"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

     Flannery O'Connor is one of my favorite writers because of her elusiveness and everything she packs into a story. Also as someone who is slow to read new writers, she's turned me onto artists like Breece D'J Pancake, a writer from a hard scrabble area of coal country, West Virginia. I love southern writers--some of my first reading memories involve Carson McCullers, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," thinking it interesting that I was reading her stories in Finland(where my mother is from), and that she had a story entitled "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," which I had yet to read.

     I've always had trouble with finishing Faulkner's novels. I recently read an interview by Raymond Carver, one of my favorite short story writers, describing "Faulkner is Faulkner" in a respectful tone, who's writing style was very different than that of Carver's,  when asked to parse through meaningful American writers, "but there was a lot of rhetoric in Faulkner, which I seek to do away with." There's a specific scene where Carson's protagonist in "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" is drawn through a tree house where she discovers a piano. Images like these stick with me from childhood readings, like the young boy  in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's "The Yearling," who describes the killing of a puma in the Florida wilderness and the eating of its heart. This lyrical, creeping, colorful and grotesque set of imagery is what I think draws me to Flannery O'Connor's "The Misfit." It's definitely a vibe that transcends simply geography, though the South must have a certain stew that can produce New Orleans Jazz, and the blues. As Buddy Guy mentioned in a not too distant interview, "People made the mistake of thinking there's such a thing as Chicago blues. We all came from the South and just ended up recording here. It's southern blues." 

    Recently I was reading a lot of old greek literature and have just started on "the Confessions" by Augustine, a somewhat autobiographical text that ponders on the dilemma of "Original Sin" as he calls it, namely the fall of man in the Garden of Eden that changed our nature to "evil" for the sake of evil, with the ownership of this evil out of God's hands. He surpasses the seeming contradiction of an all knowing, all loving god that punishes innocents by declaring that there are no innocents, because of the Fall, and therefore everyone who is punished is done so justly. He uses the image of a baby crying, and that even in this state we are sinful, because if the baby would have its way, it would strangle the mother for not being fed properly and on time. 

    The grandmother's very loose use of the word "good" until it almost has no meaning to me evokes this question of the existence of evil and its origins. I'm drawn to Martin Scorcese movies because much of my family were "failed" catholics in Brooklyn, and also did certain horrible things, but still attended midnight mass and called eachother "good." I think Scorcese tries to define what this in-between state of Good and Evil & Catholicism might be called.  I'm reminded by the "Misfit" that Satan was simply the "dirty work" angel in God's kingdom, and the idea of his separation or expulsion from Heaven is sometimes misread by popular culture between its reality and the texts. I love Civil War history. I feel like a lot of American history must be looked at through this era's lens. In this way I used to read some southern writers, including O'Connor, as being all "grotesque" or gruesome, since, as Raymond Carver would say, a lot of "severe" things happen in her stories. But it struck me about the passage in the Confessions that talks about all life being in the image of God in the "today" time, the here and now, and that all men have the law of God inscribed into their hearts, whether they know it or not, could be useful. Sometimes looking on the South, or Catholicism even, as being filled with relics and severity, it allows me to soften my view a bit and see the universality it, and look for other themes. When I re-read and meet the Misfit now I try to imagine a character that you might find on the road in one of Shakespeare's plays, and I can almost feel the wind blowing, or in the case of deep Georgia, the humidity stifling as I read, but I can suspend my moral attachment, as long as the story entertains me.