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"A Late Encounter with the Enemy" by Flannery O'Connor
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The opening two lines of this story are wonderful:General Sash was a hundred and four years old. He lived with his granddaughter, Sally Poker Sash, who was sixty-two years old and who prayed every night on her knees that he would live until her graduation from college.
My initial reaction was "what?!?" And, it insured that I would keep reading for a bit to find out why this woman might be graduating from college at age 62. Then, I found some of my favorite lines in the first two pages. Sally Poker was going to college every summer because she was teaching although no degree was required when she started. "In those times, she said, everything was normal but nothing had been normal since she was sixteen." And when she went back to teaching in the fall, "...she always taught in the exact way she had been taught not to teach." Especially when I first started teaching, I knew some of those people.
General Sash is a comical character for most of the story. My favorite quote from him on the second page was, "He didn't have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again." But, in the end, he does meet it. While the speakers are glorifying war at the graduation ceremony, he is reliving it. In the end, who is coming for him? Is it the soldiers in the war that he claimed to have forgotten? Is it his loved ones? Is it death? Or all of the above?
I think it's easy to read O'Connor's work as having nothing to do with or even being a critique of religion. But if you're aware of her deep faith, there's another way to read almost all of her output. However, I see what Oates means in that O'Connor tends to write about what she saw as the disastrous effect of living without faith rather than the consolations of living with it. I haven't read the story but will try to get to it and join the discussion tomorrow.
Thanks, Kat. Looking forward to your reaction to this one.
This is a funny story. Beyond that I'm not sure what to make of it. It's tempting, and possibly foolhardy, to read too much symbolism into it. Still, the adjective "black" is used incessantly. Black for death? Is his death the death of the Old South? Is the Old South to be preseved only by Hollywood? Is the movie premiere in Atlanta that of "Gone With the Wind?" Why is the fat dumb nephew named John Wesley?Curiously, there is a statue of John Wesley in Savannah, not far from O'Connor's childhood home.
Sorry, but I seem to have come with questions rather than answers.
Just finished it. I love that O'Connor does both comedy and tragedy in such a short space, the comedy coming from the little things in life, and the tragedy from the big ones. I think I remember reading that she had a gleeful time painting these comic portraits of her neighbors in her stories. It's easy to see why some may feel bringing these characters to life is her true subject. But I think the reason death is so often present in her stories has to do with her religious convictions. The following is mostly me thinking while keying.Ken, I too assumed the premiere was of Gone With the Wind. No idea why the nephew was John Wesley, unless to skewer Protestants generally? Perhaps if I were less ignorant about Methodism...Your question about Hollywood interests me. Certainly O'Connor makes a point of the fact that things are changing or have changed in the South since Sally Poker began to teach, back when things were "normal." I think she (O'Connor) suggests that the falseness of Hollywood is being adopted throughout the South, as Sash, who was never a general, begins dressing as one on public occasions. O'Connor perhaps suggests that the South is always memorializing its past but at the same time falsifying it.
O'Connor certainly does use the word "black" a lot in the story. I think in one instance it may double as a racial reference: "...he didn't like a black procession" might cover his presumptive racism as well as, more primarily, referring to death. For me the crux of the story comes in the lines: "Then suddenly he saw that the black procession was nearly on him. He recognized it, for it had been dogging him all his days. He made such a desperate effort to see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone." So the black procession is the past, but the past is here equated with death. When Sash wonders what comes after the past, he's also wondering what comes after life. The past has dogged Sash all his life, and is dogging the past of the South. Perhaps the blackness also represents the obscurity of the future?
Barb: I've always been struck by the disparity between O'Connor's personal views of religion and the dark world she portrays in her stories and novels. As I recall, when her lupus was at its worst she went to Lourdes for healing. As I also recall, she writes in her collection of letters "The Habit of Being" about people who believe the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation as something symbolic. "If it's just symbolic," she writes, "then to hell with it."
P.S.: What a great beginning those two lines are.
Why do you say there's a disparity between her religious views and the dark world she portrays, Dale? I think she did see the world as dark, i.e., sinful and desperately in need of redemption and salvation.I've been thinking about the title of this story, which seems to be loaded with meaning. The word "late" can also mean dead, of course. But the title made me think about that premiere, the only part of his past that Sash remembers. He doesn't remember the wars, but he remembers this. Certainly the title must refer to his death, but does O'Connor mean us to think the premiere was also an encounter with the enemy? (Vanity, worldliness, the temptation to lie about ourselves to make ourselves more important, etc.)
Kat: By "dark" I guess I meant that I can't think of anybody in her work who ever experiences that redemption and salvation. And probably the most clearly religious character I can recall, preacher Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, is both anti-religion and pretty screwed up in general.
Yes, she definitely concentrates more on the fairly rotten human condition than on the saving grace. I think there are in fact a few instances of grace in her stories but I can't bring them to mind right now. I'm by no means an expert on her work and haven't read it all, in any case.In regard to Hazel Motes, I just reread my close notes on WISE BLOOD taken in 2006 when I read it with a book group. My take was/is that Motes, even though he's of Protestant stock, exemplifies a certain kind of dark Catholic belief in which God pursues souls to save them, while the souls battle to stay autonomous and free of God so they can go on sinning. Motes shows the ambivalence of souls on the matter of salvation. He has been "called" to preach but resists the call to follow Christ.
The classic non-literary example of this is the way girls and boys in Catholic schools were taught in the fifties and sixties (and possibly earlier and later, for all I know) that if they had a "vocation" (to be a priest or member of a religious order) they had better not resist, and that God would follow them mercilessly repeating His [sic] call until they gave in, or would make their lives miserable in other ways.
Clearly something comes to a definitive end in this story, something more than just an old man. There is a New Order, signified by a lengthy queue at the Coca-Cola machine. The South ain't gonna rise again.I may have O'Connor pigeon-holed in my mind, but I think always of this erudite Catholic southerner creating a bunch of dumb redneck Protestants to playfully move around on her chessboard. Can Protestants go to Heaven? It was a question I heard often as a young Catholic kid. I think Flannery O'Connor would say, "Yes."
Dale, as far as salvation goes I think it happens often in her stories. I seem to vaguely remember a number of redemptive moments, not the least of which is the ending of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" when the grandmother reaches out to her murderer. Of course the entire family is murdered, including the grandson John Wesley.
Didn't remember that John Wesley was in "A Good Man etc." !!! Interesting. All this is making me want to read more O'Connor and reread the stories I read so long ago. Though I probably won't. So many books so little time left.
Kenneth: Good points. I had forgotten the great moment with the grandmother. And I had forgotten the irony of the child being named for the founder of Methodism. I agree that the Coke machine is a symbol that the Old South is almost gone (except for its ongoing undertone of racism, which unfortunately endures across the U.S.), but I think the "Enemy" is also modernity in general. I must be approaching the old soldier's age, because I find myself deploring modernity more every day. [G]
BTW, I highly recommend Flannery's collected letters, "The Habit of Being." Brilliant and beautiful stuff.
Kenneth P. wrote: "Plenty o' time Kat girl!"Thanks, Kenneth! Dale, I agree about "The Habit of Being," very memorable. I bought her essays, Mystery and Manners (almost wrote Mystery and Madness, hmm) last year, but haven't got around to them yet.
Also, I think modernity as the enemy is a good interpretation. I think O'Connor might have agreed about that, at least in part.
Yes, I agree. For the old dude modernity was a drag (except for the beautiful guls).
Kat wrote: "Just finished it. I love that O'Connor does both comedy and tragedy in such a short space, the comedy coming from the little things in life, and the tragedy from the big ones. I think I remember re..."This is exactly what I kept thinking as I read the story--the unsettling (thus interesting) experience of riding those swings between the comic and the serious in this story.
It's amazing to me how much complexity has been integrated into this story with the humor. The movie premier feels like a glorification of the past of the South. If it was Gone With the Wind, that certainly fits. General Sash would rather remember that prettied up version of his history than the real one in which he lived. Wars are pretty dirty things and, at some point, the story says that he was in the infantry, an especially unromantic place. In the end, Chickamauga, Shiloh and Marthasville (which I learned with Google was an original name for Atlanta), all battlefields, rush at him from the past. I think the title could have multiple meanings but one of them could be that the enemy was his actual history.Your comments have opened up this story considerably for me. What do you think about the emphasis on words coming at him in the end? And, also, the hole in his head?
Dale wrote: "Kat: By "dark" I guess I meant that I can't think of anybody in her work who ever experiences that redemption and salvation. And probably the most clearly religious character I can recall, preacher..."The Grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" does (at least according to O'Connor's own reading of the story).
(Oops--just noticed that others had pointed this out. Another interesting ending--this time for a moment of near-but-avoided redemption--is that of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own.")
Geoff wrote: "Kat wrote: "Just finished it. I love that O'Connor does both comedy and tragedy in such a short space, the comedy coming from the little things in life, and the tragedy from the big ones. I think I..."What do you all think about the humor in this story as compared to her later ones? The later ones that I've read seemed more subtle but I liked this more slapstick (can't think of a better word) approach.
Kat's comment about O'Connor's cartoons/caricatures of her neighbors seems especially pertinent here; it's her making of the General into a caricature that, I think, makes this story a little easier to dismiss than her more 'serious' stories. It's really the only complaint I'd make about the story. I'm amazed in this story, as I usually am in response to O'Connor, by her sharp, satiric eye for human behavior (and also her close observation of the physical world).
Geoff wrote: I'm amazed in this story, as I usually am in response to O'Connor, by her sharp, satiric eye for human behavior (and also her close observation of the physical world).That says it very well, Geoff. Barbara, I think that "enemy" can have multiple meanings and probably was, but certainly Sash's past is one of them and perhaps the main one. The quote I cited early on in this thread seems to make that explicit. But I was thinking in very general terms about the past then. I think you're right to focus on Sash's war experiences in the infantry so specifically--surely that's what's been "dogging him all his days."
When the General was talking about the hole in his head toward the end of the story, I felt like he might be having a stroke - he couldn't control his emotions, or get off the stage or find protection from the images and words. And I imagined that as he was dying, he saw all the people moving forward in their black gowns. He probably thought he was on his way to hell.
That makes sense, Gina. I wasn't thinking of a specific diagnosis, just of him having a death experience of some kind, but it might have been a stroke.
That part about the hole in his head (or just the idea of using that as a sensory description of a stroke, if that's what it was) was one of the things I liked most about the story.
Gina, that makes sense to me too. It's such a sensory description. And, what about the words? There was so much emphasis on that. Were the words part of the history that was forcing itself on him?
I love the sharp satire of most of Flannery O'Connor's stories. This one made me wonder, after reading it, why it was written, what was the motivation. What I came up with was the silliness of vanity, which permeated the story.
Yes, I think a big part of O'Connor's intent as a writer was to show the foibles and petty sins of her characters, and by extension, of her readers.
That old guy could easily be a 104 year old impostor. Kat, you mentioned O'Connor's intent to focus on sin. Lyn, you spoke of vanity. Well, vanity equals Pride and O'Connor may have seen Pride as the worst of the deadly sins. I'm thinking of "The Temple of the Holy Ghost."In this story a pair of silly 14 year old girls learn from their nun-teachers that their bodies are "temples." So they go around calling each other "Temple One" and "Temple Two." But their 12 year old cousin, who fancies herself smart and superior, is delighted to be a Temple. "It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present."
Alas it isn't the irreverent, silly kids who are sinning, but the smug little devotee. In church she begs God to rid her of her excessive Pride. Riding home she looks out the car window...
.....out over a stretch of pasture land that rose and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.
Kenneth, I think the story you quote is only one of hers I've read that gets explicit about her religious themes.
No question Kat. It was the fuel that drove her.
The only other O'Connor story I can think of with this much comedy (if my memory is accurate, which these days it's not) is "The Partridge Festival." One of its characters is a lady who has worked her whole career as receptionist at an asylum (clearly modeled on nearby Milledgeville, which Wiki tells me was the world's largest, in its time) and as a result has a permanent nervous tic from looking over her shoulder ever 15 seconds. Now when I see somebody in a high-stress job I often think of this lady and smile.
Kenneth: It had never occurred to me that the general might be an impostor (or at least has exaggerated his experiences) but now that you mention it, I think it's a definite possibility. I was surprised a while back by a magazine story about how frequently non-veterans somehow buy medals and invent a military career for themselves.
Dale wrote: "Kenneth: It had never occurred to me that the general might be an impostor (or at least has exaggerated his experiences) but now that you mention it, I think it's a definite possibility. I was surp..."Dale, Sash's daughter told someone that his highest rank had been infantryman. The uniform of a general was provided by the film people because they wanted someone of that rank to speak, and he wore if on important occasions from then on. So definitely an impostor, but not on his own initiative.
One of its characters is a lady who has worked her whole career as receptionist at an asylum (clearly modeled on nearby Milledgeville, which Wiki tells me was the world's largest, in its time)..."This made me remember a novel I read in which O'Connor was a character, which I liked a lot. It was called A Good Hard Look, and was by Ann Napolitano. I also read an epistolary novel which was inspired by O'Connor's letters with Robert Lowell but which fictionalizes the relationship as romantic was Frances and Bernard, by Carlene Bauer. She changes the names and background details, obviously. Which was probably a good idea, since she fictionalizes so much. But the letters were interesting and their style did remind me of O'Connor's letters in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor.
Just thought I'd mention this, in case any of you like reading fiction about the authors they like. Of course, some people hate it.
Kat: I had forgotten the uniform-for-the-film part; thanks for the reminder!
Dale wrote: "The only other O'Connor story I can think of with this much comedy (if my memory is accurate, which these days it's not) is "The Partridge Festival." One of its characters is a lady who has worked ..."Dale, would that be Milledgeville, Georgia? I grew up about 35 miles away and any time you did something goofy, everyone would say "you're going to Milledgeville."
Only just got round to this so missed the great discussion thread.My favorite line was "The past and the future were the same thing to him, one forgotten and the other not remembered" - very clever. As indeed is the whole story and its premis that life flashes before one's eyes at the point of death, so History does overtake the General, the past becoming the future.
Perhaps as a non-american I didn't notice the excessive use of the word "black" until I read kenneth's post No. 5 above, gave no thought to what the premier was, or the use of the name John Wesley. The acronym UDC went past me unrecognised and I was straining to set the story in a time period, needing to go and check when the Spanish American War was!
I took the title to be saying that he had survived wars, ie had eluded the ultimate enemy, death, until now, very late on in his life when he was still trying to fight it off - irratated by the hole in his head, and his various "Dammits!" during the final sequence. "He made such a desperate effort to see over it and find out what comes after the past that his hand clenched the sword until the blade touched bone" - a real fighter, no wonder he made 104!
Constant Reader
Books mentioned in this topic
A Good Hard Look (other topics)Frances and Bernard (other topics)
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor (other topics)
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories (other topics)
I've read many of O'Connor's stories but this was a new one for me. Joyce Carol Oates, in the introduction in the anthology, says that it was written early in her career.
For the readers here who have more experience and knowledge of O'Connor than I do, I wonder what you think about Oates' comment on her religion. She says, "Though O'Connor was a Roman Catholic, there is little in her fiction that suggests this faith. Indeed, it is the absence of faith that engages her adamantly unsentimental sympathies." I always thought that I saw her religion in her writing, but I wonder if that is because I had the impression before reading that Catholicism was extremely important in her life. Would love to hear other views.