Seminar Discussion Week #4

Here's the record of this week's abbreviated discussion. At the end, I've included some reaction thoughts on my own.

Drew: Did anyone else think the boy at The Hot Spot was going to violate Lucynell.
Everyone: No.
Potter: What’s up with the peppermint stick?
Childs: Yeah, I thought that, too. A “foot long 2” thick” stick? C’mon.
Petras: What about the hitchhiker getting in the truck? Anyone creepy there?

Nahlik (the drifter): Yesterday, we talked about Shiftlet as a negative force, but I saw him as a positive force, especially in relation to the mom?
Wehner: I agree with Nahlik—“in a few days” he begins to transform the place.
Dell’Orco: I disagree. He steals the car, the money; he abandons the girl.
N. Schmidt: (I missed this comment, sorry).
Lux: I see both sides, but I see the positive side more. He leads the daughter out of her nest, gives her some autonomy and puts her in the presence of someone who see her full humanity/glory. It’s no accident that her first word is “birrrd”—she’s finally taking flight.

Lots of general bickering and debating.

Drew: Isn’t the mother gaining some freedom at the same time? Now she isn’t tied to raising a child with a disability for her whole life.
Hannan: I disagree, Mr. Dziedzic. She does a lot of chores, carries her weight.
Nahlik: Mrs. Lucynell is very self-centered—this whole scenario is just about what she can get from the situation.
Cross: So she’s a lot like the grandmother in “Good Man.”
W. Schmitt: (?)

Kainz calls Sasha out! Shbam!

Sasha: uhhh….

Kainz: what did you write about?
Sasha: manipulating.
Kainz: tell us about that.

Sasha: The mother in “Life you Save” thinks she’s manipulating him to marry his daughter at the same time that he’s using him to get the car.

Berger: There aren’t that many indications that she wants to get rid of Lucynell.

Callon: Can someone explain why Berger might be incorrect?

Petras:
Haegerty: The way she haggles with him over 17.50 suggests she’s trying to sell her out

(Judas: 30 pieces of silver? ???)

Quinlan: Doesn’t she want the best for her daughter—somebody for her to communicate with?
Boehm: Notice that she lies about her age as a way to make her more attractive.
Hannan: What about when she says, “I wouldn’t give her up for anything on earth?”
Childs: Reverse psychology?

This is a good time for someone to warm up presenting a new topic/thread. Hogrebe? Bothmann? Hovey? Schneider?

Mr. Paradise—shifting over to the River

Nick Schmidt: I don’t see Paradise as the evil one. If anything, the preacher is the one responsible for planting such literal/dangerous ideas of salvation in the boy’s head.
Lux: Nick is wrong. Remember the pigs? Those are where the demons go when they leave the man’s body. And he looks like a pig to Harry from his underwater perspective at the end.
Potter: There’s really not enough for me to say he’s a bad person.

What about the cancer is has above his ear?

Quinlan: We seem to be putting people into two groups, but there seems to be three groups. I would put Mrs. Connin in the group of the good people. He takes him to a place that’s good for him—his first experience of anything transcendent in his otherwise secular world that treats “Jesus” as a curse word. Mr. Paradise is a cynical man who has fallen away because Christianity hasn’t given him what he wants.

Nick Schmidt: Is it good to baptize a kid without his family’s consent?
Hagaerty: Even the names seem to undercut Quinlan’s theory. How could “Con” be good and “paradise” be bad?
Lux: Every single detail connected to Paradise contradicts your punk comment, Hag.
Heated debate.
Potter takes out a stick and beats Petras. (not sure what they’re talking about)
Scheider: It’s just ironic that his name is Paradise, because he’s ugly—physically and morally.

Callon’s Final thoughts: This was a great discussion. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able just to sit back and listen to students work through the territory in a somewhat ordered, natural way for 5-10 minutes. Nice.

Many of you were looking hard to find the “good” characters—the models or norms in these. That very notion of a “good” character is very problematic in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, which focus primarily on people who suffer from some insurmountable handicap. Often they aren’t even real people but distortions somewhat like the exaggerated characters in a cartoon like The Simpsons.

Instead of trying to divide O’Connor’s characters into “good” or “bad” people, I would suggest beginning by separating them into static/stationary characters and kinetic/mobile figures in search of something. The folks in this first category—the Ashfields in “The River,” Mrs. Lucynell Crater, Bailey-- are fairly flat characters who tend to be stuck in a particular place or frame of mind. And then there’s the more dynamic figures like Shiftlet, the drifter, or the young boy, Harry/Bevel Ashfield in search of something they can’t name. They are groping their way toward something good, something transcendent. They are hungry for more than what their environment offers, yet they’re not able to satisfy that hunger either. As we head into next week, we’ll be questioning a number of thing: what is satisfying/unsatisfying about the brand of Christianity alive in these stories; what are these characters looking for; what substitutes do many of them accept; what do these handicaps—poor sight, missing limbs, cancer—symbolize; are they any truly transcendent, fulfilling alternatives available to these people?