I can’t remember anymore if I’d read some of these stories prior to this week, or if I’d simply heard so much about them that it only seems like I had. I was interested in reading this book because O’Connor had a reputation for being controversial, and also for being somewhat forgotten, although I don’t pretend to know how true that last is. I only know that finding even this one volume of her work was pretty damned hard, and I had to look for quite some time. (I may not have mentioned this before, but I don’t buy books online unless it’s absolutely necessary; even when buying used or remaindered, I prefer to give my money to someone in the neighbourhood.)
I have no difficulty seeing how her stories could be seen as controversial back in 1948. They address head on issues of race and religion; they tackle a decaying, morally bankrupt American South in ways that no doubt made her contemporaries very uncomfortable. Reading these stories is an uncomfortable experience for me a half-century later, and not just because, like most people in this day and age, I tend to flinch when I see the word “nigger” in print. O’Connor’s stories do display the moments of grace that she is famous for, but they display them only after she has raked each of us (and her characters, of course) over the coals for our ignorance, for not thinking we have ignorance or prejudice in us, for our justifications and our pride. Reading these stories would make even the most egalitarian of us wonder if maybe we aren’t as open-minded and fair as we like to think we are. I found myself asking the question, if I had been born, rural soul that I am, in the days of my grandfather’s generation, would I be the same man I am today, or would I be like the people in O’Connor’s stories? My grandfather was not like them, and that gives me hope, but that’s not the same as knowing.
If you’re the sort of reader who doesn’t think that writers should moralize, or don’t believe that literature can or should possess any sort of moral authority, then I won’t recommend this book to you. I’m not always sure about what I believe. What is right at one moment doesn’t always seem right at the next, and I suppose that’s the nature of moral inquiry in the world we live in, but that doesn’t stop me from believing that moral inquiry still has a place in art, and that making us question ourselves is not only a kind of moral authority, but a necessary one. I don’t think that literature should instruct us in what to believe (and O’Connor had enough skill with irony that she was never quite didactic), but it should force us to do our best to understand why we believe what we believe. A Good Man is Hard to Find will do that for you.
Next: The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman.
