AP English Literature and Composition
Notes of Triangulation towards Flannery O’Connor
Though written about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you might find it illuminating to read these excerpts of an exchange between A.O. scott and Christopher Caldwell, as they touch on themes that should be familiar to us from Faustus and Heart of Darkness, as well as Hazel Mote’s struggle to understand “happiness” as well as the role of grace in O’Connor’s work.
From: A.O. Scott To: Christopher Caldwell
Subject: Visitation by Divine Grace
Posted: Thursday, March 15, 2001, at 8:27 a.m. PT
I'd like to conclude this most edifying discussion by quoting Levin's final soliloquy--the book's last sentences, which deserve to be as well-known as its first one (and perhaps they are, though not, until this week, to me):
This new feeling hasn't changed me, hasn't made me happy or suddenly enlightened, as I dreamed. ... Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith--I don't know what it is--but this feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul.
I'll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul's holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I'll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I'll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray--but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which is in my power to put into it!
Those last words--that exclamation point!--may strike our ears as unbearably sincere and risk being assimilated to the phony narcissistic uplift that pervades our cultural life. But this moment is unlike any other I can think of in literature in describing, persuasively--and I have to say, despite my ingrained skepticism, realistically--an individual person's visitation by divine grace.
From: Christopher Caldwell To: A.O. Scott
Subject: A Seductive Summons to Masochism
Posted: Thursday, March 15, 2001, at 12:44 p.m. PT
Tolstoy distrusts what we call happiness. Modern happiness, he thinks (correctly), is in fact just sensualism renamed. It's Vronsky--of all people--who sees this most clearly. When Karenin frees Anna to gad about Europe with her lover, Vronsky "was not fully happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desire had given him only a grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires." If one were required to extract a sentence to stand for the whole book, this would be it.
The following quote from contemporary author T. Coraghessan Boyle touches on the lessons he learned as a “serious comedic novelist” from O’Connor.
Comedy is my mode of dealing with tragedy and despair. What do we call it – gallows humor? Black humor? Sardonic, bleak, stripped-to-the-bone humor? I do feel that the tragic and poignant can be made even more powerful, more affecting, if the writer takes the reader by surprise, that is, puts him or her into a comic universe and then introduces the grimmest sort of reality. Flannery O’ Connor taught me this, in stories like “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and especially in a novel like Wise Blood. (T. C. Boyle)