ENGL 4310

In Chelsea's blog and in class, the subject of keeping up appearances (to borrow from Chelsea) came up. Although His mother is undoubtedly trying to put on a good face for the neighbors, I definitely think that there is more to it. On the first read, it was obvious that the mother was worried about what everyone thought about her family and, consequently, nearly all her painstaking efforts to show how much she loved her disabled son were nothing more than an act. The second time I read this, though, I got a slightly different impression. Although she was, to a degree, attempting to please the neighbors, I think she was mostly just trying to convince herself that she had feelings for her son that she obviously did not really have. I'm sure that she desperately wanted to have genuine motherly feelings for Him, but she simply didn't. How hard would it be for a mother to have a child she loved less than the others? To compensate for her lack of motherly affection for Him, she tried to convince herself that "she loved her second son[...]better than she loved the other two children put together" (49). I don't know of any mother who would admit that she loved one child over the other, let alone announce it to anyone who would listen. She did love the other two, and perhaps even felt guilty about loving them but not Him, and maybe that is why she made such a shocking statement.

Sara's Lame-O in Porter's Stories


Okay, so I am sorry that I seem to be only responding to Sara’s past blogs…the reason is that I want these blogs to have something to do with what I am planning on writing my paper on (and the symposium as well), and since most of the blogs on this topic are written by myself, I have had a hard time finding blogs that others have written about even the stories that I will be focusing on. Since Sara did these lame-o ones covering most of the stories we have read, I found that I wanted to reply to her idea of the stories.

So, Sara stated that both the wife and the husband consider themselves to be morally superior individuals, and therefore they are slightly more lame-o than okay. I think that I agree with this assessment. Though I am not so sure that I would consider them thinking they are morally superior. I know that the husband and the wife are being incredibly defensive as a person is wont to do when they are being attacked. The fact that the fight so easily escalates makes me believe that this is not the first (nor the last) fight of this kind. As I’ve said before, I really don’t think that the rope is the reason for the fight…it’s the fact that he thought of himself instead of thinking of her, but when she gets what she wants (her coffee…which shows that he really DOES love her because he walked all the way to get it…again), she is okay with him having something for himself (i.e.: the rope).

Does being defensive mean a person believes he/she is morally superior? I don’t know. That seems to be the take Sara took, which is fine. Though she didn’t really give any support to her claim, so I don’t know what her reasoning was (though I’m sure it was brilliant because it’s Sara). I am thinking that neither of them really thought they were morally superior, just maybe that they were annoyed at each other, or something. Maybe I should re-read the story with the sole purpose of finding how they could be morally superior. I suppose that the wife could think she is because the husband had (possibly) had an affair. She has never cheated on him (or at least that’s what her accusation implies because we generally avoid accusing someone of doing something we ourselves have done…though not always), so she could think she is “better” than he is because of it. However, I don’t think that is what she is getting at. I think the main issue for this couple is not that they are morally superior, but are, in fact, not able to trust each other. The wife is obviously jealous, whether anything ever really happened between her husband and another woman. If she weren’t unsure of their relationship, she wouldn’t have become so angry about the fact that he forgot the coffee. Of course, that is probably a lie. As someone in class stated once, it could just be because she hasn’t had her caffeine fix and is apt to freak out because her body needs it. Then again, I don’t see why Porter would write a story that shows a woman being mad at her husband only because she can’t get her caffeine fix. I really think it has more to do with the trust/love issue.

Sara’s >“The Lame-o in Porter’s Stories”
Sara says that Maria is the morally superior person in the story, and I agree with that completely. However, she doesn’t really think she is “lame-o” because she doesn’t “kill the Maria Rosa because she holds herself higher or to rid the world of the sin Maria and Juan had committed; she does it out of grief and jealousy.” While I agree that grief and jealousy are part of the reason that Maria commits murder, I think it has a lot more to do with the institution of marriage itself. The fact that they were married in the church is a big thing for this couple. It seems as if their marriage should be on a higher playing field because they were married in the church instead of behind it. So I think that Maria really does hold herself to a higher standard, at least when it comes to her marriage. Perhaps she doesn’t believe that her marriage should be affected by things like adultery, etc. because her marriage is supposed to be a sacred thing. So maybe she’s grieving over the loss of sanctity of her marriage, but I really think that she is a “lame-o” because she wants to do what is morally right, but she then murders someone. However, she does murder Maria Rosa in order to “save her marriage.” Everything was fine before Maria Rosa came along, and perhaps she was hoping that it would all be fine again once Maria Rosa came along.

As a side note, Juan also talks of how his marriage is different than other marriages. He mentions that he cannot hit his wife and put her in his place because he was married in the church. He likes the fact that he can tell Maria Rosa what to do and hit her and all of that because he doesn’t worry that God will strike him dead for doing so. He isn’t really a lame-o though because he doesn’t hold himself morally superior, he simply recognizes that his marriage is supposed to be on a higher level.

I never really liked the “overall” Marxist theory that seems to be what everyone knows about and has to do with money, classes, etc. I have always gravitated to parts of the Marxist theory that have little to do with money itself such as Althusser’s ISAs. Be that as it may, I know there are plenty of things dealing with money in these stories that we just read (“Noon Wine” and “Displace Person”). Both of these stories have people come to a failing farm and help save it. Both times the women owners of the farm start to have a “problem” with their financial saviors. During this second bout of reading, I tried to focus on why this turnabout takes place in each story. The reasons that I saw for “Displace Person” is a difference in Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). Louis Althusser describes ISAs as a private and social organization, institution, or group that perpetuates ideologies (the way we think about ourselves). In “Displaced Person” (though granted it might be a bit of a stretch) Mrs. McIntyre holds to the ISA of racism. Society at that time had many “rules” to how the races were divided. When Mr. Guizac tries to get one of the black workers to pay for his niece to come over and then they can get married, Mrs. McIntyre flips. She calls Mr. Guizac a monster for even suggesting that a white girl marry a black man. Mr. Guizac’s difference in belief when it comes to races is enough to make Mrs. McIntyre be so upset that she finds him utterly irritating. She cannot understand the difference in ISA between herself and Mr. Guizac. She says, “I cannot understand how a man who calls himself a Christian could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!” (314). In response to this, Mr. Guizac says, “She no care black…she in camp three year” (314). Each person has a different thing that they value: She values keep the races “pure” and he values life away from Poland (as anyone probably would). Mrs. McIntyre does not question her beliefs in this particular ISA, but she is deeply shaken after this run-in with Mr. Guizac. “Her heart was beating as if some interior violence had already been done to her” (315). Finding someone who questions her ISA has deeply hurt Mrs. McIntyre, yet she still clings to it saying that he is upsetting her other workers and that they would be better off without him around.

Josie's comments on A Good Man Is Hard To Find stirred some thoughts.

The other thing I wonder is if the Misfit is really all that educated or if what we see in him is just that Southern etiquette coming out, that false (I say false because it seems to only cover up a lack of respect shown in many instances, and I'm thinking of the Southern hospitality shown to blacks -evident in this story when Grandmother calls that child they see a "pickaninny" and mentions only that he has no pants and not that he had no pants because white men didn't give slave children pants to wear) level of respect If the Grandmother uses this Southern set of etiquette standards that can represent status, but also "goodness," then it explains, on another level, why the Grandmother keeps saying he's a good man - he is very polite which doesn't seem to fit what he is doing (why would a bad man be bothered with such politeness?). It is just another way I see O'Connor equalizing or leveling the Misfit and the Grandmother.

I'm with Rachel, in her blog, trying to figure out the Misfit. When I read that the Misfit could not remember what he'd done wrong but said "it was no mistake" and that they had papers saying what he'd done coupled with the fact that the shrink said that what he'd done is killed his father when the Misfit says his father died in the 1919 (WWI) flu epidemic, I came to the conclussion that he murdered someone (not really his father) who in some way represented his father. The Misfit simply did not understand what was the psychologist's reason for motive in the killing. This is supported by the information we are given regarding his relationship with his father: "My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know. . . it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know whyit is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything.'" I got the general impression that he was singled out by his father and perhaps judged and treated like a dog or in a way the Misfit has not been able to deal with. It makes it all the more interesting to note his reaction to the Grandmother's recognition of him as "one of [her] babies." In so doing she touches him and "the Misfit sprang back as if a snade had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest...." It seems that psychologist's explaination for motive has played out again in the Grandmother's case. I'm wondering if anyone else see's it this way?
I'm wondering what you all make of some other things. Like the writting the Misfit seems to be doing in the dirt. Do you think it is reminisant of Christ's writing in the sand? And if so, what are the implications? I see the Grandmother as a sinner as well. She lies- just little white lies like the hidden panel lie that is in the old house and exagerates like saying the car rolled twice. She is a hypocrite, like when she points out that when she was young "children were more respectful" in every sense and then points out the "pickaninny" which undermines her statement as her genereation were probably the most disrespectful of black people and she obviously still is. And she even deny's Jesus as the Christ when she says "Maybe He didn't raise the dead" in order to protect herself. I'm intriged this reading with the statement the Misfit makes on p.150:

I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do
another, kill a man or take his tire off his car, because sooner or later
you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for
it.

From a theological standpoint, and I am assuming Catholic theology, but please
correct me if I'm wrong, it doesn't matter what the sin is, all sinner need Christ, evenif all they do is "steal a tire." O'Connor seems to always level the field.

I also want to know what you think of her saying "I just know your a good man" and the Misfit reacting with "Nome, I ain't a good man," yet she doesn't give this idea up. It is interesting to me that after he says this he puts on the black hat. I know we've talked in class about the black hat and the big deal that was made over it, I just can't help but apply the western or cowboy literature applications of white hat, goodguy; black hat, bad guy. If this even applies, what do you make (if anything) of the grandmother's navy blue hat with white violets?

I'm wondering who is trying to save or help who, the Grandmother who is saying "pray, pray," which I can't help thinking is what she (or I in her place would be doing) should be doing. Or the Misfit who by holding a gun to her is encouraging her to say "I know your a good man," which is not true but the point is that she is not judging or condeming him or others as she recognizes (even if it's just out of selfpreservation) that grace makes them equal, all good if they only confess. I'm wondering I the Misfit has, in a way, confessed to her? The comment the Misfit makes: "No pleasure but meanness," I'm wondering about too. Is the pleasure he finds what I have just mentioned, that this woman is calling him "a good man" and perhaps seeing him with that potential? Or does't it just simply fit or make up for life's (and his own) seemingly unballanced punishments?

Like Rachel, I was also disappointed by the fact that there were not blog entries about "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I guess our blog just wasn't up and running that early in the semester. Bummer. Anyways, since this was the second time I've read this story, I also found myself paying closer attention to the Misfit. Rachel said in her blog that the first time around, she envisioned the Misfit as a younger man. I did the same thing, although I didn't classify him as ignorant. It blatantly states in the story that "he was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray" (146) so I don't know why we pictured him as so much younger. He seemed, to me, to be the leader in a gang of rebellious kids. Envisioning him as an older man sheds a new light on this for me; although I know he is dangerous (since I have read this before and know what's coming), he seems to be more dangerous, if that's possible, as an older, educated man than he would be as a younger man. I guess this is partly due to the fact that he is experienced, and, as an older convict, likely has more numerous crimes under his belt than when he was younger. I missed it before, but O'Connor may have been suggesting that he may have killed other "folks" just prior to encountering this family. After he apologizes for his shirtless-ness, he says "we borrowed these (clothes) from some folks we met" (149). While this is merely conjecture, I would be willing to bet that those "folks" met a similar fate as Bailey's family. After all, doesn't the Misfit "borrow" Bailey's shirt after he is shot in cold blood in the forest?

Another thing I failed to recognize on our first read was the Misfit's repeated statement that "children make me nervous" (146). I wondered why he would shoot the children, especially the infant, when they presented very little threat to him and he had nothing to gain by killing them; the baby wasn't even old enough to testify against him. Perhaps his nervousness arises from the fact that children are blatanty honest and may not recognize him for what he is: a very real and dangerous threat. For example, rather than being afraid of these strangers, the first thing June Star says to the Misfit is " 'What are you telling US what to do for?' " They intimidate him more than any of the adults, which is why, I believe, he makes the choice to kill every last one of them.

Sara's The Ten Commandments was a good overview of the stories for me. I was also intrigued by the fact that there is very little adultery found in either O'Connor's or Porter's stories. I agree with Sara's idea that perhaps it isn't only the physical act of having sex with another person besides your spouse that is considered to be adultery. It is also very likely that replacing your spouse with something else (religion as in Parker's Back for Sarah Ruth for just one example) is also considered adulterous. Though, I wonder if that works the same way as it does for "thou shalt have no other god before me" commandment.

I have done a bit of research on Porter and I read somewhere (though I'm not so sure how reliable of a source it was because I don't remember exactly where it was, but I think it might have been some silly website) that Porter got married once but "was so afraid of sex that the marriage was never consummated" (I seem to remember the words better than the website). I wonder if this "fear of sex" had something to do with the fact that it is mentioned so little in Porter's stories...then again, I don't know if that information is true or if someone just made it up for kicks and giggles. I have no idea why O'Connor would not put it in her stories other than maybe being a Christian woman means that you don't talk about sex (I know many people who are so "religious" that they would never dare to speak of sex, not even to explain to their children what it is). I wonder if being religious meant, to these two particular authors, that talking about sex is not acceptable. And to write about it? Oh no, that would be unthinkable!

the more I think about this idea, the more I am drawn to it. I know that being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "prudish," but there are many who seem to think the two go hand in hand. Perhaps it did in these two cases, which is why there is so little talk of adultery. Perhaps the one sin we all need to brush under the rug. Do you think?

I wanted to read all of the former blogs on “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” but couldn’t find any, so I am writing one now. “A Good Man” was one of the very first O’Connor stories that I have ever read and so, for me, it was a very strong and shocking introduction to O’Connor. I think that I was so shocked by it I focused entirely on what happened and not how and why things happened. On this rereading, I found things that I didn’t see before and am so amazed, especially by the “Misfit.”


I hadn’t really paid that much attention to the Misfit before, but now he fascinates me. I guess that I hadn’t really read the story very well the first time because the person that I had in my mind for the Misfit is a very young twenty-something who had a hat covering his face, forcing his face in shadow, and a very ignorant, uneducated man. But in rereading the story, the Misfit is very different from my image and he becomes even scarier. The Misfit is not young, he is older, and by his speech we know that he is not the most educated, but what he has to say is very profound with great meaning. This is even more intimidating than a young man with no cause. (Also, it is another character that uses a hat to cover his face, not the Misfit).


I found that the way the Misfit came to have his name is very interesting, “’I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.’” (151). The Misfit is very concerned with things “fitting” together and making sense with proof. So it is a bit ironic that his name is contradictory to how he prefers life to be.
With the fact that the Misfit wants proof of things fitting together, his stance on Christ is very interesting. “’If He did what He said, than it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s for nothing for to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can’” (152), “’It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known’” (152). The reason why the Misfit does what he does is because he didn’t witness what Christ did and so he doesn’t follow Him. The Misfit doesn’t have solid proof and so he can’t rely on what people just say to do.


I don’t quite know what to do with the fact that the Misfit first says, “No pleasure [in life] but meanness” (152). But then after he kills the Grandmother, he makes the comment about “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (153). And Bobby Lee, one of the other men, only focuses on the shooting part and misses entirely what the Misfit meant. In his ignorance Bobby Lee says, “’Some fun!’” (153), and the Misfit chastises him replying “’Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. 'It’s no real pleasure in life'” (153).

I have ideas floating around but they won’t come together as the reason why the Misfit contradicts himself, so if anyone has any solid ideas that they can articulate, that would be awesome if you could share them with me.

This is a chapter from a book called What is a Book? by the Poet/Critic David Kirby.

It is called "What is a Critic?" and you can download it here.

Kay and I don't have a particular time assigned for this right now, but we might have more information on that this week, likely on Thursday.

I think it will add an interesting dimension to our discussions about what it means to do critical work, or perhaps what it does not mean. In any case, it's fuel for the fire.

Enjoy!

I ran into a similar conclusion as Josie about how the villain in "Free Radicals" has a completely different place in the story than O'Connor's villain. Often enough, the villains in O'Connor's stories are hard to identify at the end-well, sort of, there often isn't a definite villain in O'Connor's stories that can be easily identified, even at the end. Sure, the characters do stupid things, they are flawed, they make mistakes that make me want to slap my forehead. But I can honestly say that the slapping of the forehead was often because I had made a similar mistake (less tragic of course). And this is where I see where O'Connor is going with her characters role and purpose. The tragedy of O'Connor's stories becomes our own personal tragedy as we realize what we are. In "Free Radicals," the characters have a different reason for being. It was less personal to me, because I didn't think, "gee, I can really take that as a lesson for myself," or "wow, I've kind of been like (character's name) before in a way...that is really scary." "Free Radicals" was more just a look at the character's and sure, the mystery was still there for me, certainly not to the extent of O'Connor, but the entire time I was viewing the situation from the outside. For O'Connor I am viewing the situation from the outside only to have it turned inwards at the end. Perhaps this is only me who gets this reaction from reading O'Connor, but to me I feel like that personal reflection caused by the twists of her stories is like a slap in the face every time, and the only thing predictable was that the ending would come in a way I least expected it to. I had to stop guessing, it was useless!

Which leads me to another question, how does an author find so many paths in their writing? Is it like those adventure series books, where you get to a certain place in the book and must choose which way to go to get a different outcome?

I had made an earlier post about my obsession with the hats that we see in O'Connor and Porter's stories. As primitive as it was, my original post was a start to something I could see in the representation of the hats in our authors' stories. Now go with me on this...the hats...I believe, are a "vehicle" if you will, to show the ignorance of what they really are. The characters in the stories were the hats are mentioned or have some importance in the story, are completely unaware of how other people see them. For instance in "Everything That Rises Must Converge," Julian's mother believes one thing (that her hat is fabulous) and doesn't realize (at least in Julian's eyes) that it is actually very hideous...reminiscent of the picture I embedded. It is almost like a sign saying "take a good hard look at me, I'm blind to what I really am." It is certainly an interesting concept much like my idea of "miserable awkwardness" I mentioned before. This is brilliance--that O'Connor takes the uncomfortable and what we naturally avoid and takes us deep into the story than we'd like to choose...and in the end it is twisted and reflected on us...the reader and we realize the reality of what we are.

One of my favorite letters by Katherine Anne Porter is one to Paul Porter on page 283, where she deals with an issue all to familiar in our society. Like (I think it was Todd?) said that the issues and ideas that we deal with are nothing new to our generation. A common complaint of my own has been that people seem to not understand the initial purpose of free speech, and in fact take a mistaken advantage of it. Katherine's letters are remarkable to me because she talks about real topics in society, instead of some type of personal chit-chat. Sure, she does do this from time to time, naturally. But when was the last time you wrote an email to someone (or letter at that) and pondered about "our current situation"? Some of you may have, but I surely have not. Her letters are surprisingly conversation-like.

We had talked on Tuesday about how much design and thought goes into the structure of a letter. Of course, it varies depending on the person, but I really hadn't thought much about it until then. Obviously the process of a letter, much like this blog has been to me-is a bit less formal and deliberate than a short story or a paper. But instead of a meticulous outline, I can see through Katherine and Flannery O'Connor's letters that that writing becomes thinking about what they were writing a sentence maybe ahead. That not might make any sense-but I also see them writing their letters and thinking maybe in advance with a little short-term memory power to make the letter come around and cohere in some way.

As I have read several letters of Porter's from beginning to end, I have noticed her fierceness wear off through the years until her last few letters which have a little sentimentality. She goes from biting back at harsh criticism and general society, to blessing her receivers. It is something I'm interested in, this idea of age kind of transforming a person. If anyone else sees this (or doesn't) feel free to comment, but I feel as if her letters become less energetic in her disagreements. Or maybe it isn't an issue with energy at all, rather just a lack of caring at this point in her life.

But what I find fascinating as well is to look at her life, full of health problems, etcetera and see that she actually lived a very long time. Of course, there is a picture of her father at 80 years old in the book, it must have been hereditary, but still, she does talk a lot about her lungs problems and bouts with sickness lingering from her initial spanish influenza. I'm not trying to say she exaggerated these things at all, just that it seems kind of strange that people either suffer with life, or die from it.

The past few days I have been pondering the whole issue of "intellectual" vs. "sentimental" stories. I can never seem to get enough of comments from people about movies, music, stories, etc. that they didn't like because it wasn't a "happy ending"--something we have brought up in class a couple of times I know.
Interestingly, in a letter to Seymour Lawrence in April 1956 Katherine Anne Porter complains about having received a letter from one Marc T. Greene - a "perfect stranger" to Katherine who seemed to feel offended-threatened, even, to have had to read her less than sappy work. I was happy to find that she doesn't make any attempt to excuse herself saying, "It is offensive." And than I thought it was funny how one old stranger finds it important enough to put the energy into writing an author because they are shocked at what they are reading, calling it "vile." She admits that other writers, "have got along nicely with not a bawdy scene or crooked word." Ha, but then she follows with,

There are plenty of others; but not because they see and write about the
baseness and cheapness of life, but because they know nothing else, or
will not admit the truth of anything higher. I write of the base aspects of
human character out of a loathing of it, really--yet it is there, all mixed in
with the good and the desirable...

And isn't that what life is about anyway? A whole spectrum of characters out there identifying themselves differently-- and that is simply what Katherine was writing about, actual people.

In the blog I wrote about how I really, really just want Katherine Anne Porter to by my friend, I mentioned that she wasn't really jazzed about William Faulkner (as a person; she semi-complimented his The Sound and the Fury on one occasion) and thought little of him. Chelsea Lane told me she'd gotten the impression that the same was true of Porter's view of Ernest Hemingway, and Jillian posted a blog about Porter's anti-fandom of Maughan and Wilde. All these accumulated insults/discrediting of well-respected or widely read pieces of literature reminded me somewhat of a question Todd asked once about the stories of O'Connor and Porter: How would you read this story if it was just coming out of the fax machine? In other words, would we respect some of these stories as much if a famous author's name wasn't attached?

Well, anyway, one writer that Porter seems to have absolutely loved is Marianne Moore. On page 410 of the Letters collection, she describes Moore as "my favorite living poet, and one of the most delicious persons alive."

So, okay: at least when it comes to Faulkner, Hemingway, and (I think?) Maughan, Porter's distaste for their writing is influenced at least partially by knowing them personally and simply not liking them as people, or at least that's what her letters suggest to me. She calls Moore "one of the most delicious persons alive," and I wonder if maybe Porter's affection for Moore's poetry is determined somewhat by her love of Moore herself. It seems at least plausible.

I think that same concept - liking a person's work more when you like the person - is at play somewhat in this whole letter-reading campaign. I know I'm a little fixated on Porter's letters; this is basically the third blog I've written about how I absolutely adore reading them. Part of that adoration might be that reading Porter's letters gives me more understanding of who she was (or, at least, it helps me form my perception of who she was, and that may or may not be altogether accurate), and if I like the person she was, then I get to have an added measure of enjoyment when I reread the stories I liked so much to begin with.

The perception I've formed of Porter is more or less that she's just awesome, and I mean that in the slang sense and the actual sense; I'm awed by her work and from what I can tell of her life. Being a semi-crazed fan can't not taint my opinion of her work, but I don't think it would/will make me love a story that I would be indifferent to if it weren't for Porter's name at the top. It probably just means I'll rave a little more loudly about the ones I started out loving.

When I was little, I loved a movie with a name I had to look up on imdb.com just now. It was called "Heart and Souls," and it was about four people who died when the bus they were on crashed. The plot's not really important or anything; the point is that I loved it. We didn't own it or anything, but I know my mom must have rented it for me over and over again. I clearly remember a time in the video rental section at Smith's with my dad, who had no patience for such repetition, and he wouldn't let me rent it because I'd seen it already.

We talked a week or two ago about the love of repetition when it comes to stories. A few movies, including "Heart and Souls," came to mind for me during that discussion, and I wrote down in my notes, "As adults, we like repetition of structure but difference in detail." (I don't know at all if that was a comment someone else made or if it was a conclusion I came to myself, so sorry if I just stole that.) I think it's pretty true. I adore unique characters and distinctive voice in stories - that 'difference in detail' thing - but repetition of form or structure or theme is something I think many readers can recognize, if asked to, in the stories they like. That's the draw of romantic comedies, right? And slasher films? And romance novels? And Marvel comics? The pictures and words change, but there's safety in the story. It kind of feels like the grown-up version of four-year-old Sara would love to have four or five copies of "Heart and Souls" that all feature a different lead actor or soundtrack, maybe one shot in black and white, but with the four ghosts all getting to heaven in each version, just like they did in the original, and with the romantic subplot I really liked.

The repeated story for O'Connor is loose, but I think it hinges on two ideas:
1) The stranger comes to town.
2) The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

I don't know how many of you have read the editor's note and introduction that Isabel Bayley wrote for Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, but they're delightful and illuminating, so I'd really suggest that you do. Something from the introduction stood out to me and reminded me of our conversation in class on Tuesday about the letter-writing process and how much advance thought Porter and O'Connor may have given to their letters. On page 7, Bayley relates this statement of Porter's: "Letters I always thought were meant to be personal messages standing instead of talk between two persons who are not arguing, or trying to convert each other to anything, or writing essays for posterity or even the present public - so the free-er and easier the tone, the nearer it comes to a letter, seems to me." And later on the same page, "I write at top speed with no effort, if I didn't I'd never get time to write letters at all."

If I didn't feel so completely happy about all things Katherine Anne Porter, I'd be a little maddened by this last statement. These letters are just too beautiful. Whether it was habit or natural talent that resulted in such well-phrased sentences and glowing insights with "no effort" on her part, I don't know and couldn't speculate on.

When we started out with the letters of Porter and O'Connor, Kay commented that the volume of Porter's letters (which, according to the book's introduction, is but a very small representation of all the letters Porter wrote in her lifetime) is larger than the volume of her stories. If being a writer of short stories is considered less prestigious than being a novelist, as we talked about once, then I think that being primarily a letter-writer would be seen a little lower even, because they're (a) shorter and (b) personal, so presumably easier to write. Whatever. Porter does the job impressively, and I'd rather read her letters than almost anything else right now.

P.S. I'd suggest looking up the index entry for "Porter, Katherine Anne: on letter-writing," because there are some fantastic entries, particularly about letter-writing as a feminine thing and on the legal mumbo-jumbo of ownership.

After scanning the index of the Porter letters book I looked up what she had to say about other authors, and I must say I was rather depressed about what she wrote of two of my favorites (but then again, I have a lot of favorites.)

Of W. Somerset Maugham she writes:

First off: Somerset Maugham is a phony…Years ago I read Of Human Bondage, and that is a good solid, airless, beefy English novel, his masterpiece. For the rest he tells good, made-up tales that might entertain you if you hadn’t got a God’s other thing to read and were bored anyhow. He is a trivial, conventional minded, professional hack and I think it is perfectly proper that he should be elected Dean of English Lit. at once…He has all the qualifications, including the stipulated half-ton of half-good books (169).

Of Oscar Wilde she writes:

Oscar always did make me queasy, I always thought him one of the most tiresome men ever born—there is in English letters only one other that bores me as much, Lord Byron (401).

I thought it somewhat funny that she wrote so disparagingly of these two authors. I find that the main source of humor in Porter’s writings is irony, something that she shares in common with Maugham and Wilde. Additionally, like these two gentlemen, her stories revolve primarily around human relationships and social commentary. She creates very real characters but often looks at them under a satirical lens, again like Wilde and Maugham. In fact, I think these authors share many traits in common that attract me to their writing styles.

P.S. I actually wrote this blog prior to today’s class and never got around to posting it (mainly because blogger seems to hate me) but I have a little mini-treat to add after someone’s revelation about a “girl book” today. Here is what Porter has to say about that book:

“I consider Wuthering Heights the purest act of genius in the world of the novel; nobody male or female has ever beat Emily Bronte at that!” (503)

“Sample of higher education: the other day a young woman in the advanced fiction class said the most wonderful picture she had ever seen in her life was Wuthering Heights. I told her she should read the book, too. She was thrilled. “Oh,” said she “Did they make a book of it?” (365)

There seems to be a trend with the mothers of O’Connor’s stories. Her mothers seem to long for older times and seem very stuck in their ways. They also seem to display a sort of ambivalence, towards things that outside their bubble. All that really seems to concern them is manners and their children’s well-being. Their children regard them as stifling and rather ignorant. The children are often people who have gone away for their education and because of poor health or lack of success they needed to return to the world that they were eager to leave in the first place.
The other day in class we read a passage in O’Connor’s letters when her mother told her that her room already looked like the hen-house (I do not remember the page number, sorry) and we had commented on how O’Connor seems possibly reflect herself into her characters. While reading I came across this passage today:

My mamma asked me the other day if I knew Shakespeare was an Irishman. I said no I didn’t. She said well its right there in the Savannah paper; and sure enough some gent from the University of Chicago had made a speech somewhere saying Shakespeare was an Irishman. I said well it’s just him that says it, you better not go around saying it and she said listen SHE didn’t care whether he was an Irishman or a Chinaman. She was getting ready to build herself a pond for the cows to lie down in and cool off in the summer time. The government says it hast to go down two feet straight to keep from breeding mosquitos but she don’t want it that way for fear the cows will break their legs getting in.

Something about that echoed back to the mother’s in O’Connor’s stories. From the few letters I have read that talk about her mother, O’Connor’s mom seems simple but headstrong, like the mother’s of O’Connor’s stories. I can picture any of the mother characters digging their pool how they want it, despite what anyone says to the contrary. I can also hear echoes of the children characters when O’Connor writes, “I said well it’s just him that says it, you better not go around saying it” since it feels like the children of her stories are constantly trying to educate their mothers, but the mothers, to the frustration of their offspring, just sort of dismiss it. I also can’t help but wonder if O’Connor channels some of her frustrations about her mother’s quirks into her stories because O’Connor seems quite similar to the children in them. Like I already said, her characters are well-educated, have seen outside their world, but then returned because they are either unhealthy or failed writers. Though O’Connor is of course not a failed writer, it does not mean that she did not feel discouraged at times, but as far as being well-educated and unhealthy there is a definite parallel.

Censorship seems to be the topic of the school year for me and I have discussed at length in several of my classes whether or not the “obscene” has any purpose. In her letter to Seymour Lawrence on page 499 Porter opens the letter with, “I am in a low frame of mind because I have just been called a “thoroughly vile woman” by a man who signs himself Marc T. Greene, American Foreign Correspondent—perfect stranger to me, from Thomaston Maine.” She continues, “He took frenzied offence to only one phrase, really” and bitterly jests that “by now no doubt he has cancelled his subscription if he had one to the Atlantic.” I am not sure what phrase Marc T. Greene was offended by, but as Porter says we can be left “to guess which one.” She writes that Mark Twain dealt with similar criticism when he was advised to “take that swearing out.”
So, why do writers put in material that is bound to offend the Marc T. Greenes of the world? I’ve been wondering about this for several months now. I think the “obscene” serves a purpose in literature primarily to round out a character’s or plot’s development and/or to teach a moral lesson. I was happy to read that Porter seemed to feel the same way. She writes, “It is offensive, spoken by an offensive character, and I meant it to be so” and “I write of the base aspects of human character out of loathing of it, really—yet it is there, all mixed in with the good and the desirable: I have some very good people on my boat as you’ll see, and some utterly wicked ones, but mostly a mixture of frailty and virtues of one kind or another.” How is it possible for a writer to create realistically human characters, flaws, sins and all, without actually presenting the flaws and sins? What lessons can we hope to garner, what new insights can we hope to gain about ourselves, if we only read about good people doing good things? To me, such stories, if they really exist, would be boring, unrealistic and preachy, although Porter acknowledges, “some very great writers have got along nicely with not a bawdy scene or crooked word.” On the flip side, Porter also writes that there are some writers that “know nothing else” other than baseness and obscenity. Such stories are equally unrealistic and boring, and often move themselves into the ridiculous. Obscenity just for the sake of obscenity.
A careful balance between the two extremes makes an interesting story, one that people can connect with and learn from. Porter is of course a master at that balance and understood the purpose. In true stick-to-your-guns Porter fashion she writes, “I think I shall just have to go on the way I’m going, and take a chance on shocking certain people—who I believe do go on thinking of literature as one thing and life as quite another, and I have got the two so identified in my mind, I wouldn’t know how to separate them.” It is fortunate for us that she felt that way. After all, Porter just wouldn’t be as interesting without the occasional murder, adultery, and child abuse.

As somewhat a response to Josie’s blog about the villain’s purpose I would like to compare the villain of “Free Radicals” to the villains in O’Connor. The villain of “Free Radicals” is shady from the moment he walks in. After he begins smashing Nita’s plates we understand that he is downright unbalanced. While he is still a very interesting character he seems to lake the subtlety that we find in O’Connor’s antagonists. You know that he is no-good from the moment he arrives, and he will remain that way until he leaves. O’Connor’s characters on the other hand keep you guessing. After having read several O’Connor stories in a row you may guess that the “bible salesman” is probably not a great guy, but if you had just picked up that story out of the blue you might not suspect as such. Even if you did, on your first reading did you really think he was going to go so far as to steal Hulga’s leg? In "The Life you Save may be your Own” despite possible initial impressions of Mr. Shiftlet one wonders if he perhaps really cares for Lucynell and if he is going to be able to help and connect with her, in spite of her being deaf. Go figure though, he abandons her at a diner. The villain of “Free Radicals” did not hold the same sort of mystery for me as O’Connor’s characters. I suppose there was the question regarding whether or not he was going to kill Nita, but that is really nothing new. While it still may be exciting, whether Nita lives or dies is not nearly as exciting as whether or not she is going to get her leg randomly stolen. It would seem O’Connor is the master of creating suspense and tension with her villains while still allowing them to go in completely new and unexpected directions.

We have discussed before how the life long sickness of both of these authors affected their work. In her letter to Paul Porter, Katherine Anne Porter writes:

This is Armistice Day, and this government is busy building up Germany for the
second time, and recognizing Franco, and injuring France and England our Allies,
and, I don’t doubt, preparing another great war and great depression to follow,
in good republican routine, just as they began to prepare on this day
thirty-eight years ago. On that day I came out of the death-stupor of
influenza, and realized that I would live, after all, but it made such a change
in me, that near-dying, and knowing just what was happening, it is as if I had
two lives—one on the other side of that illness, and the second one ever
since.

We knew that “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” was largely autobiographical, but I did not realize until I read that how much so. If you will remember, Miranda started coming out of her sickness on the day of the Armistice. We can also here echoes of Porter’s “two lives” within the story. In the story Porter writes, “Miranda wondered again at the time and trouble the living took to be helpful to the dead. But not quite dead now, she reassured herself, one foot in either world now; I shall cross back and be home again” (316-317). In her letter to Mr. Hartley about “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” Porter says, “You are quite right, that story is so completely autobiographical it amounts almost to a document” (177). With that quote in mind, and the fact that Miranda and Porter both came out of their sickness on Armistice Day I have to wonder if perhaps “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is not more autobiographical than I originally thought. If “it amounts almost to a document” does that mean there was an “Adam” or are the autobiographical elements the way in which Miranda reacts to her illness? Is it a combination of the two? I wonder if anyone can shed light on that.

In any case, I think it is important to consider that “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and Porter’s life may have stronger connections than first assumed. Certainly from reading these letters I can better appreciate the origin of this story.

Our class discussion of Alice Munro's "Free Radicals" introduced, as I remember, an interpretation of the story that wasn't totally in line with my own reading of it. It seemed like people saw Nita more or less evolving/devolving into Bett, her late husband's first wife, throughout the story and especially when Nita claims Bett's sins as her own in an attempt to stay safe when the creeper showed up in her home. It's not that I didn't see this conclusion as plausible or justified; it just wasn't where I came to with the story.

We talked some about a writer's intentions. I'm pretty sure that discussion came up in regards to the difference in the intentions of letters and the intentions of stories, but I think the question applies to "Free Radicals" and fiction-writing in general. We're not supposed to care what an author was trying to do, but I can't help but be curious about that sometimes. Short stories usually leave clues to help the reader in his/her process, and - kind of for fun, since I enjoyed the story, and kind of for the sake of being an engaged student - I read "Free Radicals" again, looking for the clues that led to or away from the aforementioned conclusion. I'm not sure if it's a structural thing, but it may very well be; I'll keep an eye out as we reread O'Connor and Porter.

In the story's second paragraph, Munro writes that Nita didn't notify Bett of Rich's death, even though she (Bett), along with Rich's brother, "might have understood, perhaps better than the people near at hand, why she had proceeded with the non-funeral as she had done." I don't really know why Bett should understand Nita's justification, but I feel okay about my assumption that it would simply be a byproduct of both of these women having been Rich's wives and sharing a certain understanding of him. A bit later, it's mentioned that the sort of "contemporary affair" people were expecting at his funeral was "the sort of thing that Rich had said made him puke." However, this initial passage could easily be seen as an early clue that Munro wants Nita and Bett to be seen as similar characters.

On the second page of the story (as far as my printout is concerned, anyway), we read, "This was Rich's house. He'd bought it when he was with his first wife, Bett." Now, it's not Bett's house or anything, at least not apparently; however, Nita is living in a house that isn't really hers, and the person to whom it actually belongs - Rich - bought it with his former wife. Is Nita some sort of invader, a conquistador of this house? Does this make her more or less similar to Bett? Does it highlight common ground between Nita and the man who "invades" her home and threatens her life? Hmm ... Really, though, maybe the house was always more Nita's than Bett's, because it was Rich's relationship with Nita that prompted him to stay so long and so often at the house and to make it more than "a weekend place, closed up in the winter."

On page two again: "Bett had become interested; she'd claimed in the beginning not to understand why he'd bought such a dump, but practical improvements always engaged her, and she bought matching carpenter's aprons."
And later: "The usual ruckus followed, trite and painful, and ended with Bett going off to California, then Arizona, Nita quitting her job at the suggestion of the registrar, and Rich missing out on becoming dean of arts. He took early retirement, sold the city house. Nita did not inherit the small carpenter's apron ..."
The apron, at least, is something they don't have in common. Also, Nita can't get up on a stepladder the way Bett could, though she later claims to have this talent.

Page eight is where Nita makes the claim, more or less, to be Bett. One thing I didn't take into account entirely my first time through was the actual story Nita tells of Bett's experience; I must've been more focused on trying to figure out what she was getting at. Anyhow, she actually seems to be very well-attuned to the idea I'd have of what Bett's experience was actually like; Nita could've told the story in a very straightforward fashion, but she inserts personal observations that give depth to the story she's telling. This, for me, contributes to the idea that Munro meant for them to "end up" the same. At the same time, though, one imporant discrepancy appears between Bett's experience and Nita's telling of it. In real life for Bett, the "other woman" survives and even ends up with Rich. In Nita's story, the "other woman" dies, and Rich stays with his first wife.

And, finally:
Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you.

So, this whole "looking for clues" thing ... I don't really like it so much. It has it's advantages, and I did notice things that I hadn't before or in different ways than I'd noticed them previously. That was cool, and I think it'd be especially advantageous if I was in the position of having read a story that other people had interpreted in a way that I didn't understand at all. However, seeing the little things that contradicted my original reading this time didn't really make me change my perception, and it also served to sort of break the story down into it's smaller particles instead of seeing it for its wonderful whole. A short story is so short that reducing it further isn't altogether useful, as opposed to the options one has when analyzing a novel or other long work.

Sorry, I feel like I am stepping back in time a bit with this blog.
I want to go to a definition of epiphany by Aristole, anagnorisis: the point in the plot especially of a tragedy at which the protagonist recognizes his or her or some other character's true identity or discovers the true nature of his or her own situation (from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anagnorisis).

I have seen that a lot in both of Porter and O’Connor’s stories. But I believe that epiphanies also happen to the reader, not just the protagonist of a story. I don’t remember who said it, but in another blog is the idea that the boy in “A&P” doesn’t have an epiphany, but the reader does. I have found in different stories and books that I as a reader have an epiphany at a different time than a character does or has one when a character never does. In others (a lot of O’Connor stories) I have an epiphany with the character at the same time. That is one thing that I love about O’Connor’s stories. She sets the reader up to have an epiphany at the same time her character(s) does.

Josie blogger earlier about how letters hold “rawness.” She mostly wrote about Porter, but I have also noticed it in O’Connor’s letters. The major thing that I have noticed throughout her letters is that it is very clear that O’Connor is responding to other’s letters. Her letters are choppy, and jump into new subjects, at times, rather unexpectedly. I find it fascinating that that is her letter writing style. She says what she wants to on a subject and doesn’t feel the need for a nice clean wrap up of that subject. She goes straight into another one, which most of the time I have to guess is a response to something else someone’s letter is referring to. It is times like these that I wish we had access to the letters she received, because I think it would help me to understand better what she is talking about. With some of her letters, I feel like I am listening to one side of a telephone conversation. I only know half of the story and feel like I am missing important information.

Porter’s letters on the other hand, are not choppy. Every single one is eloquent and flows very well. I have noticed only in a few letters that she addresses several different subjects in response to a letter. Most of her letters are based on one subject. And even the letters that have several subjects still flow together.

Both Porter and O’Connor’s letters are raw and contain realness about them that I don’t get out of their stories. And even though Porter’s letters flow better, and are very eloquent, I still love reading O’Connor’s straight up, tell it like it is letters. (O’Connor is eloquent, just in her own way.)

I started out reading Porter's comments about William Faulkner, just because his was a name I recognized in the index, and when I read this, I knew that I wanted Katherine Anne Porter to be my friend Katherine:

"At last I got hold of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and it curdled the marrow in my bones. I have never seen such a cold-blooded assault on the nerve-ends, so unrepentant a statement of horror as that book. And such good bold sound writing. That must be taken for granted, for only a very good writer indeed could do what he has done. It left me so shaken and unnerved I could hardly believe the face of the sun. Not, of course, that one doesn't read worse in the newspapers, every day. Not that I haven't myself seen a man burned at the stake ... Not that things don't happen. But my God! There should be something in a work of art that gives you something to hang onto after the very worst has been told." (pg. 39 of Letters of Katherine Anne Porter)

Reasons this is cool:
1) This was in an April 24th letter to Caroline Gordon, a writer and, best I can tell, a friend of Katherine Anne's. The previous letter in the collection was written on February 11th, and in it, Katherine Anne expressed that she hadn't "read a word of Faulkner," so I think it's neat that she acknowledged a hole in her literary education and corrected it as soon as she could access a book of Faulkner's. I so, so often say, "Yeah, I've really been meaning to read that," and I don't take action to actually read it.
2) She says things really, really well. It left me so shaken and unnerved I could hardly believe the face of the sun.
3) She's done the thing I admire and adore of taking a common experience that folks don't commonly recognize, describe, or discuss - the fact that disturbing images/tales in fiction somehow carry a different weight than the ones in real live life - and she pins it down exactly.

By the by:
I think Katherine Anne felt none too kindly towards Mr. Faulkner. Weird. I get the impression that she saw him as an uppity fart. She wrote one letter to him and referenced him occasionally in her other letters.

Just as I said in class one day, I am absolutely in love with how eloquent and beautiful Katherine Anne Porter’s letters are. Even when Porter is clearly upset and angry, she remains eloquent. No matter what she is writing about, or to whom, her letters keep their eloquence. After reading letters to and about Hart Crane, it is obvious that they did not have the best relationship. Porter never goes into too many details, but from what I’ve read, Crane could be quite mean. In the one letter that we have to Crane, Porter basically chastises him for his behavior. In another letter about another situation she says that “I lectured Hart in my most motherly Dutch Aunt style” (38). But in her letter to him, it is a bit more than lecturing, “I think that you like making mischief simply through idleness and restlessness, and you don’t feel quite alive unless you are tearing at other personalities like a monkey…Let me tell you plainly that this bores me, I see through it, and I won’t have it” (46). Even when calling Crane a monkey, it still is wonderfully written.

In a letter that Porter wrote concerning her feelings toward Crane after learning of his suicide is very interesting. She expressed shock on hearing of “the manner of it” (83). This is the letter that I think really portrays her relationship with him. I recommend everyone to read it that has not. I find it quite sad that their relationship went from being friends, to Porter being very hurt by him. In another letter this is how she described him, “Look, my dear, at the utterly impossible human beings we have taken for friends… Hart Crane for mine…” (334). Crane obviously hurt Porter, and I find it interesting that when she heard of his death, she didn’t do the socially expected “don’t speak ill of the dead” thing. I kind of like the fact that she didn’t do that.“It was foul and outrageous, and as for me, his suicide has not changed the thing that happened. Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life. And I have yet to see the end, no doubt, of what he did, while he has gone, escaped, without explaining, without once giving a sign that he realized the sin he had committed” (83 ).

Even though Porter is upset about what had transpired between them, throughout the letter she expresses that they were friends and that she did want to view him in a good light “All that was worth touching in him he put into his poetry, and it is this I wish to remember, and keep and foster. Not that living corpse…” (85).

(I have never been in a situation even close to this, so I hope that I did not pass judgment, I just find Porter’s relationship with Crane interesting).

In class we have discussed a few times about how it feels to have someone you look up to read your story and express a liking in it. When O’Connor speaks to those college students, telling them how horrible they are is something we have talked about several times. I don’t remember if it was in class or in a blog, that it was mentioned that she hated telling anyone that they had promise because they would then jump all over her and never leave her alone (maybe it wasn’t even O’Connor who said this, I don’t remember). But we all decided that it is very nice to have someone that you admire tell you that your work is good. I thought that it was neat in one of O’Connor’s letters, she has found out that Lillian Hellman has read and liked her stories and was so pleased by it.

“I was terribly pleased to know that Lillian Hellman likes my stories. I had never thought of her even remotely as a person who would read them. It is always a revelation to find out the people who like and dislike them. It is another way of reading the stories” (1149).

I’m not sure what to make of that last sentence, “It is another way of reading the stories.” I think (please correct me if I’m wrong) that it is in the sense of seeing her stories in another “lens.” From a quick Google search Lillian Hellman was a very liberal playwright, which is different genre than what O’Connor wrote. So I’m sure that Hellman, not being a typical audience for O’Connor, brought a new lens to the stories that she had probably never thought of them in. O’Connor must have thought that her stories only applied to a certain group of people, and others wouldn’t relate. But with a “non-typical” reader expressing liking in her stories, I would think that O’Connor realized that her stories can’t be read and interpreted in one way.

In my other English class we are currently reading Mary Wroth. She was an author that mixed autobiographical events and fiction quite a bit. My class discussed quite a bit about how it was very obvious in some of her works that you can clearly see who she was writing about. In a set of her sonnets, she is very clearly talking about her relationship with her first cousin who happened to be her lover. In her novel she also briefly mentions the affairs of a member of court (the Jacobean court), who recognizes himself in it. He was very upset with what she had written and made a huge deal out of it, helping in having Wroth be basically kicked out of court.

So with that in mind, when I was reading the letter that Chelsea Lane blogged about that involved O’Connor’s inspiration for “The Displaced Person” it is very obvious that the dairy man’s wife was a huge inspiration, and actually became a character. Here’s my point, I wonder how the dairy man’s wife felt after reading this story. I actually have to wonder if she even read the story, and if she did, did she recognize herself in it. Assuming that she did, I would think that she would be a little upset about it. But I certainly hope that she would realize that she is a (as Sarah has named them) Lame-o. After realizing this, I hope that the dairy man’s wife could change from a lame-o into a non-lame-o.

I remember reading Death of the Author in critical theory, not knowing this essay preceded Barthes. I remember feeling a sort of relief when I first read Death of the Author, and I feel the same way now, with Intentionally Fallacy. Because I am a writer, I am relieved; these two essays free the writer of the responsibility of autonomy. Autonomy is a big deal in life and in writing. In every piece of writing, especially poetry, we always ask, “what was the author trying to portray in this piece?” So often in workshops, we read and respond and ask questions that are centered around "what were you getting at here?" What if, as a writer, I don't know-- I just know that's how the story has to be? What if O'Connor just knew the leg had to come off, but she didn't know why?

So why do we so often as this of our written art? We don’t ask that of other art forms. For instance, in visual art, most of the time we simply ask what is there and how it interacts with the viewer. Now maybe that is my naïve experience with criticism with visual art, but that seems to be the case. I am not saying, really, that not asking what the author intended is the best way to go about something, but it certainly is less intimidating for a writer. If I don’t have to worry about “getting my message across,” it leave me more open to make observations, and I prefer to write that way, anyhow. The writers who are so forward with their point they could outline the "moral", fairy-tale style, are the ones I put down quickest.

I also love when, in section 5 of Part I, the text reads, "The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about human being, an object of public knowledge." That part is freeing as a reader. I've said before in this class that I hate the idea that once something is even halfway canonized, they are too far above our heads to question. (Sometimes I still feel like a country bumkin for not loving something all-important, but sometimes, I just don't. I can respect it without loving it.) And what I read in this, although it could be debated, is that the work is what it is for the audience that interacts with it. It is the public's. The public (or the individual) can reject or embrace whatever in that text repulses or appeals to them.

This has me thinking, though. Is the public the public? Meaning that the individual doesn't matter? It is a majority rule? Because that would seem like an entirely different essay to me, and one I would mind being written (writing, perhaps?).

This is an example of how we'd like you to mount your responses to other blog posts.

1. Click on the title of the original post, then copy that URL to the clipboard.

2. In your blog entry, use the link tool to input your URL.

3. Create text for the link.

Write your response.

It will look like this: Link to Sillman's "Multiple Selves."

Again going back to what we talked about on Tuesday, I keep thinking of what Sarah said about how when we write a letter, we don't typically make a draft of it first, and then later refine it or correct any mistakes before sending it out into the world. Although we don't write letters much anymore, I know that when I write an email to someone, I often push the send button without altering it in any way. And all I would have to do is push the "delete" button. It wasn't even that easy in Porter and O'Connor's day. Porter was also such a prolific letter writer and set aside time in the day for the very purpose of writing so I doubt that she often agonized over the way a sentence sounded or the structure of the letter.

I think part of the reason I'm interested in this is because the letters represent a kind of rawness. Since they were likely created in a short amount of time and in the heat of the moment, they may refelct their creator the way a revised story cannot. I've found several examples of this. In a letter to Glenway Wescott (p. 169), Porter makes a typo when she attempts to write "phony" and it comes out instead as "P6H6o6N6Y." She goes on to say that it was a mistake caused from pressing the space bar rather than just correcting the mistake. I love that. It may sound ridiculous, but little things like this make these letters come alive for me. In another letter to Josephine, Porter writes "Your splendid letter came about an hour ago, and I am so zipped up by it I run to answer" (31). So it seems that Porter anxiously creates a response and, from the sound of it, probably put it in the mailbox as quickly as possible, with minimal revisions; it represents her authentic voice rather than her revised voice. In one letter, Porter seems to recognize this authentic nature of the letter by beginning a letter to Barbara Wescott, "your letter was like you" (165). Now, I'm not sure if "like you" means the structure of the letter in some way represented her friend or if the words themselves were so authentic and raw that she would've known it was Barbara who wrote them. I like to think it's the latter.

Because theory did not use to be part of the program and I am one of those old returning students, I have not yet taken a theory class. So I looked up The Intentional Fallacy. I think I've always agreed with it's argument that "the design or intention of the author is . . . [not] desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art," even though I would argue as to the "availability" of the author's intent. As for O'Conner and Porter, I believe that regardless of their intent, their works have proven successful. So my argument would be that study of the author's life and letters, etc. outside the works they've written is a study significant in itself and not illegitimate. As successful writers, these two provide a study in the psychology of a writer, a study both fascinating and perhaps helpful to both readers and hopeful writers themselves. We do want to make connection from their lives to their works, but it is secondary to the judgment of their success, it is merely validation for our own understanding. As a reader and potential writer, we long to connect more strongly with the works we have already connected with as well as with the writer of such accomplishments. A study of who these writers are and how they may think and write only establishes a stronger connection to their works. If we understand (if at all possible) their thought process to even the smallest degree, we may understand their works on a different level -- a different way perhaps than how their works touched us before, or perhaps in a stronger way, and neither experience is more or less valuable than the other, nor does it detract from the original success of their works. I hope I've made some sense, but I guess my point is that their intent does not matter in my own mind as to the judgement of their works and that I recognize a value in the study of their letters that although we might find insightful as we try to understand their writing better, has a value all of its own and unrelated to the judgment of their success.

In class, we talked about how these letters show us the multiple aspects of Porter and O'Connor's personalities. This absolutely fascinates me. We have developed a kind of equation for O'Connor's stories: a stranger comes to town which subsequently causes someone's life to be turned upside down. We get comfortable knowing what will happen next while reading her stories, and I get to the point where I feel like I kind of know the author, although to a small degree. After reading her letters, though, I've realized that she has several "selves" and, unlike her stories, we cannot apply an equation to her and therefore cannot know her as intimately as we wish we could.

Chelsea mentioned in her blog how Porter called feminism a "slimy word," which was a little upsetting due to the fact that we like to classify her under the category of "feminist." As Chelsea pointed out, I'm sure a lot of this has to do with the fact that in the 50's, feminism had many negative connotations. But also, there were probably aspects of feminism that Porter did and did not agree with, and so she cannot be correctly classified under this title. Maybe the title of "feminist" is a kind of equation we like to place on people in order to categorize them in a way that we feel we can better understand them. Unfortunately, Porter is much too complex to be placed under a label and her mutiple selves won't condone it.

As I was reading O'Connor's letters, I became aware of a subtle change of voice from one letter to another. I mean, you can obviously still tell it's O'Connor speaking, but there is something a little bit different in the ways in which she addresses certain people. One of the biggest changes seems to be in her letters to Maryat Lee. I'm not sure what Maryat's relationship to O'Connor was, but, just from the way O'Connor writes to her, I get the impression that they are intimate friends. To me, there seems to be a playfulness about the way these women interact with one another. In one of her letters, O'Connor writes to Maryat, saying "you didn't know I had a DREAD DISEASE didja? Well I got one" (1063) and goes on to make light of her sitution. At the end of this same letter, there is a little drawing of a skull and crossed bones. The skull is smiling, again making light of the fact that O'Connor knows she will likely die at a young age. Instances like this can be compared with her writings to A. These letters to A. seem much more formal than the letters to Maryat. In them, O'Connor talks a lot about her work and also about the authors she is reading or has read. It seems that A. is her "literary" friend and Maryat is her "buddy" friend. Nearly everyone she writes to will have their own category as they relate to her, making it impossible to produce a single title that will effectively define Flannery O'Connor.

As should be well-known at this point, I am a feminist. I feel strongly about this. And, though I would not pin a title to anyone who didn’t desire to have one, I think that most women are feminists these days—even the ones who don’t care for the title. It’s all in your definition of that word. If being a feminist means working to subvert and repress men, then I am not a feminist. If feminism is being a woman, an all it’s capacities, and not being punished or devalued or looked down on for that (which is what it is to me) then I AM a feminist.

Anyhow, browsing through the index, I ran across the letter dealing with that word in relation to how Katharine Anne Porter used it. Now, according to my definition, Ms. Porter is most definitely a feminist. But, according to her, on page 178, feminism is a “slimy word.” I read that and then re-read it three more times because I was sure I read it incorrectly. I was SURE. Katherine Anne Porter is most definitely a feminist, as far as I see it. She writes strong women and challenges all sorts of roles and stereotypes, male and female—think of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, for goodness sake! Near the above-mentioned statement, Porter also said:

“…at risk of being called a feminist, (slimy word) I wish to say that I do not believe that my faults are especially womanly, or my virtues especially masculine. After all, I am a woman of an almost boring normality, I run dreadfully true to form in most ways known as womanly. But I write as I do, also, as an artist, with an almost complete lack of self-consciousness as to sex.”

The part I would like to highlight is the first phrase, “at risk of being called a feminist…” Based on this letter and the other letters that address feminism, it seems to me Porter is drawn to what feminism is; there are elements that she agrees with. What I believe is that the cultural stigma of feminism in the 50’s is what stopped her from identifying with it fully. And I’ll be honest of my naivety here, and state that I have a slim idea of what 50’s feminism was like, but I figure it isn’t what it is today. There had to be evolution.

In her letter to A. when she compares walking on crutches to walking like an ape, Flannery O’Connor writes, “In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny” (957). While this quote seems like it could be something from Lewis Carroll, when you really think about it, it rings true. Of course O’Connor should know more about her own writing than we do, but this was really a Duh! moment for me. I was frustrated that though I know it to be true, the thought had never occurred to me to put it into words. O’Connor’s stories are hysterically funny…but only because they are so terrible. Girl throwing book at annoying old woman: funny. Getting your leg stolen by a con-artist parading as a bible salesman: funny. These are terrible, awful things that rank about an 8.94 on our Schadenfreude scale and are therefore funny. It is O’Connor’s way of handling these tragically absurd situations that gives them their humor. You know the image of Hulga waiting for someone to help her down makes you laugh in the same way that O’Connor’s notion that “the lame shall enter first” because they have used their crutches to knock everyone else out of the way does. We can see O’Connor’s humor about her real life situation as an “anthropoid ape” working itself into her writings. If she had a different sense of humor, her stories would be drastically different, even if the plots remained the same.

What happens when a chapter, page, paragraph or even an entire story get lost in the ether? In her letter to James F. Powers on pages 572-573, Katherine Anne Porter addresses this issue. She writes, “It is terrible to think of your losing tow chapters of the novel, there is a loss just next to death itself.” What a poignant and yet very profound way of looking at the situation. If an author loses her work and is forced to begin again there are two out comes. The first is that that the story is never finished. Porter writes, “I wrote the first two pages of a story once, and lost or misplaced them; after outrageous search and despair, I tried to remember them and write them again, but I could never finish the story, have not to this day.” The other potential outcome is that the story can be salvaged from the inner recesses of the author’s brain and be rewritten. Porter acknowledges that “it is the same story, but told quite a different tone from the first.”
This brings up an interesting thing to consider: how many of our great literary works ended up being vastly different than how they were originally envisioned simply because some pages were lost? Certainly many scholars still argue today if crucial elements of Shakespeare’s work went by the by. For example, how would The Taming of the Shrew be altered if the Christopher Sly induction was actually completed? Still perhaps more disturbing to contemplate is how many short stories that would’ve changed our literary landscape never came to be because they were lost and their authors never managed to rewrite them. Think of how many emails have been lost in Webland, how many reports have been eaten by the Windows Blue Screen of Death, and that is only within the last 15 or 20 years. When you really think about it, it is mind-blowing.

I found a great discussion of who A. was.

Follow this link.

Enjoy the treat. I, myself, am going to have some chocolate.

A bit ago, Chelsea (the other one) posted an entry on the writer’s inspiration. That is also fascinating to me, too. Not so much to really know where the ideas come from, though. I think most (I say most only to avoid an absolute) writers take their inspiration from the things that happen around them and tweak them to fit in a/the story.

Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, says:

“[My momma] and Mrs. S______, the dairyman’s wife, have been making curtains for the windows out of flowered chicken feed sacks. Regina was complaining that the green sacks wouldn’t look so good in the same room where the pink ones were and Mrs. S________ (who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, ‘Do you think they’ll know what the colors even is?’ Usually the families that have been got around here for dairy work have turned out to be Polish shoe makers and have headed for Chicago just as soon as they could save the money.”

Colored chicken feed sacks as curtains? Doesn’t that ring a bell or three? Flannery O’Connor wrote in The Displaced Person,

“They had collected a piece of odd furniture here and a piece there and they had taken some flowered chicken feed sacks and made curtains for the windows, two red and one green, because they had not had enough of the red sacks to go around. Mrs. McIntyre said she was not made of money and she could not afford to buy curtains. ‘They can’t talk,’ Mrs. Shortley said. ‘You reckon they’ll know what colors even is?’”

I think it reveals a bit more about Mrs. Shortley’s character to know where her dialogue came from. I mean, that statement isn’t quite one of a person we should respect in the first place, but when writing to S&R, she deems it necessary to tell them that the woman who made the comment had teeth only on one side of her mouth, and Flannery O’Connor also made the judgment she usually refrains from in her fiction, of telling that the voice was, “very superior.”

It’s interesting.

One thing I especially enjoy while reading the letters of both Porter and O'Connor is their perceptions of other writers. They are both continuously rattling off impressive lists of the famous writers they are familiar with, and we are fortunate enough to get a glimpse of their opinions of those writers.

In both O'Connor and Porter's letters, I've found instances where they critique the character development of other authors, again strongly implying that these two women are primarily concerned with portraying realistic characters rather than analyzing a larger philosophical question or focusing on plot development.

I read several instances of this in O'Connor's letters, but the one that comes to mind is a letter "To A." on pg. 1181. In the letter, she refers to a book she's been reading (I was unable to discover which book), and she says "I began to feel I was reading a connundrum about some philosophical problem and not about folks and I got most weary." This recalls to mind the "treat" we had earlier this semester, if I'm remembering correctly, in which O'Connor has her neighbor read one of her stories and she says something to the effect of "I guess that's just how some folks would do" and O'Connor took it as a compliment to her work. She doesn't care if we like her characters or not, as long as they are realistically and effectively portrayed, which I think they undoubtedly are.

Similarly, in one of Porter's letters to Barbara Wescott (pg. 307), she discusses some of the Russian writers, primarily Dostoievski. She says that she "madly (wants) to get into the book and take some of the characters by the nap of the neck and knock some sense and logic into their maggoty heads." I'm not really sure if this is a critique of the quality of the characters or if it is just evidence of Porter's investment in the characters she both creates and reads about, but either way, I think a character's mental development is her primary concern.

I have to admit that I was slightly taken aback by O’Connor’s curtness in some of her letters. After reading some of her stories, I have no idea why though. Part of it was the striking difference between her voice in her letters and her voice in her stories. She is feisty and honest to a fault. When I began to read her letters I tried to focus on the letters written to A. I was a little intrigued with the relationship. I loved that she marked up the Commonweal with, “all the marks on the copy, everything commented upon, doodles, exclamation points, cheers, growls” (1088). She just has a very clear vision of what she likes and dislikes, which is good.
In reading these letters to A. I got distracted and changed to reading the letters to Catharine Carver. It was just fascinating to me to see O’Connor’s comments back to an editor about her own writing. Like things that worked and didn’t work, how she worked through the process of writing these stories, ect. One of my favorites was a short one, where she writes, “When the grim reaper comes to get me, he’ll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. No end to this” (1090). The revision process is never over. I think more than anything, reading these letters gave me more insight to the mind of a writer, and probably hope that I am one too.
I was questioning how O’Connor judged her criticisms, how she chose what to take and what to leave behind. I think, correct me if I am wrong, that she always chose what was best for the story and the style, rather than what would make the story publishable or easy. She seemed to have an amazingly strong hold on who she was as a writer, what she was trying to say, and what her stories were. Now if I could only figure out how she did that…

The letters are so fun to read. I'm enjoying seeing Porter's and O'Conner's personalities. I found it really interesting to read Porter's letter on Hemingway's death, (p.586). She didn't love his work and seems quite upset at his death. I found a comment she maid about letter writing that I thought interesting too, (p.405):

. . . for letters I always thought were meant to be personal messages standing
instead of talk between two persons who are not arguing, or trying to convert
each other to anything, or writing essays for posterity or even the present
public--so the free-er and easier the tone, the nearer it comes to a letter,
seems to me.

I've been interested in O'Connor's little insights she gives about her own writing. I want to better understand the religious element she presents and she gives us some great information. In several of her letters she states that she writes what she writes because she is a Catholic. She says in her letter on p.930 that "If my stories are complete it is because I see everything as beginning with original sin, taking in the Redemption, and reckoning on a final judgment." In another, p.952, she says: "I believe an the Church teaches that God is as present in the idiot boy as in the genius." This belief is most definitely seen in her writing. She mentions that she thinks herself to be a writer who believes in "distortion" rather than a realistic writer (p.932), and she seems to extend or distort her idea that God is present in the idiot boy to God is present in several of her "vulgar" characters. I use vulgar because that is how she describes the characters she creates. She explains this idea in her agreement of thought with Guardini in a letter on p. 953:

I think his supreme external attribute is vulgarity and that the vulgar
must be saved and that generally this is accomplished by the vulgar, or vulgarer
than they. Who may be closer to God even than the Idiot Boy.

Wow! I love that. It is fascinating to me that she associates herself as such (she describes herself as a cross between Hulga and Nelson p. 954 ). One other statement I have to add to this. She creates the characters she feels comfortable with or capable of being.

Hulga in this case would be a projection of myself into this kind of
tragic-comic action--presumably only a projection, because if I could not stop
short of it myself, I could not write it. Stop short or go beyond it, I
should say. You have to be able to dominate the existence that you
characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less
primitive.

She makes me laugh that she thinks herself so primitive and such a monster even. I love her next letter, p.962, where she has been referred by her friend as cupid. She replies with "I'd rather be the Minotaur or the Gorgon or that three-headed dog at the river Styx, or Anybody."

I know that we talked about Porter getting married and divorced the other day, so I was interested in reading what she had to say about the matter of marriage. The first letter related to marriage in the index is when she almost got married to someone and then decided against it. She says, "I know now I'll never marry him nor anybody else unless I suddenly go mad" (76). She talks about how she was in such a "hellish gloom" (77) when she was going to marry him, and was automatically happier when she broke it off.

I love how she says that she will never get married because three years later she is writing about how she is "cheerfully, comfortably, and I hope permanently married" (119). In a later letter she writes about how important it is to be "really" married (124). She is obviously happy being married in this letter because she talks about how marriage changes a person and makes them better. Love is not blind, she claims, but instead "it is appallingly clear-sighted" (125).

I know that this is not the "personal" response time, but I can't help but relate to the lives of these authors. I too experienced the I'll-never-get-married-but-then-shortly-after-get-married syndrome. it makes me sad to know that this marriage she is so happy about eventually ends, though I have yet to read about that. Perhaps that will be my next journey into her life.

I also wonder how her view on marriage in her letters reflects her writing. I think that "Rope" reflects her view of marriage a little bit, but I cannot think of any others at the moment (though I know there has to be another, at least). Can anyone else think of any of her stories that deal with marriage? I think I should also look into O'Connor's view of marriage, but her index is harder to navigate. It would be interesting nonetheless to see how the two compare and how their views are reflected in their stories. Has anyone else seen anything along these lines that they could refer me to?

I have been thinking about our discussion last class on O’Conner’s letters that mention the KKK(p.904 & 905) and Porter’s anti-Nazi, almost anti-German response in her letter (p. 208). Then I recalled a hint of anti-Semitic sentiment in her letter to Mr. Schwartz, p.547. What she says in her letter is true about how Jews subjugate women (and early Christian Fathers: Tertullian, St. Augustine, etc.) and I am right with her on how she feels about it. Likewise, I am not impressed with Freud’s ideas of penis envy. Where I find perhaps some anti-Semitism is in the link she makes between the two. It is just the allusion she makes that, Freud was a Jew, so it figures? I don’t mean to make a bigger deal out of this than that, and I don’t want to focus on subtle negative attitudes. I just wondered if this helps explain, along with her growing up in “a world that was highly Germanized,” her need to disassociate herself with Germans. Coupled with WWII, that need of disassociation would almost seem imperative.
I am interested as well in O’Conner’s attitude towards the KKK, but we aren’t given it at all. I think we are too far removed from their situations to understand the influence or impact of their racist social atmospheres. Time and distance has afforded us a historical awareness. If we were immersed as they were we might better understand, and not that I believe either one needs an excuse nor would ask for one. I do tend to think that what one is submersed in would show itself, in one degree or another, in one’s writing. This is one of the reasons I’m interested in O’Conner’s attitudes. For example, I’ve noticed in some of her letters that she is concerned with “class,” or levels of people — a thing no doubt she saw and was subject to throughout her life— and I noticed even terminology or associated words used in her stories like Revelation. Check out the letter on p.902 to Sally Fitzgerald: “I never have read Aiken or Henry Miller or that dope that wrote the Jurgen things but from what I have read about them they all sound like steps on the same ladder— with old Aiken the high rung.”
After I went back and read the letter on 904 and 905 discussing the KKK, I understood that O’Conner was only making an observation and I even wonder if any of these people, the P—-s or J——s, are even black, because the L—-’s are clearly not. The L’s, P’s and J’s seem to be people that rent from the O’Conners. They may even be “Displaced Persons” or immigrant workers (Check out the letter on p. 893 to the Fitzgeralds, it’s The Displaced Person real life situation). Initially, in letter 904, O’Conner seems worried because she has just found out that the KKK has burned a cross at the L’s. The KKK was prevalent in Carbon County’s early years, where I grew up. The miners that came there were immigrant workers and the KKK hated all of them, not necessarily just black folks. Anyway, in the letter on 893 O’Conner is anticipating the arrival of who she suspects might be Polish immigrants to rent their property. In letter 905, O’Conner has discovered that the cross burning was just part of an initiation and the L’s were not victims of a threat or crime. We never get any insight into how O’Conner feels about the Klan herself. If anyone finds anything else out, I’d love to hear it.