Punk Rock and Grace
In which I write out these thoughts I've had about Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty and see just how much I have to say.
Several years ago, I published an article in the Flannery O’Connor Review about Flannery O’Connor’s influence on punk music. Beginning with Ministry’s sampling of the movie Wise Blood in “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” I discovered an entire playlist of punk-ish songs that referenced or were inspired by O’Connor’s work: P. J. Harvey’s “Joy.” Gang of Four’s “No Man with a Good Car.” Jim Thirwell’s band Wise Blood.
In that article, I noted that O’Connor observed that many of her stories had a moment of grace that “excited the devil to frenzy”--and that it was this moment that I thought was striking a chord with a lot of these punk bands. I still think that’s true in a lot of cases, but I’ve realized that there’s actually another aspect of O’Connor’s work that resonates even more strongly with the punk ethos. When asked about why she used so much violence in her work, O’Connor famously said, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and to the almost blind you draw large and startling figures” (“The Fiction Writer and His Country”). Upon further reflection, this strategy of O’Connor’s seems to be the heart of punk.
So much of punk is about seeing something happening–good or bad–and making a lot of noise about it. Whether it’s Tribe 8 singing about date rape or the Sex Pistols singing about the Queen of England, an important aspect of punk is making a lot of noise about something that needs attention. This noise has two primary purposes: first, it gets people’s attention and hopefully inspires at least awareness of an issue, and perhaps even action. Second, it is an importantly cathartic experience for the artist to make noise about an issue that’s important to them. Feeling heard by an audience can be quite satisfying.
The thing is, O’Connor’s statement about shouting to the hard of hearing doesn’t make sense. If you’re actually trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t hear well, there is an impulse to shout, but shouting often makes it worse. It helps to speak more loudly, yes, but also to speak more slowly and articulate well. Getting close to the hearer and checking for understanding are also important—even though getting closer and checking for understanding can be uncomfortable and might reveal that part of the problem was in your message. Intimacy can be difficult.
I’m thinking about when I first read O’Connor’s work in a southern literature class and learned that she saw her work as depicting grace. I asked Dr. Haddox, rather dubiously, if anyone had actually read an O’Connor story and found religion by doing so. He smiled and talked a bit about Robert Lowell. I’ve since talked to people who claim to have found salvation through reading her work. But I’m still a bit dubious.
It makes me think about the singer Phranc, who was once in the punk band Nervous Gender. In the L.A. punk scene of the early 1980s, Phranc got very angry at the use of Nazi imagery as a form of shock aesthetic, and she wrote a song called “Take Off Your Swastika” to call attention to the problems of using Nazi imagery. However, she found it unsatisfying to sing the song with Nervous Gender, because it was one more loud song that people would slam dance to–no one was listening to the lyrics. At first, I imagine that it was satisfying to scream, “Take off your swastika, it really nauseates me!” through a microphone. But as I’ve discovered over years of taking part in political marches, eventually screaming the same slogans feels pointless.
Phranc started playing “Take Off Your Swastika” with just an acoustic guitar and much quieter–though intense–singing. She discovered that if she wanted to be heard, the best way to call attention to herself was actually to get quieter. Indeed, hearing her sing the lyrics, “Fascism isn’t anarchy” with just her voice and an acoustic guitar is quite powerful and more effective than screaming them over electric guitars while people slamdance.
So what does this all have to do with Flannery O’Connor? I have identified the punk impulse in her work as this impulse to shout and draw large and startling pictures–and I wonder if, had she lived longer, she would have ever come to a conclusion similar to that of Phranc. I started really wondering this when reading Eudora Welty’s story “Curtain of Green,” which provides a different–but also powerful–vision of grace. In this story, a woman sees her husband die in a freak accident–a tree falls on his car when he is almost home, and throughout the story, she grieves in isolation. Toward the story’s end, this white woman is working in her garden with help from a young black man, who is kneeling in the garden. She raises her hoe up above her head, about to strike him dead.
When I taught this to a lifelong learning group once, several participants noted how they wondered if this Welty story was about to become a Flannery O’Connor story. We talked about what O’Connor would have done with this scene–perhaps after she struck the young man, their eyes would have met, and perhaps he would have reached toward her and made physical contact. There would have been some sort of terror-filled moment of connection in the midst of violence.
However, it’s not an O’Connor story–it’s a Welty one. And in Welty’s story, the young man senses that something dangerous is happening and becomes very still. The woman manages to stop herself and lower her weapon; she herself then falls on the ground, suffering from some sort of stroke, and the young man, after checking that she was still alive, runs for help. In Welty’s scenario, the violent instinct is recognized and checked, which allows the young man to see the old woman.
This story to me seems to convey a much stronger sense of grace than the violence in O’Connor’s stories does. Having the impulse to strike and then the strength to not do so seems to be a much more powerful depiction of the force of the divine than, say, the Misfit shooting the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
I haven’t read much about the role of grace in the work of Eudora Welty–that doesn’t seem to be an overt theme in her fiction. And I’m not sure if I want to write more about this comparison of the role of grace in the work of O’Connor and Welty. However, I am curious to think more about it, and I’d love to hear the thoughts of others about it.
O'Connor is very hard for me to read. I have not read a great deal of her work because the most widely anthologized of her stories are so disturbing to me; I had to quit teaching "A Good Man" because it upsets me. I personally don't find those stories exemplars of grace although I can accept that was O'Connor's intention in writing them. I know this must be an appalling opinion to an O'Connor scholar. *hides*