Re-evaluating Poe

Posted 4 September, 2007 in Literary Criticism, Flannery O'Connor | No comments

Maud Newton has an interesting post on her site concerning Edmund Wilson’s feelings about Edgar Allan Poe, specifically the question of why Poe had not been embraced by his own country. Writing in the early part of the 20th century (the essay Maud points to is collected in Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and ’30s, the first of an upcoming two-volume retrospective of Wilson’s criticism to be published by the Library of America), Wilson complains that Poe’s writing “so completely failed to impress itself upon the literature of Poe’s own country that it is still possible for Americans to talk about him as if his principal claim to distinction were his title to be described as the ‘father of the short story.’”

This might arguably have been true in the early part of the 20th century, when no one had heard of Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates; it would be difficult to make the same assertion today. Poe’s motifs, approach (the “singular effect” that Wilson points to), Gothic sensibility, and relationship with the subconscious have all found resonance in postwar American fiction. As Philip Van Doren Stern asserts in his introduction to The Portable Edgar Allan Poe,* Poe “tapped the rich reservoir of the subconscious mind to set free the strange and terrible images which had seldom been allowed to stalk the printed page until he introduced them into his work,” but which have seldom been far from the American fictional psyche since.

Is it possible, for instance, to read King’s The Dark Half or his novella “Secret Window, Secret Garden” without thinking about the ultimately fatal struggle between the narrator and his Doppelgänger in Poe’s “William Wilson”? And Oates’s Gothic stories, especially those in Haunted and The Collector of Hearts, are enormously Poe-influenced. (One story in Haunted, “The White Cat,” is a fairly explicit reworking of one of Poe’s most notorious stories, although Oates coyly changes the colour of the titular feline.)

This is to say nothing of Poe’s influence on works by writers such as Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park), and, perhaps surprisingly, Flannery O’Connor. In Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, one of the best works of O’Connor scholarship I’ve come across, Frederick Asals engages in a lengthy examination of Poe’s influence on the novel Wise Blood, commenting in part:

The parallels are at times so close that it becomes difficult to believe Flannery O’Connor was unaware of them. Such specific echoes as walling up cats (”The Black Cat”) and the story of the body in the chimney (”The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) would seem open (if tongue-in-cheek) allusions. Other, less overt borrowings, however, have greater significance. Hazel Motes’s recurrent fear of being “not dead but only buried” … has of course a number of possible sources in Poe’s tales, but the action toward the end of the first chapter of Wise Blood parallels remarkably that of “The Premature Burial.” … [W]hile Poe’s narrator claims that his experience has broken his obsession with death, Hazel Motes will suffer this defining terror again and again in the course of the novel.

American filmmakers have been similarly enamoured with Poe’s themes and stories. Roger Corman (The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher) and Stuart Gordon (The Pit and the Pendulum) both filmed Poe’s material, and Quentin Tarantino has evinced a recent fascination with Poe’s own horror of being buried alive (both Kill Bill, Vol. 2 and Grave Danger, Tarantino’s two-part CSI episode, feature characters who are buried alive).

When it comes to Poe’s influence on American letters, perhaps the last word should go to Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote in the Afterword to Haunted: “Poe’s influence upon the literature of the grotesque — and the mystery-detective genre — has been so universal as to be incalculable. Who has not been influenced by Poe? — however obliquely, indirectly; however the influence, absorbed in adolescence or even in childhood, would seem to be far behind us.”

*Van Doren Stern, pace Wilson, also locates Poe’s influence in 19th century American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Bierce, and, in the early 20th century, Faulkner.

On Stifling Writers

Posted 22 August, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor, Writing Life | 2 comments

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers,” said Flannery O’Connor. “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

Good thing O’Connor isn’t around to read a recent YouGov poll reported in the Guardian, which suggested that more Britons — nearly ten percent of those polled — dream of being writers than they do of pursuing any other job or avocation.

In a follow-up blog post on the Guardian’s site, John Crace wonders why:

It’s not even as if writing is that glamorous. You sit alone for hours on end honing your deathless prose, go days without really talking to anyone and, if you’re very lucky, within a year or so you will have a manuscript that almost no one will want to read. Your friends and family will come to dread requests for constructive feedback - which they know really means just saying, “This is far better than Amis or McEwan” - and if, by some small chance, you do land a book deal you will spend the week of publication wondering why your book isn’t piled up at the front of Waterstones and why you haven’t even picked up a single, measly review in the local paper.

Crace suggests that because writing is something that anyone with a basic literacy can do, it’s the one area of creative endeavour that the average person feels (s)he has a shot at breaking into. On the level of individual sentences, Crace posits, it’s often difficult to distinguish between an unpublished amateur and Margaret Forster (Crace’s example, not mine). It’s only with an agglomeration of sentences and paragraphs that a dearth of creativity begins to make itself apparent. Having read slush-pile submissions for a Canadian publisher, and having written manuscript evaluations for dozens of unpublished aspiring novelists, I can fairly safely attest that many of them don’t reach the level of minimum proficiency even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Regardless, the seemingly unquenchable desire of John/Jane Q. Public to write the next great forgotten or ignored novel has led to a veritable cottage industry of creative writing classes and writers’ workshops, many of them taught by working writers who need the money to live.

There are always a few people in these classes who have genuine talent. Unfortunately, the net result of the encounter with a creative writing workshop is usually to have whatever spark of originality or vibrancy that exists in their writing systematically beaten out of them; they emerge on the other side as cookie-cutter replicas of existing writers. To quote O’Connor once again: “[S]o many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.”

And then there are those others: the retirees with time on their hands, the doctors and lawyers and police officers and high-school teachers who feel that their rich life experiences have provided them with the perfect fodder for great fiction, by which one presumes they mean bestselling fiction. Crace’s advice to these people is not to quit their day jobs. O’Connor puts it more vigorously, if less compassionately:

Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing about writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had. It is a fact that if, either by nature or training, these people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money, and in a way it seems a shame to deny them this opportunity; but then, unless the college is a trade school, it still has its responsibility to truth, and I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed.

That’s. Just. Great.

Posted 1 August, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor, Book News | No comments

Most depressing lede to a book story in a while, from USA Today:

The pitch intrigued the publishing world: “Forrest Gump wins Powerball.”

And with that, Patricia Wood’s new novel, Lottery, was launched into a bidding war that nabbed the first-time writer a six-figure deal.

Perfect. A 310-page novel distilled to four words. And this is what has the New York publishing world all a-twitter. Do any of them recall Flannery O’Connor’s admonition in her essay “Writing Short Stories”:

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word of the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.

Perhaps Wood’s book is brilliant. But any novel that can be boiled down into four pithy words (especially those four pithy words) should be approached with a certain amount of skepticism.

O’Connor Correspondence Includes Musings on Plot and the Smell of Magazines

Posted 7 June, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor | No comments

The correspondence between Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth “Betty” Hester, which William Sessions has called “probably the most important collection of letters in American literature in the latter part of the [20th] century,” has been drawing a steady stream of O’Connor scholars, and even a few fans, to Emory University since the letters were unsealed on May 12. Hester donated the entire correspondence to Emory in 1987, with the proviso that the letters remain sealed for twenty years.

A Canada.com article hints at some of the letters’ subjects, including O’Connor’s advice to ignore plot while creating a story: “You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive … Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

But perhaps the most startling, if absolutely characteristic, revelation in the Canada.com article is that O’Connor subscribed to National Geographic because she liked the smell, which she describes as an “unforgettable, transcendent . . . and very grave odour … If Time smelled like National Geographic, there would be some excuse for its being printed.”