Don Hardy's study of Flannery O'Connor
Students in my 298 class recently tackled two of this American author's stories, "Revelation," and "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I mentioned to Don that my students sometimes dislike Ruby Turpin, the protagonist of "Revelation." His students, he noted, often "want to hate Turpin," but once they learn a little about the South O'Connor lived in and wrote about, they are more accepting. In the story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the protagonist is a somewhat tedious character, a grandmother. I find her fate very interesting, but Don's students are more interested in the killer, "perhaps because there are so many misfits in cinema." He mentioned Samuel Jackson's character Jules Winnfield in "Pulp Fiction," and Javier Bardem's character in the Coen brothers' production of "No Country for Old Men" in particular. In the Q and A that follows, Don discusses some of the technical and technological aspects of his study, particularly his interest in the middle voice in O'Connor's work.
What's the book about?
The book investigates through computational, linguistic, and literary methods the intersection of body, grammatical voice, the grotesque, and the sacramental in Flannery O'Connor's fiction. The grammatical analysis concentrates on constructions that manifest the semantic arena of the middle voice in English, essentially the formal and semantic merger of actor and undergoer. For example, body parts frequently seem to act on their own in O'Connor's fiction and characters act on themselves in reflexive ways.
How did you come to this approach?
I've been working with O'Connor's texts for several years now. I noticed, as have many other critics (notably, Susan Srigley, Christina Bieber Lake, and Joanne Halleran McMullen) the spirit-mind-body problem in O' Connor and thought that the body and middle voice would be interesting, largely because I had worked on middle voice in Creek earlier and knew that body and middle voice interact in interesting ways, as many linguists have pointed out, most influentially for me Suzanne Kemmer.
Can you say a little about the technical aspect of analyzing O'Connor this way?
One of the main reasons I wrote the book was to work out for myself some of the thornier quantitative issues involved in analyzing language data. Through discussions with a colleague at Colorado State University--Professor Doug Flahive--and examination of the existing research literature on the subject, I came to realize that many standard statistical analyses are unreliable for language for the reason that they depend on the assumption that language is random. As many have pointed out (most interestingly for me, John F. Burrows), language behavior is not random; thus, probability testing is frequently unreliable for language data. Adam Kilgarriff and Ted Dunning are among the many leaders in the technical solutions to this problem. The body, the middle voice, and O'Connor's fiction became the excuse for me to learn and apply the computational and mathematical best practices for analysis of narrative data.
What impact do you think such methods might have on O'Connor studies?
I'm not sure what the impact of such methods might be. I expect that if there is an impact it will be to encourage more linguistic analyses of O'Connor's fiction. There is a tradition of this analysis in O'Connor studies (see Joanne Halleran McMullen and David R. Mayer, for example) but it is not as well known as other approaches. I don't expect more computational analyses; however, there are many linguistic-stylistic topics that remain to be mined in her fiction qualitatively. The book might more easily fit into a genre of computational analysis produced by scholars on a wide variety of writers. These scholars include, among many, many others, David Hoover, Elena Semino, Mick Short, Kay Wikberg, Michael Stubbs, Masahiro Hori, Martin Gliserman, and Lisa Cohen Minnick.
How did your research impact your understanding of her work?
My understanding has been improved a bit, in that now I "know" (always a questionable word for O'Connor) that there are subtle grammatical patterns that I am convinced support the aims that she consciously had in writing. The main impact of the research has been to deepen my appreciation of O'Connor's gifts to American literature.