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JONATHAN YARDLEY
Yoknapatawpha is not merely a county, not merely a physical place,
but a tangle of human "connections" in which Compsons, Benbows,
McCaslins, and Snopses are caught.
Looming over this Southern community in the first decades of the
century was the unavoidable presence of the Southern past. In no Amer–
ican fiction does history play so large a part as in that of the South,
for in no ollher region has history's burden been so heavy: the burden
of defeat, the burden of guilt over slavery. The Southern writers of
Faulkner's day knew the past as a daily presence; Woodward quotes
Katherine Anne Porter, "I am a grandchild of a lost War, and I have
blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare
bones of privation." Ten years ago Flannery O'Connor wrote: "When
Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why
there were so many good Southern writers and he said, 'Because we
lost the War.' He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes
good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our
Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge
of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have
developed in our first state of innocence - as it has not sufficiently de–
veloped in the rest of the country."
Faulkner, in his greatest novels, dealt directly with the Southern
past:
Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go Down, Moses,
all are
concerned in various ways with the agony of defeat and the legacy of
racism. In Miss O'Connor's fiction, the theme of suffering takes more
intimate forms. As epigraph for one of her books she took a quotation
from St. Cyril of Jerusalem: "The dragon sits by the side of the road,
watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the
Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." The passage
could well have been published again in her
Complete Stories,
the post–
humous collection which summarizes her career.
The place of Miss O'Connor's stories is her own rural and small–
town Georgia, a hard and scraggly land; the community is formed by
the farmers and salesmen and poor Negroes and old ladies who inhabit
it. In her finest stories - "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "The Arti–
ficial Nigger," "The Lame Shall Enter First" - she forces these in–
significant little people to pass the dragon, to encounter evil and suffer–
ing and out of the encounter to acquire knowledge and humility: "Mr.
Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but
this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could
name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied
to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. . . . He
