audio files of Flannery O’Connor :Here's an for an audio file of Flannery O'Connor giving a lecture on "A Good Man is Hard to Find." It's absolutely wonderful (thanks Hank foor giving me the new link!) -- and I am so happy for the chance to hear her voice -- a combination of girlish sweetness with her razored wit, delivered in a rich Southern accent. She is giving her lecture "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature," (the full text of which can be found in Mystery and Manners) and a section from another essay also available in Mystery and Manners, on "A Good Man is Hard to Find." If only they had recorded her reading "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" -- one of my all time favorite stories, along with "Parker's Back," "The Enduring Chill," and "The Lame Shall Enter First."
Here's a quote from "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction":
"In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from the typical social patterns, towards mystery and the unexpected..."
And here's a quote from the essay "On Her Own Work" - which can also be heard on the recording:
"I often ask myself what makes a story work, what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is,the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it...It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery."
Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition....
