My Oedipus Complex Read Free

looked like, and O’Connor might admit that he didn’t really know; though he might ruefully agree to put up a few walls and doors if that was what the customer wanted. On Maxwell’s part, this was the reaction of an editor dutifully worrying about his magazine’s less imaginative readers; but it was also the response of a practising novelist to a short-story writer. The novelist historically pays more attention to fixtures and fittings than does the creator of the more compacted and poetic form. As O’Connor put it, the novel depends on creating a sense of continuing life, whereas the short story need merely suggest such continuance.
    On one occasion, when Maxwell was locationally baffled, O’Connor sent him a couple of sketches to explain his story, marked with helpful annotations like ‘Window’, ‘Door’, ‘Hallway’, ‘Table’, ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. But this story – about a child ashamed of his parents – survives, fifty years on, not because of any decorative infill, but because of its narrative structure and psychological truth, because O’Connor remembered and understood the full peculiarity and relentlessness of children. He knew that ‘Children…see only one side of any question and because of their powerlessness see it with hysterical clarity.’ Hysterical clarity: in this respect the child is father to the writer. The adult may learn to view others with more tolerance, tenderness and wisdom; but the writer must retain the child’s absolutism of eye, whether writing about childhood itself, or war, or marriage, or solitude, about the life of a tramp or the life of a priest.
    The child’s-eye view. O’Connor describes in
An Only Child
how as a small boy he had a great taste for sitting on roofs. ‘I was always very fond of heights, and afterwards it struck me that reading was only another form of height, and a more perilous one. It was a way of looking beyond your back yard into the neighbours’.’ This rooftop reader is an additional father to the writer: first you watch the lives of others, later you imagine them.O’Connor was to exploit this remembrance of height and reading in one of his best stories about childhood, ‘The Man of the World’, in which two boys, eager for the secrets of adult life, spy on a neighbouring house from a darkened attic. The child as spy as reader as peeping tom as writer.
    O’Connor was a most untheoretical writer whose favourite lines from
Faust
were: ‘Grey, my dear friend, is all your theory, and green the golden tree of Life.’ Nevertheless, like many another literary practitioner who spends time in academe, he ended up with a theory of the short story. This he codified in
The Lonely Voice
, a study of the form which has since become a textbook in American writing schools. ‘There is in the short story at its most characteristic,’ he proposes, ‘something we do not often find in the novel – an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ The story deals especially with ‘submerged population groups’, which helps explain its strength in America, where such groups abound. They contain the form’s characteristic personnel: ‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society’.
    How far would Dolan’s ass go with this theory? It’s certainly true that many of O’Connor’s characters have sadness and loneliness at their centre; but this often seems to make them typical, rather than atypical, of the society to which they belong – one the writer himself described as ‘potty, lonely’. Take O’Connor’s priests, for example. These are rarely of the gentle, twinkly sort; they tend to be clever, manipulative, fierce, worldly, temptable and despairingly consumed by the life they have chosen. In this they are also analogues of the writer. As O’Connor put it,
    The