"Struggling Successfully": Notes on O'Connor's "Good Country People"

“Good Country People” opens with one of its titular examples: that of Mrs. Freeman, the “country woman on the place,” though the story itself doesn’t make her role (narrative or otherwise) immediately clear (“Writing Short Stories” 98). The opening paragraph operates more as a peculiar and acutely focused portrait of Mrs. Freeman than a typical character description. Consider the following–the story’s opening lines–in which the reader is confronted with a series of operative facial expressions before the woman herself is ever described:

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Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there, as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. (271)

 

Given a reasonable paratextual context in which a reader of this story may only know its title, the latter’s operative adjective–“good”– becomes immediately complicated by the first adjective of the story itself: “neutral.” Furthermore, this neutrality–and, by its interaction with the story’s title, a larger association with a perceived spectrum between “good” and “neutral”–is ascribed to “an expression that she wore.” This formulation clarifies the moral valence presented by the story’s title: the “good” of “Good Country People” is a matter of social presentation (“an expression…”) and choice (“... that she wore”). From the outset, the moral life of this story has less to do with inherent qualities than affective social relations.

 

Mrs. Freeman’s various expressions also deploy a narrative quality that is nonetheless still steeped in sociality. Her “neutral expression” is, after all, that which she wears “when she [is] alone” (271). Sociality, at least for Mrs. Freeman, is synonymous with storytelling which, more often than not, is a matter of forward movement, “like the advance of a heavy truck,” and though a reverse gear is possible, its formulation is odd and unexpected (271). To move a story in reverse–to “retract a statement”–results not in motion but in the seizure of motion and, finally, a disappearance of the spirit of the storyteller: “... when she did, her face came to a complete stop… Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit” (271).

 

Therefore, from the story’s opening paragraph, the reader is presented with a peculiar model of moral quality mediated through intersocial change and exchange which, in its operation, either moves forward or stops entirely. Also, in a meta-narrative way, this particular mode of description elevates action—those utterances and operations with which an actant enacts change in a story—as the functional plain of description and, thus, of character itself. In contrast, we might consider what Dora Zhang called the Balzacian “expected protocols for describing a person… detailing physical features and items of dress and grooming that function recognizably as indexes of socioeconomic position and moral character” (Zhang 1). At this stage, the reader does not receive a traditional description of Mrs. Freeman—such a description might frame her class position through physical description. In fact, such a description never occurs. One may then read the story’s opening paragraph as an assertion of choice, expression, and action as the field upon which the story will lay out its game of goodness.

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But Mrs. Freeman, despite being the story’s opening facade, is not its focal character. In fact, the story manifests primarily through two characters: Mrs. Hopewell, through whose consciousness most of the story is revealed; and Joy-Hulga, her daughter, to and through whom the major actions of the story occur. Given Mrs. Freeman’s description as a model for the story’s larger concerns with morality vis-à-vis action, we might consider the first description of Joy-Hulga as revelatory through its radical formal difference from that of Mrs. Freeman: “Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg” (271).[1] Without any of the choice, expression, or action dramatized in Mrs. Freeman, one might read this introduction as a reduction of Joy-Hulga to the kind of classical character objectivity of Zhang’s Balzacian example which, in the story’s proposed scheme of morality operating through action, relegates her to a static, and thus amoral, mode of being.

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Joy-Hulga’s character is ultimately reduced to and through her artificial leg–the result of a childhood hunting accident–as the leg comes to take on peculiar narrative and exegetic importance, as seen in O’Connor’s own reading of it as a locus of symbolic accumulation through the piling-on of character opinions. Within my own model of the story’s concern with action, the leg is a literalization of Joy-Hulga’s initial incapacity to engage with morality: she is literally hobbled or, as O’Connor puts it, “we perceive that there is a wooden part of her soul that corresponds to her wooden leg…” (“Writing Short Stories” 99). So, as “the large hulking Joy” moves through the house, “lumbers” into the kitchen, “standing rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward,” one might see a corresponding movement in her paper soul (273; 271; 274).[2]

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Furthermore, expression is central to Joy-Hulga’s figuration. Considering the following quotation:

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Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it. (273).

 

Though the story’s narrator categorizes this paragraph’s opening list as one of “sayings,” we might also understand it to be one of expressions in the sense that each of its parts are idiomatic and axiomatic phrases. Joy-Hulga’s distaste with her mother’s idiomatic expressions circles back to her fundamental distaste—in fact, previous erasure—of any passive expression of her own: she’s been reduced to apparent apathy through “constant outrage.” One might glean, at the paragraph’s end, the noetic nature of her self-destructive outrage. Its final simile is an invocation of Oedipus Rex, whose self-blinding was “an act of will” incited by the fraught nature of knowledge. Therefore, one might see knowledge as a necessary aspect of Joy-Hulga’s apathy, and thus her narrative—and therefore moral—paralysis.

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She does, after all, have a Ph.D. in philosophy—one marker of knowledge accumulation par excellence. At the point in the story when her education is explained to the reader, it is also revealed that Joy-Hulga has a heart condition: “She had a weak heart” (276). This nonspecific condition, like the artificial leg, contributes to her lack of mobility: “Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about” (276). But, despite not working, Joy-Hulga still spends her days submerged in academic knowledge: “All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair reading” (276). Her concerns are fundamentally those of knowledge and she is, thus, an ardent atheist: “‘I don’t even believe in God’” (285).

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The nature of her heart condition, which I would argue is both medical and spiritual, might be elucidated through an exploration of one of those philosophers Joy-Hulga appears to be reading: Malebranche. She cites the former in an outburst against her mother:

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To her own mother she had said—without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full—'Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!’ she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, ‘Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!’ (276)

 

Firstly, we might read Joy-Hulga’s sudden outburst—“without warning, without excuse…”—as a non-narrative event because of its apparent disconnection from any causality. Though it is an action, it is a lonely action made separate from any other actants through local incoherence and separate from any narrative through its sudden appearance: a kind of small manifestation of Joy-Hulga’s own narrative position: lonely, stultified, and incoherent. One must, at this point, recall that Mrs. Hopewell is the prism through which this story is cast. Given Joy-Hulga’s own position—a position locked away from the reader—her outburst may not seem random at all.

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Her grand invocation of personal knowledge is ironized through both syntactical slippage and ideological elision. Consider the slippage that occurs in “‘Do you ever look inside see what you are not? God!’” Though the final word immediately operates as an empty marker of exasperation, it may also be read as an answer to its preceding question: you are not God: a condemnation of her mother’s narcissism that nevertheless ironizes Joy-Hulga’s atheism. This irony is doubled down upon with her invocation of Malebranche: “‘We are not our own light!’” Malebranche, an ardent theist, drew this line from Augustine’s Confessions as a reminder of the divine nature of all knowledge: “I read too that the soul of man, although it bears witness of the light, is not the Light. But the Word, who is himself God, is the true Light, which enlightens every soul born into the world” (Augustine 144; emphasis original).  Even Augustine himself wrote this in review of Psalms 88 and 89: another link in a greater historical chain.

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Therefore, one might read even Joy-Hulga’s most explicit explosions of personal academic knowledge as ideologically self-centered and removed from historical—i.e., social and inter-actantial—context. Knowledge, like her artificial leg, operates as that which both constitutes and delimits her narrative selfhood. Her atheism—though an important antagonistic force in and of itself for Christian readers of the story (O’Connor included)—is, ultimately, just a marker of her narrative/moral position in the story: not amoral for a lack of belief in God, but amoral for an unwillingness to engage on the social, expressive, and actantial field upon which the story has levied its notions of goodness—even if such a field is of Joy-Hulga’s own mother’s creation.[3] Atheism, and its concomitant theism (or mere faith), is but one language through which the story expresses these essentially narrative concerns.

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It makes sense, then, that the narrative force which disrupts Joy-Hulga’s position is the coming of the Bible salesman, Manley Pointer. His arrival in the story is marked by a series of odd resonances with and against Joy-Hulga: his “bright blue suit and yellow socks” invoke Joy-Hulga’s “icy blue eyes” and “yellow sweat shirt” (277; 273; 276); he has “prominent face bones” through which his expressions are constant, numerous, and large with “eyes sparkling” and “a pleasant laugh” (277); he carries an enormous valise “that weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing” (277). Even as Pointer bears some of the visual markers that the story has come to associate with Joy-Hulga, he both counters and literalizes her essentially narrative traits: he is boldly expressive and moves with embodied bias. Though a reader might understand this bias to be due to the literal weight of his faith—a valise full of bibles—the story will later reveal a more complicated truth. Pointer and Joy-Hulga are positioned as mutual shadows: opposite yet mutually engaged.

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Pointer goes on to put pressure upon yet another of Joy-Hulga fundamental features: her righteous sense of social isolation. Though Mrs. Hopewell is hesitant to welcome him into her home, he quickly ingratiates himself with her through a miraculous appeal to her thus-understood senses of goodness and truism:

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‘I know,’ he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, ‘that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me… I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face” … 

 

‘Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth—not many people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy… People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!’

 

‘Why!’ she cried, ‘good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!

 

‘You said a mouthful,’ he said. (278-79)

 

Pointer does what Joy-Hulga has thus been unwilling to do: submit himself to the norms of a given social context. The miracle of this interaction is Pointer’s seemingly innate understanding of Mrs. Hopewell’s ultimate evaluation of “good country people”: they are “simple,” deferential, and hold goodness to be passively expressible. 

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This regional simplicity manifests formally through the story’s depiction of Pointer’s country accent, both at the level of syntax (i.e., “‘I know I’m real simple’”) and, most profoundly, through the spelling of individual words. Though we see other examples (“sher,” “inraduce,” etc. [279]), the most revealing construction is “Chrustian.” While the accent work is clear, we might also read this as another enforcement of the story’s greater concern with the relationship between sociality and morality. Pointer replaces the “i” at the center of “Christian” and replaces it with a “u”—trading the first-person pronoun for the phonetic second-person pronoun—and thus repositions one of the story’s fields of goodness (Christianity) from a personal to a social matter: from I to You. For all of Pointer’s concerns with honesty (“‘You don’t see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country’” [279]), this formulation is, ultimately, a reflection of his own deceptive instrumentalization of the story’s field of goodness: he is using sociality, rhetorical action, and expression to cheat his way into the parlor, as it were. But we need not get ahead of ourselves.

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His deceptive nature, at least to the Mrs. Hopewells of the world, is further concretized when he reveals that, like Joy-Hulga, he has a heart condition: “‘See,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I got this heart condition… I may not live long’” (279). If this admission weren’t enough of an alignment with Joy-Hulga, Mrs. Hopewell makes it abundantly clear: “He and Joy had the same condition!” (279). If one were to accept the reading that I have previously offered—that, like her leg, Joy-Hulga’s heart condition corresponds to her spiritual/narrative position—then Pointer’s apparent country goodness grows somewhat wan.

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Given these generative similarities and apparent contradictions, the story necessarily brings Pointer and Joy-Hulga together. Presented alongside a shift in narrative focus from Mrs. Hopewell to Joy-Hulga, the following scene unfolds: Pointer leaves the Hopewell house and runs into Joy-Hulga on the road outside the farm. The encounter is oddly dramatized and continues to bear the story’s greater concern with expression:

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He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo… His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, ‘You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?’

 

The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. ‘Yes,’ she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.

 

‘It must have been mighty small!’ he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the same. (283)

 

At first glance, one might see this interaction as a kind of crude joke—a country boy persists in his clownery in the face of a woman’s high-tower stoicism—and, to a certain extent, that is true. But one might also read this passage as a dramatization of one of the operative differences between Pointer and Joy-Hulga—Pointer is an expressive actant (“gazing with curiosity,” “shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face,” and, finally, falling into a “gaze of complete admiration,” all whirling about the telling of his joke), persistent in his social act(s), and thus operates within the story’s normative field of morality.

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Joy-Hulga’s chosen separation from the story’s normative morality is again enforced through this meeting with Pointer. But, because the story has shifted narrative focus, the reader can witness the process by which she valorizes her stoic self-control in a thought that, ultimately, belies her own actantial impulse:

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During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two back fields there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful. (284)

 

At one register, Joy-Hulga sees herself as an obliquely sexualized Socratic mentor edifying Pointer as she exploits him and thus codifying her own intellectually superior position. At another register, as read through the syntactical changes of the passage, she enacts the imaginative process by which thought might become action. Though “she imagined” is the operative phrase from the outset of the passage, its final sentence resolves this imagination into action: “She took…” One can therefore read this moment—the first time Joy-Hulga’s interiority is depicted—as the pivot upon which the story shifts from an exploration of its moral/narrative field into an enactment of those concerns: from this point on, the story will test its own hypothesis that morality is a narrative function. Fittingly, this is also the point at which the narratorial perspective sidles up to Joy-Hulga.

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Pointer and Joy-Hulga plan a date, then meet the next day—again, on the highway outside the family farm. She waits for him and, just as she’s beginning to believe that he won’t show up, he emerges “from behind a bush” with a “toast-colored” hat that he did not have on the previous day (284-85). His miraculous appearance—mirrored by his miraculous apprehension of Mrs. Hopewell earlier in the story—takes on an explicitly Christian valence with his arising from behind a bush like the voice of God to Moses. The “toast-colored” hat (a decidedly odd descriptor to which Joy-Hulga attaches with peculiar tenacity and to which the story later returns) might be read as the first complicating factor of Pointer’s apparent Christian goodness. One might read “toast” as bread touched by fire—or, the body of Christ marred by flames. Joy-Hulga also notes that the hat “was slightly too large for him,” creating an incongruence that, at multiple registers, calls his goodness into question: 1) is the hat stolen?; 2) if the hat does invoke Christ, what does it mean that it does not fit him?

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In either case, this nascent uncertainty conditions the reader into a kind of anxiety regarding Manley Pointer’s intentions. Amid this anxiety, Joy-Hulga’s prosthetic leg reemerges: “They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, ‘Where does your wooden leg join on?’” (285). For the first time in the story, Joy-Hulga responds with silent and uncontrollable expression: “She turned an ugly red and glared at him…” (285). At this point, Pointer is beginning to seduce Joy-Hulga into his own apparent mode of expression: sudden, uncontrollable, and coherent. It can come as no surprise, then, that their conversation immediately takes a moralized turn:

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‘I didn’t mean you no harm,’ he said. ‘I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.’

 

‘No,’ she said, looking forward and walking fast, ‘I don’t even believe in God.’

 

At this he stopped and whistled. ‘No!’ he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.

 

‘She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. ‘That’s very unusual for a girl,’ he remarked. (285).

 

Therefore expression and morality again begin to cohere but now with a newly articulated valence of gender ideology. In a moment of culmination, Pointer resolves these factors into action: “he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily” (285).

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One might read this particularly rich section as the story’s reiterated thesis: goodness as a matter of affective social relations as mediated through the narrative features of expression, choice, and action. If this story were a traditional romance, this is the point at which the curtains would fall, and the reader would understand Joy-Hulga as having been successfully seduced into a normative moral field. But, naturally, the story continues and provides one last apotheotic burst of Joy-Hulga’s intellectual self-satisfaction and a further complication upon the story’s moral portrait of Pointer:

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The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin [sic] in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. (285-86)

 

She once again rationalizes her experience as “a matter of the mind’s control,” and thus within her individually exceptional purview. By doing so, she again undermines any influence of sociality even upon something as purely interpersonal as a kiss: “some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.” Nevertheless, her self-satisfied reverie is preceded by a neutral narrative statement: “the kiss… had more pressure than feeling behind it…” One might read this assertion—as syntactically connected to the description of action that precedes it as the intoned thought that follows it—as a true revelation of Pointer’s intentions: not passion but pressure.

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Pointer’s pressure upon Joy-Hulga soon reaches its climax after the two have climbed up into the hayloft of a barn. Joy-Hulga notes the scenery through the window: “The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue” (287). This is a pastoral literalization of the story’s thus-established discursive landscape: a dark ridge of uncertainty within a pastel pastoral overseen by a cold sky the same color as Joy-Hulga’s eyes. After Pointer removes her glasses, the view changes: “She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be green swelling lakes” (287). It’s an essentially new landscape: the eye-blue sky is now “hollow,” the already-described ridge takes on the unfamiliar preposition “a,” and the hills have transformed into “green swelling lakes.” With the removal of her glasses—the prosthetic many critics of this story ignore in favor of the leg—she has entered an unfamiliar context.

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Amidst this unfamiliarity, Pointer’s pressure upon Joy-Hulga—thinly veiled as passion—reemerges and clarifies itself as an interest in her wooden leg. As the two kiss, he insists that she prove to him that she loves him: “He leaned over and put his lips to hear ear. ‘Show me where your wooden leg joins on,’ he whispered” (288). Though she’s hesitant to do so—not from shame but pride, “as a peacock about his tail” (288)—she ultimately relents out of her continued sense of superiority over him. But this presumed superiority, as it manifests in the narrative, belies a new sense of social relatedness:

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She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, ‘All right,’ it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his. (289)

 

This sense of relatedness is one of feeling witnessed but it is, once again, mediated through a quasi-Christian depiction of Pointer. By “surrendering to him completely,” she is enacting a model of Christian grace through which salvation is achieved through submission to a very particular actant. Were this story a parable, it might end here: with the removal of her wooden leg and her walking, hand-in-hand, with her new savior.

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Pointer takes the leg off, “setting it on its foot out of her reach,” and, despite Joy-Hulga’s protestations, refuses to give it back to her (289). In a moment of odd communion, he, rather than returning her leg, enacts his own revelation to Joy-Hulga. He reveals the contents of his valise:

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It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. (289-90).

 

With this revelation, any potentially Christian parabolic function of Manley Pointer is cast in an ambiguous shadow. From the hollow Bible, he lays out each of his earthly vices in Pagan fashion, “like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess.” Despite his previous miracles, he reveals that he is, finally and as his name suggests, just a man. His nominative presentation culminates with his final action of the passage, one in which he assures Joy-Hulga’s attendance: “he stopped and pointed.”

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At the level of pure narrative, this revelation assures a certain kind of reader that this story will not have, for lack of a better term, a good ending: Manley Pointer is a vicious charlatan who now has Joy-Hulga isolated and immobile. This assertion is fulfilled when, despite Joy-Hulga’s increasingly desperate pleas, he refuses to give her leg back. So, when he throws the leg into his valise and proceeds to leave with it, one might permit this story to slip back into a different kind of moral clarity: the bad man has gotten away with his bad act, leaving our protagonist at sea, as it were.

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But, if we pay close attention to the description of Pointer’s departure from the hayloft, we might maintain the moral uncertainty that has thus far carried us forth. As he descends from the hayloft, he pauses to say one last thing to Joy-Hulga “with all of him [passed] but his head”: an image that invokes the cephalophoric St. Dennis, whose hagiography describes his preaching a sermon while carrying his own severed head (290). Furthermore, despite enacting the revelation of his name in the unpacking of his valise, Pointer reveals that he’s been using a pseudonym: “‘And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long’” (291). Then, with his last words, he enacts a Heideggerian syntactical ambivalence that both subverts Joy-Hulga’s self-image and formalizes his own character ambiguity: “‘… you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!’” (291)[4]. He finally departs, “his toast-colored hat [disappearing] down the hole,” and Joy-Hulga, still without her glasses, watches through the window as he goes:

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When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake. (291)

 

With this Christ illusion of Pointer walking on water, Joy-Hulga is left immobile in the hayloft and the story’s main narrative ends, thus leaving the reader with a kind of ambiguity that is difficult to categorize.

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Ultimately, “Good Country People” never outright abandons its opening assertions vis-à-vis goodness: that it is enacted and dramatized on a field that is fundamentally narrative—expression, choice, and action. The job of the story, as it were, has been to move Joy-Hulga into the field of action and thus moral/spiritual life through her brief but profound encounter with Manley Pointer—a figure that is, in one sense, immoral (or, perhaps, amoral)—a thief and a conman—yet incredibly active at the level of narrative movement: a Hopewellian hero. The theatre of moral ambiguity which Pointer enacts for Joy-Hulga during the story’s climax permits her to enter a field of action. But this entry is ultimately complicated, if not outright contradictory. How might she now become an actant if she can’t walk? How might she see the world around her without her glasses? How is one meant to move forward, hobbled, in a world of illusions? Her position at the story’s end leaves her literally immobile and semi-blinded but, perhaps, morally and spiritually enfranchised.

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If “Good Country People” were mere Christian parable, as many theorists have asserted, it would look entirely different. It would not, for one, make obfuscation and ambiguity central to its exegetic tension, let alone the entry point through which one enters the story’s moral field. With its acute focus on narrative function—at the levels of both its own construction and its diegetic discursive content—“Good Country People” is, rather, a short story through and through: an act of acute narrative concentration through which self-reflective ambiguities of theme and structure come to test the story’s own self-imposed field of discursive or formal possibility. One might think of other similar examples: the death of Bartleby and the old lawyer’s cry (“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”), Rushdie’s widowed and unblinded sheikha “gazing once more upon the beauties of the valley of Kashmir,” or poor Georg—Kafka’s own suspended little soul—plunging to his death “grasping at the railings as a starving man clutches food,” to name a few (Melville; Rushdie; Kafka 88).

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The novelist-monk Thomas Merton, a great admirer of O’Connor, once distanced her from her contemporaries by comparing her to “someone like Sophocles… for all the truth and craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor” (The Complete Stories xv). By my account, Merton failed to apprehend the possibility that secular modernity—and at least some of its literary forms—might still bear the complicated spirit one so often solely associates with the realm of the spiritual or heroic. Just as the murder of Abel—an act containing a species-wide legacy—is contained within two lines (Genesis 4:8), Joy-Hulga’s thrusting out into a bleary-eyed realm of uncertainty and mystic possibility is contained within some sixteen pages. Could it be that these apparently miraculous or transcendent literary engagements—always behind and apart from us cynical moderns—might be the result of formal features otherwise familiar to us?

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We need not turn to parable or psalm. How might the short story form, by sheer virtue of design, be uniquely capable of engaging with that which has been called the anagogical: the process by which, “leading upwards,” something mysterious or “invisible is revealed through that which is visible” (Cooper). Or, as O’Connor herself would put it: “the peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible” (“Writing Short Stories” 98). Such an inquiry would require an enormous assessment of a great many short stories—even those by authors with decidedly different spiritual investments than those of O’Connor. For now, we can sit with Joy-Hulga in the hayloft and ponder the weary blur set before us. 

 

Notes

[1] Joy is the character’s birth name, while Hulga is one she has adopted in adulthood–about which her mother “was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language” (274).

[2] I use “paper soul” here to both maintain O’Connor’s spiritual valence while reaching back to a Barthesian notion of the phatic relationship upon the priorities of which all fictional characters are imagined, constructed, and maintained.

[3] “It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself—bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things!” (276)

[4] One might find more and greater gestures toward Heideggerian nothingness in Manley Pointer if one was willing to unpack his name. Considering the following from Heidegger’s “What Calls for Thinking?”:

“What must be thought about turns away from man. It withdraws from him… As he is pointing that way, man is the pointer. Man here is not first of all man, and then also occasionally someone who points. No… As he draws toward what withdraws, man is a sign. But since this sign points toward what draws away, it points not so much at what draws away as into the withdrawal.” (375)

​

References​

Augustine. Confessions. Penguin UK, 1961.

Cooper, Scott. “Hugh of Saint-Victor on Sacred Scripture [English Translation].” Three Pillars Blog, 23 July 2023, threepillarsblog.org/translations/hugh-of-saint-victor-on-sacred-scripture-english-translation.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. 1972.

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Schocken, 1995.

Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street.” The Piazza Tales, 1856, moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/bartleby.pdf.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Introduction by Robert Giroux.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. vii - xvii.

---. “Good Country People.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 271–91.

---. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1965, pp. 87–106.

Rushdie, Salman. “Salman Rushdie · Story: ‘The Prophet’s Hair.’” London Review of Books, 6 Nov. 2019, www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n07/salman-rushdie/the-prophet-s-hair.

Zhang, Dora. Strange Likeness : Description and the Modernist Novel  / Dora Zhang. The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

About the Author

R. M. Corbin is a writer and Ph.D. student living in Irvine, CA. Their work has been published by the Agave Review, Africa World Press, COMMUNIST FICTION, and elsewhere.  They are the writer of the ongoing story OLLSVILLE, etc., and publish criticism at The RMC Book Club.