SOURCE: Clasby, Nancy T. “‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’: Flannery O'Connor as a Visionary Artist.” Studies in Short Fiction 28, no. 4 (fall 1991): 509-20.

[In the following essay, Clasby offers a Jungian reading of “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”]

Flannery O'Connor's reservations about psychoanalytic readings of her work have not deterred several critics from producing interesting Freudian and Lacanian studies. Some of these studies attribute O'Connor's rejection of psychoanalytic commentary to her unacknowledged fear of the unconscious as “a material realm that threatens to displace the domain of ‘spirit’” (Mellard 628). It may be, however, that her reservations are based in part on an accurate perception of the limits of Freudian thought as applied to the image-making activity of the artist. The “bleeding stinking mad shadow[s] of Jesus” peopling O'Connor's stories cannot successfully be reduced to portraits of individuals suffering castration anxiety. Carl Jung's theories were somewhat more interesting to O'Connor; she reviewed the work of Victor White (Getz 158, 145), a prominent Jungian analyst and Catholic priest, but because she understood Jung in Freudian terms, she found his approach unsympathetic as well. Nevertheless, when taken on its own terms, a Jungian hermeneutics offers a way of opening up O'Connor's extraordinary image structures.

Such Lacanian critics as James Mellard and Andre Bleikasten have indeed provided new insights, allowing us to “reread her strange fictions as if we read them for the first time” (Bleikasten 10). The difficulty with Freudian theory is that it ascribes the formulation of images to personal trauma or repression. This limits its application to literary materials, which proceed from a different source and cannot be accounted for solely in terms of the artist's personal experience. The grotesque elements, the distorted, surrealistic images essential to O'Connor's work, resist interpretation in the Lacanian framework of the “Name of the Father,” the absent, abstract principle of authority. They are products of an immersion in the unconscious and can be understood best in a register of meaning that validates the revelatory nature of mythic patterns. O'Connor's grotesques link her with such artists as Blake, Goethe and Hoffman, whom Jung called “visionary artists” because, in his view, their imagery emerges in an almost unfiltered rush from the collective unconscious (89). “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is particularly rich in symbols of interacting masculine and feminine elements and in images of the sacred child; “The View of the Woods,” which Mellard has interpreted in Lacanian terms, presents a similar morphology. I will try to show how a Jungian reading can illuminate matrices of imagery that often remain obscure in Freudian readings.

Carl Jung's work is not a heretical variant of Freud's thought; it is an interpretive system premised on a hermeneutics of archetypal images in dreams and in art. Mythic archetypes, such as the Great Mother and the Hero, are patterns of images springing from the internal structural elements of the mind. The psyche is a product of eons of evolution, and its native language is imagery. Conceptual thought is a relatively late development. The tendency to shape and respond to patterns of imagery is innate in the human species. Such motifs as the wise old man, the hostile brethren, the helpful animals, are common to all cultures. These tendencies to build and recognize pattern are what Jung calls archetypes. Edward Edinger says “An archetype is to the psyche what an instinct is to the body” (Ego 20). For Freud, the images in dreams and poetry are an elaborate code devised to conceal the psyche's “real” thought. They are products of the devalued subconscious and are to be understood not as symbols, but as symptoms of repressed, infantile drives. For Jung, these dream images “are the thought, in the natural, undisguised language of the psyche” (Welch 8).

From a Freudian perspective, the grotesque in art is a product of a personal effort to master “threatening infantile material” by diminishing “the threat through degradation or ridicule” (Kahane 114). Like whistling in the dark, the production of grotesque images is an instinctive reaction designed to conceal the true response of fear based on personal trauma. Freud coined the term das Unheimliche, the uncanny, in an effort to account for the response of fear and attraction inspired by the eruption into consciousness of numinous, often grotesque archetypes (Bleikasten 8).

In Jungian thought, the grotesque is a product of a “visionary” art. All poetry is based on archetypes, but in realistic works the archetypes are clothed in layers of plausible detail, and are thereby integrated into the world of the conscious mind. The realistic artist's imagination filters (or in Jung's term, “clarifies”) the primordial images and gives them particular faces and forms. The archetype of the Great Mother emerges as, for example, Madame Bovary. In “visionary” works, however, the bare bones of the imagination are close to the surface. Sometimes the starkness with which the archetypal image emerges lends a quality of caricature or cartoon to the artwork. For Jung, the rich distortions and dreamlike qualities that characterize the grotesque are the hallmarks of the unconscious mind at work.

O'Connor's “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” has proven difficult to fit into the usual critical categories and terms. It has been called “a theological cartoon … little more than a caricature” (see Gentry 113). The story presents the reader with a powerful tableau of primitive figures from the unconscious, frozen in a struggle that cannot be resolved. O'Connor's grotesques are striking projections of archetypal figures playing out the dramas that engage the modern psyche. O'Connor has lavished on it a wealth of irony and carefully observed realistic detail, but much of the power of the story lies in its clear delineation of archetypal motifs.

The setting is the wasteland, a “desolate spot,” where a cast of mythic figures enacts an abortive fertility ritual. The antagonists are a grim and ravenous personification of the Great Mother and a maimed hero who seeks to cheat her of her treasure. In the mythic pattern the hero must defeat the dragon-mother to win the prize, heal his wound, and bring life to the wasteland. O'Connor's version of the ancient myth is poignantly ironic in that the hero is unable to recognize the prize even when he has it within his grasp.

The treasure is, of course, the captive princess, the Daughter, Lucynell, another aspect of the Great Mother. Both women are named Lucynell Crater. The daughter's potential identity as the beautiful anima, or soul figure, can emerge only when the hero has defeated the dark forces of the Terrible Mother. In numberless retellings of the myth—from the rescue of Andromeda, chained to the rocks, to the story of Snow White—the hero thwarts the dragon, marries the princess, and rules over the kingdom. But this is not the outcome of the confrontation between the Lucynells and Tom Shiftlet.

The drama that O'Connor presents so starkly and yet with such fine shadings of irony is the confrontation that Jung saw as an expression of a central problem of our time. The particular form of developing consciousness favored by modern cultures has systematically suppressed the unconscious side of the self. Feminine images are associated in the imagination with the unconscious, with feelings and instincts. Masculine images are associated with consciousness; the hero (of either gender) is the developing human ego. Erich Neumann says:

In the course of Western development, the essentially positive process of emancipating the ego and unconscious from the tyranny of the unconscious has become negative. It has gone far beyond the division of conscious and unconscious into two systems and has brought about a schism between them. …

(Origins 436)

The split between the masculine and feminine elements of the psyche is the characteristic wound of the Fisher King, so familiar as an image in twentieth-century literature.

In the normal development of consciousness the life-bearing Great Mother at first provides support for the newborn consciousness. Further development requires, however, that the ego separate itself from the primitive realm of feeling and instinct and emerge as a separate center of consciousness. This growth process is perceived as a struggle in which the hero must resist the downward pull of the unconscious, now seen as the Devouring Mother. In normal development the child leaves “the instinctual land of the Mothers” and aspires to the abstract plane of the Fathers, the arena of law and light. Thus far, the Jungian and Lacanian myths parallel each other, as the narcissistic “I” of Lacan recognizes first the “m-other” and then the “Symbolic Other,” the controlling Father of the Oedipal power struggle. The subject emerges from the contest wounded by the castrating power of the Father or, in Jungian thought, by the loss of the unconscious or “feminine” part of the self that has been cut off or suppressed. The Lacanian account essentially ends here. Efforts that the subject may make to reintegrate the feminine aspects are regarded as regressive denials of the Oedipal outcome. For Lacan, normal development requires acceptance of the authority of the “absent” or abstract signifier, the “phallus.” In the Jungian scheme, the subject seeks to find wholeness by re-assimilating the lost feminine capacities. This mandates a heroic quest into the domain of the unconscious, symbolized finally by images of death and rebirth. O'Connor's work is typical of much twentieth-century wasteland literature in that the hero is unable to risk the loss implicit in transformation. The Lacanian formula works well with the elements of myth preliminary to the death/rebirth imagery, since these struggles can be understood as narcissistic or Oedipal. Within these limits, Lacan provides a workable matrix for delineating the destruction of the ego unable to accept or to transform the power of the Father. But the dynamic of O'Connor's narrative always includes an abortive or vestigial effort to go on to the phase of the heroic rescue of the feminine. The images generated by this phase of the myth are troublesome leftovers, difficult to integrate into a Freudian analysis.

To succeed in his quest, the hero must perceive that there are two aspects of the feminine, one frightening and one beautiful, essential to his or her own full development. Erich Neumann says the “elementary” character of the feminine, as Great Mother, “tends to hold fast to everything that springs from it. … Everything born of it belongs to it and remains subject to it” (Great Mother 25). This aspect of the archetype is the Devouring Mother, the embodiment of the prepersonal forces of the unconscious. Powerful images of the feminine as womb and tomb characterize this aspect of the archetype.

At a higher level of development a second character appears that “drives toward motion, change, and in a word, transformation” (Great Mother 29). The transformative aspect of the Great Mother is embodied in the anima or soul image, which is the feminine side of the ego liberated from the unconscious. When the hero successfully confronts the Devouring Mother, the anima crystallizes, and part of what had been the alien, the feminine, the unconscious, becomes an ally. Only when masculine and feminine, the conscious and unconscious elements, are joined is the psyche made whole. Joseph Henderson describes this process of synthesis: “Man's knowledge (logos) then encounters woman's relatedness (eros) and their union is represented as that symbolic ritual of a sacred marriage” (126). Together, the ego and the anima, head and heart, form a living personal center capable of bringing forth new life.

In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” the daughter has “long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a Peacock's neck” (161). The waiter at the diner says, “She looks like an angel of Gawd” (169). Lucynell is, potentially at least, the transformative side of the old woman who, in contrast, is an elementary figure, standing solid as “a cedar fence post,” arms folded, looking as if “she were the owner of the sun.” But the daughter is deaf and retarded. Her plump hands dangle helplessly at her sides. Lucynell's defects indicate that she is a captive of the negative aspects of the Great Mother. Unlike the spirit-birds with which she is associated, she cannot fly. The healing, transformative aspects of the unconscious, which she represents, are too bound up with the frightening, pre-personal forces of the unconscious to be available to the developing male ego figure. It is the task of the hero to free the princess by confronting the dragon.

Tom T. Shiftlet, the hobo protagonist, comes to the desolate Crater farm looking for a job, a task to perform. He carries a tin tool-box, representing his potential for creative work, but he is also maimed. His left arm is cut off at the elbow. His “face descended in forehead for more than half its length and ended suddenly with his features just balanced over a jutting steeltrap jaw” (160). He is associated with metallic objects and a hard-edged, calculating rationality. He tells Mrs. Crater that he can fix anything on the place: “I'm a man … even if I ain't a whole one.” “I got,” he says, “a moral intelligence” (164). Shiftlet successfully applies his skills to repairing the woman's ancient car:

With a volley of blasts it emerged from the shed, moving in a fierce and stately way. Mr. Shiftlet was in the driver's seat, sitting very erect. He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead.

(165-66)

Images of the heart, or unconscious, run as a counterpoint to the masculine images associated with Shiftlet. Shiftlet tells an anecdote about a doctor who cut the heart out of a man's chest and held it in his hands to examine it; the doctor “‘studied it like it was a day old chicken, and lady,’ Shiftlet said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, ‘he don't know no more about it than you or me’” (162). The mysteries of the heart are impenetrable to Shiftlet because the heart is associated with the archetype of the transformative feminine. In Neumann's words, the heart is the source of “the spirit-nourishing ‘central’ wisdom of feeling, not the ‘upper’ wisdom of the head” (Great Mother 330). In other places O'Connor refers to this source of understanding as “wise blood,” or the “underhead” (body, what is “under the head,” Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away).

At one point in the story it appears that Tom Shiftlet may indeed be able to restore life to the wasteland. He has spent a week on the farm, patching and building, and has taught Lucynell to say the word “bird.” “The big rosy-faced girl followed him everywhere, saying ‘Burttddt, ddburrttdt,’ and clapping her hands.” At night, the “fat yellow moon appears to roost in the branches of the fig tree with the chickens” (163). These images suggest a potential richness in the barren farm. Old Mrs. Crater offers to turn the farm over to Shiftlet if he will marry Lucynell. Shiftlet agrees to the arrangement, but plans secretly to run away with Mrs. Crater's other treasure, the old car.

“A man,” he says, “is divided into two parts, body and spirit. … The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile; always on the move” (166). The farm house is associated with the static, elementary aspects of the feminine. The masculine spirit, on the other hand, is an active element that needs, at a certain level of development, to break away from the containing womb of the unconscious. From Shiftlet's point of view, the old woman is the Devouring Mother, “ravenous for a son-in-law” (164). He feels that he must escape the slide back into the unconscious represented to him by marriage to the mindless Lucynell. The car, a mechanical womb, where he sleeps, like “the monks of old slept in their coffins” (164) is his means of escape. It is also a mechanical anima figure, a princess whom he has brought back to life. After the wedding he abandons Lucynell at the diner and drives on alone with his mechanical bride. His rejection of the feminine expresses “the desire to deny one's origin in the womb and to become the omphalos, which is to say, to be alive without knowledge of death” (Paulson 102, re Tarwater).

Shiftlet appears to have executed his plan, but he is nevertheless troubled. He has indicated from the beginning his awareness that “The world is almost rotten.” He is unsatisfied by the routine legalities of the wedding at the courthouse. The blood test reminds him that no one really knows a thing about his blood or his heart. In an effort to live up to his new responsibilities as the owner of a car, and perhaps to “save his own life,” he picks up a hitchhiking boy. Flannery O'Connor experimented with a number of different endings for this story, including one in which we learn that Shiftlet is a married man with a family (Kessler 4). The 1950s Schlitz Playhouse production of the story (starring Gene Kelly) introduced a happy ending, in which Shiftlet returns to Lucynell. O'Connor said, “I did have some trouble with the end of that story. I got it up to his taking the girl away and leaving her. I knew I wanted to do that much, and I did it. But the story wasn't complete. I needed that little boy on the side of the road, and that little boy is what makes the story work” (qtd. in Muller 33). In mythic terms, the runaway child may represent Shiftlet's own vulnerable ego. Shiftlet attempts to effect a reconciliation between the boy and his mother: that is, between the masculine and feminine elements in his own psyche. He warns the child not to wander too far from the realm of the Great Mother, and he applies the phrase, “angel of Gawd” (164), the waiter's description of Lucynell, to his own remembered mother. He says he “rues the day” that he left her. The intractable boy, however, curses Shiftlet and jumps from the slowly moving car, shouting, “My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat!” His irreverence adds exactly the right acerbic tone to cut the potentially over-sweet sentiment of Lucynell's abandonment.

A mythic reading suggests yet another interpretation of the boy's significance: he may function as the “Divine Child,” whose appearance at the conclusion of the hero's tale is not uncommon. Ordinarily, the child represents the new birth, the product of the successful hieros gamos, or divine marriage. His presence signifies the return of life to the wasteland. In O'Connor's story, of course, such a motif can have only a negative or ironic application. The child's appearance also links him to a secondary aspect of the role of the daughter, Lucynell. She is also a child. Although Lucynell is nearly 30, her innocence makes it impossible to guess her age. Her mother calls her “Babydoll,” and Shiftlet asks, “Is she your baby girl?” The Mother replies, “My only … I wouldn't give her up for a casket of jewels” (163). In spite of her innocence, this divine child will be sacrificed, in a pathetic turn on the usual fate of the babe.

O'Connor's “The View of the Woods” involves a similar displacement of the hero's death and rebirth onto an innocent child. James Mellard's Lacanian analysis casts the story in terms of the Oedipal struggle. The characters are an old curmudgeon named Fortune, his look-alike (mirror-image) granddaughter Mary Fortune Pitts (“an angel! a saint!” [76]), and her authoritarian father, Mr. Pitts, who beats her in the woods to demonstrate his control over her. From a Lacanian point of view, Fortune's attachment to the girl (mother figure) is a regression from the Oedipal situation to infantile narcissism. In the last scene, the old man and the child are locked in a death struggle over Fortune's plan to humiliate his rival, the Father, by spoiling his view of the woods. Mellard sees the daughter as an extension of the old man's “Oedipal arch-enemy, Pitts” (641). Fortune refuses to submit to the child, as agent of the Father: “Were the old man to remain beneath Mary Fortune Pitts, he would signify his ‘proper’ or ‘normal’ relation to the Other for which she now substitutes” (Mellard 640). Fortune dies (of a heart attack) because he will not adjust to the “knowledge of the limits imposed by what Freudians call castration, what we might call limitation or finitude, and Lacan calls the Law of the Name of the Father” (640). Before Fortune dies he maims the Father through killing the child, so a mutual “castration” appears to have occurred.

From a Jungian point of view, the child, like Lucynell, is an anima figure, held captive in the wasteland. The cruel father is a displacement of the Devouring Mother figure and the name Pitts suggests both a seed and a grave, two emblems of the feminine unconscious. When Mary Fortune Pitts resists the plan to desecrate the woods, Fortune is forced to recognize her “Pitts” side. He can choose to embrace her as she is, thus incorporating saving feminine elements, or he can reject her, choosing a display of ego power instead. This matching pair of figures, male and female, roll across the forest floor in a fatal embrace. Fortune wins, cracking her skull on a rock and declaring, “There's not an ounce of Pitts in me.”

The central symbolic matrix involves blood flowing in the woods. When the Father beats the child she clings to a pine tree, suggesting crucifixion. The woods prefigure her death: they appear to “be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them … as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood” (79). Old man Fortune, separated from the unconscious, lacking the capacity for symbolic understanding, sees “just woods … a pine trunk is a pine trunk” (79).

In Mellard's Lacanian reading, the blood is that of castration and suggests the setting of limits, the imperative to maintain the status quo of ego authority. From a Jungian viewpoint, the blood of the child's death is the sacrificial blood of the lamb. The failed hero “saves his life,” refusing to undergo transformative death and rebirth, and brings about the death of the holy innocent, the devalued feminine capacities (cf. Pharaoh and Herod). Mellard, in dealing with the complex motifs associated with the bloody woods, attempts to stretch the Lacanian structure to include the category of the “sacred.” He sees the bleeding “sacramental woods” as the Other: “the Otherness they represent is God, or God's Other and double, Christ” (639).

Tom Shiftlet, at the conclusion of “The Life You Save,” has, like old Fortune, rejected the feminine powers of transformation and destroyed the anima or soul figure. Lucynell's eyes, “blue as a peacock's neck,” are closed, as she sleeps in the implacable hold of the unconscious. Shiftlet, alone now in the wasteland, and “feeling that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him,” cries out, “Oh, Lord! … Break forth and wash the slime from this earth” (170). A turnip shaped cloud descends, and “after a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet's car.” This conclusion is a parody of the mythic rainfall bringing new life to the desert wasteland. The raindrops, like tin can lids, are emblematic of Shiftlet's futile embrace of the car, the mechanical anima figure.

When Tom Shiftlet makes his first appearance on the Crater farm the sun is setting: “He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross …” (161). Most critics have dismissed the idea of Shiftlet as a Christ figure as ironic. The crooked cross is seen as a sign that Shiftlet is “a grotesque Christ figure who is decadent and evil” (Muller 32).

An archetypal reading suggests another view of the image. Edward Edinger analyzes the symbolic significance of the figure of Ixion, who is also a crucified hero (Melville's … 138-40). Ixion was a mortal who offended Zeus by attempting to seduce Hera. As punishment for his hubris, for making himself equal to the gods, Ixion was bound, spread-eagle, to a fiery wheel. In Jungian terms, the sin of hubris is the identification of the ego, or the conscious mind, with the entire psychic entity. It connotes an inability to perceive the existence of a higher psychic authority than the self-constituting ego. Jung differentiated between the personal factors of experience and environment that shape the ego and the transpersonal factors, “collective … internal structural elements” (Neumann, Origins xx). The Self includes not only the ego, essentially a construct, but also the unconscious aspect that is fitted for participation in the collective unconscious through instinctive capacities for symbol and myth. The Self emerges as a synthesizing entity that reconciles the forces of personal experience and transpersonal, or collective patterns of development. Often the Self is symbolized by a mandala, or circular figure, such as the sun silhouetting Tom Shiftlet like Ixion's burning wheel.

The conscious persona, the ego, may reject the unconscious elements as “not me” or “not real,” and thus usurp the place of the Self, which, as the product of the developing interplay of conscious and unconscious elements, is the highest reality of the psychic organism. Ixion was punished because he showed no respect for the transpersonal reality of the gods. In a well-ordered psyche the ego and the unconscious interact harmoniously, and the emerging self enhances both components. But if the ego attempts to make itself the center, it will suffer. The conscious mind cannot successfully separate itself from the unconscious, but it can so distort the relationship as to cripple the entire organism. The self, meant to bloom like Dante's rose from the interplay of conscious and unconscious, becomes instead a fiery wheel of torture to which the struggling ego is bound. Paul Ricoeur translates the biblical injunction, “Who would save his life must lose it,” to “Whoever would posit himself as a constituting consciousness will miss his destiny” (115). For Tom Shiftlet, the life he would save is the life he loses.

Old man Fortune, in “A View of the Woods,” is similarly punished for his assault on the sacred woods and on Mary Fortune Pitts. As he fights with the child, he “rolls like a man on fire.” His heart “enlarges”:

It expanded so fast that the old man felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the lake. … On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into dark mysterious files that were marching across the water and away into the distance.

(86)

Shiftlet and Fortune demonstrate that the forces of the unconscious cannot be resisted by the subject who refuses to ally himself with them.

By stripping her characters of ordinary social context and realistic detail, O'Connor reveals the archetypes underlying the narrative. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” presents us with a tableau of grotesque forms acting out the central modern psychomachia of the wasteland. The male protagonist appears preoccupied with universal questions (“What is a man?”) that he will never answer because he protects himself from engagement with the mortal, passionate eros represented by the female archetype. Because the hero evades the quest, “a dead day” is born. The archetypal figures are rendered trivial, almost ridiculous. And yet, because O'Connor's visionary art flows from the deep wells of the unconscious, it brings strange and wonderful images to the surface. The numinous aura of the archetypes clings to her pathetic grotesques, and her narratives perform the function for society that dreams serve for patients in therapy. They allow patterns of the most personal, original, and yet archaic images to reveal the wounds, the pathologies that impede growth. O'Connor's art shares in those qualities that St. Bernard of Clairvaux saw in the grotesques of gothic art: “A wonderful sort of hideous beauty and beautiful deformity” (Muller 2).

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