A Sense of Place

 

For a virtual tour of Flannery’s world, check out the Piety and Peacocks slide show at this link:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/travel/04Flannery.html?ex=1331352000&en=6d3a860af4ea11b1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Asa Hawks tells Haze in Wise Blood: “you can’t run away from Jesus. Jesus is a fact.”

And of course Haze tries, but does not make it.  From the time he sees Jesus “moving from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around…” to the scene by the side of the road where he no longer has his car, his ‘ersatz’ “house”… he tries, but he is just not as fast as Jesus.

 

“The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown.”

 

A History of Horror - Betty Hester aka “A”

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10154699

 

Mary had a little chicken.  Watch this:

Not too far off the mark…

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.” 

- Flannery O’Connor

…when it comes to what Flannery thought.  

In some twisted way Sarducci could even be a kindred spirit, especially in the theology he “teaches.”  Take five:

 

Caught in her own trap, she is too clever by half.

Do take three minutes to enjoy her downfall:

Flannery was not from around here and she wanted to make sure we knew it.  Many of her characters are also just barely comfortable in the visible world and many do not realize why they are so ill at ease here.  Mrs. Shortley only enters her true country when she has a stroke, Haze tries living in Eastrod, Taulkinham, his car, at Mrs. Flood’s… but only at the end does he really make it “home.”

A single intricate design

The list goes on.  

Obadiah Elihu Parker is trying to compensate for his estrangement from God through a neurotic obsession with tattoos.  David Eggenschwiler* says Parker turns like so many O’Connor characters to the finite world to satisfy a spiritual hunger.

His wife calls it vanity, maybe it is pride and it flirts with idolatry.  He breaks the first three commandments** in Parker’s Back and contemplates adding to those.

Parker’s inspiration is a man he sees at a fair.

 

…the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin
appeared to have a subtle motion of its own.

 

Says Michel Thevoz about tattoos in The Painted Body: ”…they are essentially the marks of the social misfit applied defiantly to the surface which, in Judeo-Christian culture, is considered taboo” (p. 81).
 

 

* The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor

** Thou shalt have none other gods before me; thou shalt not make thee any graven image…; thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

To refresh your memory on just what these sins are, check out 

“Seven deadly sins.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 22 Apr 2008, 18:13 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 24 Apr 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Seven_deadly_sins&oldid=207411771>. 

The peacock stopped just behind her…

…his head on the long blue reedlike neck was drawn back as if

his attention were fixed in the distance on something no one

else could see.

 Flannery, about the cry of the birds:

“To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical.  To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.”

“… seven or eight screams in succession as if this message were the one on earth which needed most urgently to be heard.”

- from her essay, The King of the Birds

Listen up!

http://encarta.msn.com/media_461538253/peacock.html

 

None as blind as he who will not see.

… he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look.

The boy found himself scrutinized by two small drill-like eyes set in twin glass caverns.

… some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see.  It’s a kind of salvation.

… her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.

 

 

The ugly girl’s peculiar eyes were still on her…

… looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life–all of Mrs. Turpin’s life, it seemed too…

Sharpness of vision is a leitmotif in O’Connor’s work and essays.  For her, the Christian writer has the sharpest vision, “the sharpest eyes for the grotesque.”  Her characters’ eyesight or lack of vision is symbolic of their spiritual insight or lack thereof.  She truly writes about the “blind, the halt and the maimed.”

A motley crew - Haze  Motes, Asa Hawks, Hoover Shoats, Francis Marion and Tarwater the elder and others are collectively a voice crying in the desert, haphazard and ineffectual in impacting the lost.  They are driven by their own demons and steeped in their own perversions.  Whether or not they are heard depends entirely on the receptivity of the audience.