Short Story Masterpieces
Flannery O'Connor
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
It feels weird to dislike something considered a masterpiece. It feels preposterous, because I’m lucky if I can string even two subpar sentences together on an otherwise blank page after days of fretting over it, so who am I to critique a great writer? I feel like that time in my senior year in high school, when my Humanities teacher put me on the spot to ask me what I thought of Jane Eyre (which we were reading in class), and I said, emphatically, “Boring.” He didn’t say anything but looked at me as if to ask, “How can you even exist?” Oh, well. I wanted to elaborate on what I mentioned in class, if only because I never explain myself well out loud and am better getting my point across when I write. (Or so I hope.)
Predictability was mentioned. My problem with the predictability wasn’t well explained in class, but it wasn’t the "suspense" factor now common in crime fiction or the plot structure itself (which was predictable thanks to the foreshadowing, but I didn’t have a problem with that, since foreshadowing well done can give the reader a sense of full circle at the end of the story). What I found predictable was the character dynamics between the grandmother and the Misfit, which is what the entire story is built on, really. If that fails, it sort of all fails. And it failed for me. She didn't do it particularly badly (aside from the melodramatics), but it's just a dynamic that I'm weary of. I couldn’t think of examples during class, but I wasn't thinking specifically of crime novels or even short stories, but all kinds of stories by all kinds of authors. Shakespeare, Hugo, Steinbeck, Dumas, all the way back to Homer, even Disney, etc. Tons of Japanese literature. Various characters (most often “heroes” and “villains”) have been directly expressing this sort of existential angst, speaking to each other to be more understanding, to be less cruel, to do this or be that or pardon this for the sake of [me/my child/my love/your wife/your unborn son/your cousin-lover-bff/etc.]. The bad man isn't truly evil, not really. He doesn't believe himself to be, doesn't want to be, feels trapped into being, etc. The good guy forgives, or is willing to. On and on. And on. But of course neither of them can really change the other, and that's seemingly rarely the point, anyway. Writers (including myself) seem to just love getting down into all that delectable existential material. So it just goes on. And on. I very rarely enjoy those kinds of scenes where two characters--no matter the circumstance but generally protagonist and antagonist--have these dueling monologues that go from angst into really self-important, this is the sum of me, religiously symbolic angst dialed up to eleven before one of them dies or kills someone the other one cares about or whatnot. To be fair, I’m lately far less patient with this particular writing tactic at (or, more pointedly, as) the climax of a story only because I used to watch Supernatural until it shredded my last nerve, and I think a good 90% of their episodes ends with one of the “heroes” and a villain jawing at each other for approximately 10 minutes, sometimes 20, and certainly from one commercial break to the next and final one. I’m just over the monologuing. I expect them in plays, but everywhere else, it has to be earned. Earned, for me, means that it’s not a character (like the Misfit) who just shows up two-thirds of the way into a relatively short story and spends the whole time making this self-important speech to another self-serving character who is doing the inverse right back at him. The grandmother earned her monologue, but the Misfit’s monologue was wholly unearned and dead on arrival for me. The fact that his scene revolved so overwhelmingly around his monologue makes the monologue the point of the climax if not the whole story, and that's where and why it truly failed for me. The fact that the grandmother’s monologue (I’m calling it “monologue” in place of “ramble”) revolved around the Misfit was just the final nail in the coffin of that scene. Too, too much. And then some.
It bothers me because A Good Man Is Hard To Find was going really well initially (after a “too many names” moment, which I'll comment on below) and I was enjoying the naturalistic and unapologetic way O’Connor wrote the dialogue and characterization. The scenes in the car were the best for me, very evocative of time and place and very clear in characterization. I was firmly in their story, whether I loved or hated or felt annoyed by them, because the story was allowing me to sort of naturally fall in step with them. It felt as opposite of put on as it gets. (As a side note: this is part of why I think Red Sammy was unnecessary. Three pages with him and his nameless wife, just to set up the Misfit, when a wanted poster observed from the window of the car or some such would have sufficed. I didn’t need the Red Sammy interlude to be more/less sympathetic to the protagonists. In addition to that, the interlude didn’t offer any new information about them, which made the interlude a criminal waste. In short stories, real estate is so important because there’s so little of it.)
To comment also on something mentioned in class, I disagree that the “you’re one of my babies” line was genuine. I felt it was the most self-serving line from the grandmother of them all, the most blatantly manipulative, and probably why the Misfit shot her, kind of like when someone says “I know just how you feel” after someone else has explained in vivid detail a horrifying event in her life. “Piss off!” is what I’d feel and probably shrug off her hand if she tried to touch me. Well, the Misfit had a gun and is a killer, so he shot instead of shrugged. That's my read on it. Maybe I’m projecting or maybe I'm too cynical, but the Misfit was just too full of granny’s bs at that point and went off. (Yay! The best part of the story, by far.) I felt that was the only genuine moment from him, and the least genuine granny moment (and O’Connor’s least effective line if meant to be genuine, even including all the religious symbolism). Really, this could just as easily be titled A Good Woman Is Hard To Find. The only cool thing about that scene to me (and this is based on me reading it differently from most of the class) is that they were both getting tighter and tighter latched onto their sense of self-preservation: the Misfit on an emotional level against the manipulation and the grandmother on a physical one against his gun/strength. Particularly the grandmother, who became so desperately focused on self-preservation that she grew less and less aware of the nonsense she was spouting and how over-the-top it was. They both made an instinctive decision in that moment, both of them bad ones, and what followed is what would follow. That was very cool.
Another problem I had (and I'm probably alone in this) was a thought that struck me at the beginning (and it was the only real problem I had with the beginning). “Too many names.” Awesome names, for sure, but just too many. Name after name after name, or, in the grandmother and children’s mother’s case, place-holders. The Misfit. Red Sammy. John Wesley. June Star. Pitty Sing. Bailey. Grandmother. Children’s mother. Baby. Too many names, too many characters, too many people to pick and choose from on who to care about and who not to, with too little "screen" time to encompass it. And some of those names were "Southern" almost to the point of caricature, which had the effect of turning the characters into cartoons. It's no wonder the grandmother wasn't the one named June Star, for instance, because that would have emphasized the already overblown nature of the climax: June Star telling the Misfit, "You're one of my own children!" It's not that I don’t think names have a place in short stories, but reading this brought back my thoughts upon reading “Popular Mechanics.” I prefer minimalism to paragraphs of expositional text and strings of character names. With names and cartoonish names and non-names thrown at me in such abundance, I didn’t know which character I was supposed to care for or if I was supposed to take this story seriously, and so I didn’t care about any of them, even at the end. (Well, I felt bad for Bailey, but only because I can’t imagine living with that madhouse, plus being killed by a crazy convict because a cat fell on his neck while he was driving pointlessly into the woods. That sucks.) Anyway, I remember something I read once in a genre writing book by Orson Scott Card (who I have mixed feelings about, but his writing advice is very useful). You have an opening scene that lasts two and a half pages between a taxi driver and the narrator/main character. The taxi driver is an obnoxious guy and leaves a strong impression as a distinct character in his own right. If this is a novel-length story, you don’t expect to ever see him again, except perhaps in passing as an aside, possibly one of the least important of the many subplots. But if this is a short story, by the importance given to his scene simply by its length, you expect him to be a major character. This is how I felt during the interlude with Red Sammy and his wife and, to a lesser extent, during the opening scene learning everyone's names, including the cat's. (The cat, by the way, was the only one I liked all the way through, and the only time I felt bad for anyone was when Bailey threw the cat against the tree or whatever it was.)
I guess my distaste for this story boils down to what we talked about in class during the poetry section and again during the Buffy episode: the hotter the content, the cooler the language. But in this story, everything was hot: the final situation itself, the content of the grandmother/Misfit conversation, and the language O’Connor used throughout the scene, dramatizing it even further. I felt like the Emperor in Amadeus, thinking “Too many notes. Just cut a few, and it will be perfect!” The Emperor couldn't answer Mozart's question, "Which few did you have in mind?" but I hope I've clarified exactly which ones bothered me, and why.
