A Layered Reality

"The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive" (O'Connor 862).
Flannery O'Connor's "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1863)

Flannery O'Connor's letter to "A" (Betty Hester) / Milledgeville / 20 July 55 / 942-43

1. in the first of many letters written to fellow fiction writer Betty Hester (“A”), Flannery O’Connor declares that she writes the way she does “because (not though) [she is] a Catholic” (O’Connor 942, emphasis added).  As both a Christian and a woman with a “modern consciousness,” how does the respond to the “terrible world” she inhabits (O’Connor 942)?
2. alluding to an article about her work in The New Yorker, O’Connor claims that “the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them” (O’Connor 942).  She suggests that it is this missing moral sensibility that leads some readers to think her stories bitter, brutal, sarcastic, and horrifying.  How does your own view of reality’s complexity/layers shape your reading of O’Connor’s stories?
3. what does O’Connor mean when she calls Christian realism "hard" (O’Connor 942)?

Flannery O'Connor's "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1963), 853-64

1. do you agree with O’Connor that educated westerners now prefer abstract statements over storytelling, and value statistics even more than abstractions (O’Connor 853)?
2. what faults does the Catholic press apparently find in contemporary novels written by Catholic authors?
3. what does Conrad accomplish which O’Connor approves?
4. what does O’Connor mean by the provocative claim that “[t]he isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory” (O’Connor 856)?
5. do you agree that, “Alienation was once a diagnosis, but in much of the fiction of our time it has become an ideal” (O’Connor 856)?
6. is the following an accurate diagnosis of the American attitude towards religious belief as it manifests itself in life and art?  “It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, which is what the novelist had to do. It takes less and less belief acted upon to make one appear a fanatic. When you create a character who believes vigorously in Christ, you have to explain his aberration” (O’Connor 857).
7. O’Connor holds that successful storytellers needs some concrete standard against which they can measure themselves; she finds such a standard difficult to locate outside of Christian practice, and argues that the modern individual’s primary moral standard is self-created, a function of personal preferences (O’Connor 858).  Can you identify any other hard and fast standards against which modern writers regularly measure themselves?
8. why does O’Connor claim stories can accomplish which “[a]bstractions, formulas, [and] laws” cannot (O’Connor 858)?
9. what does O’Connor claim the Hebrew writers of the Jewish Bible accomplished which the modern Church has overlooked?
10. what does this Catholic writer find so valuable in the Protestant South (859)?
11. O’Connor claims that literature which penetrates to “any considerable depth of reality” ultimately comes upon what (O'Connor 860)?
12. how do modern readers apparently react to characters who, prophet-like, see “near things with their extensions of meaning,” thereby “seeing far things close up” (O’Connor 860)?
13. according to O’Connor, a sense of regional identity is built, not upon historical events—like slavery and segregation—but upon “qualities that endure because they are related to truth,” qualities that often manifest not in typical but extraordinary ways (O’Connor 861).  What qualities does she believe gives the South its true identity?
14. what kind of grace do contemporary readers apparently wish to find in literature, and how do they want this vision of grace to make them feel (862)?
15. O’Connor argues that while everyone wants the redemptive act in the stories they encounter, they have forgotten the price of such restoration (O’Connor 863).  Do you agree that a central character’s profound transformation always comes at a high cost to her/himself?

Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim / Norton Critical Edition articles: 393-403 (that is not a typo--only part of Guerard's article), and 439-54

1. which of these early, critical responses to Lord Jim perpetuate some kind of racial essentialism?
2. in the author's note, written in 1917, Conrad claims that "Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can assure my readers that he is not the product of coldy perverted thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either . . . He was 'one of us'" (6). Is Jim, indeed, a realistic figure, a representative human whose strengths and weaknesses are in some way universal?
3. consider the opposing viewpoints represented by the New York Tribune critic (1900), who suggests that "[t]hough originally projected on a small scale, its unpremeditated expansion to the form of a full fledged novel has done nothing to spoil the simplicity and balance of the design" (393), and Hugh Clifford (1904), who argues that this admittedly amazing novel "suffers because we are asked to believe that the story as written was told by the seaman Marlow to his friends after dinner, an illusion which it is impossible to sustain [. . .]" (396). Whose perspective does the novel itself best support?
4. consider the like-minded perspectives of the New York Tribune critic (1900) who claims that "Lord Jim is a hard book to read, for it communicates to the reader a grievous sense of man's weakness and of the woe that he can bring down upon his own head" (394), and Albert J. Guerard (19858), who claims for Lord Jim "a form bent on involving and implicating the reader in a psycho-moral drama which has no easy solution, and bent on engaging his sensibilities more strenuously and even more uncomfortably than ever before" (397). Does Conrad's novel indeed prompt the reader to engage in personal, even uncomfortable self-analysis?
5. does Guerard classify Lord Jim as an example of the romance, realism, the grotesque, the sentimental, naturalism, or something else (397)?
6. Guerard asserts both that Jim's second chance is a "tragically certain" failure (398)--one in which he is once again "immobilized by a dream" (403)--and that the reader is free to decide whether Jim is ultimately redeemed or not (399). Which do you think best describes the closing act of Jim's life: success or failure?
7. why does Guerard think Lord Jim, an exemplar of the "art novel," worth reading repeatedly (399-400)?
8. what cardinal sins does the "casual" reader of Lord Jim tend to commit (400-401)?
9. Albert J. Guerard (1958) suggests that our sympathies for Jim are, ultimately, left suspended, that it is difficult to either glorify or despise him. "The digressive method does indeed convey the 'feel' of life. But the impressionist aim is to achieve a fuller truth than realism can, if necessary by 'cheating'; and to create in the reader an intricate play of emotion and a rich conflict of sympathy and judgment, a provisional bafflement in the face of experience which turns out to be more complicated than we ever would have dreamed" (397). See too Guerard's consideration of the novel's close, and his claim that "the novel, especially on a rereading, legitimately asks us to decide whether Jim, still 'at the call of his exalted egoism,' is really in the clear at this moment; whether he is truly redeemed" (399). Towards which pole of opinion does the twenty-first century reader incline, or are we too drawn towards the middle, ambivalent course?
10. do you dare to disagree with the reflection of J. Hillis Miller (1982) that "from whatever angle it is approached Lord Jim reveals itself to be a work which raises questions rather than answering them. The fact that it contains its own interpretations does not make it easier to understand. The overabundance of possible explanations only inveigles the reader to share in the self-sustaining motion of a process of interpretation which cannot reach an unequivocal conclusion" (453)?

Accen on Rose (1926)
Wassily Kandinsky

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu