“Lingering” and “Incurable”: Flannery O’Connor’s Humor and the Game of Status in “Good Country People”

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Whether Joy-Hulga understands Heidegger or Malebranche is, of course, a separate and more disputed matter. I am persuaded by Elizabeth Hubbard’s argument that those who view the story as “conflating Heidegger with nihilism, seeing Hulga as a Heideggarian [sic], and suggesting that Heidegger’s thought becomes an object of the story’s critique” are mistaken (53). This in no way detracts, however, from the futility of Mrs. Hopewell’s reaction: because she is no position to evaluate either Heidegger’s claims or why they might interest her daughter – and can only respond by fleeing – Joy-Hulga’s power over her is validated in this instance.

² My contrast between class and status here is meant to gesture toward the competing accounts of their relative importance proffered by Marx and Weber. For Marx, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and economic life. It is not the social consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (425). For Weber, “‘Economically conditioned’ power is not, of course, identical with ‘power’ as such. On the contrary, the emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued ‘for its own sake’” (180, scare quotes in original). To maintain, as I do, that “Good Country People” aligns more with Weber than with Marx is also to say that it breaks decisively with the materialist assumption that ideological superstructures – including perceptions of status as separable from class – always derive ultimately from the workings of the economic base.

³ Such speculation, I believe, is justified by the fact that there is a continuity between “reading” characters in fiction and “reading” real people in life, and that our motives and interests in doing both might be more similar than we generally admit. We can experience reading fiction as a further elaboration of our own autonomous, ongoing, and self-flattering meaning-making – in part by identifying with some characters and projecting onto them our own sense of freedom, while withholding such identification with other characters and denying them the same degree of autonomy or moral worth. As Kenneth Burke has suggested, such moves are of a piece with “consider[ing] works of art … as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another” (304). Yet, we can also remember that fictional characters are not free human beings but verbal constructions, and that the stories they inhabit, no matter how inventively wrought, can usually be categorized according to a rigid taxonomy of plot structures. In this way, as I suggest, readers both consider (and identify with) the full range of strategies available in status competition and confront the limits of those strategies.

⁴ Brooks’s theory is rooted in Freud’s account of the interplay of Eros and Thanatos in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. O’Connor famously wrote to Betty Hester that despite being “against [Freud] tooth and nail,” “[w]ithin his limitations I am ready to admit certain uses for him” (HB 110). Given O’Connor’s own insistence that the meaning of a life can only be fully determined retrospectively, from the moment of one’s death (most famously, of course, in the case of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), I suspect that she would have found Brooks’s Freudian theory of narrative congenial, with the qualification that death matters because the closure it provides is simultaneously a determination of where one will spend eternity.

⁵ I am not persuaded by Ruth M. Holsen’s claim that, because “Hulga” derives from the Norse word “heilagr” (“holy,” or “the holy one”), it follows that “Hulga has saved herself by seeing through to nothingness – no wonder she feels the fitness of a name that means holy” (59). My first objection is simply that we are not told that the name’s Norse etymology plays any role in Joy-Hulga’s choice of it, though we are told that its ugly sounds and its (Roman) mythological associations do. To be sure, Holsen does not claim that Joy-Hulga knows the name’s meaning, only that the “feels the fitness” of it. But here, I would raise a second objection: the name is “fitting” in this sense only if we accept that Joy-Hulga has truly “see[n] through to nothing” (CW 280, emphasis in original), as she maintains and probably believes. It seems more plausible that Joy-Hulga’s claim, based (as I have already suggested in connection with Elizabeth Hubbard’s argument) on a misreading of Heidegger, is primarily another move in her jockeying for status.

⁶ For a remarkably clear (yet, in my view, flawed) account of what is at stake in such debates, see Rainer Forst.