 
Let’s start with O’Connor and her exposition in “Revelation.”  O’Connor
loves irony, and loves to portray her protagonists (often Christians) as
people who have grown to believe that the facade they display for others
is an accurate reflection of their inner life.  But it’s not.  The
protagonist, Mrs. Turpin (one of my students once called her “Mrs.
Turpentine”), is stuck in the exposition’s setting–a doctor’s waiting
room in the pre-civil rights deep South.  Obviously, a doctor’s office
is a place where the sick wait to see a physician.  O’Connor wants to
make the distinction between those who need a doctor to fix their
visible illnesses and those who are in need of a physician to diagnose
what might well kill them on the inside.  She and another woman, who are
well-mannered and are neither “white trash” nor African American nor
ill-mannered, think they’re just fine; everyone else in their eyes is,
well, unclean. Mrs. Turpin becomes so thankful, as she looks around the
room at who she is not, that she shouts out a prayer of thanks to Jesus.
The East coast educated young girl Scot describes then hurls a book
(Human Development) at her and hits her “directly above her left eye.”
The girl (named Mary Grace), walks over to Mrs. Turpin and whispers to
her, “Go back to Hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”  Mrs.
Turpin, now lying on the floor, is literally now experiencing changes in
her vision, and eventually will struggle with how she has come to see
the world.
 
So, Scot and readers: two questions I would ask at this point are:  which of Jesus’s
stories is echoed by the exposition and crisis, and what is the importance of where Mrs.
Turpin ends up after she leaves the doctor’s office for her period of
reflection and eventual epiphany?


Author: | Category: Reading Fiction | Comments(0) April 2008
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On Reading Christian Fiction…with a Theologian

The following is the opening session of my conversation with Scot Mcknight (JesusCreed.org) on Flannery O’Connor and reading fiction–from a both a theologian’s and an English professor’s points of view.  These will be posted in this series on both our web sites.  Welcome, Scot!

Scot writes:

One of my friends and a former colleague, Dan de Roulet, used to urge me to read some piece of fiction. He just knew I needed to do this, but deep inside I had to admit that I simply didn’t know how to read fiction. One day Dan suggested I read Flannery O’Connor’s great piece, “Parker’s Back,” and I was overwhelmed with her imagery and prose. So, I summed it all up for Dan with a short sentence or two and he gave me that look, attended as it was by a Mona Lisa smile, of saying, “You really don’t get it, do you.” So, we chatted over and over about Parker’s Back and I came to see more than I had first seen. So, today I begin a short series with Dan about another Flannery O’Connor piece, called “Revelation.” Today I summarize it a bit from Collected Works.

Then Dan will ask me questions. By the way, he’s an English professor, has an excellent book called Finding Your Plot in a Plotless World, and he’ll teach me to read a story by reading “Revelation.”

The story is a devastating critique of Christian hypocrisy. Mrs. Turpin enters a doctor’s office with her husband and, one by one, she sizes up everyone — none of them with anything but brutally critical judgment. She ranks people from African Americans (O’Connor uses the “n” word) to white trash to good Christian folks like her. An East coast educated young woman, whose irritation rises as the story moves on, hauls off and wallops chubby Mrs. Turpin and likes to kill her, but doesn’t. The young woman is taken away, Mrs. Turpin goes home, and has a vision of seeing folks like her descending into hell while others seem to be advancing toward heaven.


Author: | Category: Reading Fiction | Comments(2) April 2008
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What’s Next? Scot McKnight and Reader Requests

In about two weeks author and theologian Scot McKnight and I will begin a discussion on Flannery O’Connor (both here and on www.jesuscreed.org) and, in doing so, will be writing about the differences in how literature people and theology people read.  We’ll be starting with the classic O’Connor story, “Revelation,” and then will be moving on to reading a Bible “story” together, Luke’s parable of the prodigal son.  For those unfamiliar with Dr. McKnight, he is a prolific writer, reader, and blogger.  Jesuscreed.org is a terrific site, consistently worth the visit.

In the meanwhile, what authors and/or works of literature are you interested in discussing?  O’Connor will be addressed, of course, but what others are of interest?  Walker Percy?  Ron Hansen?  Anne Lamott?  Donald Miller?  Are you interested in a particular genre of literature that addresses Christian spirituality (such as memoir, short story, poetry, film, novels)?  Let me know, and we’ll go from there.


Author: | Category: digressions | Comments(3) February 2008
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4. Willing to Live…How Exactly?–”Desire on Domino Island”

Sorry for the break in posts–a flu bug and life interfered. I’d like to finish out the discussion on Lee Smith and then, in the next post, both present a few ideas and receive some suggestions for future posts.  Scot McKnight (JesusCreed.org) and I are discussing a cooperative blogging exercise on reading Flannery O’Connor.

Smith’s story, “Desire on Domino Island,” as I mentioned earlier, is a short satire on supermarket romance novels.  In an introduction to the story, Smith writes about the amazingly restrictive rules of that genre–that life must be free of “unnecessary complications”–and her story shows both the frustrations and ultimate limitations of writing under such strictures. The publisher for which she is writing is called “Silhouette Romances.”

The romance (of Rock Cliff and Jennifer Maidenfern) moves along predictably enough at first, until Smith’s “chapters” become abbreviated complaints, ending in the anticlimax of the couple’s embrace:

“And that’s it!  I shade my eyes against the brightness of this sun, the glare off the water, but in vain:  all I can see is the silhouette.  Jennifer and Rock have nothing, nothing left–no faces, no bodies, not to mention fear or pain or children, joy or memory or loss–nothing but these flat black shapes against the tropic sky.”

I recently got back in touch with a colleague who has walked a complicated road similar to mine. We began to talk about the churches we had attended during tough times.  There were those which, at that point anyway, were concentrating on presenting a certain face to the world around us, selling Christianity, if you would–and others that saw our problems and, as my friend said, “offered to walk beside us.” 

One can eliminate the low points of life, but in doing so, joy can be lost as well.  One is left with a flatness that is not particularly painful, but not lovely either.  Such a life seems totally at odds with the one that Jesus led.


Author: | Category: Lee Smith and Authenticity | Comments(3) February 2008
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But I digress…(1) Local Government and Purgatory

I thought I’d take a brief digression from Lee Smith…a couple of folks have commented that they need a little more time to read some of the stories under discussion.

Last night I attended part of a local city planning commission meeting with one of my sons, who was required to be there for his U.S. Government class.  By the end of the meeting, I was able to determine the difference between local government and Purgatory:  in Purgatory, people make progress.  After two hours and with no real end to the meeting in sight, it became clear to me that some of those involved in the meeting might never leave the room.

I think, or hope, that the point of sending my son to this event was to convince him of the importance of politics on the local level and to give him a taste of what issues are discussed.  Instead, he spent the evening learning about what kind of trees must be planted on narrow lots, the importance of brick facing on new buildings and how those buildings must be angled to match the neighborhood, and about something called varied usage areas.  He’s a patient young man, and only commented that no matter how hard he tried, he would get lost about half way through each agenda item discussion.  I am less phlegmatic of a soul.  I wanted, for example, to stand up and tell the architect, two minutes into her 20-minute power point presentation, that there was no way the planning council was going to approve a Frank Lloyd Wright style office building in the middle of Old Town.  After I returned home, I asked my wife to please, if I ever wanted to run for a local post after I retire, to please shoot me.  Please.  And I had spent most of the meeting in the library next door to city hall, reading a copy of Jane Smiley’s Moo.

Eventually I was able to calm down, and I have great respect for people who can sit through those meetings and make decisions on issues I have elected them to contemplate.  But I prefer my own career path.  My oldest son, when he was in first grade Sunday school, was asked by his teacher what his father did for a living.  “My dad,” he said proudly, “reads books and drinks coffee.”  Amen, son.  Amen.


Author: | Category: digressions | Comments(2) January 2008
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3. Socially Unacceptable Spirituality and the Purpose of Christian Literature: “Tongues of Fire”

We’ve been considering authenticity and Christian spirituality–particularly the problem that in-authenticity and Christian identity are oil and water:  they don’t mix well nor for long, and they’re not particularly appetizing in the first place.

Lee Smith’s novella, “Tongues of Fire,” the center of her second collection of stories, Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, shows this problem in its fullness. It centers around the life of Karen, its first-person narrator, who survives  the search for a religion that fits her, a family breakdown, adolescence, and a Christian experience that occurs at the just about the most socially unacceptable time and place possible.

Probably what separates Smith here from a segment, at least, of a “Christian readership,” is the humor and ambiguity of Karen’s journey.  It is a spiritual, coming-of-age, social-class-crossing, quirky journey that makes everyone in the story uncomfortable.  This is especially true for Karen’s mother, who is all about correct religious expression, social standing–let’s call it the “cosmetic life.”  The mother is concerned that her husband is having a nervous breakdown, but she is much more concerned that he is inconveniently having it in the country club dining room.  She’s concerned that Karen is seeking out religious experience (or perhaps a sense of being a special, visible human being) in backwoods churches among the “wrong kind” of people; she’s so concerned that she sends Karen to an Episcopalian summer camp, to both temper he religious expression and to put her back on the right social track.  The results of this attempt, for those of you who have read the story, can be understated simply:  alas.

One of my favorite groups of musical artists is Switchfoot. In their Oh Gravity! cd, the song American Dream, states, “I want out of this machine / it doesn’t feel like freedom /This ain’t my American Dream / I want to live and die for bigger things.” 

You see, I truly believe that one of the signs of Christian growth, just like human development, is differentiation:  from authority figures, from social norms, from religious forms and institutions when any or all of these don’t match up with the authenticity of Christian experience. And here’s the interesting thing:  literary writers are all about differentiation.  The nature of literature is to challenge the inauthentic and, therefore, the nature of Christian literature should be to clearly identify the inauthentic and lead the reader as far away from it as humanly possible.

Will such writing be perfect in where it leads?  No.  Is expressed, authentic Christian spirituality likely to be always on target?  No. But remember Jesus’ parable about the men entrusted to invest gifts from their master in his absence.  The one who fails does so because he’s afraid, if you will, to take the gift (and perhaps himself, metaphorically) out of the box.  He buries it in the field, where it’s safe, where it disturbs no one, where it is utterly ineffective.


Author: | Category: Lee Smith and Authenticity | Comments(6) January 2008
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2. Religious Experience: “Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach”

So, I’d like to contend that Lee Smith’s stories “get” the irony of Christian spirituality that some areas of mainstream Christianity miss:  a Christian spiritual experience does not “keep up appearances”; it is not intended to keep up the material and cosmetic accouterments that the American Dream (the American Christian Dream), described in my previous entry, sets its sights on.  Because of this fact alone, Smith’s stories that address Christian experience should be embraced by our communities for conversation.

“Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach,” from Smith’s first book of short stories, Cakewalk, focuses on the unlikely and unclear spiritual encounter of a higher-society widow, Lolly Darcy,
amidst her family and friends at their North Carolina summer beach home.  Mrs. Darcy is grieving and inactive, her adult children are worried (mainly about who would receive the responsibility of caring for Lolly rather than, it seems, about her).  During a moment on the deck of the house, as a rare double rainbow appears over the ocean, Lolly sees the vision of a robed man who calls her by name.  She shouts something inaudible and faints dead away.

The Mrs. Darcy who awakens is more trouble than the one who was grieving.  She is active, friendly and smiling–she even takes an unheard of swim in the ocean!–but she also has lost almost all sense of her social mores. The Lolly who once would have not thought of serving a meal without fine China and only entertaining in highly presentable attire now favors frozen pizzas and lounges around a house dress.  The seems to see the world differently as well, something like what Blake described
as seeing the universe in a grain of sand.  Moreover, the story ends with the late night meeting of Lolly, and old friend, and a guest.  The friend has brought her friend over because she has had terrible chronic pain and because Lolly has had success with others, since her encounter, taking pain away.  And so it is, instantly, in this encounter as well.  Lolly’s response?  “I’m only a vessel.”

Some of what I love about this story its proposal that spiritual experience does not do away with the need for faith–questions don’t go away, ambiguities remain, doubts creep in from their hiding places.  When the Gospel describes the voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus as the son of God at his baptism, some in the crowd believe they have heard an angel; others claim it was thunder.  Lolly’s encounter brings renewed life and a new set of questions.

My own Christian conversion came about while I was attending a University of California campus in the junior year as an undergraduate.  I had a strong, unexpected spiritual experience which turned my world upside down.  My friends seemed curious–they didn’t know what to make of the change–much like Lolly’s children in Smith’s story.  There was no way to “keep up appearances” any more and, like Lolly Darcy, not much of a desire to do so…although I wish I had at that point cared even less about appearances .


Author: | Category: Lee Smith and Authenticity | Comments(0) January 2008
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