'The Least Motion of Wonder in Himself'

In 1968, my high-school English teacher loaned me the anthology of short stories she had used at Kent State University just a few years earlier. Included were the usual suspects -- Maupassant, Hemingway, Chekhov, Eudora Welty – but I read them because I knew nothing. Among the unknowns was Flannery O’Connor and her “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a title I knew as a young blues fan from the Bessie Smith song. I stayed up late one school night and read the story in bed. I had never encountered anything so violent and disturbing that came under the heading of “literature” and was defiantly not pulp. It was more shocking than a vicious film noir like “Kiss of Death.” Hugh Kenner would call O’Connor’s story a “nice morbid little shocker.” 

To this day I’ve never read anything like O’Connor’s mingling of murderousness and what might be called applied theology – a combination I've seldom encountered outside Dante. As a non-Catholic, my understanding is not profound. At first I read it for the Misfit’s psychotic behavior – and the narcissistic grandmother’s comeuppance. Now it’s a permanent gloss on the human condition.

 

In her final short story, “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor has O.E. (Obadiah Elihue) Parker, at age fourteen, see a tattooed man at the county fair. The sight transforms his life:

 

“Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”

 

Self-absorbed and always self-seeking, Parker has never indulged in a self-reflective thought. He moves by instinct, following obscure impulses as they lead him. In his Rambler essay for July 9, 1751, Johnson writes:

 

"It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of inquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate inquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing; and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties."

 

Parker sleeps in “the gloomy quiescence of astonishment,” at least until he crashes a tractor into a tree and instinctively yells, “God above!” I’m not describing influence; more an elective affinity. O’Connor admired Johnson’s work, especially his Lives of the Poets. His name shows up five times in her published letters, The Habit of Being (1979), always with approval. We know from Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 1985) that her personal library included Dr. Johnson’s Prayers (ed. Elton Trueblood, 1947) and a two-volume Lives of the Poets, as well as Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

 

Johnson and O’Connor would have agreed that evil is a mystery to be endured not a problem to be solved, and that self-delusion is endemic among humans. On April 14, 1750, Johnson wrote in The Rambler:

 

“When a man finds himself led, though by a train of honest sentiments, to wish for that which he has no right, he should start back as from a pitfall covered with flowers. He that fancies he should benefit the public more in a great station than the man that fills it will in time imagine it an act of virtue to supplant him; and as opposition readily kindles into hatred, his eagerness to do that good, to which he is not called, will betray him to crimes, which in his original scheme were never proposed.”

 

Today is O’Connor’s centenary. She was born on March 25, 1925, and died in 1964 at age thirty-nine from systemic lupus erythematosus.

 

[Kenner’s quip can be found in Vol. 1, p. 268 of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018).]