Holes in Your Head
On Flannery O'Connor and also on Ottessa Moshfegh
This is the fourth section of Chase’s 2023 Reading in Review, a series of posts where Chase reflects on books read in 2023. The first is here. The reviews don’t assume you have read the works, and don’t spoil their experiences. This section primarily discusses:
Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Works
Ottessa Moshfegh’s McGlue, “Bettering Myself”, Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Lapvona
Full list of works discussed here.
I read all of the works of two different authors this year, both enjoyable. This post covers the first, Flannery O’Connor.
Her life’s work fits into two paperback collections: one fiction and one nonfiction. Reading her for the first time, I found the Catholic, Southern (and proud! An advocate of regional writing!) O’Connor weirder, grosser, and more violent than I would expect given how reverently her name is thrown around (much like Melville and his wild Moby Dick).
I am late to this game. Her famous grotesqueness felt like an actual revelation upon reading her stories. Here is the blueprint for so many other things, like almost everything on Adult Swim with their craggly mean animation (e.g., Squidbillies, and every episode of Mr. Pickles could be a Flannery O'Connor adaptation). And she’s definitely, absolutely a bit of a Rosetta Stone to the very-of-the-moment Ottessa Moshfegh.
To follow that for a bit, Moshfegh's gross and aggressive interests are wildly imitated, but rarely matched, and I think this is an answer why. Take, for example, this abridged opening of her short story "Bettering Myself":
My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. One was old and the other was young. The young one talked to me sometimes, asked me what I would do for the long weekend, if I’d see my folks over Christmas, and so forth. The old one looked the other way and twisted her robes in her fists when she saw me coming.
My classroom was the school’s old library. It was a messy old library room, with books and magazines splayed out all over the place and a whistling radiator and big fogged-up windows overlooking Sixth Street. I put two student desks together to make up my desk at the front of the room, next to the chalkboard. I kept a down-filled sleeping bag in a cardboard box in the back of the room and covered the sleeping bag with old newspapers. Between classes I took the sleeping bag out, locked the door, and napped until the bell rang. I was usually still drunk from the night before. Sometimes I had a drink at lunch at the Indian restaurant around the corner, just to keep me going — sharp wheat ale in a squat, brown bottle. McSorley’s was there but I didn’t like all that nostalgia. That bar made me roll my eyes. I rarely made my way down to the school cafeteria, but when I did, the principal, Mr. Kishka, would stop me and smile broadly and say, “Here she comes, the vegetarian.” I don’t know why he thought I was a vegetarian. What I took from the cafeteria were prepackaged digits of cheese, chicken nuggets, and greasy dinner rolls.
I had one student, Angelika, who came and ate her lunch with me in my classroom.
“Miss Mooney,” she called me. “I’m having a problem with my mother.”
She was one of two girlfriends I had. We talked and talked. I told her that you couldn’t get fat from being ejaculated into.
“Wrong, Miss Mooney. The stuff makes you thick in the middle. That’s why girls get so thick in the middle. They’re sluts.”
She had a boyfriend she visited in prison every weekend. Each Monday was a new story about his lawyers, how much she loved him, and so forth. She always had the same face on. It was like she already knew all the answers to her questions.
The element here that gets repeated in worse writers' stuff (taken from stories like this, but also the obviously and correctly celebrated My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and her debut novel Eileen) is a woman violating social norms. Our narrator here is drinking at work, and around students. She's at a religious school doing so, making it feel more inappropriate. Her life is mess, she's sleeping in the school, she's not behaving right in front of the kids.
What Moshfegh does here (and elsewhere in the story and in other pieces) is go farther than others are willing to go. The line I think others wouldn't include is: "I told her that you couldn’t get fat from being ejaculated into." This is a grotesque line (and efficiently grotesque too). Others might have the messy protagonist say inappropriate stuff to kids (I'm thinking of the show The Flight Attendant with Kaley Cuoco, or the show AP Bio), but nothing this violent. Nothing this genuinely shamey, sexually misadvised, grossly explicit. They would still want the character to be "likeable" which is at odds with the grotesqueness. They'd still never actually put the kids in jeopardy. I'm thinking again Eileen, of her father pointing his gun at school children. That's an evil thing, irredeemable, it's grotesque, that's why she puts it there.
The rest after that builds: "thick in the middle" is such an ugly and subtly violent thing to say, talking about people like animals, and then she raises the stakes by adding a prisoner boyfriend (danger… of course, prisoners need not be violent, but it feels like it is, she's playing off bad social biases). It feels like she is genuinely putting the life of this girl at risk. Messy-girl novels aren't always doing that, sometimes they’re scared to go that far.
And not for no good reason. Obviously, morally, portraying things that are genuinely grotesque is going to brush up against taboos, against claims that you're glamourizing evil or you're reveling in it. I think both O'Conner and Moshfegh are too good artists for this to be valid. O'Connor, super dogmatically religious and moral focused, on this exact topic, says:
The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees. Now this is the first point at which the novelist who is a Catholic may feel some friction between what he is supposed to do as a novelist and what he is supposed to do as a Catholic, for what he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be?
[...]
There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. 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. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to “tidy up reality” is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride. Open and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is meaningful, as the Church teaches."
I think O'Connor here is touching not just on the "ethics" (she would point to a less secular term) of writing this way, but also on precisely the same stuff that Annie Dillard is (Dillard has deep relationships with Catholicism too). Again, O'Connor says: "Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery." I'm thinking of Labutut, who seems aghast that modern science has removed the "understanding of the world" from physics: O'Connor would say, yes, precisely, the way it's always been! We have never understood the world, this isn't a specifically modern phenomenon.
That's not to say O'Connor is free from claims of ugly ideology (or Moshfegh either). They’re full of it, intentionally. But they’re using that as paint. The lines in “Bettering Myself” are more visceral because of the taboos they brush against. Her goal, as she says, is to make something honest, no matter if it looks glorious or not (an aside: I think the brutal work Andrea Long Chu makes of her subjects in her reviews is some of the best writing I'll ever read, but she swings and misses when she takes on Moshfegh for her fatphobia here. Reproducing the evils and taboos of society are the reason her stories make you feel so weird, she finds the exact most sensitive, socially ingrained, ugly nubs inside and flicks them. The art of fiction can be to do stuff like that).
Reading Flannery O'Connor's 30-odd stories, her life's work, was a great reading pleasure of the year. Reading them chronologically, it was enjoyable to watch her get sharper and better as the stories went on, and it was clear the kinds of phases she went through as she developed her craft.
The early stories have her sensibility immediately: pieces like "Wildcat" show her ability to establish authentic regional dialogue and a sense of danger and tension with the animal stalking the house. Her first story, "Geranium", already has the limited POV and internal chatter that I think is her best feature. She gets so deep inside these emotionally stunted, ugly characters that their strange and unusual ways of seeing the world feel totally inescapable. How else could you feel except bitter and angry at your neighbors?
She's got a great run of the stories that make up her novel Wise Blood. Both the two characters of those stories, Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery, have a sensitive loneliness that she captures. I love Motes on the train, homesick, watching the countryside go by. He’s great in being dismissive and mean to the charismatic little boy Emery. We know they are both yearning for connection, but Motes is too self-important to let himself experience it without irony. He pushes Emery away. The boy, meanwhile, exhibits what Charles Baxter describes in his book about subtext: his insistence on chattering nonsense reveals so much inherent backstory and POV about why he is the way he is. Other writers aren't this good. By the time Enoch Emery plots to fit inside a gorilla suit, I think O'Connor has reached something special. She has found (in her own words) the mystery of human behavior (why does this boy want to be in a gorilla suit? Because he's lonely. Does that make sense? Maybe? That's the best kind of literature).
Immediately after this is the most famous story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find", which has all the good hallmarks of all of any Flannery O'Connor story: a wise but weak old person, terribly stupid children, moral risk, violence, moving through Southern spaces, vehicles that seem powerful and uncontrollable, love and hatred towards God, brutal behavior. I don't have more to say on this than anyone else has (again, I recommend “Material” by Lucy Corin who literally maps out the function of each page of this story), except that my guess for the reason this one transcends her others and gets anthologized and read so much is all brand. There's something about a serial killer that feels sexier than "Civil War veteran" or "rich land owner" or "mother and mentally challenged daughter." He's even got a cool name!
My favorite of all her shorts is the Civil War veteran one, "A Late Encounter with the Enemy." It’s got an anciently old man and his young granddaughter (relatively, at least, she's in her 60s and he's over 100). Early, we got another "clock" in that the granddaughter is graduating from college, in her 60s. This feels wrong and pathetic. That's worth unpacking: in real life, getting a degree in your later ages can be a beautiful thing, it can mean never giving up on knowledge and life, hopeful. But there's a specific POV, a culturally in-grained, ugly POV, a bully's POV, where you would call that pathetic, and it's within the rights of the fiction to take that lens and use it. That's the grotesque! O'Connor gets inside the veteran's head so closely and beautifully to describe his feelings about his granddaughter Sally's graduation:
This was not the same uniform he had worn in the War between the States. He had not actually been a general in that war. He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all. It was like his feet, which hung down now shriveled at the very end of him, without feeling, covered with a blue-gray afghan that Sally Poker had crocheted when she was a little girl. He didn’t remember the Spanish-American War in which he had lost a son; he didn’t even remember the son. He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades. People were always asking him if he remembered this or that—a dreary black procession of questions about the past. There was only one event in the past that had any significance for him and that he cared to talk about: that was twelve years ago when he had received the general’s uniform and had been in the premiere.
“I was in that preemy they had in Atlanta,” he would tell visitors sitting on his front porch. “Surrounded by beautiful guls. It wasn’t a thing local about it. It was nothing local about it. Listen here. It was a nashnul event and they had me in it—up onto the stage. There was no bob-tails at it. Every person at it had paid ten dollars to get in and had to wear his tuxseeder. I was in this uniform. A beautiful gul presented me with it that afternoon in a hotel room.”"
I think is is maybe a perfect storytelling setup, really genuinely masterful. You've got an insecure, "pathetic" woman graduating from college, who wants her grandfather to attend her graduation (can you feel the desperation, weakness, ugliness in that need? It need not be in real life, but O'Connor wants it to be ugly, in fiction it can be "safe" to see things in that mean way). But the grandfather is a ticking time-bomb of an explosion: he is a Confederate War veteran (feel the latent hatred, racism, resentment). He is ugly with shriveled feet. He is so emotionally cold that he has forgotten his son (this is most grotesque line, the most taboo thing, the thing others would not be able to cross effectively). He is so conceited that he must dress up in this uniform to attend this meek local graduation. We feel his needs are as pathetic as his granddaughter's. This is a lose-lose situation: for him to get gratified would be ugly but to see an old man fail would also be ugly. It's incredible. At the emotional level, both their egos are at high stakes.
But more than external conflict or emotion, there are themes here. A Civil War veteran who has so little care for his family? Who has no regard for history, who is all pageantry and ego projection? That's political! For all O'Connor's contempt for the North, I don't think she's writing fiction that's bathed in a sincere Dixie flag.
Most importantly well done is his language, the nuggets of good words she's able to give him to paint his dialect, his community, and his way of seeing the world. "Guls" does so much work. His emphasis that the event was not local, it was "nashnul" undercut by the way she spells the word! The strange threat of sexual violence present in his emphasis on how beautiful the "gul" was in an afternoon hotel room! Grotesque grotesque grotesque!
She keeps us in that ugly world for all of the piece. The veteran is vain, lascivious, cruel. The granddaughter is pathetic, needy, stupid. Her nephew is a fat little boy, not only also stupid, but also so gluttonous and disrespectful that he cannot avoid rushing to the Coke-Cola vending machine (I love seeing modern details in her stories, O'Connor's contempt for late 20th century culture is great. She riffs in her in nonfiction on advertising executives, which feels anachronistic, but obviously it is not).
Graduation comes. O'Connor notes the details of a "black procession" which is meant literally to be the graduates in their black robes, but I felt the threat of the veteran's racist violence inherent in the scene, that he might blow at any moment. Everyone is hot in their wool robes. Granddaughter Sally smacks a Coke-Cola bottle out of her fat nephew's hands.
We stay in the veteran's ugly POV. He hears the speech, and O'Connor presses on that taboo again, that he has disregarded his family:
Another black robe had taken the place of the first one and was talking now and he heard his name mentioned again but they were not talking about him, they were still talking about history. “If we forget our past,” the speaker was saying, “we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won’t have one.” The General heard some of these words gradually. He had forgotten history and he didn’t intend to remember it again. He had forgotten the name and face of his wife and the names and faces of his children or even if he had a wife and children, and he had forgotten the names of places and the places themselves and what had happened at them... He heard the words, Chickamauga, Shiloh, Johnston, Lee, and he knew he was inspiring all these words that meant nothing to him. He wondered if he had been a general at Chickamauga or at Lee. Then he tried to see himself and the horse mounted in the middle of a float full of beautiful girls, being driven slowly through downtown Atlanta. Instead, the old words began to stir in his head as if they were trying to wrench themselves out of place and come to life.
Intertwined with this is the ending plot point: the nephew was supposed to move the man out of the sun, but he's left him there to go to the Coke-Cola machine, and the old man is baking to death in the heat.
It's unclear the literal mechanism of death, it's all filtered through the veteran's subjective POV. He experiences it as a "hole in his head", thinking, "If it hadn’t been for the little hole in the top of his head, none of the words would have got to him. He thought of putting his finger up there into the hole to block them but the hole was a little wider than his finger and it felt as if it were getting deeper." His moment of death is drawn out: we get his mental experience of being attacked by the spirits of the crimes of his past while literally, the man is holding a ceremonial sword and we get the gruesome detail that "his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone."
If there's any more need to feel the connection between O'Connor and Moshfegh, digging into a hole in the head is the ending of her great novella McGlue!
It does feel like after Wise Blood, O'Connor found a groove. There is dense meaning and detail in stories like "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" about a suitor who scams a mean old woman by courting her poor mentally deficient daughter, "The River" about a boy living with "modern" parents (i.e., wayward, lazy, sexually promiscuous, ugly) who drowns attempting to experience the glory of baptism, the other famous "Good Country People" about the wannabe-scholar one-leg woman who has her wooden leg stolen by a bible salesman.
As I said, I like the moments when you can see O'Connor as a part of the larger American project (e.g., the Coke Cola). "The Displaced Person" tells an economic story about wage pressure. A Polish refugee works harder for a landowner for less pay than the previous worker, creating harsh tension. This is the way violence in one part of the world reverberates everywhere (She says as much in her nonfiction: "the longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene. For him, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima affects life on the Oconee River, and there’s not anything he can do about it." I like seeing O'Connor know about Hiroshima)
"A View of the Woods" feels like the last story in this stretch. It has a classic O'Connor premise: a rich old man is trying to bypass the lazy stupid children he has and pass along his fortune (his last name is Fortune, which is great) to his granddaughter, the only one he thinks is smart enough to be worthy. The tension of this piece comes from whether he will change his mind: over the course of the story, he keeps glimpsing characteristics in the girl that remind him of his much-hated son-in-law, and it climaxes when he beats the girl. Again, the story has great modern details: a focus on the kinds of giant machines that can move and reshape the earth, a gas station, the fight between nature (his spunky well-written granddaughter appreciates the "view of the woods" that granddad's land development would destroy).
The last stretch of stories is weirder, they feel bigger and more spiritual. They point to a development that I wish O'Connor had survived to continue. What else would she have written? I like the sick family dynamics in "The Comforts of Home" where pious Thomas tries to undermine his promiscuous mother, and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" has the same template as Kafka’s “The Judgement” (and in a sense, Ben Marcus’s "Precious Precious") where another judgmental son judges his parent and finds himself judged in return. "The Partridge Festival" feels totally experimental for her, the main characters are both young, there's sexual tension between them, it's maybe a murder mystery.
One of the best written stories, in that it feels so dense with meaning and detail, is "Parker's Back" about a man covered in tattoos. Again, it feels bigger than the country-home stories of the first two thirds of this collection. The man is well traveled, still narrow-minded but not quite so narrow-minded as the veteran or the family of "A Good Man." It's a more emotionally honest story (in that O'Connor doesn't feel like she as the writer is so completely different from the voice of the story. This is worth remarking on: a clear feature of her early stories is that these ugly characters are painted so cruelly by the story, there is so much tonal and psychic distance, that O'Connor's intellectual concerns are done through rather than alongside the characters. They are three dimensional, but flatter than if the characters were people worth taking intellectually serious. This is a feature I feel like I see a lot in contemporary short stories, where you don't need to feel alongside the character for longer than a few pages.)
The last story "Judgement Day" is, as noted in the introduction, similar in plot to her first story, which is grim and fitting, but I was struck by how much of a command she has over voice. The story is about a man Tanner who is old and dying and wants to escape the North to return home to die in the South. O'Connor is back to high psychic distance and subtext. It is a great example, maybe the best most easily cited example, of subtext. Our man Tanner had a relationship with a black man in the South named Coleman. In the explicit version of the events Tanner recounts, Coleman was an idiot, subservient to Tanner, and not someone Tanner has respect for. But Tanner's behavior betrays him. He pins a note to himself in case he dies on the trip (a great, morbid detail) which immediately mentions to give the body to Coleman (how tender, unknowingly for Tanner). In his inner monologue, he keeps saying how he needs to get back to Coleman. And the first black man he sees in the North, he immediately compares to Coleman and tries to talk to the man about Coleman, even though the men are described as nothing alike. This is love!
I took a lot from my experience with these stories. The biggest thing I haven't yet had occasion to mention comes from her nonfiction, where she talks about the right order of operations for fiction: things first, and only through things, ideas.
I'll put the passage here:
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.
[...]
One of the most common and saddest spectacles is that of a person of really fine sensibility and acute psychological perception trying to write fiction by using these qualities alone. This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.
Now when the fiction writer finally gets this idea through his head and into his habits, he begins to realize what a job of heavy labor the writing of fiction is. A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.
All the sentences in Madame Bovary could be examined with wonder, but there is one in particular that always stops me in admiration. Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, “She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose stings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.”
The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it. At one end of it, we are with Emma and this very solid instrument “whose strings buzzed,” and at the other end of it we are across the village with this very concrete clerk in his list slippers. With regard to what happens to Emma in the rest of the novel, we may think that it makes no difference that the instrument has buzzing strings or that the clerk wears list slippers and has a piece of paper in his hand, but Flaubert had to create a believable village to put Emma in. It’s always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.
The idea that a good writer's job is putting slippers on clerks is something I've been repeating often this year.
Click here for the fifth post of 2023 Reading in Review when it’s posted and subscribe below to get email alerts for new posts. Full list of works discussed here.