Track Mangoes

Flannery O’Connor once said that when you write the South the way the North wants you to write it the critics call it realism; but when you write the South the way it is the critics call it grotesque.

Three prominent figures seem to receive most of O’Connor’s criticism in her short fiction. In chief, academics and intellectuals, particularly those of the secular persuasion, come under harsh condemnation. Intellectuals form the butt of O’Connors conception of evil/the devil, that being any intelligence that is determinable on its own terms, a cerebral force that defines its own nature, a nature that, theologically speaking, is out of one’s hands regardless. Intellectuals must be shaken, violently, from the shackles of their arrogance in order to realize their moment of grace and return to god. Secondly, O’Connor criticizes women for their pedantry, their fascination with cultural minutiae and fetish of artistic scintilla. Thirdly, children, bratty and catty, never seem to deserve the love they receive, despite their unique power to reveal the hopelessness of the convoluted plight of seculars. Those who took American Lit in high school will surly remember the noisy John Wesley, "a stocky child with glasses," and the whiney June Star from "A Good Man in Hard to find.

In a strange way O'Connor's fiction is deprication. She criticizes the three things that she most closely related to: women, intellectuals, and children, while writing about something she was simoultaneously a part of and distant from: The South. But these social slots were alloted to her, she had not say, and perhaps harbored a self-hating resentment. She had no control over her gender and surly felt suffocated as a woman living in the post WWII South. She was also an amazingly bright and well read intellectual, graduating from today’s most prestigious school for English majors, the Univserity of Iowa, being sent there on the whim of her family. And finally, and perhaps most tragically, her crippling illness forced her to forever be at the call of her overbearing mother, pigeonholing her into a role of snowballing infantilization.

In her short story “The Crop” Miss Willerton, a well-to-do literary dilettante, attempts to pound out a composition on her old type writer only to be distracted constantly by her nagging family and, most troublesomely, by her own lack of skill, which she mistakes for arch.

The story begins at the dinner table where the Willertons have just finished their morning breakfast. “Miss Willerton always crumbed the table,” the narrator proclaims in the first sentence. “It was her particular household accomplishment and she did it with great thoroughness.” The narrator goes on to describe the myriad menial tasks the women perform in the kitchen, “Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle,” interspersed with onomatopoeic expletives and catty stream of consciousness rejoinders like “As if…after having [added Agar-Agar to Garner’s Cream of Wheat every morning] for fifty years, he’d be capable of doing anything else.”

This sporadic pastiche of tasks, thoughts, habits, and exercises of etiquette perfectly sets up the tenor of the entire story, in which Miss Willerton will sit at her type writer unable to think of a subject for her stories. “That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing.” Willerton discards subject after subject, first writing about bakers, but later deciding that baker’s were neither picturesque nor did they provide provocative social commentary, moving on to teachers, which she immediately dismisses, “Teachers? Miss Willerton wondered. No. Heavens no. Teachers always made Miss Willerton feel peculiar.” Finally Miss Willerton settles on a sufficiently incendiary muse: “Teachers weren’t timely anyhow. They weren’t even a social problem. Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm,” Miss Willerton thinks before finaly settling on: “Sharecroppers!”

The monkey mind of Miss Willerton poses an interesting postmodern problem. Postmodern literary composition often used, as a device or technique, metaconscienceness as a means of problematizing the auteur-reader relationship. The opening chapter to James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," for example, mediates on the perverse quality of the observer, in this case a Northern journalist, trying to examine Southern subjects, impoverished and, above all else, "dirty." Agee sits on his porch litstening to Beethoven and smoking cigarettes, thinking that perhaps he should not write the book he needed to write because he could never do the truth justice. The work itself called attention to the fact that it had a process, a conception, and an architect.

Miss O’Connor, who was writing at the forefront of the postmodernists, refused the inanity of the mere technique of metaconsciousness. It wasn’t enough. Metaconsciousness had to be delicately weaved into the plot, which, for O’Connor, was at the forefront of the problem of literary creation. In “The Crop” O’Connor satirizes her own creative process as a means of simultaneously using the postmodern device of metaconsciousness and remaining staunchly faithful to the old time tradition of plot plot plot.

“Lot Motun,” the typewriter registered, “called his dog.” “Dog” was followed by and abrupt pause. Miss Willerton always did her best work on the first sentence. “First sentences,” she always said, “came to her—like a flash!” And she built her story up from them.”