A Jungle of Shadows: Seeing Flannery O’Connor as a Modern-Day Sophocles
In his stirring elegy dedicated to Flannery O’Connor, Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton — a contemporary of O’Connor — wrote that when he read her writings, he thought of her as someone like Sophocles (Merton 161). A comparison of O’Connor to Sophocles can be readily defended by a close reading of her short story The Lame Shall Enter First which runs parallel to the classic tragedy Antigone. This paper will explore how O’Connor, like Sophocles before her, uses tragedy to intimately probe the nature of families in grief as a warning to the reader/audience.
The Lame Shall Enter First begins with a simple breakfast scene. The father, Sheppard, is immediately shown to be the protagonist of the story and the first few pages center on his judgment of his young son, Norton. “All he wanted for the child was that he be good and unselfish and neither seemed likely” (O’Connor 143). Sheppard, in an attempt to reproach Norton for his apparent selfishness, mentions the plight of Rufus, a boy that Sheppard had attempted to help at the reformatory for the past year, who was recently released, and who Sheppard saw eating from garbage cans.
Sheppard tells Norton that he has given Rufus a key the house with an invitation to come any time. In fact, says Sheppard, if Rufus doesn’t come of his own volition, Sheppard will go find him and bring him home (O’Connor 145). When Norton frowns, Sheppard interprets this as further evidence of Norton’s selfishness and rebukes him saying: “Your daddy gives you everything you need and want.” You don’t have a grandfather who beats you. And your mother [in contrast to Rufus’] is not in a state penitentiary” (146)
Indeed it is true that Norton’s mother is not in the state penitentiary. Norton’s mother is dead. Norton mentions that if his mother were indeed in prison, at least he could go see her. And so saying, he begins to cry. And here then is the first glimpse of tragic irony, for the text goes on to describe Sheppard’s reaction to his son’s grief: “Sheppard sat helpless and miserable, like a man lashed by some elemental force of nature.” Both father and son are in a state of helpless misery: the son because he needs the empathetic love of his father, the father because he resents his son for having that need. For Sheppard, “this was not a normal grief. It was all part of his [Norton’s] selfishness. She had been dead for over a year and a child’s grief should not last so long” (O’Connor 146).
Turning now to Antigone, we see also a scene between a father and a son. As context, Creon, the king, has sentenced his son’s bride Antigone to death for burying (religious ritual) a traitor. Haemon, Creon’s son, attempts to respectfully reason with his father but Creon is too prideful to relent. At the end of the conversation-turned-argument, Haemon says, “You want to talk but never to hear and listen” before promising his father that “you will never again set eyes upon my face” (Sophocles 191) It is the greater ironic tragedy precisely because Hameon begins the conversation by saying that he would always choose his relationship with his father over a marriage. It is because his father will not validate his son’s pain and pridefully ignores his son’s pleas that Haemon severs the relationship. This is an important point to reiterate: the son is loyal to his father, the father is blind to this, and thus compounds his son’s suffering.
Likewise, in The Lame Shall Enter, Norton is fiercely loyal to his father. Later on in the story when Rufus is mocking Sheppard, Norton defends him saying, “He’s good . . . He helps people.” Yes, indeed he does help, or at least try to help, people, most especially Rufus, but he will not help his own son. Again the irony is tragic and painfully acute, for Sheppard’s work at the reformatory is unpaid and he does it simply for the satisfaction of “helping boys no one else cared about” (145–146)
Extending the irony, Rufus is resistant to all efforts by Sheppard to help (reform) him. “His desire to “save” Rufus is misplaced because Rufus is unwilling or unable to be saved . . . Sheppard’s efforts would be much more fruitful if he put them toward his son” (Pasto 36) Nevertheless, the way Sheppard sees it, his efforts to help Norton — which in this case center on curing Norton’s apparent selfishness (actually grief) — have been wasted, thus he refocuses his attention on Rufus, for “what was wasted on Norton would cause Johnson to flourish” (O’Connor 152) Pasto comments on yet another element of irony here: “Of course, Sheppard’s intentions with Rufus are to boost his own ego rather than to actually help Rufus, which is evident of Sheppard’s own selfishness” (39) — ironic because A): selfishness is what he accuses Norton of and B): he fails to actually help Rufus anyway.
Before returning to Antigone, it will be helpful to examine one more scene from O’Connor’s story. Near the end of the story, Sheppard goes upstairs to the attic to find Rufus. Instead, he sees Norton using the telescope that Sheppard had bought for Rufus as a method of reformation. “Amid the strange vine-like shadows cast by the lanterns, Norton sat with his eyes to the telescope. ‘Norton, Sheppard said, ‘do you know where Rufus went?’” (O’Connor 186) Here again is painful irony: the boy is literally in the shadows, and Sheppard, looking for Rufus, sees Norton without really seeing him at all which truly describes the relationship between the two throughout the entire story.
Norton is convinced that he can see his mother through the telescope and is anxious for his father to come and see, or even, just look. Instead, Sheppard rebukes Norton, denying that Norton is seeing anything other than stars, and, worse yet, dismisses Norton (“go to bed”) while again asking for the location of Rufus.
After the deeply sad confrontation between Creon and his son Haemon in Antigone, Creon has a minor epiphany — for with Sophocles as with O’Connor, major epiphanies must be preceded by death — and decides to change his ways. But alas, it is too late for Creon, his son has killed himself. In great agony and remorse, Creon cries out:
“The mistakes of a blinded man are themselves rigid and laden with death . . .Oh, the awful blindness of those plans of mine. My son, you were so young, so young to die. You were freed from the bonds of life through no folly of your own — only through mine” (Sophocles 209)
In The Lame Shall Enter, Sheppard also has a minor epiphany:
“He had ignored his own child to feed his own vision of himself . . .The little boy’s face appeared to him transformed; the image of his salvation; all light. He groaned with joy. He would make everything up to him. He would never let him suffer again. He would be mother and father. He jumped up and ran to his room, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him, that he would never fail him again” (O’Connor 190)
But alas, as with Creon, so with Sheppard. The epiphany arrives too late. Norton’s room is empty so Sheppard goes to the attic: “The tripod had fallen and 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” (O’Connor 190)
But now, whereas Sophocles gives us a glimpse of Creon’s major epiphany (“the mistakes of a blinded man”, etc..), O’Connor simply leaves us with death. Truly, this is where O’Connor’s genius surpasses that of Sophocles. For the reader of O’Connor has one of two choices: he can accept the story’s ending as an atheist would, as eternal tragedy, a death with no life thereafter, which would be in keeping with Sheppard’s believes hereto. Alternatively, the reader can accept the inherent eschatological vision of the story, the reality of life-after-death to which Norton, in his child-like understanding, marries himself in death in the hope of being reunited with his mother whom he saw through the telescope.
Blogger Mary Franks comments on how O’Connor’s fiction opposes the “modern project” of atheism by depicting the modern world as grotesque and in need of saving. Nietzsche said God is dead, O’Connor shows what the world would look if that were so, and then what the world looks like because it is not so. Mary points out how Nietzsche foresaw that “with the modern project we would rid ourselves of God, telos, order, moral sense in favor of libertarian freedom, revolution, science, fact/value splits, and darkness” (Franks).
If indeed we have lost our sense of telos, how might we recover it? Mary writes: “The unity of human life, the virtue of purity of heart, and a rediscovery of our telos often comes only through conflict and the dark night of the soul.” This language is mirrored in O’Connor who says that revealed truth can often appear “hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive” before commenting that “right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul” (Habit 100).
Mary comments that “the modern project lays the groundwork for the good society in that it enables us to seek our ends once again through horror stories like that of Antigone.” And where might one turn, in seeking, once the horrifying truth about the human condition is revealed through stories like Antigone? O’Connor provides a starting place for seekers rediscovering telos; she provides her readers with the language of Christian faith: language that may in fact be horrifying to modern sensibilities with its mentioning of God, Satan, sin, and hell, but which is no less true for being hard to stomach.
There are two explicit uses of this Christian vocabulary within The Lame Shall Enter First and interestingly, both truth statements come from Rufus, who knows the good chooses to reject it. “Whoever says it ain’t a hell,” Johnson [Rufus] said, “is contradicting Jesus. The dead are judged and the wicked are damned” (O’Connor 166). Naturally, Sheppard rebuffs him. Sheppard does not recognize the Messiah because to his way of thinking, he is messiah for Rufus and for himself. He states: “‘My resolve isn’t shaken . . .I’m going to save you”, to which Rufus replies “Nobody can save me but Jesus.” (O’Connor 180)
At a time when contemporary intellectuals such as New York Times columnist David Brooks are calling for us to begin talking about sin and righteousness as a society again (Haanen 1), O’Connor’s stories serve to simultaneously rebuke us for our cavalier dismissal of the language of sin and invite us to contemplate the language of salvation. O’Connor, like Sophocles, wrote prophetically of our sin and its damning, death-inducing consequences, but of the two writers, it is only O’Connor who could provide a comprehensive vision of salvation. Sophocles says to the modern reader, “be warned, you have lost your telos.” O’Connor adds to this, “here’s how you find your telos again.”
Works Cited
Franks, Mary. “A How-to Guide for Those Living In A Generation of Wingless Chickens.” Musings of A Southern Belle. N.p., 30 Apr. 2015. Web. 16 Sept. 2015.
Haanen, Jeff, and David Brooks. “David Brooks: We Need to Start Talking about Sin and Righteousness Again.” ChristianityToday.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Sept. 2015.
Merton, Thomas, and Patrick Hart. The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. New York: N.Y., 1981. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. Everything That Rises Must Converge. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery, and Sally Fitzgerald. The Habit of Being: Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. Print.
Pasto, Allison. “Flannery O’Connor: A Study of The Children In Three Short Stories.” MA thesis. California State University, Hayward, 2004. Print.
Sophocles, David Grene, and Richmond Lattimore. Sophocles. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1954. Print.
