Flannery O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her many writings on Flannery O’Connor in the April 9 New York Review of Books with The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, a review-essay around Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor. JCO, a great admirer of O’Connor’s work, speaks of  her “cartoon art” (but this term is desrciptive, not derogatory):

Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is “cartoon” art invariably inferior to “realist” art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the “realist” struggles to establish the trompe l’oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O’Connor called “large and startling figures.”

JCO has previously written on:

O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Nigger”: “This graceful, parable-like short story, with its precise, weighted language and its comically sympathetic rural Georgians Mr. Head and his ten-year-old grandson Nelson, is virtually unique in Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, ending not in violent death, nor even in devastating irony, but with tenderness.”

O’Connors letters: “The experience of reading these collected letters (which are, in fact, rigorously selected letters) is a disturbing one: but tonic, provocative, intriguing. For while it cannot be said of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that she revealed herself anywhere within it—her strategy was to submerge herself, to “correct” emotion by means of art—it must be said of the letters that they give life to a wonderfully warm, witty, generous, and complex personality, surely one of the most gifted of contemporary writers.”

O’Connors essays: “Reading and rereading this book is a moving experience: not only is Mystery and Manners (Occasional Prose of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) a valuable and exciting collection of essays in itself, it is a testament to the deep humanity of Miss O’Connor, to the modesty and wisdom and gentle humor that lay behind her vivid, sometimes repulsive fictional accomplishments. Her death at the age of thirty-nine is one of our bitterest losses.”

And in JCO’s most extensive essay, on O’Connor’s fiction: “It is this complexity that makes the fiction of Flannery O’Connor so rich and at the same time so perplexing and alienating. She seems unique in her celebration of the necessity of succumbing to the divine through violence that is immediate and irreparable. There is no mysticism in her work that is only spiritual; it is physical as well. She has been accused of being un-Christian or anti-Christian in her insistence upon the limitations of the human will. For, as she says in an introductory note to her first novel, Wise Blood, ” … free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery …. ” Her refusal to account for the mystery leads to the bizarre atmosphere of her world.”

Sylvia Plath

With the recent death by hanging of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, the New York Times asks “Why the Plath Legacy Lives”? Joyce Carol Oates notes,

The suicide of Sylvia Plath was and is obviously of enormous cultural significance because Plath was a brilliant poet—at the time of her death she was already considered a very important poet and since her death, her reputation has risen continuously while others who were her gifted contemporaries—Anne Sexton, John Berryman, even the much-acclaimed Robert Lowell—appear to have faded.

JCO has written extensively on Plath, most notably in “The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath:”

… the cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature—as in the poem “Mirror,” the eye of a little god who imagines itself without preconceptions, “unmisted by love or dislike.” This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action he does not know is “tragic.” He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death—to illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike.

All of the Plath writings are collected in JCO on Sylvia Plath.

Man Booker Shortlist

Joyce Carol Oates is among the contenders this year for the biennial Man Booker International Prize, recognizing one writer for their achievement in fiction. Previous winners were Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Ismail Kadare in 2005. 

The Man Booker International Prize echos and reinforces the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that literary excellence will be its sole focus. The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.  In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.

The judges of this year’s prize will be Jane Smiley, Amit Chaudhuri, and Andrey Kurkov. In addition to JCO, the complete shortlist of contenders includes Peter Carey, Evan S Connell, Mahasweta Devi, E.L. Doctorow, James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Arnošt Lustig, Alice Munro, V S Naipaul, Antonio Tabucchi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Dubravka Ugresic, and Ludmila Ulitskaya.

Truly an impressive list to which JCO deservedly belongs.

Fifty Years

Joyce Carol Oates published her first “professional” work fifty years ago this year.

When she was a junior at Syracuse University, JCO entered her short story “In the Old World” in the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition. The story was selected as co-winner of the competition (two winners each year) and was published in the August 1959 issue.

JCO was in good company, as Mademoiselle had also published the early work of Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath (who had also won the competition).

“In the Old World” was subsequently included in JCO’s first book in 1963, the story collection By the North Gate.

JCO published several more stories and poems in Mademoiselle over the years, and was a regular contributor of book reviews for the magazine from 1979 to 1980.

Since the appearance of “In the Old Word,” JCO has published close to 800 short stories, including acknowledged classics such as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” and many others collected in award anthologies such as the Best American Short Stories; the O Henry Prize Stories; the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; etc. Fourteen of JCO’s most recent stories, including two award-winners, are collected in Dear Husband, available on March 31.

Joyce Carol Oates is among the great short story masters of all time.

Art For My Sake

The Guardian asks Joyce Carol Oates and others whether writing for a living is a joy or a chore; JCO suggests don’t trust anybody’s answer:

Recall that DH Lawrence warned us to trust the tale, not the teller – the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar. Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really knows what has made us what we are, still less why we behave so eccentrically as we do; when we are pressed to explain ourselves, we invent. In the Renaissance, poets claimed repeatedly that they wrote for posterity – to be “immortal.” In religious communities, the creation of any art was for the glory of God. In a capitalist society, one is likely to claim that one writes for the same purpose that everyone else produces a product – for money.