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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Grace and the Grotesque: The Lame Shall Enter First by Flannery O'Connor with Dr. Brian Kemple
02:21:14
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A
Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. Today we are discussing a grotesque, violent story from the American south by Flannery o' Connor called the Lame Shall Enter First. If you're not familiar with Flannery o', Connor, she is certainly a particular flavor. She uses violence and the grotesque to show how grace is operative in our lives. To be quite honest with you, I'm not even sure that I enjoyed this story, but I am still thinking about it and still thinking about the lessons that it has to teach us. We are joined by an excellent guide, Dr. Brian Kempel of the Lyceum Institute, who does a wonderful job kind of unpacking the depths of her characters and showing us what lessons Flannery o' Connor is trying to teach us, but in a very subtle and somewhat enjoyable way. And don't forget we are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for Christmas. A wonderful and beautiful read for either you or your small group. Check out our website for our reading schedule and pick up either the Tolkien or the Armitage version. It's going to be an excellent read. But today join us for a very different type of read as we read the Lame Shall Enter first by Flannery o'.
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B
Connor.
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A
Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording on a beautiful evening here in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend, we are a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the Great Books. It's our goal to be like a small group to people, especially first time readers, and we have podcasts, videos and written guides to help you read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Orestia, the dialogues of Plato, and many other great books. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook or Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information. Today we are taking a break from our study of Plato to read a short story, the Lame Shall Enter first by Flannery o', Connor, a grotesque gospel tale of pride, hope and tragedy. Here to guide us through this kind of Southern gothic story is Dr. Brian Kimple, who serves as the Executive Director of the Lyceum Institute. He holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas in Houston. He's published several books, numerous academic articles, and many popular articles. He also runs an excellent account on X. I've certainly benefited from his comments online. Please go follow him and the Lyceum Institute. Dr. Kempel, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I'm really excited to talk about some Flannery o'. Connor.
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A
Yeah, no, it's going to be good. Before we kind of jump into who she is and her backstory and why you had me read this short story, which I have lots of questions about, tell us a little bit about the Lyceum Institute.
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B
Yeah, so the Lyceum Institute is. It's a little project that I started kind of just as an experiment back in 2019, but before COVID I got in the door early there to try and do some online education after the academic job market didn't work out for me. And so what we're essentially attempting to do, you know, the Lyceum, the term comes from Aristotle's name that he gave to his school just outside the wall of Athens. And I'm a Thomas by training, so that makes me a peripatetic as well, although some peripatetics might object to that. But what we're really trying to do with the Lyceum Institute is to expand higher education beyond the walls of the university and use this. This incredible opportunity that we have for, like, what you and I are doing right now to talk about great books, to talk about great thinking, great ideas, you know, using the Internet, using it in a way which is much more fruitful than what a lot of people tend to use the Internet for. So to bring some nobility to the atmosphere, so we offer courses in the Trivium, a bunch of different courses in the Trivium. So grammar, logic and rhetoric, as well as in Latin, Greek, and a panoply of philosophical offerings across a wide range of topics. So lots of great faculty have joined me to help make it a realization, and we're growing little by little, step by step.
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A
Wonderful. I think one of the great faculty members who's joined you is Dr. Daniel Wagner. Correct. So he actually joined us not too long ago to help lead us through the MENO and classical education. Did a phenomenal job. Represented the Lyceum Institute quite well. So when you take classes in the Lyceum Institute, are they synchronous or asynchronous? Like, are you. Are you just kind of signing up and getting videos? Are you signing into a live feed? Is there a chat? Like, how's that work?
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B
Yeah, it's. It's a combination, actually. We use. Everything we do right now is through Microsoft Teams, so there's an ability to share files and readings and to have a continuous text conversation. We also do a lot of asynchronous lectures. So the instructor will record a lecture, say for a philosophy seminar, usually around an hour, and then that helps to shape a live discussion session which is held once a week. So trying to balance the busy, chaotic schedules of everyone's lives and being dispersed really across all the globe. We actually have members on all the inhabited continents of the earth. So trying to find ways to balance that asynchronous flexibility with the vitality of a live conversation is what we were trying to do.
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A
No, that's beautiful. Now I deeply appreciate efforts like the Lyceum Institute. A while back we had an episode on the Gorgias and I had on Athenian Stranger and Jonathan B. We kind of talked about like all of us have these projects online and how it's almost very self evident. You can tell who has kind of a natural eros for wisdom because it's diffusive. We want to share it with other people. We're doing these projects usually at expense to ourselves. I'm not sure any of us are getting wealthy off of offering all these classes and inviting people into wisdom. It's unfortunate how the, how our system works, but I think your project, along with several others and the presence that it has on X, just online in general is. It's a really important project and it's one that I would invite people to check out.
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B
Yeah. And that's perhaps the last thing to mention. Then we can move on is we, we do operate really entirely on a model of financial subsidiary. So we want to keep that baseline cost, you know, really just to cover our own overhead and then really rely upon the charity and the largesse of those who have the virtue of liberality and any magnificence as well. For anyone who's got that. But common everyday liberality is important as well. So we're very support. Very appreciative of those who've come out to support us so far, of which there have been a good number of people because there's a real thirst for this and there's a thirst which is not being satisfied in a lot of the world today for genuine education in the truest sense of the term. So what little we can do to help, provide or we're delighted to be able to offer.
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A
Yeah, no, that's excellent. So maybe transitioning from a Thomistic kind of based institute that's flowing from the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas to the hillbilly Thomist that we have read for this Episode Flannery o'. Connor. So let me give, like, a brief snapshot of who I kind of understand who as a she is as a person, and maybe you can add to it. So just like, brass tacks, right? So Flannery O' Connor was actually born March 25, 1925. So last year she just celebrated her hundredth birthday and then she died August 3rd in 1964. She was an American writer, essayist, fun word. Renowned for her distinctive Southern Gothic style, which we probably need to explore what that means. Born in Savannah, Georgia, she's an only child. I think this is kind of pretty indicative of her character. She was diagnosed with lupus at age 25. So she's coming from this, like, condition of suffering. It's the same disease that killed her father. So she returned to her family farm in Georgia while she's kind of suffering with this illness. But despite that, she wrote two novels and 32 short stories. And actually a really wonderful collection for those joining us by video is this one the Complete Stories of Flannery o'. Connor. It's a really wonderful collection if you're kind of looking to pick up her works. And so what does she do? She explores the themes of faith kind of wrapped in a grotesque Southern style. People sometimes are very surprised to find out she's a devout Catholic. She raised peacocks, hence the front of this text. She died at 39. So what, anything that you would kind of add to that, that's a really quick snapshot of who she is.
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B
Yeah. And for anyone who's. Who's looking actually for a little bit more, there was a biographical, you know, fictionalized somewhat film of her life, which was released a couple of years ago, directed by Ethan Hawke. That was actually quite good. Most of those movies I'm always a little skeptical of, but I thought that one was. Was pretty good for articulating her character in a way which was. Was insightful. Right. For someone who just wants that sort of quick look. But I think, you know, maybe another thing to. To sort of draw out a little bit is she seems to have always not felt like she was in the right place. And I think that's. That's an interesting thing to. To reflect upon, particularly when you read some of her short stories and you read about how there are figures and there are characters in her stories who are out of place. I think that's somehow a reflection of her own character and of how she lived. She was, from what I understand, somewhat embittered, understandably, by. By having to move back home. With lupus, which at that time especially was. Was a really devastating disease to be diagnosed with. To have to suffer. She lived the last 14 years of her life walking around on crutches. She couldn't move from one side of the room to the other without some sort of assistance, whether from her own partner or somebody else. That's a very, you know, limiting thing. And Milledgeville, Georgia, where her family farm was. It's still not the most exciting place in the world to go, I think. And so I imagine it was maybe even a little bit less exciting back then. So from when she had been, you know, flirting around to New York City for a bit and living in Connecticut and sort of on the scene of a literary world, that was a little bit more exciting, perhaps, to have to endure this kind of suffering, not only of the disease, but also the circumstances which changed because of it. And I find, for my own part, that that helps to contextualize a little bit better her fiction. It doesn't certainly unveil all the meaning there, but I've always found that to help me read it just a little bit differently.
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A
Yeah, no, I think that's very good. Yeah. There seems to be. You see her suffering. You see that the rural nature. You see a very kind of deep South, Protestant culture all kneaded into her stories. I think a lot of people at times are surprised to find out that she's Catholic. Typically, she doesn't have Catholics in her story. She's writing about the characters, the kind of types that she would see around her. This kind of Southern Baptist, Protestant, very deep south kind of culture. I mean, in a lot of ways, you know, she's a fish out of water reading St. Thomas's Summa Theologica. This is. This is something very distinct. So can we. Can we pivot a little bit, though, and understand, like, one of the most, like, I think, dynamic, but also distinctive qualities of her writing is the grotesque, particularly, like, the violent. And I think this turns off a lot of people to her when they first start reading her, particularly if you're coming from, like, the Catholic side. There's probably some people who read the short story tonight for Ascend and were like, why did you have us read this terrible tale? And so maybe we can. Can we give a little bit of defense, you know, maybe either using the story tonight or maybe just other stories of why she. Why does she have the grotesque? Why does she have the violent?
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B
Yeah, she actually, she. She has a whole essay. It's not a terribly long essay, but she has an Essay specifically on this. This question titled the Grotesque in Southern Fiction. And so I think it's interesting to note that she identifies it in that way. Right. It's not just the grotesque in my fiction is the grotesque in Southern fiction. So she is, to some extent, I believe, really participating in a tradition, and in a tradition which really developed in the early 20th century southeastern United States. There's an interesting discussion on Southern literature in Alan Tate. Alan Tate, who was, I believe, corresponded with Flannery o' Connor quite a bit. He's one of the Southern agrarians, and he has an essay on the Southern mode of the imagination and sort of how this is identifiable as. It's this unique sort of mode of discourse that the Southerner partakes in. And it's really something that only developed in that point in time, you know, early 1920s, when the. The sort of. Let me. Let me contextualize a little bit. I don't want to go too deep into the history of it all here, and probably not good to get too deep into the weeds. But the rhetoric, the writing, the style of the south, particularly antebellum Southern United States, was very Ciceronian. In fact, it was very, you know, high language, very polished prose, very rhetorically polished. Among those who wrote, which was. Was very much a small minority, you did have much higher rates of illiteracy in general. And so what you see in the 20th century starts to emerge is this unique sort of unlettered people gaining letters, these uncivilized people almost gaining letters, gaining knowledge, gaining knowledge of Scripture, gaining knowledge of politics, getting this sort of oblique knowledge of a tradition. And so you get this strange blend of things, right? You have deep Southern. I don't know. There's a kind of character, Southern evil, which is actually really hard to characterize. You might find it in something like. Cormac McCarthy is a good contemporary example, though he usually focuses on the Southwest. There's a little bit of the Southeast in some of his writing, and I think that identifies that character of evil quite well also.
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A
Would William Faulkner be in this category as well?
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B
Faulkner is, in a lot of ways, the sort of primary character in terms of Southern literature in that way, I think Alan Tate analogizes him in the Southern fiction to Shakespeare and Elizabethan England. So there's that kind of parallel structure there. So there's just this sense of the uncultured, uncivilized, often being thrown into a kind of civilization which is foisted upon them. And you see that a lot with a lot of Fledg's stories A lot of her characters, you get the country bumpkin, for instance, who gets brought into the city and just simply doesn't know how to behave and reacts in these strange and violent ways. And so there's always this sort of tension which is underlying in a lot of her writing and a lot of her storytelling. And it does seem to be partially this participation in that tradition. Now there is of course also an exaggeration and this is something that she was quite keen on, the pointed, meaningful exaggeration in order to better show the realities of evil. And the grotesque does that quite strongly, I think. There's actually a line from the movie that I mentioned before that someone suggested that she clean up the language a little bit. And she said, well, I don't intend to tidy up reality. That's a great line. Because she doesn't, if anything, she messes it up a little bit more so that we can see the filth more clearly. Yeah, it is the sort of thing that a lot of people are going to read and go, oh man, that's just awful. I hate that. But it shows you something.
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A
Yeah, it does show us something. Maybe we can push into that just a little bit about. Is there a pedagogical purpose to the grotesque for Flannery o'?
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B
Connor?
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A
Right. That would be a question I have. So I'll kind of. Obviously I am. Maybe I should give my, you know, play my card. So one, I am a first time reader of the story that we're discussing tonight. I've read probably a handful of her stories before. Was first introduced to her, I think in high school in my English class. And so how we kind of. How I was taught to contextualize this is like you have this like broad tradition of the kind of the Southern grotesque and that. That plays in different ways. It's not just simply acts of violence, but it's also how the characters are presented. Sometimes they're very imploded. You know, it's. It's more of a veneer over the whole thing than any one particular act, I would say. But then a lot of her stories typically do revolve around one central act of violence. So for instance, in a different story, the character is finally trampled by a bull or there's some kind of violence comes in. It's very grotesque. And so one of the ways that I've been taught how to read Flannery o' Connor is, is that what she's doing here, which doesn't maybe make sense on its face, but what she's doing here is she's actually presenting something that's sacramental. So if you think about the sacraments, grace is mediated to us through things that are physical. So we receive, for instance, the body and blood and soul of Jesus Christ and divinity of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. So it's actually something physical that we receive. And so there's a way to read Flannery o' Connor in which this violence that occurs in her stories is supposed to be analogous to something that's like sacramental. It's something physical that comes into our life to bring grace, to cause redemption. Right. Because her violence is not without purpose. She's not writing simply to be grotesque. She's not writing simply like a, you know, some kind of Southern horror or something like this. She's actually presenting violence for a pedagogical purpose to teach us something about the soul, even in a very disordered shape story. Does that sound about right?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I might, might get pedantic about the word pedagogical there, but I do think there is, there is a, a way of conveying meaning there. Right. It's not just story for the sake of, of entertainment or absorption into whatever these ideas are that she's trying to convey, but to really get you to, to see the real in a different light. And I think a little bit of, you know, maybe broaden this out even wider and ask, you know, why do we read literature at all? What is, what is the purpose of reading literature? You know, I think for a lot of people it's always been regarded as mere amusement, mere entertainment. But I believe it was. I think it's Horace actually, who says, you know, going back 1st century BC that the purpose of literature is to instruct and to delight. And that can be taken a great number of different ways. One might interpret that to mean that the delight is in service to the instruction, or that they're co. Equal or one could even quibble, discuss, argue, debate. What is meant by instruct in that case? Latin terms actually prod, essay, which is an interesting bring forth into being in some way. So it's an interesting notion because I think for the most part when we read literature that sets out explicitly with the purpose of instructing us. In my frank opinion, very often it's not good literature that, that it's. If it's overly didactic in some way, if it is structured in some sort of. Here's your, your pedagogical lesson. My usual reaction when I receive that is like, I don't want to be lectured to do right now, if I want to be lectured to, I'll go listen to a lecture or I'll pick up a manual philosophy or, you know, theology or something of that nature. I want a story that's going to be more concrete and real and bring me into the presence of what is. Which isn't to say that we shouldn't learn things from it, but I think the way that we learn things from literature is quite different from how we learn things in philosophy or theology or a formal academic setting in most cases. So I think she's certainly trying to show us something, but she's trying to show us something in a way that's. That's a different kind of signification, let's say. And here's why I think she was in correspondence with Jacques Maritin, the French Thomas for Catholic philosopher of the 20th century. Maritan wrote a lot about art and a lot about how the artist signifies. And he makes the point, particularly in an essay first published under the title Sign and Symbol, I think in 1932, that the artist uses something which is more akin to. He calls it a magical sign as opposed to a clear sign or something like that. And the magical sign isn't really distinct wholly from the world, unlike the clear or logical sign is what he calls it, the logical sign. The clearly articulated premises and conclusions that one finds in St. Thomas's Summa are quite distinct from the muddy, unclear movements and actions that one finds in Flannery oconnors fiction. So I think it does teach us, but it teaches us in a really different way. And we need to understand how it teaches us in that different way in order to profit from its lessons.
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A
Yeah, no, very good. So what would be the. I mean, if you could give the summary of that, like if you had a student come to you and say, hey, I'm interested in reading Flannery o', Connor, what's the answer to the why there? Why does one read Flannery o' Connor outside of, like, say, maybe the delight of this is a very unique genre, she's a very unique writer, et cetera. What is it that we should be pulling from the text? Like, if she's trying to show us something, what's the lesson there? Or what do you think she wanted her audiences to know?
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B
Yeah, I mean, if we're going to sort of take that first question, why, like, why should I bother reading this figure, let's say, as opposed to any other, there's so much that you could read, right, that obviously that's always a Valid question. Why should I choose this one? My main reason, my main argument for why one ought to read Flannery o' Connor is that I think you'll have a hard time after you've finished the story, stopping yourself from thinking about it for a while. They will stick with you, and you will think about what happened in them. They impress themselves upon the soul in a way that very few authors, I find, are truly capable of accomplishing. And I think of it very much. You know, obviously it's a different genre in many ways, but I think of it very similar to Dostoevsky. You get the same sort of grotesqueness in Dostoevsky. You get the same sort of moments that stick with you. If you've ever read, you know, the Crime and Punishment or the Brothers K, there are moments from those stories that will stick with you probably your whole life. And I think that's true of Flannery o' Connor as well. There's going to at least be images and parts and bits here and there, whether it's from the short stories or the two short novels where you. Let me also put it this way. I guess there are parts of the world now that I see where I say I feel like I'm in a Flannery o' Connor story. And I really hope that I'm not right. But you get that sense that, okay, her. The light that's suffused in her stories, or the dark, perhaps, as it is, helps us to make sense of the world at times when it might not make sense otherwise. Or to put one final spin on this, where the philosophical and theological, the more formal disciplines of intellectual development provide for us universals of intelligibility. She gives us many great particulars by which those universals become concrete and realized for us in experience.
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A
Yeah. No. Very good. So why this particular story? Maybe as a last preliminary before we jump into the text.
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B
Yeah. I think in. In short, there are. Are two things that. Attracted to. Attracted me to pick this one in particular at this moment in time. On the one hand, there's the. The character about whom we'll have plenty to say momentarily, I suppose, of. Of Shepard, who's. I don't. I don't know that you can really ever call characters antagonists or protagonists in O. Sort of the central figure around whom the drama unfolds in a lot of ways. And he is, to my mind, one of the saddest characters in all of oconnors stories precisely because he has a false notion of what it means to be reasonable. And I Think that's something that needs to be sounded loudly today when many people do have such a false notion of what it is to be reasonable. I think that's a. You know, if you go back to sort of the overall purpose of the grotesque and what it helps us to accomplish, I think it helps us to see things to which we've got become. We've put on blinders, right? Allows us to see outside of this narrow scope that we've perhaps instituted for ourselves. And so I think today a lot of people believe themselves reasonable and believe themselves to be in possession of reason. But he shows that. That that sort of possession of reason is flawed. And as a sort of connection between that. There's really only three characters in the story. There's some ancillary characters that don't really have names and don't really do anything. They're just sort of there. A couple of policemen, some kids in the background at a baseball game, a cook who comes in in one scene. But there's really only three characters. And I think. And perhaps your listeners to. To Plato, your series on Plato will appreciate this. I think we can identify them as in some way corresponding to fragmented versions of the reasoning part of the soul, the spirited part of the soul and the desiring part of the soul. So what happens to the soul when we suppress one part of it or various parts of it and overemphasize the others? And what are the consequences of that? How do we undo our humanity in some way? So that's sort of the one main reason. The other one is actually related in some way to the title. And what you'll notice when you look at Flannery o' Connor's stories and the titles of her stories, they often have this biblical sound to them. The lame shall enter first. Okay, well, that sounds. You know, that's clearly got some. Some scriptural reference. And I think what she had in mind when she titled it was in particular in the Gospel of Luke, in chapter 14, verses 13 and 14. I'll just read these real quick because they're short. It says, when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. And I think those two lines in some way can encapsulate a very strange reading of the story. Or rather maybe the story is a very strange reading of those two lines, those two verses. So I've just always been sort of captivated by that connection. And I've Always wanted to explore it a little bit further, and you've given me a great opportunity to do that here.
- [30:28]
A
So I'm interested to see how you kind of draw that mapping in this text. So maybe with that as our bait, let's kind of look at the text. So the lame shall enter first. So just kind of taking this, this, like, very first passage, we're introduced to the characters of shepherd and to his son Norton. So, like, two things that immediately stand out to me. One, does Flannery o' Connor play with names? Because his name is Shepherd. And two, this whole. This whole bit here at the beginning of him, like, they're having breakfast and he gets cake out and then it's dry. So, like, the boy who I think is like 10, right. He's like, putting ketchup on it. Like, you read this. And shepherd takes us with a certain level of, like, disgust, like he's watching this with disdain. But as a father of five, I'm asking, like, where. Where is his father? Like, what are you doing? Like, where. Where is the proactive parenting here? Where's the engagement with the child? Right. He seems very kind of disjointed from the child. So maybe the first one, like, does Flandrill kind of play with names in these stories?
- [31:41]
B
Yeah, she's. And I don't know that it's always deeply symbolic or anything, the names that she chooses. But they do always have some sort of general connection, I think, to what's going on in the story. But so too, there's. There's probably some participation in the general tradition of, of names in the South. I think a lot of it's been sort of lost in recent generations. But in southern Appalachia, for instance, they all had very traditional names. There's, there's. It's interesting. I had a literature professor, wonderful professor for my undergraduate, whose name was Cicero Bruce. He was from Appalachia. But there's often very biblical sounding names. There's often very classical sounding names that you'll find, particularly in her time in that region, it was still very much a tradition. So I think as well, she's. Because when you read this, there's no location given. This is not situated anywhere. But that does kind of indicate. It's one of many indicators that this is a southern situated story, is that sort of naming. She's giving a context through names, which I always appreciate. Just as a general comment on fiction, when you're shown and not told, it's much more rewarding, I think.
- [33:11]
A
Yeah, that's a good Tolkien principle. Yeah. If I remember one way to maybe to rephrase like a principle that's here, is that I one time read about her and people are asking her about her stories, and of course they're asking her, like, well, what does this represent? And what does this represent? And it kind of got to an absurd level when she was like, no, that doesn't represent anything. That's just a chair or that's just a hat. And so I think it's important to note that she has analogues, like, woven through the tale or maybe allusions, but it's not an allegory. So we're not trying to stress everything into an allegorical picture. This is not Aslan as our, like Jesus resurrecting lion. So there's a certain way here, I think, that we, when she can't, sometimes plays with names, but that doesn't mean that everyone's name is going to have some type of allusion. This is. It's not an allegory. What'd you make, though, of, like, just how she sets up this first kind of interaction? I mean, we're being introduced to Norton and to shepherd and this. This kind of very stale relationship between father and son here at the beginning.
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B
Yeah. Well, the reason why. And this is often the case with o' Connor stories, they can never just be read once, I think, but I think they often have to be read many times to see all the connections. We're being introduced to the situation where it's father and son. And one could almost infer very quickly, even from the first page, that the mother doesn't seem to be in the picture. Certainly by the second page, it becomes evident that there's this absence in the child's life when I think it is actually mentioned. Yes. When his wife was living, they had often eaten outside, even breakfast on the grass. So you get this sense of there's. There's grief hanging in the air. And that's what I've taken away from this story, this setup to the story. Shepherd, in a number of different places, seems to admonish his child, even if it's just silently in his own interior monologue, for retaining grief over the death of his mother. And yet it's quite clear that shepherd himself still has that grief quite profoundly as well, and has simply shut himself off from it. And in shutting himself off from that grief, he's also shut himself off from his own child here, which is an interesting point to note as well. He doesn't reference him here as his child or his son. It just says the child, the boy until the very end. And we'll see why and see why that's significant when we get there. But throughout the entire story, he's not referenced as his son. He's only referenced as the child or the boy. That too is as a general comment. O' Connor was known to revise her stories extensively. She also, she would never outline anything. She would never script any plot out in advance. She'd just start writing. She, she described it once as like being a blind woman who's trying to pour tea. She has to put her finger in the cup to tell that it's getting in there. So that's what's going on here. Yeah.
- [36:35]
A
So then Shepard, where we have to kind of explore his character. So he is the city recreational director. Right. So what is this role that he plays? I think this kind of really informs then how he sees himself. He sees himself like as an intellectual. He sees himself as doing good things. He sees himself as even self sacrificial. How do we take like this kind of first imprint of this character?
- [37:03]
B
Yeah, he's. Well, that gets tied in as well to this other character who's introduced indirectly here, Rufus Johnson. This, this young deformed child who's, whose dad is dead, I believe, and his mother's in the penitentiary. His grandfather beats him and you know, he saw him digging out of the trash. Right. To get something to eat. And so he, he wants to be this, this guardian, this person who's able to elevate or to lift up this poor young neglected boy. Right. Of Rufus, who is also, he notes here, the most intelligent boy he had worked with as in addition to being the city recreational director. That is not a very intellectual job. Basically it's implied that it consists largely in, you know, organizing youth softball leagues. But he also works as a counselor at the reformatory on weekends. And that's where he meets this Rufus Johnson. And that's where he sort of tries to practice his, his better angelic nature, as it were, in elevating the poor, lifting them up in some way.
- [38:20]
A
Yeah, I liked, I liked what you said earlier that Shepard can, like, he can't. He can kind of see the grief that Norton's showing. But he, he recontextualizes it. He actually, he says in there, he says this was not a normal grief. It was all part of his selfishness. Right. This little boy is selfish. He can't share. Like there's a lot of heavy critiques of him here at the beginning. And I really like what you Say there that shepherd is blind. Right. To his own grief and how he's kind of disassociated, you know, from his own son. And I like what you point out there, that that possessive language is missing. Right. That he. There's a father and son relationship. Yeah.
- [38:59]
B
And, you know, he's touting in his own mind, at the very least, his generosity and his. His, you know, sort of magnanimity or magnificence, if you will, to the. The poor. And yet it's pointed out that Norton's shirt is. Is faded and he's eating stale cake for breakfast. That's why he's putting peanut butter and ketchup on it. So there's this just sort of blindness to the neglect that he's exercising within his own household. It's very. It's very. An interesting thing how much it seems to be tied into. To the material. Just the mere fact of material. There's no quality invested or concern for quality or whether these things are good for his son. It's just that his son has them. That's all that he seems to really care about, which is. Yeah, well, that's a pretty common thing these days, I suppose, in our land of plenty that we don't really stop to even think about. Okay, are we actually doing good through having the things that we have?
- [40:07]
A
Right.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah.
- [40:08]
A
No, that's a good point. What'd you take at the beginning? Like, we're being introduced to Norton. He's being presented to us as a. As a selfish character, one who's somewhat materialistic. He can't share. Actually. He's actually somewhat antagonistic to sharing. And we get this kind of narrative that he wants to sell seeds because he's got to enter some kind of contest to get $1,000, which is a significant amount of money in this time period. And he's like, what are you gonna do with it? Well, I'll keep it. And then he throws up the introduction here that we have the Norton. I mean, it's just interesting to me because with Shepard. You mentioned earlier that you found Shepard to be probably one of the most tragic characters, I think, or something along those lines. Part of that, too, is. Is because Shepard sees himself as trying to do good. He sees himself as trying to be kind and like, you know, there's. There will be no. He has. At one point, there's no chink and the armor of my kindness. There's. There seems to be, like, a general nobility of how he sees himself and what he wants to do. Meanwhile, his child is Trying to gain money and then vomiting because, you know, he just had. Right. Chocolate cake with peanut butter and ketchup on it for breakfast that he just now has like vomited. So Norton, Norton, like when I first started reading the story again as a first time reader, I was really curious where the character of Norton was going to go because he's being set up as such. This whole first part is very heavy into like who he is and what motivates him. And he is presented as not necessarily like annoying, but it's like, oh, here's this other kid I'm interested in. And then here's this kid that's like in my way and eating chocolate cake and just vomited. And he's just a hassle.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah. And he's this greediness, this selfishness. Right. That he's being characterized as having. Well, there too, I think you can see the blindness of Shepard being exercised in that he attributes Norton's vomiting to having eaten too much. He doesn't question whether it's the fact that he just put ketchup and peanut butter on chocolate cake, which I think would make, I don't know, it'd probably make me throw up if I, if I ate that. So there's this, you know, view of this, this young child, 10 years old, who's been without his mother for the past year and has probably been suffering neglect for that whole year while his father has been blind to all of these things or has blinded himself to all these things. He just wants. He just wants something. He wants something that's his. When it's mentioned, Shepard mentions to him that, you know, Rufus's mother is in the state penitentiary. Your mother isn't in the state penitentiary. Norton bursts out into tears because he's like, well, she was in the penitentiary. I could go see her. And just this unfulfilled absence in Norton's life is not at all recognized by Shepard. And so he continues to neglect it.
- [43:26]
A
I think it's a wonderful foundation and how o' Connor sets this up because I think one thing for us to watch is that as you said, we have these three main characters. Like what is their maturation arc throughout the story or how, how do they develop? And I think it's really interesting because if you read the, you know, little Norton here as, as being very flat and materialistic and having certain desires that I'm not entirely sure he even understands and he's trying to satiate those, then it's really interesting to compare that to him in the story that then when he has somewhat of a spiritual awakening and he finds the thing that makes him excited. We'll even get. We skipped it here. But there's like this really kind of grotesque, pitiful description of his face, how it looks and his eyes listless and these kind of things. And like his whole demeanor changes later in the story. So I think it's nice to. To root this now to say that it may be overly critical of how he's being presented here, because then I think we see the contrast. I think in that same way, as you said, like when you read it more than once, you start to notice these things that Flannery is kind of setting up for us. It really caught my attention kind of pushing on a little bit to that, that next section when it starts talking about Shepherd's office and the reformatory. He says he had never been inside a confessional, but he thought it must be the same kind of operation he had here, except that he explained he did not absolve. His credentials were less dubious than that of a priest's. He had been trained for what he is doing. So you see this, you see one that he's never been inside a confessional, but that's not terribly surprising given the demographics. But then when he compares, that's what I felt was really interesting, particularly in reading the story again, where he compares his office, where he reforms these young men to a confessional. And I think, at least as a first time reader, the thing that started to come out is that shepherd seems to embody some type of like. And you're probably gonna get into this about the intellect, but he seems to embody some type of like secular like optimism or like materialism or scientific, where things are empirical, they've been flattened, if you will. Right. Because he seems to have like a noble intent. But yeah, like, you don't need to go to a priest. Like they don't even know what they're doing. You come to my reformatory, right? I can counsel you, I can lead you away from scripture. We'll see that later. We're in the scientific age, we're in the space age. We have all these new things. So it looks like at the beginning here, o' Connor is setting up this, this contrast between a spiritual reality that shepherd just seems basically not only blind to, but almost antagonistic towards. And then this kind of flat materialistic side which has like, kindness and other things that he wants to try and invite, you know, Rufus into.
- [46:19]
B
Yeah, this obsession with, with space is an interesting thing as well. There's, there's A kind of tension there. I believe, you know, this story was, I believe, written in 1962. So you really are in the space age at that time. Right. I mean, that's what a lot of the news is about. That's a common thing in the United States. And there's this, this thought of human beings controlling their own destiny, determining what the future is going to be. And shepherd doesn't seem to think that he himself is going to participate in that. You know, he's a city recreational director, but he wants to see others take on this sort of new faith, as it were. He wants to be an evangelist for the space age, if you will. And so when he's looking through the records of the kids in the reformatory and he comes across Rufus Johnson's file and sees his IQ that's listed as 140, it says he raised his eyes eagerly like he's like, oh, here it is, here's the one, right? Here's the one who can, I can convert to this and, and bring, you know, a sort of great prize forward in some way.
- [47:37]
A
And that's part of that same parallel. So he. And we kind of see this later as Johnson's character is introduced to us. But that whole like, oh, this kid's special like you, you could do these things because you have this high iq when really that. That capacity of your intellect to maybe to outthink or outwit your neighbor is only one facet of your soul and of who you are. So it's just really interesting me that shepherd, he, because he seems blind to the moral nature of Rufus's soul, he seems blind to like the holistic understanding of the soul and as a moral agent and as virtue with these kind of things would probably be too religious for him. And he kind of just flattens it again, right, to like, well, you're, you have 140 IQ like you, you can go do whatever you want. You could do all these things. There's no credence given to anything of like the moral life.
- [48:27]
B
Yeah, there's, there's nothing other than your intelligence, right. Your ability for, for knowledge, your ability to apply this even. And I won't go off on a rant here as I do it all the time, but you know, just even the notion of the IQ score, it's a very sort of strange way of categorizing intelligence when it comes or, you know, measuring someone's ability to perform well in a test and then saying that, that, that alone indicates that individual's intelligence, that person's intellectual value. And there is absolutely a way in which Shepard is looking at these two children in terms of their value. At one point he says that Norton is mediocre or he's mediocre at best or something like that. Which, what a lovely thing to say about your own child. Right? But he wants to educate this, this, this person, right? He wants to, he says it on the following page that I want you to see. I want to see you make the most of your intelligence. And it's just this idea, and I think this is to go back to the passage in scripture where you see that sort of almost sort of demonic inversion of it in the way that it's being applied here that he's looking for a reward in Rufus. He wants to invite the lame in so that the lame can reward him by becoming a sort of disciple of his scientific religion or his scientistic religion.
- [50:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, I like that because it once again shows that kind of flat empirical nature. Like I have to quantify this thing. So I can quantify your intellect. I can quantify my son's intellect and I'm going to table my son because this, you're so important. You have this 140 IQ. So again, it kind of goes to this like flat empiricism that always is so blind to the holistic spiritual reality in which we live. Right? Which is his big blind spot throughout most of the story. Can we say something about Johnson though? Because we haven't even mentioned like his most. We haven't mentioned his most like this, you know, prominent trait here, which is that he has this like grotesque giant club foot which apparently when he meets with people he likes to like hang over his knee so everyone, you know, can see this monstrosity that's there. And I think it's so funny that Shepard immediately like steps into like an armchair Freud and was like, oh, okay, now I see what's going on. And he tells him, there are a lot of things about yourself that I think I could explain to you, which again, think of, like, think of his earlier comparison to the confessional. So we are seeing this like we're seeing the sinner come. We're seeing, you know, he has this deformity, you know, that could be analogous. Flannery loves deformities. Every, every story you read, someone's missing a limb or something or some one eyed guy shows up or someone gets smashed, like it's all over the place. But it typically is analogous, right, to some type of evil. There's some type of depravity here. And so you have someone who's maimed, someone who's deformed, coming into this, like, secular confessional scene, this reformatory, and presenting themselves and saying. But then they're being recalcitrant, right? He's. Johnson's not. Rufus, Rufus Johnson. He's not open to Shepherd's invitations to reform.
- [51:56]
B
Yeah, I mean, immediately he responds to that. I didn't ask for an explanation or I ain't asked for no explanation. I already know why I do what I do. And there's no openness to this scientistic perspective. And he just immediately sort of, you know, answers. It's Satan. Satan has me in his power. And this is something that Shepard just can't even process, right? He can't even make any sense of it. He's like, well, that. Just because he's not trying to be funny, he's not making a joke. It's like, well, you, you know, how could you believe this? That's nonsense. That's rubbish. We live in the space age, right? How could you possibly believe this? And so he then goes on, right, and says, okay, well, we're going to meet every week, right? Says this to Johnson. We're going to meet and I'm going to. I'm going to arrange things so that you can come here and we'll talk every Saturday. He says that he talked a little above him to give him something to reach for. He roamed from simple psychology and the dodges of the human minds to astronomy in the space capture principles that were whirling around the earth faster than the speed of sound. He wanted to give the boy something to reach for besides his neighbor's goods. He wanted to stretch his horizons. He wanted him to see the universe. And I find this is an odd little phrase here, one of these interesting ones that captivates you a little bit to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated, right? He wants. He. He really does fixate here. He says, concentrates on the stars. And this wants to look up out into space, this new frontier which has been opened up by science, even though there's really nothing there to be seen, it's just this darkness. He just wants to send him out into darkness. It's a very strange, thoughtless sort of thing that even if Shepard is intelligent in some way, we don't actually know whether or not shepherd is intelligent, whether he actually has knowledge. We know that he thinks he does, but we don't know whether he actually is or not from what's shown to us. He doesn't really seem to certainly, I'd say, have wisdom. He's. He's reaching for things, he's grasping for things, but there's no sense of why, even other than this is simply something to do. And there's almost something, maybe a little bit. He seems perhaps motivated in a way which is antagonistic to faith, not just neutral to it. But he wants him to go to astronomy because, well, you can see that there's nothing up there. There is no heaven up there. The stars are just the stars. And it's this empty, vast darkness. So there's, you know, it's hard to say that definitively, but I think there's something to think about there in that regard. Why space? Why the stars? There's an importance for the story, but the character is an interesting question there.
- [55:02]
A
Yeah, I mean, it does play as we see throughout the whole story. It plays a strong theme. Yeah, I took the darkness again, that kind of, like, empirical scientific revolution, space age spirit of, like, there's no mystery.
- [55:18]
B
Right.
- [55:18]
A
There's no mystery that's not subject now to empiricism that can't be put inside a beaker and measured and weighed and et cetera. You know, there's Even the blackness of the universe, you know, can be explored. And I mean. Yeah, as we kind of come to the end of that section too, I mean, this is where I think you really understand that something heartbreaking is happening. He catches himself basically daydreaming about Johnson, this other kid, in direct contrast to his own son. There's a really tragic line in here. He says, what was wasted on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish. What's so heartbreaking about. I mean, there's many things that are heartbreaking about that, but what's so heartbreaking is. Is that what we're getting set up for here is that then later, Norton does get an interest in a telescope. He does get an interest in space. And I really thought it was like, oh, this could crack the veneer, right? The father and son have something to come, and he completely ignores Norton. And so you see this, like, foundation being built up, but it's not captivated, it's not built upon by the father. It's a really heartbreaking scene. But this next scene, though, is where I was like, oh, great, we're already, like, five pages in. And I'm gonna hate this story because. Right. What happens? Shepherd's away. Norton is at the house. He's 10. And he hears the distinctive click of the key unlock. And we know that Shepard has given Johnson, this wayward child who's apparently eating out of trash cans right now. A key to their own home. So here he comes into the house. Now, you never know what you're gonna get with Flanner o'.
- [56:55]
B
Connor.
- [56:56]
A
So this was a lot more tame than what I thought could have happened. I was very concerned, actually, when this scene popped up. But what's he do here? He comes in, you know, he basically acts like he owns the place. He commands Norton to go around and make him a sandwich. And then he has no respect for Norton's mother's things that we kind of get the hint that after she died, they basically just kind of shut the bedroom door. It basically turned into a little museum. Her hairbrush and stuff is still out. The room actually still smells like perfume. That door has been shut. It hasn't even aired out. And he goes in there just completely without any reverence towards what's sacred. And Norton, I liked Norton in his scene because I felt like Norton finally kind of became a little spirited. Right. Kind of, like, pushed back a bit. But maybe here, two questions. One is, you know, what do you take of the scene which ends in a really kind of bizarre way of him putting on the mother's clothing and dancing, you know, with a girl that's come over to cook food. But, like, is there anything that we need to pull from the scene particularly? And two, when are you going to pull back the veil a bit and tell us how the characters start serving as analogs to the Platonic soul? Because I'm very interested about this. Or who should we be watching as they develop?
- [58:16]
B
Yeah. Well, first of all, actually, to start with that second point, you know, when we're looking for these analogues, I'd almost even say more metaphors, specifically, there's an improper proportionality, if you will, between the characters and the parts of the soul, because they are complete human beings and they're not meant to be allegorical symbols of the parts alone. So they're each complete human beings. But I think we can see that there's this impulsivity in Rufus, in Johnson. He's going to do whatever he feels like doing at that particular moment. He's not one of restraint. He's going to act out. He is spirited. And we see this really throughout the story, in all the things that he does. Now. There's also a kind of cunning there, a kind of low cunning, which is an often characteristic in o' Connor's characters. But he's. What is he gonna do? He's gonna go play with the mother's comb. He's gonna tease Norton around, he's gonna order him around, he's gonna make fun of him. He's going to put on the mother, dead mother's clothes and dance around, right? Because he feels like it. And I think that's what really kind of the purpose is, is that he's, he's not restrained by anything. There's nothing that really restrains Johnson at all.
- [59:52]
A
And you find that more spirited or repetitive?
- [59:55]
B
I find that more spirited because it's not as though he actually really wants any of these things or really cares about having any of them. I don't think he cares about having anything really, is what we find throughout the story. Whereas I think what you can see, and it's a little bit different in this scene with Norton where he does have some spiritedness, he's maybe roused a little bit by the spiritedness of someone else since his father doesn't seem very spirited in any significant way. So having the presence of this other spirited person around him causes him to act a little bit more spiritedly as well. But you can see that he certainly doesn't want the memory of his mother disturbed. And that's what you can see is, is where he really gets most animated. He gets a little animated in defense of his father, right? Saying that, you know, his father's good and he wants to help people or something along those lines. But he's, he's mostly, he's more concerned, he's more disturbed by the way that Johnson treats the mother's possessions and treats that room. So I think what you can see is, is actually here's where you really do see those, those characters start so to come to the fore. You've already seen it to some extent implicitly with Norton and his desire just to keep things. You know, what would a 10 year old boy wants to keep $1,000 for so it's not taken away from him? That's, that's really, I think the only thing that 10 year old boy I know when I was 10, if I got $1,000, I was spending it all on Legos like right away. There's no question about what that thousand dollars is for. I certainly wouldn't keep it. But you can see that, that desirousness in his character, I think really throughout. And here you can see there's this, it's. I mean he's, he's sort of in a lot of ways in the background. I think in this scene, Norton, he's there as a punching bag for, for Johnson, a punching bag for this unrestrained spiritedness which is simply going to act out against whatever it wishes to act out against.
- [62:04]
A
Yeah, no, I think that's, that's very good. But then so kind of pushing on into the narrative. Right. Shepard actually comes home, which I was relieved happened in the story because again, I was, I was very nervous about Norton being at the house by himself with Rufus there. So Shepard comes home and we get this. I mean, again, this kind of like fawning narrative of like he's strategizing about how, how can I get Rufus, you know, just stay. What's really fascinating about this kind of arc throughout the story is throughout the whole time, Shepard is telling himself that he basically reads Rufus like a book. And he knows, okay, if I push this way, if I push that way, if I have to pull this way, he'll react like this. So I have to be really delicate. We basically find out by the end of story that he's just been played completely to this whole facade. So I guess if you're gonna carry out your analogy there. Right. There seems to be a false intellect in shepherd, but he finds himself very savvy on these things, but they, they fall flat. But his main purpose here is he's trying to orchestrate that Rufus would somehow stay with them.
- [63:11]
B
Yeah. And. And again, he's trying to co opt him into the scientistic perspective. You know, he first comes into the house, he sees Rufus sitting there at this, before this wall of books. And Rufus is sitting there reading the, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you know, this supposed summary of knowledge. And this too, I think in particular, what you find with Shepard and his distorted presentation of the reasoning part of the soul is. It's not just distorted in the sense that it's divided from the desiring and the spirited, but it's distorted in that it's an Enlightenment sense of what reason is. And the encyclopedia is in fact a sort of perfect metonymic signifier for that. Because the encyclopedic tradition really does grow out of the Enlightenment, grows out of Voltaire and Diderot and that tradition where wisdom gets displaced by exhaustive knowledge, a knowledge of all the facts. And so he sort of sees Rufus in this scene like, oh, look, he's here. A place where he can get all of the facts, where he can become this, this wise figure. And it's just, it says, you know, he, he sees him so engrossed in that he didn't look up. He holds his breath. This was the perfect setting for the Boy, he had to keep him here. And he's. He's got to, to seize the prize. And at the same time, Norton's been shoved quite literally into a closet. He's. He's. An old gray winter coat of shepherd's wife still hung there. He pushed it aside, but it didn't move. He pulled it open roughly and winced as if he had seen the larva inside a cocoon. Like again, what a way to describe your own son there. His face was swollen and pale with a drugged look of man misery on it. And so you have this just. I mean, this is an almost comic scene because it's sort of so over the top to just picture it, you know, here, here it is, this man comes home. This, you know, ragamuffin quite, quite literally is sitting there reading a book in one of his chairs while his own son's been shoved in the closet. And he won't listen to anything that his son has to say. He won't hear him out. He'll just sort of rebuke him immediately when his son tries to speak, all as a part of trying to get Rufus to stay. And he's so fixated on this ideal that he can't see what's there before him. And this is oftentimes, I think, how reason, and this is where Shepard, as reason divorced from the other parts of the soul, starts to shine forth more clearly. I think, you know, reason, it's almost like an inversion of that line of Pascal that the heart has its own reasons. It's almost like the reason has its own desires here. And reason, devoid of any sort of properly oriented desire, is going to fixate on the imposition of ideas rather than contact with an observation and proper ordered love towards reality.
- [66:31]
A
I really like you bringing forth the role that the encyclopedia plays in this because that's probably something we're so habituated to as moderns. Or there might be people listening today who never had an encyclopedia in their house. So they actually don't know why that's a big deal because they just had Google and now we have Grok. And so all these things are getting outdated. But a lot of times you'll hear the encyclopedia as that kind of historic example compared to something like St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. However, St. Thomas presents this knowledge in a, you know, sapiential order, in this pedagogical order to actually lead the listener through, like the higher and the lower, according what you need to know in a certain order to understand things correctly. Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. And he kind of holds your hand and leads you through that. As opposed. The encyclopedia is just everything we know according to an arbitrary principle, the Alphabet. And so you just start reading things that start with A. And that distinction might not be apparent to us because we're so habituated to the latter, to the modern side, but we do. I take that from your meaning of why I liked your phrase. We have replaced wisdom, which is really usually a knowledge of the whole. We understand how the parts come together. There's a knowing of an order with. I think you said, like an exhaustive knowledge. Like, I just know lots of stuff. Stuff. Right. It's the same. The same spirit. There might be. Well, I know I'm smarter than the scholars in the medieval age because I have an iPhone.
- [67:58]
B
Right.
- [67:58]
A
I can Google things, I can pump things into Grok. And therefore I'm smarter because I have more access to knowledge.
- [68:05]
B
Yeah. And it's interesting. I grew up with an encyclopedia in the house, and I would pick it up off the shelf, random volume here or there. When I was doing research, when you're. When you're 10 years old and doing research, or 14 or whatever it is. And I've always found it interesting to reflect upon the fact that, you know, it would do its. Its job in trying to say you come across something which is controversial or where there are different interpretations, it would lay out what the different interpretations are. If it happens to be a matter of scientific consensus or something like that, they'll go with the consensus as a thought authoritative. But there's no real argumentation that can be found in an encyclopedia. There's no demonstration, there's no explanation why there's no connection to the real causes of things. There's simply this exhaustion of fact, this exhaustion of even opinion, but without any sort of faculty of judgment being exercised. And there's perhaps an ironic comment there on Shepard's character as well, who seems to lack any sort of sense of judgment also, although perhaps in a more directly practical way or pragmatic way.
- [69:21]
A
Yeah, no, I like that parallel. I like that parallel a lot. Yeah. So as we've mentioned, kind of pushing into the narrative. So he sets up a telescope in the house and we're going to do this. And again, I found this to be a really tragic scene as the story kind of develops, you know, as I think you alluded to earlier, I. In the margins of mine, I'm like, why a telescope? Why the stars? I'm writing these things out. And obviously, you know, on the Empirical side, the flat side, I think the space age, things like that. But it's always every time I see stars though, right? We just, we just read Dante's Inferno for Lent and all of his volumes, all his songs, if you will, of the comedy end with the stars. This is, this is where wonder begins. This is where the soul's being called up. So it's interesting to me and I don't want to read like too much into the story. It's interesting to me that Flannery uses a symbol that simultaneously has a very like space age scientism, empirical loaded meaning to it that we're actually the masters of the universe. But for the ancients, this was the symbol that actually started wonder in the soul. To look up at the stars and start to think about them was really in a lot of ways the beginning of philosophy. I think she might really be playing off this here because of how it ends up. I think the surprise here, right, is that it ends up affecting Norton. And so I think it's showing that the same thing can symbolize two very different things to different types of souls that are receptive to them.
- [70:48]
B
Yeah, I mean we could go off the significance of the stars and the visibility of the stars. As an aside, I think it's one of these great, you know, modern tragedies that many of us suffer unawares of, of how much light pollution we suffer and how difficult it is. In fact, I just took the trash out a little bit ago and I could actually see the stars for once and it was great. I stood there for a minute and just, just looked up. But I think, you know, there's, there's certainly a way in which it's this unparadoxical thing right now that we've, we can't see the stars, but we can reach them. And I think in her time in Flannery oconnors time, we could still see them, but we couldn't understand them. And I think that's part of the message here that's being conveyed, maybe not fully intentionally, but certainly in the truth of the story which stands as a background to it. The truth that is in the background of the story, I should say the truth of reality that you can scientifically analyze the stars and their movements and understand the composition of, of the moon and the distance of, you know, beetle goose and all these other things. Right. But do you understand the significance of it? Do you understand what it really means for us as human beings that we look up and see this, this cosmos? So there's there's something there, most certainly. And so, you know, like for Dante still, you know, operating under the roughly Ptolemaic cosmology, the stars were also a principle of order. Really, the principle of terrestrial order was the motions of the heavens. And so there's something there as well. You know, the loss that Shepard doesn't even realize he's suffered, which is perhaps an emerging theme in thinking about the character of Shepard, is his blindness to himself, his blindness to not knowing what he doesn't have.
- [72:46]
A
Yeah, no, well said. Yeah, it's one. One of the joys of moving out to rural Oklahoma was being able to actually walk outside with your kids and actually see the constellations. It's amazing. But here, what's really interesting is that this is also the scene kind of taking all the stuff about the stars in mind that starts to plant the seeds in Norton, right? So Johnson starts to share a few things with him. So he says, like, you know, nobody's given any hell comes up. And so, you know, Shepard's like, well, no one's ever given any reliable evidence for hell. Again, that empirical, scientific kind of view. He says the Bible, right. Johnson says the Bible has given evidence, and if you die, you go there and burn forever. Now, you know, this is that kind of brilliance of o' Connor is you can put things in the mouth of a character who's not saying them for the right reasons. So it's. It's not. At least my read is Johnson's not trying to actually, like, evangelize shepherd, but rather how I read this is that Johnson has finally found the thing that annoys Shepherd. He's finally found the thing that actually gets underneath his skin. So he doesn't like this Christian talk. He doesn't like, talk about faith or heaven or hell or et cetera. And it seems like then that. That Rufus then latches onto that. And in the midst of these two characters kind of having this battle back and forth, Norton then is. Is kind of like picking these things up, almost like in a really tragic way.
- [74:16]
B
Well, yeah, and I. And I think what Rufus can do, and maybe this is an interesting point where it's reflecting upon as well, he gives Norton something that Norton wants, something that Shepard hasn't been giving him, which is some enduring, meaningful connection in some way or another to his mother. The question comes up, you know, is, is Norton asks whether or not his mother's in hell, and Shepard's just sort of like muttering like, oh, I can't believe this superstitious nonsense is going on. And Tells him that, you know, your mother's spirit lives on and other people live on. And you. If you're good and generous like she was. And the child's pale, hard eyes. Pale eyes hardened in disbelief. And this is actually, in some way, I think, the line that stuck with me the most in reading this story right after that, it says that Shepherd's pity turns to revulsion, that the boy would rather she be in hell than nowhere. I thought there's. There's. I mean, there's. There's a title right out of that for some other story, which is that Hell is a pity, that it's. It's better to be in hell than not to exist. And this is something that o' Connor, and her reading of Aquinas and her reading of, you know, the tradition, I think, comes to see with respect to being some being is better than no being. Right? And if you're in hell, then you're at least you are in some way. And so it's just. It's this very interesting thing, right, that the child would in fact, rather that his mother be in hell and that she be nowhere, that she still exists. And Shepard just can't even conceive of why that might be the case. Right. It's a very telling scene, I think, in terms of the psychology of these. These characters. Norton has nothing to want, really, up until this point. And the only thing that he's presented is an absence, the absence of his mother. So money is this pale sort of substitute. Selling the seeds is this pale substitute. And Shepherd's going to offer it, or, excuse me, Johnson's going to offer it to him in this strange and twisted way. And this does seem to really drive shepherd up the wall. Shepard really starts. This is where he gets agitated. This is where Thumos starts to affect reason. I think before you'd seen Thumos affecting desire in a perverse way, and now it's affecting it in a different way. Now Thumos is affecting reason and twisting reason around its own agitations, if you will.
- [77:00]
A
Yeah, I think it's a really beautiful scene for Norton. The little boy that was eating the dry chocolate cake, that seemed very materialistic and selfish almost here has a spiritual awakening. There is a longing in his soul. And you're right, he's been offered a path to that, something he doesn't quite understand. But there's something new here. There's a thickness that comes into Norton's imagination here that he previously did not know about. Right. He was, like, from his father, very flat very materialistic, etc. And there is a certain thickening agent that comes in when that spiritual reality comes in that there are more things than you're actually aware of.
- [77:43]
B
Yeah, he, he has a kind of vitality. He's, he's not just being pushed around any longer, but he has a kind of agency which he seems to start to exercise. He starts to do things in some way after this other than just the sort of listless. When he's described as collecting the ingredients for, for his breakfast at the very beginning. Right. He's described as sort of wandering from cabinets to cabinets. He's lost and has no direction. And here there's a kind of clarity which starts to emerge for him, a kind of goal, something towards which he can act, which he was previously lacking.
- [78:22]
A
So I think Norton, you know, obviously you get kind of a tragic line here at the end of the scene where he and his small mind, his child's mind is trying to process this and he says, when I'm dead, will I go to hell or where she is. I mean, the poor kid doesn't even have a cultural understanding of heaven. Of like what I mean, that's how deprived he is in his kind of spiritual imagination here is that he doesn't, he doesn't seem to even understand like what the opposite of, you know, hell would be. And that's, and that's. That actually I think is really telling because even, you know, in these kind of non religious households, you know, everyone goes to heaven. I mean, that's just like, you know, that's just like the nice myth that tends to, you know, perpetrate here.
- [79:06]
B
It's a strange thing to reflect heaven being so alien to the child that he's just never even heard of it. And I hadn't picked up on that before. That's interesting.
- [79:16]
A
So the next scene we get where this is where they're walking and they're going to the Little league game. And so this was interesting to me. So now the problem is, right, is that Shepard, this whole conversation's happened. Johnson has seen that this is an irritation to Shepherd. And so of course now, like Johnson has spent basically the whole day filling, you know, Norton's head full of, you know, this kind of Christian imagination, which obviously he kind of means as an indirect evil against shepherd. But it's, it's serving some type of good maybe arguably, you know, for Norton, as he's kind of understanding these things and his soul is reacting to these kind of thicker spiritual realities. I thought it was interesting. So I, I Guess like the Little League. It did. It did strike me as. As curious that, like, they're not in the Little League, like Norton's not in the Little League. This seems to be maybe another example of shepherd going off and doing other good things for other people while his son is neglected, right? So, like, his son's not on the team. His son's not playing. He's off organizing games and doing these things. Meanwhile, you know, Norton has been left into the care of. Of Johnson. I don't know. I found it to be another kind of a strange scene.
- [80:26]
B
Yeah, it's. It's a fairly short scene, right? I mean, it doesn't take last very long before they move on, but it is this sort of. And. And this is often something you find in Oconnor stories, right, where there's communication that happens off stage, as it were. We don't know what Johnson's telling Norton. We know. We can infer from the end of the story some of the things that he might have been telling him, but we. We don't really know what's happening. And it's a rare moment of a kind of opacity, right, which often is a prelude to violence in her stories. There's something, and I've always taken this to be a sort of like there's something beyond or outside of reason which is going to germinate violence. It's going to bring it into being. And so the fact that it's not said, that what isn't said here seems to be very important, is, I think, an interesting clue. But to the point that you're raising about the increased sense of neglect, right, this sort of. Rather than incorporate his son into his life, into what he does, you know, running a Little League game, he's foisted his son off on this strange child that he has no reason to trust. He trusts in him only because of his iq. What a strange reason to trust in someone, it seems. Yeah, yeah.
- [82:10]
A
I mean, Norton just seems to be completely expendable. Like his good is. Is not thought of. He can be entrusted to the care of this delinquent. Again, we've already seen this. He gave the key to Johnson to come home whenever he wants to. Even when Norton was there, all kinds of terrible things could have happened. So, yeah, again, Norton just kind of gets pushed to the side. But there is this interesting thing that's happening in him. I think, as I mentioned earlier, this is the scene in which you really feel like something has tragically gone wrong or how much Shepherd's neglect of Norton is very palpable because what ends up happening, right, is that Norton's just staring at this telescope. Norton is now absolutely enamored with this whole idea of the stars and the telescope. And he's kind of muddled it in his head with the spiritual realities in heaven. And Norton shows interest in this and Shepard just walks away. And that was. That was a tragic scene. It's a scene that, like, you just realize how far gone shepherd is in being divorced, you know, from his paternal duties and the love that he should have towards his son, that even this thing that he tried to get them to get interest in. If it's Norton that has interest, then it has no interest for Shepherd. It's. It's. Again, it's tragic insofar as you just see the degree by which Shepard actually has separated himself from his own son.
- [83:34]
B
Yeah. And to just immediately turn away and to just immediately say, oh, you know, where's. Where's Rufus? Norton says he was fed up looking at stars, so said he was going somewhere. And shepherd says, I see glumly, and walks away. And he's worried that he's been too lenient with this strange boy that he's let into his home, too concerned with getting the boy to like him, and not at all concerned with how his own son is thinking of him or not thinking of him. What his son's doing, what his son has been up to, what has been done to his son in his absence and his neglect of him. All of these things are completely absent from. From his own mind. And so he's. He's thinking about how he's going to discipline Rufus while his son is actually doing what he had said that he had hoped his son would do. In the prior scene, when the telescope was first mentioned, he was sort of chastising Norton for not showing interest in it. And now that Norton is showing interest in it, he's just concerned with the fact that Rufus isn't. Even though Rufus had never really shown any interest in it, that Rufus had said in that scene, you've seen the moon. Once you've seen it, what is there to look at? It's all just sort of flat and boring and uninteresting to him. So, yeah, you really see this struggle that shepherd is trying to reason through. What's the best way to approach this situation? Okay, well, I've had the wrong mixture of kindness and firmness. And so I need to increase the amount of firmness that I apply in order to get the right combination, the right mixture. So as to properly develop the boy, to develop Johnson.
- [85:32]
A
Yeah. I will say that the scene in which Norton is just staring at the telescope, all of my alarm bells went off. Because one of the stories that Flynn o' Connor wrote that really lives rent free in my head and at certain points I wish it didn't, was the river. And the river, I won't give away the ending, but the river has a similarity to this story insofar as it's also about a little boy who misunderstands spiritual realities and that leads them basically into self violence. And this is the part of the story I really started to get worried because the river, it's a gut wrenching story. And I will say that my sensitivity to o' Connor has grown tremendously since becoming a father. So when I was in high school, when I was reading this, and one, I thought I was immortal and two, you know, I don't have anyone relying on me. I read her stories and like the grotesque and the violent, like it caught my imagination. I thought it was like really fascinating on an intellectual level. I'll just be honest with you. I actually really struggled with this story. Like I struggled with it because as soon as I realized that the child was really within the ambit of the spiritual violence, to use that kind of phrase, I really struggled with this. And actually when we got to the end, I just dropped my book. As soon as I realized what had happened, I just literally threw it down because I had this brief moment of hope, which I was an idiot for. So I had this brief moment of hope that, you know, as the character is like understanding himself, that there's, there's going to be some kind of happy ending. And I was terribly wrong. But this is the first part of the story where I wrote out the river in my, in my margins that they parallel. And I actually think I would push that probably. This is where I'm most opposed or unsettled by o', Connor, where she brings in children into the narrative. And I haven't read enough of her to understand how often she does that. But now this is twice in which basically the childlike imagination can't conceive of the spiritual realities correctly because they haven't been taught correctly and they're neglected. And so these neglected children seeking spiritual goods basically engage in self harm. And that is a. I, I understand like the pedagogy of that, but that is a hard narrative and imagery to try and sell to have some type of like spiritual good or purpose. Does that make sense? I mean, it's probably it's probably her. Like, you know, if you have the old lady, like, you know, there's several things where you have, like, these old ladies that are just rude to everyone the whole story. Or like, you know, these.
- [88:18]
B
These.
- [88:18]
A
Parker's back is another one where it's like, these guys, like, they get their comeuppance at the end. They're like, yeah, great. Awesome. That was wonderful. The kids, like. I don't know. It's hard for me to follow.
- [88:29]
B
Yeah, no, I mean, it's. It's. It is hard. It's brutal. I mean, there's. It hits you in a way that you're like. It just doesn't seem. It doesn't seem just. I think is. Is where we perhaps want to object to it. But I think there's. There's two points I would make in Oconnors favor here. And one is that point that I quoted earlier that I prefer not to tidy up. Reality. And the sad reality is this is the sort of thing that happens. Children do misunderstand spiritual realities if they are left with no guidance. And quite easily when. When you have no good, clear teaching of what is and you start hearing about issues of a spiritual nature, the likelihood of your misunderstanding them is quite high. You're going to conflate the spiritual and with the corporeal. And in that lies a great possibility for the tragic. I think the other part of it. And this is where again, perhaps you see, to go back to that scriptural passage and to think about the final things. There's always an eschatological element in all of Oconnors writing. There's very much the sense of the transitoriness of this world and the finality of the next. And so that second verse in the scripture passage of you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. I think that's where her mind is always going. That as unjust as the moments here and now may seem to be to us, to see the innocent suffer, and particularly to see the innocent suffer in any way by their own hand or by their own misunderstanding or by their own fault, to really experience a kind of tragedy in that sense that where something. Something avoidable, they have failed to avoid by their own errors in some way or another, that's an injustice that receives no compensation. Let's say in the Greek tragedies, there's always that hint, at the very least in the background of o' Connor stories, that there is a final good that is redemptive. No matter how grotesque, no matter how unjust. The here and now happens to seem. And it's in that in which we have to have hope. Not only, let's say, I'd say for Norton, but also for Shepard, which is an important thing here as well, I think.
- [91:06]
A
Oh, so we get to. Now we start getting to the theme of the policeman showing up, right? There's been these robberies and like, these houses have been actually robberies for the wrong word, right? They're just ransacked, they're just destroyed, right? Someone's basically just gone in there and gone on a rampage and destroyed all these things. And the police keep coming back. I like how they explained it at one point because Johnson has a pretty distinct pattern and the way that he walks. So they're kind of seeing these things and they're highly suspect of him. So the first time they come, he's arrested and. And Shepard doesn't intervene and allows him, like, to go to jail for the night. It's like, oh, this will be good for him. But unfortunately then the police say, oh, wait, we arrested someone else. It wasn't your son. And then this becomes a real kind of thorn in the side of Shepard that Johnson's able to kind of just drive in, right? All this manipulative language of like, you didn't believe in me, you didn't trust in me, you know, X, Y and Z. I mean, and again, this is like, who, who's the cat and who's the mouse here? Because Shepard finds himself to be quite proficient at understanding these psychological realities and being able to guide Johnson the way he needs to go. But I think we see at the end of the story, as things have developed, it's actually Johnson who has been leading Shepard along and manipulating him the entire time.
- [92:27]
B
Yeah, there's. There's a few lines here and there where he sort of almost sort of conspires with Johnson. He's sort of like, okay, you know, I got your back, I'm on your side. And he feels like he's getting along with him. But yeah, he's just getting. Just getting played, just being used in some way or another. Not even really used because again, it doesn't seem. Seem that Johnson actually cares about whether or not he goes to jail. He really just cares about needling shepherd over it, making him feel bad for, for, you know, not believing in him and abandoning him.
- [93:09]
A
Well, Johnson seems to have this thing, right, where he. He doesn't actually want help from anybody. And so he seems to then prove that to himself by throwing these goods back in the face or Showing that I can kind of destroy my own benefactor. I'm willing to burn it all down. I don't owe you anything. He has this kind of. I mean, at times, very demonic understanding that when he should be prompted towards gratitude, then how he responds is either with violence or manipulation or something else that kind of destroy whatever it is that precipitated that feeling of gratitude in him.
- [93:52]
B
Yeah, like there's the. The scene with the shoe where Shepard's trying to give him a new, better fitted shoe to fix his club foot and make it easier for him to walk around, and he just rejects it. He wants nothing to do with it. Twice he rejects the shoe and decides he doesn't want anything to do with it. Yeah, he's crass to everyone, right, who tries to help him in any way, because all he wants to do is sort of burn it down. He just wants to break windows, break into things. Again, he doesn't want anything. He's not acquisitive. He doesn't care about the things that he has. Even when it goes back to in an earlier scene where Norton says something to the effect of when Johnson first comes to the house of, you know, he saw you eating out of garbage cans. He's like, well, I eat out of garbage cans because. Because I want to eat out of garbage cans. Right? It's. It's not that he thinks that he needs to, or at least that's how he's portraying himself. He's saying he just does whatever he feels like doing whenever he feels like doing it.
- [94:57]
A
Even before the kind of the. Because remember, the shoe's not ready. And then they go the second fitting of the shoe, and then that's where he kind of throws it back in his face. And that's. Then that's actually where, you know, Shepard starts to get quite, quite angry. Before that, though, you have the second Police episode, and this is the one that, again, is just brutal because then he holds, right? Shepard holds by Johnson, and he goes and talks to him like a father would go talk to a son to a certain degree, right? Goes to his room, sits down with him, talks with him. You know, Johnson, I think, is manipulating him. And then he. Johnson gives this, like, kind of indirect thank you. He says, you don't want to steal and mash up things when you've already. When you've got everything you already want. And that's like his kind of indirect way of saying, like, oh, I'm actually thankful to be here. Assuming that you see any kind of sincerity in that. And Shepard Responds. I mean, this whole thing is over the top. Again, you mentioned earlier, Flannery can have very human characters, but they're. They're exaggerated to a certain degree. So it's like, oh, I understand. Good night, son. He calls him his son, and then he walks down the hallway to his own little boy. His little boy sees him. They catch eyes together. But then he's too afraid to go talk to Norton because he thinks that Johnson might think that he is, you know, checking out his alibi. And so he just pretends he doesn't see. Norton walks on, and there's this. He says the child sat for some time, looking at the spot where his.
- [96:25]
B
Father had stood, and finally his gaze became aimless and he lay back down. So this whole scene, this is where, I mean, first of all, I think there's a kind of a little perhaps like, Christological illusion in the police coming three different times to the house. It's not, you know, again, allegorical. It's not direct, but there's something about that, that he's. He's. Okay. Do I defend Johnson or do I. Do I deny him? So there's. There's a little bit of another weird inversion there, I think. But these lines in particular, I think I actually have the word son underlined four times there, because there it is. He's not referred once in the story up to this point to his own son as his son, his child. There's no possessive pronoun used. And yet here he is explicitly calling this other boy his son, all because he's really, I think, misunderstood him. You know, you don't want to steal and smash up things when you've got everything you want already. Again, I don't think Johnson wants anything. So when he says he's. You've already. You've got everything you want already. He really just means, I just want to keep messing with you. And that's really all I want. And yet here's Shepard, this. This poor fool who wants to have this. At this point, it's. I find it kind of strange that he doesn't even seem to care about Johnson's intelligence or his IQ or his potential. He just wants to be liked by him. He just wants to be brought into his trust and his confidence. That's a very. You talk about sort of the maturation. You might even talk about the dematuration or the degradation of the character of Shepard up to this point. He's being broken down by Johnson throughout the story.
- [98:28]
A
Well, that's a really good segue, because after the shoe fitting incident where he kind of throws the shoe back at him and says, I'm not taking this gift. Then you think that's going to start causing cracks in the veneer a bit. But then we get a police episode again. And so here, right here is Shepard's chance to really stand by Johnson, say, no, no, no, it really can't be him. And this is where you kind of get the twist. So Johnson finally comes out and tells him, like, man, you're not a bad liar yourself. Shepherd's like, wait, what are you talking about? And so then how I took this is that basically Johnson then admits that, no, I have been the one that's been rampaging these houses. I did have enough time to get in and out and do all of these things, basically pushing on shepherd saying, yeah, actually you are covering for me doing this damage. You are covering for me doing these things. And this, this is really interesting to dovetail into. What you said is like, where's, what's he care about right now? Is it more the IQ or is it that he'd be liked by this kid? Because now it seems very much that the covering for the lying and the admitting that I am doing these things wrong is more of I'm just gravitating, gravitating towards being liked by him as opposed to why would an intelligent person do this? Because I think he has some notion that the intelligent person would not do these things. But here he seems more gravitated towards, I want to be liked by Johnson. And probably one of the most fascinating lines in this is how, how this ends, where Johnson then, after admitting that he's been the one rampaging in these homes, he then says to shepherd, he says, save yourself. He hissed, no one can save me but Jesus. And shepherd laughed curtly. You don't deceive me, he said, I flushed that out of your head in the reformatory. I saved you from that. At least there's a lot going on there. But one, that we see that shepherd is the one that snuffed out maybe whatever kind of religious inkling was in Johnson when he was in the reformatory. Again, that really interesting comparison between his reformatory office and the confessional. Now it's like an anti confessional, right, this kind of secular optimism, kindness is actually serving to snuff out that kind of religious inclination right in this young man. But two, what do you take though about. I think, and I think this becomes more of a prominent theme towards the end, but here we're seeing the truth. Only Jesus Saves, a religious concept is being mediated by the villainous character. And is it better. How do I phrase this? Is it better to be vicious but understand religious truth, that Jesus saves and there is redemption for me, like Johnson, or to be like shepherd, where you're trying to be kind, but you don't believe in Jesus?
- [101:38]
B
Yeah, I mean, on that point, I think you're actually echoing in some ways a line that Johnson utters himself early on in the first scene when he enters the house where, after Norton protests that his father's good and he tries to help people, Johnson replies, I don't care if he's good or bad, he ain't right. This is something about this sort of fundamental need for truth. And truth in the spiritual sense, that no matter how much good you accumulate in your life, otherwise, no matter how much good you do, otherwise, if you're missing the thing that actually redeems any of it, that turns it into a final good, then whatever you've done is in some way might as well have been nothing. It's fruitless. And so you see this. This turn, even that happens in this scene in particular with respect to the police come and Shepard lies on his behalf and knows that he's just sort of taking his side, or he doesn't lie knowing that. That Johnson's done these things, but he lies knowing that Johnson hasn't been there. And so he lies and gives him this false alibi to say that, no, he's been here. And he tells the police that you're wasting your own time and you're wasting hours. And he felt that the hours sealed his solidarity with the boy. He's trying to. He's. He's in, you know, cooperation with him. He's in cahoots with him. He's making them a unit in some way. And then only to find out that Johnson, you know, he. He gives himself away by saying, you know, that whole thing about tracks was. Was nonsense. It's all concrete there. Right. I couldn't have left tracks. Right. I rather like that whole place is concreted in the back and my feet were dry. Which, as just as a brief aside, you know, even in. In the midst of these stories, which are often very painful, I find it telling as well that o' Connor said she could never read any of her own stories without laughing at least once. I thought, okay, actually does. You do see some levity when you pull away from the grotesque a little bit. But at any rate, you know, this. This notion that I think Shepard was. Was thinking that, okay, if he could gain this boy's trust. If he could really establish this solidarity, then he would be saving him. I thought that's what salvation would be. And you just have this rather curt response. Right. From Johnson. Also, I find it telling that when his response is given, he's described as becoming. His look became sly. Again, there's something of the serpent suggested by that. There's something of Milton, Satan, I feel like, in the background there. And you get this sense of that. That evil, but an evil that knows what's true, just as Satan did.
- [104:53]
A
Yeah, that's a good comparison. I like that a lot. Yeah. So what do you make then? Like, we get this scene in which he's like admitting that he's lying and he's rampages and rampaging in people's homes. And it's juxtaposed with him and Norton sitting on the couch reading the Bible together. And we get then this very fascinating. I mean, if for those who have read a lot of o', Connor, you've kind of been waiting for this scene, there usually is a scene of the grotesque of the absurd where basically all these things kind of coalesce into one kind of terrible action. And here this kid is. He won't put his Bible away at the dinner table. And so he starts to yell. And he opened the book in his lap and tore out a page of it and thrust it into his mouth to show what's he doing. He's showing that he believes. And so he's eating this page of the Bible to show that he truly believes. Like what is going on in the scene.
- [105:55]
B
Yeah, I think this is one of those scenes in o' Connor where the almost absurd over exaggeration is used to really hammer something home. I mean, it's. It's a evocative scene, right. It's one that I found myself sitting there reading and like imagining it very vividly and seeing this kid with this. He's described as having like burning eyes, right. Tearing a page out and shoving it. And you could just sort of see him staring down shepherd while he does it. Right. Like he's possessed almost. And it's really just, I think, driving home this irrationality in stark contrast, stark contrast to Shepherd's proposed supposed enlightenment esque rationality. This is something that your reason cannot account for. This action. I mean, how do you just. How do you psychologize that action? I don't think you can. And I think that's the point. This is a behavior beyond the can of a calculating reason. And so that's What Johnson is, he's a character who can't be fit into that box. He can't be tabulated in the way that Shepard would like to. He can't be defined by his IQ score. Here he is acting in a way which is disruptive. I mean, extremely disruptive to any sort of family life, to any sort of dinner, to any sort of household, even as screwed up as a household. This is here you've got this. This figure who at the end of the scene is described as a small black figure on the threshold of some dark apocalypse that's beyond human reason and it's meant to be. And I think that's the point.
- [107:53]
A
Yeah. No, very good. I appreciate that. Yeah. And too. I mean, he's the reference to Ezekiel there. The biblical allusion is. At one point, Ezekiel is told to eat a scroll. Right. So I think there's this internalizing of the word of God. I'll show you. I believe. And I'm taking this thing from being something external to me to being one with me. Right. I'm going to consume it, which is what the I believe the angel asks Ezekiel to do. And he makes that illusion clear. He says, I've eaten it, like Ezekiel, and it was honey to my mouth. And so there's this deep kind of. I'm going to internalize this. I'm going to consume it. I'm going to show you that I believe because me and the word of God are going to become one. So. Yeah, no, it's a. It's a powerful scene. I. I agree. I. I read it multiple times, just trying to make sure I kind of understood because I'm not sure I quite. I think Johnson's character is very complicated. And it's not really until you see the whole story that I think you can kind of understand where he's going, because I found him to be a complicated character throughout the story. Maybe not terribly predictable about what he's going to do. And so this is like his crescendo. But it's such a Flannery o' Connor scene.
- [109:04]
B
Yeah. And he serves, as so many of these characters do, as a kind of catalyst. He himself, in no ways, I don't think changed throughout the story. I don't think anything changes in Johnson from beginning to end. And his character does not alter really at all, just intensifies, but it doesn't change in any significant way. And yet he brings about all this other change in the other characters.
- [109:32]
A
Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah. He doesn't change. Once you kind of understand that he's been manipulating from the beginning. There actually hasn't been a true warming, I think, to Shepard. So what we see then moving on as we kind of, you know, race towards tragedy here, of course, then.
- [109:52]
B
You.
- [109:52]
A
Have this line where Norton says to shepherd, he says, Norton started. He turned around. There was unnatural brightness about his eyes. After a moment, he seemed to see that it was Shepherd. I found her, he said breathlessly. Found who? Sheppard said Mama. Shepherd steadied himself in the doorway. The jungle of shadows around the child thickened. Come and look. He cried. So here, here, Norton has finally found whatever it is that he thinks that he's found. He's found his mother via the telescope. And here again, Shepard cannot simply be bothered to deal with. With Norton. He has to find where Johnson went. Where did Rufus go? And this gets us. And then, of course, then he just. He just leaves, right? He tells Norton, hey, you need to be downstairs or you need to be in bed in 15 minutes. And then we get the police coming back. And that's where we leave Norton in this kind of. He's this kind of zenith for him that he's finally found his mother. We don't understand it. We don't quite understand what he means. There's. For those of us who are used to reading o', Connor, there's a terrible feeling that is occurring right now when he says these things. But we pivot and we pivot to the police. You know, coming back in this scene, I don't know, what did you make of this? Because, you know, so Johnson's being arrested and now obviously Shepard's not going to run interference for him. And I don't know, it was really this. I thought it was going to go one way, and then it seemed to almost like go a certain way and then reverse and then go a certain way and reverse again, you know, because they. They come to him. And when he first started saying, Johnson jerked his arm down savagely. I was waiting for you, he said, you wouldn't have got me if I hadn't wanted to get caught. It was my idea, right? He's saying the police there. At first when I read that, I thought he was saying that to shepherd because Shepard had just lied for him and given him an alibi. And what I thought was going to happen here is that Johnson was going to fold shepherd into his crimes because shepherd had already covered for him and given him an alibi. That now that he's been caught, he could easily suck shepherd in to that fault. Does that make sense?
- [112:15]
B
Well, yeah, I think, I mean, he's speaking on two levels here, right? There's the literal level, of course, talking to the police. And I mean, it does. It says, right, he was addressing the policeman, but leering at Shepard. You wouldn't have got me if I hadn't of wanted to get caught. It was my idea. I think he's referencing in some way the whole narrative of the story. Like, it wasn't that you actually drew me in to your home. It was my idea in the first place. It wasn't that you decided to offer me the key to your house. That was my idea in the first place. I'm just doing this because I'm doing what I want to do. I'm smashing things up because I want to. I'm smashing up your life because I want to. So he's mocking Shepard is what I take him to be doing in this scene.
- [113:12]
A
Yeah, no, I, I don't. I don't think anything I said is competitive with. With that. It was just interesting because I thought. I mean, I'm just playing out ideas here. But where I thought was going to happen is that Shepard was going to get sucked into the injustice of Johnson, which kind of would have a poetic fittingness, right? That he's. That he's covered for him, he's done these things for him. Now he's going to go down with him in his crime. And what's interesting is, is that, I mean, what did you make of it? Because in a certain way then all of a sudden, in a certain way, Johnson's scrambling and he does try and do this by saying that. Oh, oh, well, by the way, shepherd made like, immoral suggestions towards me. Right? Trying to like, blame him, you know, for. For something, you know, improper. I mean, that was. I mean, maybe I'm missing something there. But that seemed to me to be like him scrambling. But I thought that was really interesting because I thought he really easily could have folded shepherd into the crime itself, but instead he kind of scrambles and says, you know, he made suggestions to me. Suggestions. And I love. It's like the 60s. There's like, there's a reporter that then also rides in the police car. Did you catch that? Like, the reporter gets in the front seat of the cop car. Like, it was just really funny. So you're. He's having a deal with Oz with a reporter in his face. It's like immoral suggestions. Right? Immoral ones. And this is not dropping that thread, but it's actually Shepherd's response here for the. I think the first time he says, I did more for him than I did for my own child.
- [114:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I think this is where you see that kind of. It's a little bit of a thievery and manipulation of a Tolkien term, a kind of new catastrophe occurring at this moment. It's a terrible thing, but it brings back some actual goodness. Right. In depressants that was absent beforehand. And so the, the immoral suggestions. I don't know that, you know, Johnson seems like he's. He's scrambling. Yeah, He's. He's sort of almost like yelling and random things. Right. And I ain't having none of it. I'm a Christian. He tails off. Right. He's a dirty atheist. He said there wasn't no hell. I think to some extent he. He might actually be acting in again, to make an analogy to Tolkien, a kind of golem like role here. He's shocking Shepard into a realization by his. His own wild behavior. He's bringing him into an awareness that he was lacking. Because it is the first time he says, I did more for him than I did for my own child. It's the first time in the whole story that he's referenced Norton as his son in any way, as his child, as his progeny. And he does this, right? He comes to this by this sort of, how do I defend myself against what Rufus is saying right here? How do I explain myself? How do I explain my behavior? And in a way that sort of is, you know, the. The immoral suggestion. It's very vague language. Right. And it's. It's not, again, not meant to be allegorical in any way, but he's suggesting to, you know, Johnson that you can go and be all of these things, when in making those suggestions, he neglected his own child. He ignored his own responsibilities. So those suggestions were immoral in that sense. They may not have been anything intrinsically wrong. Because I don't think he ever does suggest that Johnson go and do anything which is morally wrong. I don't think he puts him up to anything bad in any way. But the suggestions that he was making are in some way contrary to the right order of the universe.
- [117:11]
A
Right? Yeah. So it works on two levels there. No, I like that. Yeah. In his statement there, too, down, he says Johnson hurled himself forward. Listen at him. He screamed, I lie and steal because I'm good at it. My foot. Don't have a thing to do with it. The lame shall enter first, the halt be gathered together When I get ready to be saved, Jesus'll save me. Not that lying, stinking atheist. So there's our title phrase, the lame shall enter first. And again, this kind of goes into what is Johnson's sincerity here. Right. So again, going back to that juxtaposition between the sinner who is in sin but understands the reality of Jesus Christ in the path of redemption versus the secular atheist trying to be kind, like in this kind of secular notion, but has no notion of the realities of Jesus Christ. And I think that's a really interesting juxtaposition that o' Connor's giving us between Sheppard and Johnson and then particularly how they interact with one another.
- [118:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, they're polar opposites in many ways, inversions of each other. And yeah, there is that order and orientation beyond the here and now in Johnson, which I do think is. Is sincere in at least some way, maybe very twisted and perverted. And who knows exactly how he's being employed there? Because, again, he's. He's in many ways a character, I think, beyond reason. And we're not meant to reason out all of his behavior or to provide fully rational explanation for why he does all the things he does, because many of them seem to be things done without reason employed. He's just doing them. And so I think this is also, of course, a common trope in o', Connor, that the evil, the demonic seeming, is a force which works on behalf of Providence, whether it intends to or not. So in some sense there, too, I think the intention of Johnson is including his sincerity. It's a worthy question to ask and think through, but it's also to some extent, maybe even irrelevant for the way that o' Connor wants the story to unfold here. These. These things that happen which are beyond reason can be for the proper revelation, which everyone needs to have in some way or another to see the truth.
- [119:54]
A
Yeah, no, that's a very good point, particularly when we're. Obviously, Johnson's intentionality is distinct from the effect that his words have upon Shepherd. And I very much like your point that Providence can use those words then to bring about a good effect, which I think is what happens here. So we get this. Basically, Shepard almost goes into this, like, little mantra, like, he's got these, like, two lines that he just keeps repeating to himself as he's gone through this traumatic experience. And he just, you know, he says, I have nothing to reproach myself with. He murmured, and he keeps saying this over and over again. He had done more for Johnson than he had done for his own child. Right. I have nothing to reproach Myself with. He almost gets into this. This mood, this mantra of his, Rapini's two. But then it kind of hits him, right? I have nothing to reproach myself with. He began again, I did more for him than I did for my own child. He heard his voice as if it were the voice of his accuser. He repeated the sentence silently. Slowly, his face drained of color. It became almost gray beneath the white halo of his hair. There's kind of this beautiful scene. It's a fast transition, but it's a beautiful scene in which his own excuses become the accusation against him. He finally hears for the first time what he's actually saying. And he has this epiphany moment in which he actually is his own accuser. And he. I mean, it's just. It's. It's a beautiful scene. Norton's face, which is a motif in this, Morton's face comes, but it's not unpleasant for him. And he says that he had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton, and he had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself. And then, just a beautiful line, she says, a rushing of agonizing love for his child rushed over him like a transfusion of life. The little boy's face appeared to him, transformed the image of his salvation.
- [122:01]
B
Yeah, and. And so again, to. To point out some of the somewhat allegorical elements here. He says the words, I have nothing to reproach myself with, and I did more for him than I did for my own child. Three times he's. He's denied his own child three times. And then you get this vision of Norton, this rush of agonizing love. The little boy's face appears to him, transforms the image of his salvation. Alt light. I think that's a fairly clear Christological image that he's putting forward. He's. He's found his salvation in this child that he has denied three times. And then, of course, there's the truly catastrophic moment which comes after it.
- [123:06]
A
Like I said, I was an idiot. Like, I had a little bit of hope because I was like, oh, maybe I was like, maybe the thing with Johnson was. I was like, maybe this one's just not as violent. Maybe this one's just not as bad. Like, maybe the thing with Johnson is that violent, weird, absurd, grotesque moment. And he's gonna run upstairs and we're gonna get some type of, like, reunion now. Maybe I'm just obtuse because I can't point to any other story I've ever read of Florida o' Connor that would have that in it. I should have known. But my own emotions, I got too much tied into Norton and the little boy. And this is where I said, reading these as a father is hits different than when I read them, like in high school. And so, yeah, we get this. I mean, he dashes up, the light was on, the bed's empty. He goes up the attic stairs. And so the tripod had fallen. The telescope lay on the floor a few feet over it. The child hung in the jungle of shadows just below the beam from which he had launched his flight into space. So I don't. I have raw thoughts on this, probably because I just read this for the first time today and I did not like this. So I'm. I'm recalcitrant to it. And so I'm omitting that. I. I struggled with this passage because, again, I. I probably judge o' Connor the most harshly when she elects to bring children into these narratives. Now, I defend o' Connor by saying that I think that her. There's a teleology to her violence, whether it's analogous to sacrifice to the sacraments, or it has a sacramental character to it that comes breaking into our life. Right. Grace comes breaking into our lives in many different ways. And sometimes it is violent. But here I struggled because I didn't find the death of the boy, to me just seemed to be a punishment because he had already had his epiphany. And I realize this is also a trope because of. For instance, we read the Theban plays and say, in Antigone, Creon has his epiphany, but he's already put in motion things that he can't stop. So as he has the epiphany and he knows what he's done wrong and he's called himself a fool and he's asked for forgiveness of the gods. But then he goes out, he can't stop it. The causality is already there from his former mistakes. And so Antigone dies, her, you know, fiance dies, and then the queen dies, and he can't stop it, even though he's already repented. So maybe it's analogous to that. But as I kind of defend o', Connor, like in a Christian setting, it was hard for me to square this because at least in the river, the boy is the main character. And so his misunderstanding of the spiritual realities that leads him into an unfortunate act of violence is heartbreaking, but makes sense to me as far as, like, a lesson that she's teaching here. Here I just found this to be a punishment of shepherd, if that makes sense.
- [126:18]
B
Well, certainly it is a punishment. Or we might say perhaps better. I would say a payment. Payment for a debt that he has incurred. And again, I think this is where interpreting this in.
- [126:38]
A
A bit of a.
- [126:39]
B
Christological sense does make a lot of sense for us. It does make. It provides the only sort of resolution that I can think of for the story. Here's the innocent who dies because of the sins of the father because the father did not care to treat the son well in the first place. He violated his duties, his obligations as a father, and he has incurred a debt which is paid in a way which is obviously very grotesque. And you perhaps feel bad for the boy. I would expect everyone feels bad for Norton at the end. But Norton doesn't know what he's doing in some sense either. Right. Norton. Norton is oblivious. And we don't really know exactly what happens to Norton, if he suffered, how he suffered and what way that suffering actually occurred in that moment. So that's sort of a blind spot that.
- [127:38]
A
Yeah. Did you. So maybe just piggybacking on that. Did you. Did you take this to be ambiguous? Because it's not. Because I wasn't quite sure how to take it. Was. Did he. I guess the two ways to read it is that he hung himself. Because there is. There is the direct connection earlier that you have to be dead to go see your mom. Like, that's. That's made really clear by Johnson. And then it's kind of muddled into all the space stuff. And then he sees his mom, so there's an intentional hanging versus, like, some weird child thing that I'm actually gonna launch myself in the space. And he gets himself all tied up in whatever. All these ropes and ribbons and whatever is. And so he ends up killing himself, like, accidentally. I. I don't think it's the latter, but she leaves it a little. It's. It's broad here at the end because, I mean, she. She ends it on the heartbreaking note that he launched his flight into space. No.
- [128:34]
B
And. And, I mean, there's a little ambiguity there, but I think it's fairly clear that he. He hugged himself, but I don't think he even really knew or understood what. What that is. I think that's. That's what's not shown in Johnson speaking to Norton when they're walking to the Little League game. He's turning his mind towards this action that once you, you know, find your mother or something, or once you're sure that she's up there or you discover her in heaven or something like that. Then, then you do this and you'll go to her.
- [129:08]
A
So you think this is, you think this is something that Johnson like intentionally planted the seed for him? Not just like through the indirect statements, but, but basically because 10 year olds typically don't hang themselves. They have no concept of like how this works. Right. And so I guess if I hear you correctly, the theory is that this is what we don't know is that the speeches that are off stage is that Johnson probably particularly told him how to do this or what this was like, and then he's mimicking what he was told. Okay.
- [129:38]
B
Yeah. Because there he's particularly conspiratorial in hiding it from Shepard.
- [129:45]
A
Well, the thing about that too is that it makes it even worse that Sheppard kept Johnson around and that he entrusted Norton to the care of Johnson and that makes him even more liable for what happens there to his son. It's not simply a neglect. But then on your own part, then you're handing him off to someone that you already know is a delinquent to care for him.
- [130:09]
B
Yeah. And setting up your own catastrophic ending in the process. Yeah, it's, you know, and this is where we, you know, sort of started off with, with why read o' Connor in the first place? You might very well, anyone out there listening who reads the story, hate it. And you might put it down and you might say, well, why, why the hell did I read that? Right? What, what good have I gleaned from that? But I can fairly well guarantee it'll make you sick and you'll come back to it again and again, thinking about it probably for days, perhaps even unbidden. Right. Perhaps even without an intentional desire to do so because it is so catching. And we struggle, I would say most of all with this, again, that sense of injustice that, okay, we're going to do things right now, we're going to correct our lives and it's too late. That feels unfair. Not sure that it is. And I'm not sure whether we want to reject that or object to that simply because we've maybe adopted a way of thinking that understands our redemption stories to always be imminent and not to see them in the final analysis. Right. Not to see them in that final moment, not to see that the repayment that we receive will be at the resurrection of the just.
- [131:51]
A
Yeah, no, there's very much wise words there. I mean, I'm sensitive to the argument that when we say we're sorry, we have an inclination that that Means I should not be punished. Right? So if I. If I've said I'm sorry, then, you know, I'm alleviated from any type of, like, penance. And so, you know, there obviously, if. If Johnson had already. Excuse me. If shepherd, right, had already done the actions that set about this tragic ending, then the juxtaposition of him saying he's sorry and his redemption, like I. Like I mentioned, it's very parallel to Creon, doesn't stop what has already been merited by their previous actions, even though it seems to be then such a tragic juxtaposition to have the redeemed soul looking upon the death of his own son, just. Just like we had in the Theban plays in Antigone, Creon looking upon the body in that one. They just keep hauling bodies in that he's caused. But. But as the person who's already asked for forgiveness, which makes it even such a deeper and kind of existential angst about that, because he's fully absorbing, because we don't get that reaction here. But you would imagine that then what ends up happening is that you. You see the full scale of what you've done because you've already admitted your fault. So as you embrace, right, the dead body of the loved one, you do so knowing your guilt. And in certain ways, the truth sets you free in certain ways. That makes it a very profound and deep sadness in that moment. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a story. It's a story. Yes. You. I mean, you're. You hit the nail on the head. I'm certainly gonna be thinking about it for a while. I'm not really. I might. I might push back against this. I mean, I. You know, I don't. I've enjoyed this conversation. I don't want to drag it on too much longer unnecessarily. But I do with these kind of stories, particularly, like, when there's children involved. I do wonder where the line is between what I allow in my imagination, arguably for the sake of some type of spiritual lesson, particularly like, if you have a habit of actually cutting out, like most media and etc, Whatever. A story like this hits heavy. It really does. Like, the first time I read the River, I realized I keep making parallels. Like I didn't know what it was about and that kind of shock, like, I had this at the ending here, that shock that I even knew was gonna happen, but I told myself is not going to happen. Like, I lied to myself. Like, I don't know it is something that's Gonna stick around with me for a little bit. And that. That is an interesting conversation about exposing the imagination that. These types of thoughts and images, hopefully for the sake of something that's actually pedagogical and good for my soul overall.
- [134:41]
B
Yeah. And, you know, that's. That's a tension that I think we all face. And, you know, your point about cutting out media and most things where the shocking and the grotesque serves no purpose. Right. Other than to shock and to draw your attention. You know, I think stories like this, just a little historical disclosure, when I first got. Actually had a different copy of this book, and I have since replaced it with this one. Somebody. Somebody ran off with my previous copy in a proper Flannery o' Connor type of situation. Someone in the Deep south ran off with my treasured books. But the first time I got it, I. I made the worst mistake in my literary life whatsoever, which is I tries to read one of her stories every day for a month. And after about a week, I was like, I need to stop, because the darkness here is just too much. That said, I think there is a time and a place, and it's not something to immerse oneself in ever. I find oconnors stories are best read spread out over time because they do have this dark imagery. They do have these dark things which come into your imagination. Even the way that it's described twice towards the end. The surrounding of Norton in the attic, the Jungle of Shadows, says at first that it thickened around him and that he was entangled in it or something at the end. And so that darkness is coming, and it's foreshadowed. It's foreshadowed in many ways, but you don't realize it till you get there at the end, and then you're like, oh, yes, now I see it. Now I see all the signs, all the indications. But yes, I think how you contend with those images, and I think this is part of the strength of o' Connor as a writer, how you understand that despite their presence, the good is still there to be found. Because whether you encounter them in fiction, literature and movies and television or in real life, those sorts of grotesque moments do in fact occur to human beings. Maybe not very often, and they're certainly not things to be sought out for their own sake. But I think that perhaps if there's. There's one of these constant themes that we all ought to take away from it, it's that the greatest consolation the human being can ever receive is from a belief in the guiding hand of Providence such that even in the most grotesque and awful and terrible moments of life, there is still purpose which is being served by those things happening, even if we can't see it at the moment.
- [137:40]
A
No, I agree. I liked your comment about wanting to read her every day for a month. That sounds existentially heavy. Is that. That's what that sounds like. I will say though, I'm probably done with o' Connor for a while. It's gonna be a while again until I pick this book back up. I've had my fill. I will say though, for first time readers, if you read this story and you really enjoyed it again, I would look at picking up like her complete set here. Some other really good ones to look at. Right. Good Country People. Greenleaf is another one. The Enduring Chill. Why do the Heathen Rage? Revelation is a very famous one. Parker's Back. Any other ones I didn't mention that you have a particular fondness for? Maybe for those who want to dive in.
- [138:26]
B
I mean, I was going to jump on Revelation, but you got there.
- [138:31]
A
Revelation, I think, is her at her best in a lot of ways. I read that one in high school. I thought it was a really good introduction to her thoughts. I might recommend Revelation. Parker's Back is good, but it's a little bit more difficult if you're not used to reading that. Greenleaf is also another good one. I might recommend Greenleaf and Revelation for first time readers if you want to go read more of her stories at this juncture.
- [138:57]
B
Yeah, I was fond of Everything that Rises Must Converge. Well, I think that's a good one. And of her short novels, I've always been particularly fond of Wise Blood. Wise Blood is another one that's going to get people who aren't prepared for it though. So that one comes with a. I guess. What the. I don't know if they still call it a trigger warning, but it's. You got to be. Got to be ready for that.
- [139:25]
A
Yeah, no, that's very good. Well, Dr. Kipple, we really appreciate you being here and helping us. Guide us through. Through this text and kind of showing us, I think, all the lessons that FL o' Connor has to offer us remind us where people can find more about you and your good work.
- [139:43]
B
Yeah, the Lyceum Institute, It's. You can Google it, you can type it into any search engine or Lyceum Institute is the address. I'm on Twitter. There's a Lyceum Institute account there. Or my handle is. Or excuse me, x dot com. It'll always be Twitter to me. My handles. Alebriancomple. Yeah, take. Take a look. See, see what we're doing. See how we're. We're trying to bring a life of the mind as best we can, such as you are, to these digital airwaves that we all now inevitably inhabit. So.
- [140:20]
A
Yeah, no. Very good. All right, everyone, go follow them on X. I deeply appreciate their presence there. And Dr. Kimball, thank you again for joining us this evening.
- [140:30]
B
It's my pleasure. Thank you.
- [140:31]
A
All right, everyone, in the weeks to come, we're going to set Flannery o' Connor aside and we're gonna go back to Plato. So next week we'll have a roundtable on Plato and the dialogues we have read thus far. Just kind of a summary, picking out major topics. A few of our favorite friends of the podcast will be coming back to join us for that. And then to end the year, we are going to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. An absolutely fantastic poem, if you're not familiar with it. Tolkien did a fantastic translation, so we'll use that to end the year. So we'll see you guys next week.