Extra People

"He's extra and he's upset the balance around here" (Collected 322).
Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person" (1955)

Flannery O'Connor's "The Fiction Writer and His Country" (1957) in Collected 801-806

1. why do O'Connor and other artists not preoccupy themselves with capturing joie de vie in their storytelling--with providing their prosperous readers with . . . assurances (Collected 801-03, 806)?
2. how does O'Connor prefer to define "country"?
3. when O'Connor holds that "a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not," to what standard of "acceptable" is she implicitly referring (Collected 802)?
4. what word does O'Connor, speaking in her own voice, use to refer to a person of color?
5. why does O'Connor oppose representing America "according to survey" (Collected 803)?
6. O'Connor believes that her faith opens her eyes to reality, instead of closing them (Collected 804). What does she mean?
7. to what end does O'Connor employ violent and shock in her stories (Collected 805-806)?

Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" (1960; 1965) in Collected 813-21

1. Flannery O'Connor implies that she is one of those "for whom the ordinary aspects of daily-life prove to be of not great fictional interest" (813). She is less interested in the typical/normal than the atypical/abnormal (814), preferring the deeper if eccentric realism that concerns spiritual verities to a shallow realism of fact only (814-15). Such "grotesque" realism might contain "strange skips and gaps" in the narrative, along with elements of "mystery and the unexpected," while retaining an "inner coherence" faithful to individual human psychology and spiritual experience (815). Do you share this preference? Consider the types of film and television towards which you gravitate . . .
2. why does O'Connor claim that the "social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction" (814 top)?
3. what once-hidden aspect of human experience has ridden the wave of realism in twentieth-century fiction, according to O'Connor (814 mid-bot)?
4. O'Connor notes that one's definition of "realism" hinges on what one considers to be "the ultimate reaches of reality," that many post-Enlightenment optimists convinced of science's ability to eventually rid human experience of all suffering focus their attention on the agents of that suffering--on economic, social, psychological, and other quantifiable variables (815 bot). She, by contrast, believes that human life--while describable--remains inherently mysterious because it stands atop a great mystery we only partially understand (816 top). As a Christian writer whose life rest on faith in Divine Grace, then, is O'Connor primarily interested in what we do completely understand as humans, or what we do not? Is she more interested in probability or possibility (816)?
5. why does O'Connor claim that writing grotesque fiction is, in one way, easier than writing the kind of realistic fiction produced by Henry James (816 bot)?
6. does O'Connor call authors to be compassionate, to place feeling over morality (817 mid)? Would C. S. Lewis agree or disagree? Consider pages 32-33 of Lewis' The Problem of Pain.
7. what definition of prophecy, as it applies to the novelists, does O'Connor offer up (817 bot), and what does she mean when she casts herself with other writers as a "realist of distances" (817 bot, 819 top)?
8. O'Connor writes, in 1957, that Southern writers can identify "freaks" so readily because they retain a theological conception of the "whole" human (i.e. soul, as well as body and mind) against which the freak is measured (817 bot). Is this true today? Do the majority of those living in the South see reality through a theological lens? Are they, like Southerners sixty years ago, "Christ-haunted" even when not "Christ-centered" (818 top)?
9. does O'Connor identify herself as one who speaks "with" or "counter to" her own era's "prevailing attitudes" (819 bot)?
10. O'Connor provocatively asserts that if a reader's heart is in the right place, s/he will indeed find her/his heart "lifted up" by reading her stories (819 bot), and that her fiction points to the "the redemptive act," though it also highlights the high cost of such restoration (and often doesn't detail the actual restoration itself, just its beginning) (820). Do you agree?
11. when O'Connor claims that "distortion" is necessary for certain writers to get their "vision" across to the reader, what does she mean (816-17, 821 top)?
12. is it possible to reconcile O'Connor's call to create "grotesque" fiction filled with atypical scenarios with the Biblical call to fill one's mind with "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable . . . [with] anything [that] is excellent or praiseworthy" (Philippians 4:8)?
    

Flannery O'Connor's "The Displaced Person" (1955) in Collected 285-327

1. what important differences can you identify between the final version of "The Displaced Person" and the opening excerpt of a previous draft which we examined in our last class?
2. the peacock, which did not appear at all in an earlier version of this story, struts about the dairy farm to what end?  Why does O’Connor include this bird, and what do her characters’ responses to the bird’s presence reveal about them?
3. why might Mr. Guizac shrug so often?
4. when the Priest claims “‘He came to redeem us’” (317 bot), of whom is he speaking?
5. could Mr. Guizac’s narrative thread have concluded any other way than it did?
6. would it be appropriate to characterize Mrs. Shortley as religious?
7. what appears to motivate the actions of the eighty-year-old priest?
8. why does Mrs. McIntyre wear a nice dress and necklace to great the émigrés recently arrived from Poland? Does her attitude towards the displaced family change over the course of the story?
9. trace Mrs. Shortley’s shifting opinions about the displaced family; what triggers each change?
10. what precipitates Mr. Shortley’s adoption of his wife’s prejudices towards the Guizacs?
11. how does the final “vision” of Mrs. Shortley differ from those that precede it?
12. what type of value system does Mrs. McIntyre use to justify her actions throughout this story?
13. is Mrs. McIntyre’s dream (322) in any way prescient?
14. which characters encounter circumstances that force them to understand what it’s like to be displaced?
15. which voices deploy the words “negro,” “n-gger,” and “colored person”? What does suggest about O’Connor’s own posture towards each of the words?
16. why does Flannery O’Connor allow so many of her characters in this story to speak truths aloud, then remain ignorant of these truths’ applications to themselves?

Summer Landscape (1909)
Wassily Kandinsky

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu