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Vocation in
Flannery O’Connor’s
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “A View of the Woods”
by Br. Robert King, OP
Flannery O’Connor writes her stories with an
explicit intention of presenting the gospel to people who are
ignorant of or even opposed to the gospel.
She wishes to present the Catholic view of the world without
omission, or, to put it another way, to present the world to itself
exactly as it actually exists by using (among other things) the lens
of Catholic dogma. She notes that “The Catholic fiction writer is
entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of
God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at
the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees.”
She sees her fiction as depicting “the action of grace in a
territory held largely by the devil,”
and one of the actions of grace which she particularly dwells on is
the grace of vocation.
A story deals with particulars and individuals,
so it is difficult (or even impossible) to draw out general
principles from them; but it is possible to see exemplified in her
stories the principles on which O’Connor bases her characters and
situations. Both of her novels, Wise Blood and The
Violent Bear it Away,
revolve around characters who resist calls to the vocation of
prophet, and many of her short stories also show characters
discovering some sort of calling in their lives, and each story’s
plot unfolds in the manner of his or her response to that call.
Here, I will take two stories as examples: “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” and “A View of the Woods.” In reading these stories, I hope
to understand a little more clearly one aspect of what O’Connor sees
in the universe we already have.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The story begins with resistance. “The
grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.”
But she is not forthright about the reasons for her resistance: she
wants to visit her own relatives, but rather than saying so, she
warns her son of the danger of an escaped criminal. She says, “I
wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that
a loose in it.”
Only after providing several obstacles to the trip to Florida does
she suggest east Tennessee, where her connections live. Neither her
son, Bailey, nor his wife pay attention to her. But going on the
trip seems imperative, as her granddaughter notes: “She wouldn’t
stay at home for a million bucks. Afraid she’d miss something.”
The grandmother has set ideas of how things ought
to be – or, at least, of how she wants them to be – and she follows
whatever course of action that seems immediately to achieve her
goal. She dresses herself carefully so that “In case of an
accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once
that she was a lady.”
She hides her cat in the car, despite her knowledge that Bailey will
grow angry; later in the story she lies to the children to convince
them to seek out the old plantation house. She perhaps fancies
herself far-sighted, and wiser than the rest of her family. This
may in fact be the case.
The family stops at The Tower, a barbecue
restaurant, where the grandmother reminisces with the owner, Red
Sam, about how good life used to be. Red Sam complains that people
abuse his trust in them. The grandmother notes that “People are
certainly not nice like they used to be,”
translating trustworthiness into niceness. But Red Sam’s wife
returns the issue to trust: “It isn’t a soul in this green world of
God’s that you can trust,”
and she includes even her husband in that generalization.
She speaks not, as Sam did, from a particular experience of
disappointment, but from an apprehension of the human condition:
human beings simply are not trustworthy. But nobody agrees with the
absolute nature of her assertion. Red Sam may say, “A good man is
hard to find,”
but he holds out the hope that it is possible to find one.
After the grandmother convinces Bailey to search
for the plantation house, she accidentally lets the cat loose in the
car, which distracts Bailey and rolls the car into a ditch. As they
are recovering, the escaped criminal about whom the grandmother had
read in the paper, who calls himself The Misfit, approaches with two
companions, but she doesn’t recognize him immediately. When she
does, however, she calls him by the name he has chosen for himself.
Her recognition apparently causes him to “have to” kill the whole
family.
He sends his henchmen to take the family in segments into the woods
and shoot them, while he holds an extended conversation with the
grandmother. She engaged his attention by recognizing him, and now
he engages her on a very personal level. They talk about his past,
about whether he is a “good man” or not, about his crimes.
Throughout, the grandmother asks him, then commands him, to pray.
Finally, with her whole family taken from her, she is left with only
one word: “Jesus.”
And The Misfit discloses that it is exactly the person of Jesus who
has caused the conflict in his own life.
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the
dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He
thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then
it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow
Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy
the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing
somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness
to him.”
The Misfit goes on to claim he doesn’t know
whether Jesus did in fact raise the dead, and that it is unjust that
he wasn’t there to witness the event personally: “if I had of been
there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” And in
this moment, the grandmother sees him clearly for a moment, and
comes to a second stage of recognition. Again, she calls him by a
name, but not the name he gave to himself; rather she gives him a
new name: “Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own
children!”
He rejects this name and all that it carries with it by killing her,
but he cannot entirely shake the power of her recognition. His eyes
are “defenseless-looking” and he defends her against his companion,
saying “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there
to shoot her every minute of her life.”
The pleasure he once found in meanness is gone.
The Misfit’s claim about Jesus – that his
existence and especially his resurrection demands a decision to
follow or oppose him – constitutes the terms of a calling, the
description of vocation. It is facing this stark choice that
enables the grandmother to become, in the end, a “good woman” by
recognizing something worth loving in The Misfit. She loves him, in
her own limited way, as Christ loved her, and she lays down her life
for him in hope of resurrection. In short, The Misfit places the
terms of Jesus’ call before her in a way that she must respond to
it. He becomes, for her, an agent of her vocation. And she, for
her part, by accepting Jesus’ call to her, becomes an agent of
Christ’s calling to him. She calls him to pray, to engage his
creator more deeply and to seek in Christ the answers to his
questions. She recognizes him and calls him by various names,
addressing him personally.
The theme of vocation sheds light on the rest of
the story, especially on what it means to be a “good man.”
Throughout the story, O’Connor depicts her characters resisting,
even explicitly opposing the call of Christ. The grandmother
harbors no qualms about lying to get her way, or about denying her
participation in sin by blaming Europe for the troubles of the
world. Likewise, The Misfit deliberately rejects Jesus’ call, first
by committing the sorts of crimes which he claims are the only
alternative to following Jesus whole-heartedly, and then by
murdering the grandmother in the very moment she herself reaches out
to him. Neither the grandmother nor The Misfit can be said to be
“good men,” that is, neither fully answers Jesus’ call to follow
him; but each encounters Christ’s call in the other, and each is
able to choose to follow or to deny. The hearing of Christ’s call
and the choice one makes in answering is foundational to O’Connor’s
anthropology.
A View of the Woods
Identity and allegiance drive the characters in
“A View of the Woods.” Mark Fortune seems alone in his world, at
odds with the rest of his family, except for his granddaughter,
Mary. He identifies her with himself, gives her gifts, and assumes
that he holds her allegiance. After all, she looks like him and
thinks like him. Though she is only nine years old, she is “the
only member of the family he [has] any respect for,” and this is
because, despite “seventy years’ difference in their ages, the
spiritual distance between them was slight.”
He is very glad for her likeness to him, because the thought revolts
him that his daughter and son-in-law, Mary’s parents, the Pittses,
might inherit from him. Fortune has willed his entire estate to
young Mary, and he reminds Pitts that he, Fortune, owns the property
and may do with it as he pleases. “Anyone over sixty years of age
is in an uneasy position unless he controls the greater interest and
every now and then he gave the Pittses a practical lesson by selling
off a lot.”
Teaching his children a lesson is not the only
reason he sells off his lots. He counts himself a firm believer in
“progress” and a protector of “the future.” Progress “had always
been his ally. He was not one of those people who fight
improvement.” Rather, he welcomes it. A hydroelectric dam down the
river had flooded the land nearby into a lake, on which everybody
wanted land, and on which people wanted modern conveniences.
There was talk of their getting a telephone
line. There was talk of paving the road that ran in front of
the Fortune place. There was talk of an eventual town. He
thought this should be called Fortune, Georgia. He was a man of
advanced vision, even if he was seventy-nine years old.
And he and his granddaughter pass much of their
time watching the construction equipment digging and building on one
of the lakeside lots which he had sold.
Almost half the story is set at the lakeside lot,
where Fortune and Mary watch the back hoe and bulldozers pushing the
red clay dirt around to form a foundation for a fishing club. Mary
watches the equipment working with intense attention. When the
bulldozers approach the edge of the property, she reacts
protectively to the point of running over to check on a boundary
marker that one of the bulldozers has nudged. He warns her to be
careful, but overall approves of her concern, her actions and her
judgment. “More sense in her little finger than all the rest of
that tribe in their heads put together,” he thinks to himself.
To this point, it seems that Fortune has been
interpreting Mary’s interest in the construction site to be like
his: fascination and wonder at progress, and pride in what will be
built because of him. But when he suggests selling off the lot
right in front of their house, she reacts negatively: he can’t sell
the lawn because that is where she and the other Pitts children
play, and where Mr. Pitts grazes his cattle, and because it would
block the view of the woods across the street. Fortune cannot
understand her objections; he cannot see another reason for
absorption in the construction on the sold lot than pride. But
Mary’s attention might equally come from concern that no more of the
land be touched than is absolutely necessary. In fact, at nine
years old, it seems likely that Mary herself couldn’t say exactly
what she finds compelling about the construction equipment, or
whether she has any value judgments at all about them. The lawn,
however, she values very highly for its own sake. It is safe to say
that the abstract notions of “progress” or “the future” mean little,
if anything, to her, and that she does not give them much credence
in argument.
Whether or not a rift existed between grandfather
and granddaughter before he proposed to sell the lawn, his proposal
opened one and his insistence that the sale take place drives them
apart, forcing Mary to identify herself over against her
grandfather. In separating herself from her grandfather, she begins
to identify herself with her father, so that when Fortune calls
Pitts a fool she replies with scripture: “He who calls his brother a
fool is subject to hell fire.”
Note that by using this verse she calls Fortune and Pitts brothers.
He calls her a Jezebel, and she replies by calling him the Whore of
Babylon. But in her stubborn willfulness he sees himself reflected,
and he is proud of his image even as she storms away from him.
The only cause of a rift forming on his part is
her docility to her father when he takes her out to punish her by
whipping her. When Pitts would take her out into the woods to whip
her,
A look that was completely foreign to the
child’s face would appear on it. The old man could not define
the look but it infuriated him. It was a look that was part
terror and part respect and part something else, something very
like cooperation.
Partly because he places so much value on the
similarity of their facial features, and partly because Mary was
otherwise so much his own, “It was as if it were he that
Pitts was driving down the road to beat and it was as if he
were the one submitting to it.”
By identifying Mary with himself, he hardly is able to distinguish
her from him, which makes her defiance of him all the more
traumatic. He refuses to believe that she in fact wants the lawn to
remain intact, and attempts to bribe her with a boat. It is not
until she becomes violent upon the final sale of the lot that he
really takes her conviction seriously.
His blindness extends beyond his daughter. He is
unable to recognize anything good in Pitts, or even to acknowledge
the validity of Pitts’ arguments. He has no retort to Pitts. He
also does not notice the evil in the person to whom he plans to sell
the property, Tilman, who is described in extraordinarily serpentine
language: his “head weaving snake-fashion…. [T]he top of his skull
was covered with a cap of freckles. His eyes were green and very
narrow and his tongue was always exposed in his partly opened
mouth.”
Ultimately, his blindness prevents him even from seeing himself
with any clarity. Even after he decides to follow Pitts’ lead and
to whip Mary, even after he kills her, he says to himself, “There’s
not an ounce of Pitts in me.”
Throughout the final scenes of the story which
lead to his killing Mary in wrath, Fortune’s heart continually
expands. At first, his heart expands only when Pitts takes Mary out
to beat her. But as the conflict between his granddaughter and
himself escalates, he feels it within as a convulsive growth of his
heart. After he has killed her, it expands beyond the limits of his
body, and drags him down to the lakeshore, where he finds himself
surrounded by all his former allies (the back hoe, the lake, the
trees on his property) but they have become mysterious and
threatening. The back hoe is no longer a machine, but a monster,
and the trees march in military formation. Physically, he is
probably no longer seeing the world very clearly; but spiritually,
he recognizes for the first time the dangerous aspect of these
things which he had embraced.
If “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” explores the
choices people make when presented with the terms of Christ’s call,
“A View of the Woods” looks at the long-term results of choosing
against one’s Christian vocation. O’Connor links Fortune to demonic
forces at key moments – when he associates with the serpentine
Tilman, and when his spit and image, Mary, attacks him “from all
directions at once. It was as if he were being attacked not by one
child but by a pack of small demons,”
and finally when the construction equipment appears as monstrous –
to show that Satan has him in his grasp. Fortune heard and followed
the call of progress, and progress called him to neglect his family
and human relations. He heard the call of Satan, and Satan called
him to refuse the call of Christ. He follows the call of the father
of lies further and further from the Way, the Truth and the Life.
He compounds his own error by trying to force
Mary to follow exactly the vocation which he himself follows. He
wants her to be pure Fortune, to be his exact image and likeness –
and more: to fulfill his fantasy to “make the rest of them jump.”
By denying her the freedom to discover and follow her own vocation,
as both Fortune and Pitts, he forces her to choose.
“Are you a Fortune,” he said, “or are you a
Pitts? Make up your mind.”
Her voice was loud and positive and
belligerent. “I’m Mary – Fortune – Pitts,” she said.
“Well I,” he shouted, “am PURE Fortune!”
There was nothing she could say to this and
she showed it. For an instant she looked completely defeated,
and the old man saw with a disturbing clearness that this was
the Pitts look.
A few pages later, in the midst of their final
and mortal combat, having just been portrayed as demonic and with
his blood still in her mouth, and moreover with her features having
been emphasized as identical to her grandfather’s, Mary declares
“I’m PURE Pitts.” She is so forced to choose with whom she
identifies that she cannot simply be Mary.
If these stories show “the action of grace in a
territory largely held by the devil,” then part of that grace is the
vocation to follow Christ. This vocation is presented as a real
option, though a difficult one because it demands faith over
certainty, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Misfit rejects the
call because he wants sure knowledge, while the grandmother’s eyes
are opened to recognize a truth deeper than knowledge: that The
Misfit is in fact a child entrusted to her loving care by God.
Following Christ’s call also is a difficult option because it must
be made in “a territory largely held by the devil,” as shown in “A
View of the Woods.” When Fortune first proposes the sale of the
lawn, Mary presents him with the option of not selling it, of having
mercy and acting with generous care for her and their family. She
gives a variety of reasons, all of which reduce to: the lawn is a
good thing for the Pitts family. But, as the story progresses, it
becomes clear that Fortune is surrounded by demonic forces which
blind him and draw him along the false path of progress and
self-sufficiency.
The grace of vocation which O’Connor portrays is
a grace universally available but almost always rejected, and
rejected because it is a very difficult grace to accept. As she
describes another character in another story, “She could never be a
saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her
quick.”
Being a saint, answering Christ’s call, is a long and difficult
journey for which few are equipped. And yet, the opportunity to
embrace sainthood, to choose the hard and narrow road of one’s
vocation, appears at the most unlikely times and even to those who
have made a long habit of rejecting that grace. If O’Connor truly
is writing for those who are ignorant of or opposed to the gospel,
then she is describing the situation in which her intended
readership must find themselves on a regular basis. The shock of
grace presented to her undeserving and ungrateful characters, then,
itself calls the reader to receive the grace given him or her, and
to follow his or her vocation in Christ.
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