Did Flannery and Bill get it right?

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Thoughts on the recently old South

I’m writing a novel set in the modern-day South, and because of that, I’ve been looking back, reminding myself how we got here. And trying to sort out, in my own mind, what some writers had to say about the time back then, and how it conforms to my memories of growing up Southern.

Re-reading Wise Blood, I was struck by how important cars were to Flannery O’Connor—at least in her early work. (Flannery? you ask.) Hazel Motes spends more time buying his car, and worrying with it, than he does thinking about his theology. We see it again and again: a high, rat-colored car. In fact, there are two high, rat-colored cars in Wise Blood, one driven by Hazel and one by his adversary--almost his twin--the false prophet. The cars fight to the death, and Hazel’s is the winner. “Nobody with a good car needs to worry about anything,” Hazel says. And maybe that’s his moment of enlightenment, in O’Connor’s design. He doesn’t seem to have another. Or is it a metaphor for a bad choice? When he loses his car, he blinds himself, and dies in a ditch.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the old woman (as she’s called) will give Mr. Shiftlet the car he repaired if he’ll marry the girl. (The title itself is from a highway sign.) And Shiftlet sure wants that car. “The body, lady, is like a house” he says, “ it don’t go anywhere: but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always….” Mr. Shiftlet marries the girl and takes the car; abandons her somewhere down the road, and drives on. Another bad choice?

And then there’s the car that appears at the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A big black battered hearse-like automobile, as O’Connor describes it, bringing The Misfit, and an end to a grandmother’s life. (“She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When you read Flannery O’Connor, especially if you’re from the South, there’s always an immediate sense of recognition: the speech, the characters, all so closely observed, and all seeming so right. And leaving aside the Catholicism (and Kierkegaard, and all that), the stories work on their own. The car as freedom? A sign of failed understanding and death? The soul on the move? Well, why not? O’Connor’s Southern primatives are forever finding small, even trivial, answers in a confused world, enlarging and seizing them, holding them close.

But did Flannery O’Connor get it right? Is this a true picture of the South?

Maybe for a certain period, and for a certain group of people--a narrow class of whites inhabiting Middle Georgia in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. But her characters are almost too ignorant, too naïve, and so limited they often seem mentally deficient. We see none of the cleverness, the sly intelligence, the manipulative skills that we find in a character like Faulkner’s Flem Snopes.

There never was a Hazel Motes. There never could have been.

One more thing about O’Connor. She turned away from the most important issue of her day. And that, frankly, was race. The culture and treatment of Southern blacks was background for her, when it wasn’t invisible. Once she even used it as a prop for another small—artificial--epiphany. Only late in life did she address the issue directly in her work, and still, it seems to me, her concern was with white culture. (Strange how the confrontation in “Judgment Day” reminds me of the confrontation in Mr. Sammler's Planet between Sammler and the black man.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Faulkner never turned away. He looked at the South straight on. O’Connor was always wary of Faulkner. Reading him, she said, made her want to go back and raise chickens full time. As a Southern writer (she suggested) you don’t want to encroach on his territory or put yourself in his way. He’ll run you over.

But did Faulkner get it right? In one important way, he did. I’m thinking especially of Absalom, Absalom!

Imagine it: This vast edifice that Faulkner constructed, a lop-sided, insane structure, a story torn from the earth and built with the bodies of men. Gone, but living in memory. William Sutpen comes down the mountain (in the longest tracking shot in American literature), takes what he needs, builds his empire—Sutpen’s Hundred--and seeks to found a dynasty.

But in the end, it all turns on racism. And founders.

There’s an unyielding stupidity at the heart of Absalom, Absalom!, and the characters know it.

So too that “Old” South—not so old at that. An unreal society, full of harm for everyone who resided there. For hundreds of years a world structured out of collective insanity, so bizarre you had to live in it to believe it. Only in the 1970’s did it begin to change in any real way.
Or did it just go underground?

Flannery O’Connor once admitted that she couldn’t deal with the larger things. But Faulkner did, and got it right. So much shame in the past, and he’s shown it to us. But was he right, too, when he said that the past is never dead, it’s not even past. I hope not, for the sake of my own writing.

In the last pages of Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson finishes the story of Sutpen’s Hundred. Having listened to it all, his Harvard roommate asks him, “Why do you hate the South?”

And Quentin replies, “I don’t hate it.” And he thinks: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!
Doesn’t he?