“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
Every time I read this line from the end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I want to shout: Can I get an amen? Not just because The Misfit pegs the grandmother in this story so accurately, but because O’Connor pegs all of us so accurately. Wouldn’t we all be better women and men if there was someone holding a gun to our heads every minute of every day?
Unlike most of her contemporaries, O’Connor wrote through a pointedly Christian lens. In The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, she wrote:
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
For O’Connor, then, a good woman or a good man was solidly in the eye of the only beholder who matters: Christ. Many of her characters lived in little universes of their own choosing until some act of violence, like a real or metaphoric gun to the head, brought them before a mirror where they stood, stripped of their pretensions, alone and sorely in need of grace. O’Connor’s work centers on the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. The problem, however, is one with which she was all too familiar:
All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
O’Connor was painfully aware that her audience was largely comprised of people who think God is dead. She knew that this audience put little stock either in grace or the devil. For this audience, her stories were examples of the modern pessimism and violence which characterized much of 20th century literature.
If O’Connor’s works were to be taught as she intended, from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy, many literature teachers would undoubtedly be fired–or suspended until they could promise to avoid this perspective in favor of a more psychological one. For these teachers, her characters are not sinners in need of grace but rather victims in need of psychiatry. For them, a good man or woman should be defined by the prevailing social and cultural mores.
I thought about O’Connor as I finished Ian McEwan’s novel, Enduring Love. The story opens dramatically with a young boy inside a hot air balloon which has become untethered. His grandfather clings to the one of the ropes, running and pulling, desperate to bring his grandson to safety. Upon hearing the child’s cries, the novel’s protagonist, Joe Rose, and several other men rush to help the grandfather. They grab the dangling ropes and do their best to hang on to the balloon as the wind threatens to carry it and the child away. When they can no longer hold onto the ropes, Joe and the others–except one man–release their grips, as the wind lifts the balloon from the field. They watch in horror as this man is carried into the air and, finally unable to hold on any longer, falls to his death. The boy is later rescued when the balloon descends miles from the field. After the tragedy, Joe Rose and Jed Parry, one of the others who came to the boy’s assistance, share a few moments of grief.
The novel centers on the relationship between Joe and Jed, one that begins with Jed’s insistence that Joe pray with him before they leave the field. Jed becomes increasingly persistent–calling, writing, and stalking Joe in an attempt to help him see that God loves Joe, just as he loves him. As Jed’s attempts to communicate with Joe escalate, Joe becomes convinced that Jed suffers from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a delusional disorder in which one believes another to be infatuated with him or her. Jed’s infatuation unfolds over the course of the novel. As it does, McEwan appears to lay the groundwork to ultimately reveal that it is Joe—not Jed—who is truly paranoid, that he becomes obsessed with Jed, just as Jed is obsessed with him.
At the end of the novel when he is finally institutionalized after admitting that he did try to kill Joe, that he held his wife at knife point, and then threatened to slit his own throat unless Joe forgave him, Jed stays true to his love for God, his undying love for Joe, and his desire that Joe come to God. Many reviewers turned up their noses at this ending, claiming that it seriously weakened the novel. Better to omit this scene altogether, to continue pulling readers into Joe’s paranoia, to conclude the story as a psychological tale. But to end it with Jed’s unfailing passion for God and for Joe’s soul? As a literary work of the 21st century, this simply would not do.
Jed’s character is much like those of Flannery O’Connor—those characters who appear fanatical, characters whom you want to cast off as crazy or ignorant until she brings their convictions to light, and you realize that you’ve smugly empathized with the wrong character(s) all along. O’Connor ultimately uses violence to shock both her characters and readers into an awareness of her protagonists’ desperate need for grace. McEwan uses violence, too, as he brings Jed and Joe together in a final traumatic scene. Here, I could see that in spite of his delusions about Joe’s love for him, Jed does not suffer from any delusions regarding sin and grace. He clearly sees the real hole in Joe’s heart and understands that only God can fill it. The reviewers haven’t shared my insights, however, finding both Jed and Joe to be psychological victims of their circumstances and of an indifferent, if not hostile, world. In their eyes, neither character constitutes a good man.
But have the critics gotten it wrong with Enduring Love? If O’Connor were alive today, I truly believe that she would say yes. Yes, they got it all wrong. With a single violent and traumatic event, McEwan sets the stage for the possibility of Joe’s conversion. O’Connor would see Joe as an atheist blinded by his devotion to science. She would see Jed as an unlikely but willing disciple who yearns to bring a fellow sinner before God, to open his eyes to the limits of his intellectualism. And when Jed threatens to kill himself and begs Joe to forgive him, she would see this as the pivotal moment of the novel. Gun to the head or knife to the throat, violence can shatter our false sense of control. And humbled then, we can choose to turn to God or to turn away.
O’Connor would understand that it would be more modern to accept Joe as an educated, intelligent man who succumbs to paranoia after a tragic event and encounter with a delusional man than it would be to consider him as a sinner in need of redemption. She would understand that many may argue that the Jed Parrys of the world should be institutionalized. They would be sorely mistaken, though, for Jed emerges as the novel’s true protagonist and as the only good man.
Perhaps good men and women are hard to find because, like Joe and many of O’Connor’s characters, we refuse to see them. And because we do seem to stumble blindly through our lives, often unaware that we cannot see, we may need a proverbial gun to the head. O’Connor wrote:
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
We may need writers who shout and draw large and startling figures to bring us to our senses–and to our knees. We need these writers to help us see the good men and women in our midst. They are often easier to find than we believe.
It didn’t surprise me that McEwan’s critics panned the ending of his novel. They don’t have eyes to see Jed as anything but another crazy fanatic. They were disappointed in the novel’s ending because Joe’s paranoia was finally validated as real and not imagined. Sadly, they would have preferred that this paranoia remained imagined, reducing Jed’s presence (and faith) to figments of Joe’s traumatized mind.
Just last week in a commercial advertising a current reality television program, a young man questioned a young woman’s chastity. In the sound bite, he announced his conviction that the marriage bed should be pure. Indignant, she rose from her chair, pointed her well-manicured finger into his face, and claimed that indeed she had had sexual relations and that Jesus still loves me. In the next frame, we see the young man being packed into a waiting car and driven away as the young woman smirks in disgust. It won’t surprise me that many will see the young woman as good and the young man as misguided, at best, and bad, at worst. Many will not regard the young woman as O’Connor might: one who sets up a little universe of her own choosing and who gleefully pronounces a little immoralistic message.
It struck me that I might write Ian McEwan as Flannery O’Connor’s proxy and encourage him to keep up the good fight. But a good fight, like a good man or woman, is clearly in the eye of the beholder. For O’Connor and for me, that beholder is Jesus. I’m not really sure who McEwan’s beholder may be, but I can hope that Jed Parry’s unfailing faith was more than a just fictional account of a delusional man. I can hope that, in McEwan’s heart, Jed Parry is a good man.
