SOURCE: "O'Connor's Ancient Comedy: Form in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'," in Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 16, Spring, 1991, pp. 29-39.

[In the following essay, Donahoo analyzes the influence of Dantean and Aristophanean comedy on "A Good Man Is Hard to Find. "]

More than any other short story in the Flannery O'Connor canon, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" has attracted the attention of commentators, not the least of whom is the author herself. Both in letters and lectures, O'Connor found herself explaining the story, trying to recover it from the grasp of symbol hunters and allegory explicators, by ending a frustration perhaps summarized by her description of an exchange with an "earnest" young teacher seeking to know why the Misfit's hat was black. "Anyway," O'Connor wrote to Dr. Ted Spivey, "that's what's happening to the teaching of literature."

Perhaps this explains why, in a lecture to English teachers, O'Connor attacked what she saw as the usual ways literature is taught and called for "attention, of a technical kind." She elaborates:

The student has to have tools to understand a story or a novel, and these are tools proper to the structure of the work, tools proper to the craft. They are tools that operate inside the work and not outside it; they are concerned with how this story is made and with what makes it work as a story.

In the act of writing, one sees that the way a thing is made controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change, and unless the student is able, in some degree, to apprehend the form, he will never apprehend anything else about the work, except what is extrinsic to it as literature.

In emphasizing the importance of form and mechanics to the search for meaning, O'Connor clearly places herself in the modernist critical tradition sketched out by such predecessors as Eliot and Pound, both of whose work she claimed to know and appreciate. Moreover, O'Connor's emphasis on form goes beyond the critical sense; it undergirds her best work and points to levels of meaning commonly sought in the work of more prestigious figures but ignored in the fictions of this isolated Southern lady. In fact, her form, as it appears in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," is not an idiosyncratic creation but a définite patterning of her work according to classical models whom Eliot and Pound would surely have approved: Dante and Aristophanes.

Of the two writers, Dante's importance to O'Connor's work seems the least surprising. His Divine Comedy, with its foundations in Catholic theology, particularly the thought of Augustine, provides an obvious model for any writer interested in combining orthodox faith and "serious" art. And, as Kinney's research in O'Connor's personal library shows, O'Connor certainly had access to the great Italian's poetry—an access her own private writings argue she used. "For my money," she wrote to "A" in 1955, "Dante is about as great as you can get." More importantly, in her essay "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," she directly refers to Dante as a model even as she hints as to how that model will be reflected in her own work:

I am told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture that it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved in the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one with a felt balance inside himself.

The key here is form—a Christian comic form which places individual narrative events into a particular perspective. Moreover, as John Freccero has well pointed out, Dante's form is built around his idea of conversion, "a death and resurrection of the self dramatized in the journey of "gradual illumination." Looking at "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" with an awareness of Dante's views begins to resolve some of the basic questions which critics have long argued. Instead of counting the bodies or the jokes, explaining the symbolic hats and cats, or even discerning the good guys from the bad, an awareness of O'Connor's modeling of Dante frees the reader to watch for signs of this illuminating journey—as well as for signs of what Freccero calls "the journey that fails," "the journey without a guide" in which the pilgrim seeks ultimate reality through his own intellect. Certainly, journeys, both literal and figurative, abound in O'Connor's text; indeed everyone in this story is moving. Recognizing Dante's presence behind the text pushes the reader to judge each motion in the light of his sense of comedy and to see why O'Connor herself was adamant about her tale's comic nature.

The opening sentences of the story reveal the two most overt journeys, one that will be taken and one that won't: "The Grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind." The family is planning a trip to the exotica of Florida, America's vacation wonderland, the Mecca of a tired middle-class looking for an inexpensive place to relax. It could almost be seen as a trip to paradise, except for the fact that by the 1950s Florida was already scarred by the line of neon-lit motels stretched along its beaches. Traveling there provides no pilgrimage toward illumination but an escape from reality. Moreover, as the Grandmother points out, "The children have been to Florida before'"; rather than discovering unknown territories, the family is only continuing in its comfortable rut. In fact, the family has little interest in traveling at all. Bailey, at his best, is a nervous driver, and the children dislike scenery ("'Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much,' John Wesley said." They would all be much happier to just be there—to be translated, as it were, from the living room of their Atlanta home to a Florida beach.

The Grandmother's purposed journey—her wish to travel to Tennessee—is hardly closer to the Dantean comic ideal. For, she desires not pilgrimage onward, but a return to her "connections." Moreover, her East Tennessee has no more reality than neon-orange Florida; it is largely the creation of her own romantic memory, complete with a courting prince (Mr. Teagarden) and a castle with secret panels (the plantation house). Like the family, she seeks no revelation; instead, she wants a solipsistic world with everything in its place, be they good men or pickaninnies.

But there is a third literal journey here, one that hardly seems important at first, but one which alters completely both the Grandmother's and the family's travel plans. This, of course, is the journey of The Misfit. Initially, his journey seems to parallel the one the family desires: an escape from Georgia to Florida. Drawing from the information in the newspaper, the Grandmother announces, "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it." However, the direction The Misfit is headed is not really toward any particular place or thing; it's merely from. In fact, such movement away has defined his entire life's journey, despite its division into two distinct parts by his time in prison. Rather than construct anything in his life, he has moved from experience to experience. He describes his early life this way: "T was a gospel singer for a while. . . . I been most everything. Been in the arm service, both land and sea, at home and abroad, been twict married, been an undertaker, been with the railroads, plowed Mother Earth, been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive once .. . ; I even seen a woman flogged. .. . I never was a bad boy that I remember of . . . but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary.'" In images striking for their relation to what is to come, he describes prison as being "buried alive," a time when he tried to realize "what I done," only to discover that he can't remember anything. In the sense of Dante's journey of illumination, of his having learned anything capable of redirecting his life, this memory is accurate. For though The Misfit seeks illumination, he searches for it as a form of information—a form "in" which, according to Dante's poem, it does not have. Thus, he resembles Dante's Ulysses, of whom Freccero writes, "Just as the ancients equated knowledge and virtue, so too Ulysses seems to equate them, making no provision in his calculations for the journey within, the personal askesis upon which all such attempts at transcendence must be based. The distinction between Ulysses' journey and the journey of the pilgrim is not in the objective, for both are directed toward that mountain in the southern hemisphere, but rather in how the journey is accomplished." Seen in this light, it is not surprising that the Misfit has sometimes been mistakenly admired as a hayseed Byronic hero and the story twisted to show him in a positive manner. Nevertheless, for O'Connor, committed to the model of Dante's comedy, his very Byronic nature makes him damnable. And just as her model did not hesitate to place his misguided hero in hell, O'Connor clearly embeds her Misfit in a hellish morass of evil—in his own words, "it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.'"

These are the literal journeys in the story, none of them illuminating, none comic. Were "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" merely the record of these movements, it would offer a dark vision indeed. However, an unacknowledged, spiritual journey is going on within the character who dominates this tale: the Grandmother. This journey has led her to the dark wood of her present self, to a danger she cannot immediately sense, and it will be altered, detoured, rescued only by an encounter with a guide she neither wants nor expects. Though, in many ways, her journey parallels the movement of The Misfit, it has that one crucial variation: the obtaining of a guide to whom she loses control.

As many critics have pointed out, the Grandmother begins the story as a self-centered, self-conscious representative and exploiter of genteel Southern-ness. She tries to assert her will over the family in the choice of a vacation spot; she smuggles the cat, the cause of the accident, onto the trip; she points out the "cute little pickaninny," enjoying the picturesqueness of his poverty; she ignores Red Sam's sloth and rudeness to his wife; and she deliberately lies about the "secret panel" in order to force a detour in the family's trip. The catalog of these events differs only in externals from the list of The Misfit's pre-prison activities; both are equally banal and unconstractive. But whereas he entered the crucible of prison and was left alone, her crucible comes in the confrontation with him, a guide from hell who takes her on a journey of illumination through loss.

Though The Misfit may seem an unlikely Virgil, he does share with Dante's guide one essential quality: an awareness of his situation, an awareness of what he does not have. What he lacks is Virgil's penitent nature, his hellgained acceptance of his condition. Instead, like a good empiricist, he defines his essential problem as his inability to have first-hand information, an inability to have certainty about history, the past, the supernatural world. In his own words, "'[Jesus] thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can. .. . I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't [raise the dead]. .. . I wisht I had of been there. . . . It ain't right I wasn't there. . . . because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady, .. . if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now.'" Clearly, The Misfit believes he lacks information, and, by blaming his lack of information for his actions, he again links himself to the pre-Christian idea of equating knowledge and virtue. Considered from the Christian perspective, however, his problem could be seen, not as a lack of information, but a rejection of the possibility of ordering life by faith.

At this point, The Misfit and the Grandmother show their fundamental similarity. Like him, the Grandmother also bases her life on what she can see, though she seems well aware that what is seen may be mere appearance, not reality. After all, she has dressed for her journey so that "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." At the same time, her social position (dependent upon a son's charity) and her regional origins in rural East Tennessee hardly coincide with those of the gentility. Far from being a "lady," she is a pretentious, middle-class woman.

The difference between the two characters lies in their words. The Misfit's statements are as harsh as his vision; the Grandmother disguises her vision beneath traditional Christian pieties. In fact, she disguises it so well that even she is unaware of its true nature—until forced to view it in the mirror of The Misfit. When she does, she begins to change, to unify her words and actions, her medium and message—something that happens in what many view as an instantaneous conversion—an occurrence which Dante's form would seem to reject.

The writer's problem which O'Connor's situation on the highway presents is how in a limited physical situation to realize Dante's gradual illumination. Certainly, a reader could claim some sort of vague psychological journey—the kind of eternity-experienced-in-a-single-instant which not only stood Ambrose Bierce in good stead but has since provided fodder for such post-modernists as Barth and Borges. However, O'Connor is not interested in such literary tricks. Instead, she turns to a second, even more ancient, model for a comic form that suggests great action within a limited space: the comic form of Aristophanes.

Any suggestion of a link between O'Connor and the king of ribald fifth-century Greek comedy must, at first, seem odd. However, such a connection is more than possible. Robert Fitzgerald has noted the influence of Sophocles' Oedipus plays upon the composition of Wise Blood, and O'Connor herself seems to confirm this report in a 13 February 1954 letter to Ben Griffith: "At the time I was writing the last of [Wise Blood], I was living in Connecticut with the Robert Fitzgeralds. Robert Fitzgerald translated the Theban cycle with Dudley Fitts, and their translation of the Oedipus Rex had just come out and I was taken with it. Do you know that translation? I am not an authority on such things, but I think it must be the best, and it is certainly very beautiful. Anyway, all I can say is, I did a lot of thinking about Oedipus." Moreover, this chance encounter was not the limit of her contact with ancient Greek literature. As might be expected of the housemate and close friend of a Greek translator—if not a Georgia recluse—O'Connor shows in her letters a familiarity with the work of Euripides and Homer. Also, Kinney's study of her library reveals a volume of plays by Aeschylus and translations of two plays by Aristophanes—the two comedies, significantly, translated by Fitzgerald's co-worker on the Oedipus translation: Dudley Fitts. Admittedly, from this point, any further connection becomes tenuous, and it is not the argument advanced here that O'Connor consciously drew upon Aristophanes as a model. Nevertheless, the biographical evidence suggests that she knew at least some of Aristophanes' plays, while the text of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" offers striking parallels to his comic structure.

Francis MacDonald Cornford, in providing one of the major discussions of that structure, explains that in the comedies of Aristophanes there exists a "definite section" "referred to in the text as 'the Agon " Although he disagrees with those critics who see it as "the whole play," Cornford labels it "the first moment in the action" and "the chief and critical moment." He further describes the Agon this way:

In some plays, it is less a debate than a criminal trial, and less like a trial than a duel, with the two half-Choruses acting as seconds and the Leader as umpire. It is several times preceded by an actual fight with fists or missiles, which is somehow arrested in order that the flushed combatants may have it out with their tongues instead. Though the victory is finally won by argument—a term which must include all the arsenal of invective—the Agon is no mere 'dramatised debate'; it ends in the crisis and turning-point of the play, reverses the situation of the adversaries, and leads not to an academic resolution, but to all the rest of the action that follows. Above all, it is, as we have said, organically related to the final marriage in which the victor is bridegroom, the triumph of the new God or the new King.

He also describes the major players in the Agon as follows:

First there are the two Adversaries (as we shall call them). For the sake of convenience, we shall distinguish them as the 'Agonist' and the 'Antagonist.' The Agonist is the hero, who is attacked, is put on his defense, and comes off victorious. The Antagonist is the villain, who is in the stronger position at first, but is worsted and beaten from the field.

With these definitions and descriptions in mind, O'Connor's paralleling of them in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" becomes apparent. The dialogue between the Grandmother and The Misfit serves as "the chief and critical moment" in the story, and clearly, it consists of a debate which develops elements of both trial and duel. The question at hand involves "goodness": is there a good man present in the situation—the "accident," as the children refer to it—who can redeem or save those involved in it?

The course of this debate provides much of the story's black humor. The Misfit opens the proceedings and takes the offensive by aligning himself with the negative in his hints of the evil to come: "'it would have been better for "all" of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me.'" The Grandmother counters by asserting the positive, using as the basis of her reasoning the evidence of appearance: "'I know you're a good man,'" she tells The Misfit, who is pointing a gun at her. "'You don't look a bit like you have common blood.'" The Misfit answers her with a direct denial—'"Nome, I ain't a good man'"—even as he emphasizes his good appearances by apologizing, like a gentleman, for being shirtless. Meanwhile, he orders his henchmen to take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods where they will be shot. Round one goes to The Misfit. This defeat forces the Grandmother to move on to another point of argument: the familiar forms of her religion. '"You could be honest too if you'd only try,'" she tells him, and then she asks, '"Do you ever pray?'" Obviously, the Grandmother imagines prayer as a kind of vending machine, and she sees goodness as some sort of necessary consumer item, part of the "comfortable life" she touts. At first, the Misfit replies by denying his materialism. '"Nobody had nothing I wanted,'" he tells her. However, in light of his story about borrowing clothes, this argument seems blatantly untrue, and, sensing a weakness, the Grandmother presses her point: '"If you would pray . . . Jesus would help you.'" Here The Misfit admits she is telling the truth—"That's right'"—but then destroys her point by showing that it is not germane: "'I don't want no hep . . . I'm doing all right by myself.'" Round Two goes to The Misfit. Her second point vanquished, the Grandmother moves onto a third position, a rather surprising one given her previous certainty but one, perhaps, dictated by the dire nature of events: the Grandmother presses her case on the basis of the mystery of Jesus. In seeing "Jesus" as both possible help and curse, as paradox, she moves toward the position her opponent claims: '"Yes'm . . . Jesus thown everything off balance.'" The truth of this statement in Christian doctrine is that by his existence Jesus demonstrated that humans could not justify themselves, that God does not run a good/credit, evil/debit accounting system. Instead, orthodoxy holds that "goodness" is not dependent upon human action but upon a faith which participates in the death/resurrection pattern Jesus established. In short, goodness stands in relationship to the paradoxical pattern St. Paul describes when he writes, "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." By his statements, the Misfit responds to the Grandmother's use of the mystery of Jesus by claiming that it supports, not her case, but his.

At this point, The Misfit appears to have won the Agon, a sign that he is the "hero" of this tale; however, he then admits that he does not hold the position that he has described. He will not claim the argument of Christ's mystery because he lacks empirical evidence and refuses to accept on faith the possibility of Christ's action: "'I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't [raise the dead). . . . I wisht I had of been there. . . . It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady . . . if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now.'" The winning argument is now up for grabs, and the Grandmother advances to it. Having earlier admitted the impossibility of certainty—'"Maybe He didn't raise the dead'"—she begins symbolically to enact the death St. Paul speaks of, despite uncertainty. The text describes her as sinking "down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her." She then rises, not to argue that someone else is a good man, but she rises as a good man—justified, in the eyes of orthodoxy, by faith. More importantly, the discerning reader justifies her as well—not because of an unseen faith but due to an overt act. The Grandmother stops merely showing good manners by her words and, instead, shows love to her enemy by an act. '"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my children'," she says, followed by a small but undeniable act of compassion: a touch. Such argument is unanswerable; the Grandmother wins the Agon, a fact the Misfit's wordless, mindless murder of her seems to admit.

In picturing the Grandmother's "change" as a Greek Agon, O'Connor manages to avoid giving her an instantaneous conversion and instead has her conform to the Dantean pattern of comic illumination achieved through a descent into a hell. In combining the two comic forms, she achieves in her art an illustration of the idea Emmanuel Mounier expressed in a passage which O'Connor marked in his book Personalism: ". . . life is a struggle against death; spiritual death is a struggle against the inertia of matter and the sloth of the body. The person attains self-consciousness, not through some ecstasy, but by force of mortal combat; and force is one of its principal attributes. Not the brute force of mere power and aggression, in which man forsakes his own action and imitates the behavior of matter; but human force, which is at once internal and efficacious, spiritual and manifest."

Still, this is not the end of the story, or of O'Connor's paralleling of Greek comedy. Cornford notes the tendency in the Sacrifice/Feast/Wedding portions of the plays for "elderly heroes" to "throw off the slough of sour and morose old age, and emerge at the end carrying their youthful behavior to the point of scandal"—a pattern especially clear in Wasps. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the final image of the Grandmother displays her not only as sacrificial victim, but also as strangely rejuvenated, her position "like a child's." Moreover, in the face of so much "serious" horror, "her face [is] smiling up at the cloudless sky."

The modern reader may be tempted to shiver at the thought of a smile in the face of so much blood—just as we shiver at horrors which the protagonist of Dante's poem encounters in hell. Moreover, unlike Dante, O'Connor does not mitigate her picture of suffering by allowing the reader to follow The Grandmother beyond the river of death into purgatory or paradise. Her focus remains plainly on this world, not the next. In Dante, however, the vision of Inferno changes because, as Freccero points out, we finally see it from the view of paradise. "In a sense," Freccero writes, "the purpose of the entire journey is to write the poem, to attain the vantage-point of Lucy, and of all the blessed, from which to perceive the figura and the coherence in life, and to bear witness to that coherence for other men."

The loss of faith in modern times, the difference O'Connor noted between Dante's age and her own, makes such a vantage point and such a coherence seem a fantasy—an obvious fiction unacceptable within the bounds of "realism." "Happily ever after" exists only in the province of fairy tales; O'Connor dare not claim it as "real." Instead, she can only make use of forms which imply it—the forms of comedy as it was known in ancient times.