Flannery O'Connor: The Canon Completed, the Commentary Continuing
1973; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton
ResumoFlannery O'Connor remarked in one of composite pieces included in Mystery and Manners: It's always necessary to remember that fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks. She said this after examining a sentence from Madame Bovary and marvelling at its economy and powers of suggestiveness. She perhaps saw a special kinship between Flaubert's controlled methods of composition, realized through his famous style indirect libre, and her own habit of art (an expression she was particularly fond of). There is much of Flaubert's attention to detail and untiring search for best possible turn of phrase in evidence in Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. All thirty-one of these stories--even those six which were originally part of her Iowa master's thesis--seem splendidly finished. There is no sense of any of them being prematurely removed from drawing board. O'Connor stories need no props or critical underpinnings, although collection is clearly enriched by a discreet introduction and helpful bibliographical notes by Robert Giroux. One never has uncomfortable feeling (such as one has with recent Carson McCullers miscellany, Mortgaged Heart) of a patchwork quilt of short pieces, stitched together with finesse and devotion by an editorial hand. Even early O'Connor stories, quite simply, are finished pieces and point with assurance to her best work in shorter form, like Revelation, That Rises Must and Judgement Day. Her earliest story, The Geranium, in fact proves to be a first draft of her last story, Judgement Day (which gives Complete Stories an intriguing symmetry); characters are renamed, situation is altered, vision is deepened, but, in end, O'Connor of 1946 has curiously much of wisdom, finesse, and narrative control of O'Connor of 1964. Flannery O'Connor seems not to have passed through painful apprenticeship of so many other writers. One can see six stories which comprised Flannery O'Connor's master's thesis moving toward her first published book, Wise Blood. last of these stories, the Train, in fact, is an early version of opening chapter of this first novel. There are usual O'Connor name changes--Hazel Wickers becomes Hazel Motes, Mrs. Wallace Ben Hosen becomes Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock--and necessary adjustments of narrative focus from story to novel. But The Train has its own pace and movement, its own identity, and deserves to stand by itself as sixth in order of composition of Flannery O'Connor's complete stories. same can be said about seventh, eighth, and tenth stories, The Peeler, The Heart of Park, and Enoch and Gorilla, all of which were finally revised to become chapters of Wise Blood. One sees, I think, how first ten of Complete Stories, all written before publication of Wise Blood, directly or indirectly make us ready for Flannery O'Connor's first novel. There is nothing like startling and radical leap from apprenticeship stories of Mortgaged Heart to Carson McCullers' first novel, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Indeed there is no great distance separating an early piece like Wildcat, with its creative writing course origins, from Wise Blood. One ends up by feeling that everything is worth preserving in Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor. Flannery O'Connor apparently never wrote any fugitive pieces; there was clearly no emptying of waste baskets or raiding of cobwebbed attics to fill out pages of her Complete Stories. notion of arranging stories chronologically in their order of composition (retaining sequence she followed in her thesis for first six stories) might prove unsettling to those who view two collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, as following some inviolable pattern or design. …
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