“How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?”
Mrs. Turnpin hurls this question at heaven toward the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.” The story up to this question has resided in the head of this rather selfish and self-satisfied woman. Sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, Mrs. Turnpin thanks Jesus that she is not “a nigger”, or “white trash” but a nice lady with “a good disposition.” Like the Pharisee who thanked God for not being like the other sinners, Mrs. Turnpin’s gratitude is always at the expense of another person. This merits the condemnation of the seemingly omniscient Mary Grace:
“Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,”
Before arriving at the line of Mary Grace, I was taken aback how similar some of my own thoughts have been to Mrs. Turnpin. I ride the bus to class with mostly single men and unmarried mothers. “Thank God I know the importance of marriage and education,” I have thought on more than one occasion. Then there I was: a hog from hell, in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. Chesterton insisted that bad fiction tells the truth about the author and good fiction tells the truth about the protagonist. But then he wrote The Man Who was Thursday, which, through the everyman Gabriel Syme, tells the truth about the reader.
This seems to be the role of the great fiction writers: to introduce us to ourselves under the pretence of introducing a stranger. Mrs. Turnpin is totally separate from me: in sex, in place, in time, in disposition. Yet if I stare too long into the grotesque distortions of her soul, my own ugly mug begins to peek mischievously back at me.
We conservative students should repeatedly place ourselves before the possibly intrusive mirror of fine fiction. Not only will our minds be cultivated with the sort of beauty only available through the imagination of others; we will examine with increasing clarity the lingering beauties and swelling distortions of our own consciences. Examination of this inner face becomes all the more important at a time when our President assures us he is more suited to the task than ourselves. Backed by the piercing gaze of O’Connor, Chesterton, Dickens, Shakespeare, Swift and Chaucer we can insist that we would really rather he leave this task to us.
