The 'Old Child' In Faulkner and O'Connor

by Conan Christopher O'Brien

March 1, 1985

INTRODUCTION

How do we relate to our myths? The question is asked by almost every
culture at some point in its history, not to find out specifically where
it has been as much as to locate itself in the present. The legends and
beliefs of our origin are compelling because they invite comparison. They
tempt us towards self-examination because -- at a distance -- they appear
so starkly absolute and resolute: so resolved. In a Utopian view of the
past many anxious questions arise about the present. Are we as good as our
fore-fathers? Have we made progress? Have we fallen? The farther we move
away from the past the more it commands our attention and forces us to
re-negotiate our personal and cultural identity.

The American South has undergone such a period of self-examination in the
early and mid-20th century known as the Southern Literary Renaissance.
During the Renaissance, historians, fiction writers, and sociologists
began to search for a sense of regional character by sorting through the
stories, ideals, legalisms and codes of the Southern experience. The
search invariably forced these intellectuals to decide which visions of
the Old South to keep, which to abandon, and which to re-write. The
answers have varied widely but the essential question has remained the
same: How should the South's notion of what it was determine its new
identity? The purpose of this thesis is not to find the answer but to
examine the power and prevalence of the question.

W.J. Cash argues that the South is a child, indulging itself with
comfortable myths of innocence, while C. Van Woodward maintains the South
is apre-maturely aged region, stripped of its childhood legends by a
series of bitter, awakening defeats. Although they disagree, both men
associate the South's old myths with the metaphor of childhood. This image
seems appropriate because children need to forge a sense of self and they
rely heavily on myths for spiritual sustenance. In their years of rapid
growth children thirst for beliefs and ideals as a foundation for their
newly-forming identity.

This association between childhood and myth can also be used to analyze
Cash and Woodward themselves. As intellectuals of the Southern
Renaissance, they too are feeding a New South's craving for
self-definition with myths and revisions of myths from the Old South. As
writers from the first prolonged period of Southern self-criticism, they
have the child's impulse to organize, choose, and interpret past lengeds
in order to construct a new identity. This analogy holds not only for
historians but for Southern fiction writers of the Renaissance as well.
According to Louis Rubin, these writers intensely re-examined their
region's character and were disturbed by what they found:

"These new writers were, in short, modern Americans who were Southerners;
and because that identity posed complex problems of self-definition and
was fraught with incongruity, discrepancies, oppositions and divisions,
and loyalties and contradictions that were rooted in the circumstances of
their time and place, their writings probed beneath the everyday surfaces
to get at the universal human problems of definition . . . "

In their child-like forging of identity, these writers encounter
traditions unique to the South which contrast with many ideals of the New
South. The most obvious of these problematic traditions is that of racism.
Most Southern Renaissance writers have had to question how the racial
tension in the South's history affects the New Southerner in his youthful
state of self-definition.

According to Lilliam Smith, this racist tradition has marred the
Southerner, but specifically it has damaged the children of the New South.
Smith argues that all Southern children are "stunted and warped" by racial
conflict and that it "cruelly shapes and cripples" the personality of the
child. In her shocking image of a child "crippled" and distorted by this
Southern tradition, Smith is really symbolizing the dilemma of many
Southern Renaissance writers. In their child-like state of forming a self,
these writers are tortured by the contrasts between powerful Southern
traditions and the need to abandon or re-write these traditions in the
forging of a New Southern identity. These Old South myths of honor,
invulnerability, racism, innocence, and bravery can distort and "cripple"
the writer during his formative stage of identity construction. The
distinct relevance of this warped child image to Southern intellectuals
raises an important question: Have other writers of the Literary
Renaissance voiced their innate sense of discrepancy through this image of
a warped child? I believe that they have.

I have found that several Southern Renaissance writers have articulated
their regional sense of contradiction through what I have termed literary
progeria. Progeria is an often fatal disease that strikes children and
ages them pre-maturely. In the works of several Southern writers the child
protagonist becomes "old" long before his time because he is tormented by
the same anxiety over myth which troubles Cash and Woodward. In an effort
to construct an identity the child is drawn to past myths and builds the
foundation of his character on archaic beliefs. The result is that this
child caries the vast experience of these myths as burden; he or she
becomes an "old child" who tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his elderly
identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child"
who tries unsucessfully (sic) to reconcile his elderly identity with the
modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" symbol in
Katherine Anne Porter's _Pale Horse, Pale Rider _ as well as in Caron
McCuller's _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ and _A Member of the Wedding_,
but these authors do not explore the symbol extensively enough to
establish its characteristics and thematic significance. Both William
Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor do develop the "old child" symbol
extensively, however, and although they differ in their specific fictional
concerns it is clear that the image emanates from similar regional
instinct. Each author places the "old child" in the center of generational
argument over the value of past myths and the child, unable to reconcile
opposing views, represents experience and thus an anguished state of
conflicting loyalties. The extreme generational attitudes towards myth
resemble the same extremes Cash and Woodward delineate in their argument
over the South's relation to the past. The myth Faulkner's children turn
to is the myth of the Old South and his "old children" suffer from a
spiritual progeria. O'Connor adds a second layer of significance to the
symbol by incorporating the myth of Christian redemption and this
increased complexity produces in her children both a spiritual _and_ a
physical progeria which borders on the freakish.

By establishing a close correlation between such disparate Southern
Renaissance writers as Faulkner and O'Connor we can begin to appreciate
the power of the "old child's" significance. This is not a paradigm which
has been examined in detail in the critical literature, but the motif
merits our closer examination -- first because it is a figure which recurs
throughout the literature of this period and second, because the "old
child" represents these Southern Renaissance writers need to dramatize the
the bitter argument that rages within them.

. . . .

Excerpt from THE CONCLUSION

. . . .

Flannery O'Connor's fiction also explores this distinctly Southern paradox
through the symbol of the "old child." Like Faulkner, she creates child
characters who are disillusioned by the inactivity and lack of belief in
their parent's generation and subsequently construct their identity on the
model of an elderly figure, only to suffer a tug of loyalties between the
past and the present which embitters the child. The difference with
O'Connor is that the discrepancy she seeks to capture is not between the
Old South and the New South but between the Christian promise of
Redemption and a modern nihilism and as a result her "old children" suffer
both a spiritual _and_ physical progeria. Her "old children" are more
freakish and grotesque than Faulkner's but they still emanate from the
Southern question of how to incorporate past myths in articulating an
identity in the present. . . .

**

AL BELL's ANALYSIS: 

I think this thesis is as much about Late Night, and the generation
reluctantly known as Generation X, as it is about Southern Gothic
literature. Conan IS one of Flannery O'Connor's old children, torn between
traditional Catholic spiritualism and modern nihilism.

Conan and other serious Gen X artists know that they live in a screwed up
society. They know we have to find a way to care about something other
than scandals and the landfill in our own backyard, or face destruction.

But Gen X artists also know that the Nazis, the Communists, the urban
planners of the 1960s, and the free-sex Baby Boomer hippies have caused so
much destruction that they made the very thought of altruism seem
ridiculous.

Gen X artists who try to say they care about the world end up sounding
like sanctimonious pricks, beauty pageant contestants or
genocidal dictators in training.

About all a self-respecting Gen X artist can do is gurgle something about
how it would be nice if someone would keep the Serbians from killing
ethnic Albanians, or AIDS from killing 20 percent of the population of
Africa.

So Conan fixates on guys like Lincoln and Kennedy -- good guys who
found sensible ways to care -- as if trying to figure out some way that we
could care, too.

Page established in May 30, 1997. Hit counter installed Dec. 2, 1999.