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ornamental line

Responding to the Inexplicable

"What the fiction write will discover, if he discovers anything at all, is that he
himself cannot move or mold reality in the interests of abstract truth."
Flannery O'Connor's "The Church and the Fiction Writer" (1957)


Points for Reflection

Gwendolyn Bennett's "Heritage" (1922), PDF

  1. does the heritage envisioned here appear to lie out of reach, or within the narrator’s grasp?
  2. does Bennett’s sparing use of rhyme and variable line length reinforce or work against the poem’s powerful sense of longing?
  3. does this poem appear to support the back-to-Africa movement spearheaded by Marcus Garvey?
  4. in order to see the images described in stanzas one and two, would the narrator need to be lying down?
  5. those experiences for which the narrator longs provide counterpoints to which elements of western civilization?


Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1954-55; 1956), online

  1. does Ginsberg's poem identify a clear cause of the "madness" he accuses of destroying the best minds of his own generation?
  2. can you find evidence that these "best minds" encompass people of color?
  3. does drug use appear to be more a cause than a product of the extended, varieggated vision provided by the narrator?
  4. the narrator lists a number of American and international locations visited by these vanished best minds. Does he privilege particular parts of the world? Does he steer clear of others?
  5. what attitude does the narrator adopt towards therapy, an ostensible treatment for the madness he identified at the poem's beginning?
  6. to adopt Ginsberg's own words, does this poem's colleage of images strike you as more a set of "lofty incantations" or "stanzas of gibberish"?
  7. has this poem "dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed"? Does it focus more on gaps and absences, or on what can be seen and held?
  8. why does the narrator include so many religious references throughout the poem? Does he mention Christian and Buddhist images and notions for similar or disparate reasons?
  9. can you derive a tangible sense of what might be meant by the following, evocative but enigmatic phrases?
  10. at what Moloch-like aspects of modern culture does the narrator take particular aim in Part 2?
  11. Ginsberg fabricated the events related in Part 3, yet mentions his friend Carl Solomon by name. (Solomon was not happy about this.) Does this feel like an enfringement on someone else's rights--to immortalize them in a poem, by name, by connecting them to things which did not in fact characterize their own experience?
  12. does the poem transcend the stylistic and thematic inspiration of Walt Whitman enough to become its own creature?
  13. is the complaint raised in "Howl" at all similar to that voiced by the black writers of the stories and poem we read for today?


F. O'Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" (1954; 1955), PDF

  1. Though no motion picture, this written tale does register O’Connor’s evidence in visual art, including lighting choices.  At what points does the lighting of the tale do more than set the mood?
  2. This tale repeatedly turns on free indirect discourse, on a willingness to push the tale through a character’s (the unnamed 12-yr-old-girl’s) perspective even though the story isn’t technically told in first-person.  Can you identify moments where the narrative slides from objective, omniscient narration into this more, biased perspective inflected by our young protagonist’s viewpoint?
  3. Upon what criteria does our twelve-year-old, unnamed protagonist rely when deciding that her older, second cousins are intellectually inferior to herself?
  4. Besides intellectism, of what other –isms and failings is the child guilty, and is she aware of these faults in herself?
  5. Play the psychologist and attempt to determine what underpins the young girl’s criticism of others.
  6. Under what circumstances is the clause “I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost” first introduced in this tale, and what does the child make of it?
  7. Does the child’s creative imagination serve her well?
  8. Why does the child’s mother invite the Wilkins boys, Wendell and Cory, to hang out with her nieces?
  9. The child thinks these two boys stupid because they do not know Latin and are unfamiliar with the "Tantum Ergo," the final verses of the "Pange Lingua" written by Thomas Aquinas (c.1264). Is the subject matter of this eucharistic hymn at odds with the content of the Protestant hymns sung by the boys?
  10. What four occupations does the child consider for herself, and which does she currently think best?  Why?
  11. Though the child usually says her prayers automatically, sometimes her mind strays to and lingers upon what particular, pictorial narrative?
  12. What is the unnamed condition of the “freak” whom the two girls see at the fair?  What attitude does this individual adopt towards the condition in question?
  13. As the child mentally plays back her cousins’ account of the "freak," what new elements does she insert into it? Does her imagination turn the event into something resembling more a Catholic mass or Protestant revival, and what is the tone of the reimagined scene?
  14. Immediately following her prayer to behave with less ugliness towards others, the child notices the Host (bread, symbolizing Christ’s body in the Eucharist/Communion) and envisions the "freak" (208-209).  Can you trace any thematic connections among these three narrative elements?
  15. Tackle the latent symbolism of this story’s final line.


James Baldwin's "Letter to My Nephew" from The Fire Next Time (1963), PDF

  1. What two different types of laughter does Baldwin discover in his brother’s experience?
  2. Why might Baldwin choose not to identify the specific injustices experienced by his brother?
  3. Why does Baldwin call the white Americans complicit in sustaining a racially stratified society “innocent”?
  4. Baldwin again paints in broad strokes instead of clearly delineated details when he compares the conditions of black Americans to the Victorian Londoners of Charles Dickens’s novels, instead of naming a particular novel by the British author or listing specific difficulties generated by, say, the British Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 or the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), as well as those problems imperfectly addressed by the Mines and Collieries Act (1842), the Labor in Factories Act (1844), or the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1889).  Why speak in vague, evocative generalities?
  5. How many different ways does Baldwin use the word “black” here?
  6. In the same breath Baldwin tells his nephew to “trust your experience” and to “know whence you came” (2).  If the latter does not come naturally because of restricting “details and symbols,” this would make it difficult to do the former.  What sort of “details and symbols” do you imagine a black individual in the early ‘60s would need to deconstruct in order to fully recognize her/his potential?
  7. Why does Baldwin, in writing about integration, claim that the real crux of the matter lies in black Americans accepting white Americans, not the other way around?
  8. What does Baldwin believe prevents white folk from acting on the truths they know (presumably, truths about equality like those embedded in the U.S. Constitution)?


a painting of a desert scape with blue sky and clouds in the top half and tan and red rocks on the bottom half. there is an abandoned old car in the bottom right overgrown with moss and plants.
Paranoic Critical Solitude (1935)
Salvador Dalí



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu