By Patrick Thomas Henry
“I’ll call anything a story in which specific characters and
events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative,” Flannery O’Connor
claims, with her characteristic tenacity.† O’Connor’s attitude toward fiction welcomes reality—whatever
that may be—as the originator of meaningful narratives. Fiction and reality, though disparate
entities, are inextricably wound together. Stories are merely how we make sense of them.
An event on Aug. 4, sponsored by One Story,
negotiated this line between fiction and reality, with O’Connor’s life and work
as its hub. One Story editor Hannah Tinti and novelist Ann Napolitano discussed Napolitano’s new novel, A Good Hard Look, and O’Connor’s influence in the packed lower level
of New York’s McNally Jackson. Napolitano set her novel, in which
O’Connor is a pivotal character, in Milledgeville, Georgia, toward the end of
O’Connor’s career. Napolitano
riskily places her readers alongside O’Connor as the storied author struggles
with the writing process.
 |
| One Story editor Hannah Tinti (right) listens as novelist Ann Napolitano discusses her novel A Good Hard Look. |
But the novel isn’t another how-to guide on literary
craft. O’Connor’s presence as a person in this narrative binds her to the fictionalized
Milledgeville community. Napolitano’s O’Connor forges relationships with imagined denizens of
Milledgeville, including New Yorker Melvin Whiteson, who married former town
belle Cookie Himmel, an ardent opponent of O’Connor’s seemingly clairvoyant
prose. These ties lash an epiphany
to O’Connor’s wrists: Life is a
narrative, and somebody has to find meaning in it.
Tinti prepared the audience for the evening’s topic with
O’Connor commenting on the art of the story: “I have very little to say about short-story writing.... I
hope you realize that your asking me to talk about story-writing is just like
asking a fish to lecture on swimming.” O’Connor expands on her simile with the assertion that “nothing produces
silence like experience.” The
impression is that we must cope with experiences and histories by performing
(and not simply recounting) those events in fiction. O’Connor does this in her prose, and Napolitano in turn
dramatizes O’Connor and her struggle with lupus in a conceptualized
Milledgeville.
O’Connor’s terminal experience with lupus provoked her to
concentrate on writing before anything else, and her personal understanding of
human frailty—both physically and psychologically—honed her prose into an
honest reflection of humanity. She
portrays this without transforming her characters into transparent
avatars. Instead of a veiled
retelling of her own life, O’Connor adapts her struggles to push her readers
toward an understanding. In “Good
Country People,” a tale at once cautionary and humorous, a con-man (posing as a
Bible salesman) dupes a woman who has an artificial leg. Even with such apparent internal and external faults, these
characters remain human in their own element, and nothing suggests a lament for
O’Connor’s condition. O’Connor’s
sentence-to-sentence precision, Tinti and Napolitano agreed, generates this
effect in her stories.
Tinti commented that O’Connor’s fiction is “about trying to
get to a moment of realization with her characters.” “With” is relevant here; astute readers can sense the author
grappling for grace and redemption alongside the reader. O’Connor offers glimpses of
salvation—even if the readers miss the textual clues—through a sequence of
events that can, as Tinti said, “lead you to a strange place, but when you
arrive, it feels perfectly right.” O’Connor attaches this journey to grace in describing her own work: “I
have found that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet
totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action
which indicates that grace has been offered.”
Serendipity, grace, and influence all exist in the writing
process, as well. Napolitano
informed the audience that she owes A Good Hard Look to her copy of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. She read the book for an undergraduate writing project and,
years later, saw it on her shelf while considering how to circumnavigate a
roadblock involving the character Melvin Whiteson. The epiphany, for Napolitano, was that O’Connor had to be in
the novel. Her previous experience
with the personal, wry, and witty voice in O’Connor’s letters allowed her to
shape a genuine, emoting O’Connor on the page.
Napolitano condenses O’Connor’s snide wisdom in A Good
Hard Look, when O’Connor presents an
address at a high school graduation ceremony. She offers the assembled crowd of students, parents,
and teachers one token of advice, which doubles as a mantra for readers and
writers of short fiction: “Take a
good hard look at who you are and what you have…and then use it.”
†All direct O’Connor quotations come from the essays in
O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners.
