In Poetics, Aristotle offers two valuable observations about the creation of art. First, and most significantly, Aristotle tells us “not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically”. In other words, it is less important for a writer not to be fully informed about the subject he is writing than it is for him to describe his subject in poor style.
Second, Aristotle offers his definition of tragedy. The ideal outcome of a tragic story, he writes, is that the protagonist will experience peripeteia (or a reversal of intention), which leads to anagnorisis (or a recognition), which in turn leaves the protagonist in a state of catastrophe and suffering. Put another way, peripeteia is the revelation that a pursuit which the protagonist believed to be in his best interests is in fact the opposite, and anagnorisis is their sudden awareness of the consequences of this reversal.
Aristotle uses the play Oedipus Rex (which Wikipedia summarizes fully here, although I would point out that they date the first production of the play as 429 BC, nearly a hundred years after Aristotle’s death) as his example. In this story Oedipus, who is made king of Thebes after defeating the Sphinx, is seeking the murderer of the former king, whom an oracle has said must be brought to justice before the pestilence plaguing the kingdom will end. The peripeteia is reached when it is revealed through Oedipus’s investigation that he himself had unknowingly murdered the former king, and the anagnorisis occurs when Oedipus then realizes that he is the murderer of his own father and the queen, was queen alongside the former king and whom Oedipus married when he assumed the throne, is his mother, which, in case you need it spelled out for you, is the catastrophic aspect of this equation. Suffering, in the form of Oedipus’s self-inflicted eye gouging, ensues soon thereafter.
(Tangental recommendation: Mary Renault’s fascinating mythological novel The Bull from the Sea contains a brilliant scene in which her hero, Theseus, encounters the blind, wandering Oedipus as an old man.)
Now, before I really get into my critique of O’Connor, I would like to praise her. O’Connor’s prose is superb; I have her stories bookmarked in an anthology I keep on my desk, and I read a few of her paragraphs every morning before I begin writing. But being familiar with Aristotle, I noticed something interesting last year when I read O’Connor’s collected stories: almost every one follows a pattern resembling the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. The basic plot goes like this: a character, who believes they are more intelligent than everyone else in their life, attempts to demonstrate their superiority, only to have their actions lead them down a path that ultimately leaves them significantly humbled.
To demonstrate, let’s consider two of O’Connor’s most well-known stories.
In “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, the focal character, Julian, a college graduate who lives with his mother, who he considers ignorant and backwards, because he cannot find a job. He fantasizes about teaching his mother a lesson, and, near the end of the story, when she is accosted by a black woman whose son she’d tried to give a penny, Julian sees “…no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning,” which he does by telling her, “‘That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies…’”. The peripeteia comes only half a page later when his suddenly nonsensical mother collapses on the sidewalk, the commotion apparently having given her a stroke. The anagnorisis comes in Julian’s realization that he does not loathe his mother quite so much as he believed, and the story ends with him running down the street for help.
In “Good Country People” Hulga, a Ph.D. educated woman with a wooden leg who lives with her mother because she cannot find a job, invites the traveling Bible salesman who shows up at their door to come again the next day, when, she imagines, she will prove her genius by seducing him and, because he’s obviously a religious man, “[will then take] his remorse in hand and [change] it into a deeper understanding of life. She [will take] all his shame away and [turn] it into something useful”, because “[t]rue genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind”. Instead, she experiences peripeteia when, after he has coaxed her into removing her artificial leg in the barn behind their house, he opens one his Bibles, which is hollow and contains a pack of pornographic playing cards, a flask of whiskey, and a package of condoms. Hulga experiences anagnorisis when the Bible salesman, rather than give her her artificial leg as she asks, puts the leg in his case and leaves
So what does this prove? Nothing, really. I just think it’s interesting. What, you want a deeper analysis than that? I give you Sophocles and Aristotle, yet you want more? Very well.
I suspect that O’Connor either profoundly experienced the feeling of superiority followed by a humbling she writes about (perhaps it is a reflection of her diagnosis of lupus in 1950, which required her to move back to Georgia and live with her mother), imprinting her psyche with a specific perspective on life that was to be found again and again in her work. In this same way, Hemingway writes often of war and the shell-shocked soldier’s return to normal society, and Carver writes often about an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic who is either divorced or soon to be. I can recognize, also, a similar occurrence in my own stories, which are populated with characters who long for things they don’t have, believing life would somehow be better if they could only accomplish this, or live there, or be with that person. Feel free to extrapolate from that bit of information whatever conclusions you like about what that means about me.
