fiction files redux discussion

I wish I had more time to post but I am at a conference today... I will post more thoughts on this story later...

Please feel free to get going without me!

story link: http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/go...

Not sure what to think...

I read this before on my own, and thought it was sad and scary. The characters are drawn true to life and I really loved the innocence of the mother wearing her green hankercheif about her head like the ears of a rabbit. I guess the concept is the characters are doomed from the very beginning because of their naive and mistaken assumptions. The grandmother is finely drawn with dozen of flaws that led the family to their doom. It was fine irony when the grandmother tried to use the avoidance of Misfit as an excuse to get her own way, and when she failed, it was ulimately series of her mistakes that led the entire family to be wiped out: the lie about the cat that sprang onto Bailey's shoulders at the end of their trip, her insistance at tagging along to keep controlling the family on their outings, the mistake of telling the children about the house with the secret panel, and waving down the very dark gangsters for help after the accident. The scenes themselves are comical and the characters own various flaws are realistic.

It seemed like an ironic story of a very severely flawed grandmother who thought herself as better than anyone in her family and attempted to manipulate her family in having her own way at all time and controlling them at the same time, only to lead her family to a very certain doom in their encounter with the Misfit gang

I believed the father, Bailey called his mother, quite adeptly, a "cunt" even though the author did not write what he actually muttered about his mother.


Flannery O' Conner was very brilliant in exposing the flaws of everyday person, and creating very, very, very, dark people despite their charms, excellent manners, politeness, and other facades. It really make me resent the various idiotic control freaks that I had to put up with in the course of my attempt to live my life in peace. It is one of those ironic story about a person's endless struggle to control fate.

When I read this story a few years ago, I pictured the grandmother as Geraldine Page’s character in The Trip to Bountiful – all she wanted was to see her hometown before she died.

The family’s attitude and remarks in this story stirred up my emotions (Kids, don’t talk that way to your grandma!) and strengthened my sympathy for the protagonist. I like all the flaws too, Patrick, and the believability. The irony is all tangled up in my head right now… I’m anxious to hear all of the different perspectives on this tale.

It's funny how a different perceptive sympathizes with the grandmother...I found the grandmother very manipulative and scheming, and a emasculating liar. It was she who insisted on leading the family to her own bitter end, and it was she who attempted to wrest control of everything, from bringing her cat along, to witholding information that the house she talked about was in Tennessee, not Georgia.

Just to get warmed up, I reached back into the archives to the discussion of Greg Downs’ Spit Baths, a Flannery O’Connor Award winner. A couple of the things he said at that time have stuck with me ever since and I wanted to share some quotes from him just to start:

Flannery was definitely one of my heroes, though I confess the Catholic thing all went over my head when I was first reading her. I lived in an uber-Protestant (mostly Baptist world) and had never been inside a Catholic church. One of my cousins did marry a Catholic, but it actually caused a big divide in the family, with people not speaking for years and so on. So I missed a lot of the ideas and images that I'd later realize were there. What I didn't miss is the aspect that Alice Walker praised in O'Connor's writing, the easy she dismissed all the crap about ladies and gentlemen that screwed up southern writing for so long. She wrote about characters that were like my crazy cousins and uncles and neighbors, and that helped open my eyes to the stories that were out there. That you didn't have to be living in an old plantation house to have a southern story, that in fact the stories outside of the plantation houses were, by far, the more interesting stories. It's hard not to put her right up near the top of the southern clan. How about you?

And this one, which pretty much sums up southern lit in two words:

As a line by line writer, I could read him {Faulkner} all day. As an observer of human nature, he's Shakespearean in a way that I fundamentally am not. If every writer in the end is a Shakespearean or a Dickensian (not in terms of influence but in terms of the way they think about character and fate) then I'm on the other side, as I suspect Flannery O'C was. There are enormous personalities who set drama in motion, but 1) there aren't that many of them and 2) many of them are not fundamentally interesting people unless they are speaking in Shakespeare's or Faulkner's sentences, while the comic, plainer folks are often not only more amusing but more interesting. I'm interested in small people operating in big worlds that shape them, while I think Faulkner may have been the opposite, big people in small worlds.

Here is a link to the original thread in the FFv1 MySpace group…

Spit Baths

mm

I've read this story so many times. It is a masterpiece, I think. I love reading Flannery O'Connor. I love the sharp, unflinching eye she turns to the world, the realness of her characters.

I think that at first we are supposed to be sort of ... shocked by the family's treatment of the grandmother. We are supposed to be sympathetic to her, an older woman living with her son and clearly disregarded, ignored, talked to with disdain. I mean, the parents aren't half as bad about it as the kids are and I had the same response to the kids - what the hell is wrong with you little brats?

But we are led to understand just how much she is the bad guy - the antagonist, not the protagonist.

I can't say enough about her. She's always been one of my favorites.

I read the story again and still felt sorry for the grandma… maybe I have a soft spot for the simpleton. She did veer the family onto the isolated road and because she brought the cat, the car overturned, yes. But was it her intention that they all die that day? I guess if I had been the driver, I might have thought of her as a control freak… but I watched everything happen through her eyes.

I liked that O’Connor compared the monkey, on a chain, made nervous by the children to the Misfit. Although, I don’t like monkeys. Monkeys are creepy. Maybe that was the intention of the comparison.

Bailey was a coward. Red Sam was a pushover. Was there anyone in the story with backbone? Maybe the Misfit was a good man that no one could find - including himself.

I love all these quirky, ignorant, unedjamacated characters.

It is kind of hard to judge someone like Bailey as a coward. I mean, the gangsters had guns, he did not and probably thought if he cooperated with the gangsters, they might live. It's hard to tell how someone would have reacted. Also, remember he was just in an accident, a stressful situation by itself and probably just gave up on the grandmother, control over his family, and was worn down by her emasculating comments and ways. I bet a petty part of him peevishly thought to himself, 'See? That's what you get for being such a control freak. Way to go, granny. Getting the family killed just to have it your way.'

Personally, as to Bailey being a coward, I would like to think I would have used Kung Fu ninja magic tai chi bullshit moves on the Misfit. But if I was really honest, I probably would have crapped in my pants while meekly walking to the dark wood with the other gangsters. At least Bailey died with clean underwear.

Ha! Kung Fu ninja magic would never have entered my mind. 'See? That's what you get for being such a control freak. Way to go, granny. Getting the family killed just to have it your way.' If she would have kept her mouth shut they might have had a chance. And yeah... shock after an accident has a wierd effect.

I think Bailey is a coward because he allows his mother to boss him around, he all but ignores his wife and lets his children take advantage of him - and he wears a yellow shirt with parrots.

Bonita wrote: "unedjamacated..."

Awwsome use of vocabulary Senora Bonita.

seems strange to me to blame the grandma. keep everything the same but eliminate the MASS MURDERER WHO KILLS THEM ALL and she's the hero, the only character who seems to be living and feeling and human. yes, she's scared of death (very scared) but she's not the one toolin' around the countryside killin' folks because she wasn't there when jesus raised folks from the dead. nobody knows what death is and what lies beyond; some people fret about it and keep their family and past and cat close and worry about the gas burners and what they will look like when they're dead; some people go crazy embracing nihilism and start killing; and others are just oblivious and don't seem to even notice the question... i think the story is about the fourth option, which is to simply believe there is something beyond (or love all of creation)... the good man who's hard to find doesn't appear in the story... the grandma comes closest to meeting him and maybe she almost does at the end... or maybe she does... at any rate, she wants to... in any case, the fault of what happens in the story is i believe the fault of the world at large. or maybe it would be better to say, it is the predicament of the world.

the danger is seeing the misfit as the hero.

definitely a story that hinges on a certain mindset in the reader. though i guess they all are, really.

Yeah...but it is a cool name for a true villian who is totally the opposite of every fifties side of the mouth snarling tough dialogues, suit and tie and hat wearing, black, white, gray walking around, cliche gangsters. But more ruthless and dangerous. It is a good thing the Misfit was a fictional character.

Even if the gangster was eliminated, I still think Bailey might have driven the entire family off a cliff to end their suffering of the grandmother's prying prattles and controlling behavior. But ironically, The Misfit was there to take care of that.

I didn't think there was a hero.

I was thinking in terms of antagonist/protagonist... who makes things happen and who responds.

I don't equate what the misfit does with the grandma's behavior, but there are different kinds of bad/evil/ill-intent in the world, and I think those two characters represent different types - bad and worse? - and the story is about what happens when they collide.

Sorry guys, I've dropped the ball on this story. I will try to contribute more next week. Just some personal stuff getting in the way of the thinking stuff...