Steven Awalt's Blog: Scribblings.

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

The Complete Stories

Like many voracious readers, I'm the kind of person that usually has a raft of books open at once. Currently, I'm reading (and rereading) short stories by two of my favorite authors: Ray Bradbury and Flannery O'Connor. I've been reading a story or two from collected works, Bradbury's "Bradbury Stories" and O'Connor's "The Complete Stories", floating back and forth between each writer after they've told me a few of their tales, and then back again.

Comparing and contrasting the styles of two very different authors during one period of literary engorgement can be quite informative, even inspirational. Perhaps the greatest contrast I find between Bradbury and O'Connor is in their use of language and style as writers.

In Bradbury's case, the man is like an explosion of words given heart and wing. His words can have great force: they're colors, clarion calls, weighty bricks building upon one another until they pile up and reach into the heavens. I am fueled by Bradbury's shining enthusiasm for his ideas he's conveying on the page. There's often an almost outsized ebullience to how he constructs a sentence, a paragraph, a story, like he just opened his mouth and heart and blurted out streamers of language into the world that insisted they be noticed.

And yet Bradbury can also caress a reader's senses and sense memories with a phrase, gently swirling words around us. One of his favorite devices that he's reused numerous times is finding ways to describe the movements of the seasons into one another. Here's a brief but beautiful example from "The Toynbee Convector", one of Bradbury's most curious and moving later-period tales.

"Here, an autumn blew away in tatters; there, winters arrived in snows that drifted in spring blossoms to fall on summer fields."

What a gorgeous sentence! We're riding the back of Bradbury's words, coming apart, blowing and pirouetting, gently falling and blooming on winds and moisture and flowers through the air! There's a sense of tangible movement in that single sentence, as our surroundings change before our eyes and as we float and flit our way through the four scenes/seasons. All that in one single (but far from simple) sentence. Bradbury's critics have long accused him of his "purple prose," but when he sings, man, he sings with the sweet voice of the muse who visited him for nearly eight decades, and brother, that goddess had some chords.

O'Connor works in a different way, certainly more internal than Bradbury, perhaps more from the mind than the heart, more surgical than celebratory. And yet despite the specificity of her words, she can tug at my heart and soul as much as Bradbury and his sense of wonder. While Bradbury is of the heavens, O'Connor was firmly of the earth. They both speak deeply to the human experience, whether through pure flights of fantasy or grounded character studies.

O'Connor's use of language to tell a story can sometimes be a frustrating and thrilling challenge to read. For instance, the first few stories in "The Complete Stories" are very much rooted in the American South she knew most of her life , and she had a finely tuned ear for the vernacular of the people of the region and time. Try the story "The Wildcat" on for size. Despite the simplicity of the tale — a community of poor southern African Americans are threatened by a wildcat on the hunt — the language is incredibly dense. Her role as a narrator is limited, as she lets a collection of characters speak the narrative, and through their almost foreign tongue, we feel their creeping fear, their outright terror, and in the case of Old Gabriel, his sense of being shunted aside by the younger men out to protect the women, children and elderly.

O'Connor's choice of the narrator's voice is also notable in that it isn't a well-spoken authorial voice, but a more "folksy" voice that's not quite at the level of the characters, but does not speak down about them either. In fact, the narrator dips into the character's internal thoughts, melding these twin tracks of voice into one. Here's an example that peaks with a nice jump up to O'Connor's sense of phrasing (above the characters, above the narrator), but without betraying the narrative voice coupled with Old Gabriel's thinking.

"He hadn't been able to wring a chicken's neck for fo' years. It was gonna git him. Won't nothin' to do but wait. The smell was near. Won't nothin' for old people to do but wait. It was gonna git him tonight. The teeth would be hot an' the claws cold. The claws would sink in soft, an' the teeth would cut sharp an' scrape his bones inside."

That last detail grates across a reader's spine, and apart from being a painfully tangible notion, this is O'Connor setting up the very end of the story. She comes back to this very line with the carefully reflective, "Their forks were scraping back and forth over their tin plates like knife teeth against stone."

Beautiful parallelism in her word choices between these two sentences from the middle and then end of the tale, all done in the service of sinking readers' teeth into the essence of the story itself.

I will likely write more about Bradbury and O'Connor on this page, but if these ramblings have piqued any interest, I highly recommend dipping into their short fiction by way of introduction or rediscovery. Here are some links to the books I've mentioned:

http://www.amazon.com/Bradbury-Storie...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-St...

Ray Bradbury Flannery O'Connor