Going Limp: Flannery O'Connor and Ottessa Moshfegh

One night I had a dream that Gigi told me to make a radio program out of the demon voices inside of me.  I did so, and when I put the program on the air, the world heard the evil things the demons were saying, and everybody went crazy and killed themselves.  In bed, as I dreamed, I became paralyzed.  The ceiling opened up and an alien spaceship lasered down a powerful ray of vacuous light and exorcised all the demons out through my chest.  It took about ten seconds.
                                     -Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Surrogate”

note to flannery o’connor: most people are just regular
                                    -Patricia Lockwood tweeting for Strand Book Store

I picked up Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story collection Homesick for Another World for two reasons.  The first was the presentation of the book itself.  The title evoked an existential, quasi-religious sort of ennui that immediately struck a chord with me on the particular day that I came across it.  The cover art, featuring a flying saucer speeding through a cloudy sky and a small and limp human form being lifted off the ground by a tractor beam, added to this compelling title the further appeal of science-fiction iconography.  Already this seemed right up my alley.  When I opened the book to read the dust jacket, I was given the last piece of evidence that I needed to take this collection and read it—Moshfegh is proclaimed in the liner notes as “our Flannery O’Connor.” 

I first encountered O’Connor in an undergraduate literature course.  At the time her spiritual vision—of a Christ who had to break through humanity’s prideful and clueless stubbornness with the violent force of tough-love—was something that I needed to keep me hanging on to the Christian faith in which I had been raised.  Years later, while working on a Master’s thesis on O’Connor’s fiction, I again found her work crucial to my still-developing faith.  This time, though, it was different.  I found within myself the need to articulate my faith if not against O’Connor’s vision then at least in a way that tempered it significantly.  Humanity’s prideful and stubborn cluelessness I could still acknowledge, but I found myself craving something that O’Connor rarely offers in her work:  Divine gentleness. 

Upon beginning Moshfegh’s collection, I immediately saw the merit of the comparison to O’Connor.  Though set largely on the west coast of the United States, clear across the country from O’Connor’s Deep South, Moshfegh’s stories led me into familiar territory.  Like O’Connor’s work, the tales in Homesick for Another World are populated by absurd caricatures and ridiculous figures whose idiosyncrasies, while often hilarious, render them decidedly grotesque.  Also like O’Connor, however, Moshfegh’s characters are imminently relatable, summoning up the reader’s sympathy and pity just as easily as they may inspire revulsion.  They, too, seem to be waiting for an upsetting but saving intrusion that may pave the way for what we might call, if a bit tiredly, redemption. 

Though these similarities are clear, there are some critical ways in which Moshfegh’s aesthetic diverges from O’Connor’s.  It is in these differences, I believe, that she shines a new light, providing a valuable counterpoint.

The first significant difference is that Moshfegh’s stories have no overt religious or theological underpinning.  There are certain religious details in the backdrop of a few of her stories—the alcoholic math teacher at the center of “Bettering Myself” works for a Catholic school and the troubled siblings of “A Better Place” seem to attend a similar school—there is no consistent presence of any institutional faith as there is in O’Connor’s stories.  Nor should there need to be.  There is, however, a biting and incisive picture of capitalist consumer-culture and the degrees to which individuals invest their identities in acquiring and consuming.  My favorite example of this, perhaps, is Nick, the narrator of “Dancing in the Moonlight.”  Nick is thirty-three years old and self-consciously living through his “Jesus year,” in honor of which he has grown his hair out long.  Nick lives a strangely ascetic life in the small room he rents in a decrepit flophouse.  His existence is nebulous, with little evidence of attachment or connection to anyone other than his friend Mark, who has moved on to a defined and controlled family life that Nick seems to view with more than a little disdain.  His small income as a graphic designer goes toward expensive clothes, cappuccino, and alcohol.  The inertia of his life, it seems, is carefully walled up by the cultivation of style and comfort.  The story chronicles Nick’s infatuation with a woman who sells refurbished furniture and the ridiculous quest that this sends him on, momentarily breaking his inertia with a sense of absurd aspiration and momentum.  Upon the end of the story, Nick returns to find a fire raging in his flophouse, perhaps (but not certainly) due to his negligence with a heater, and he declares the fire an “act of God.”  This wonderfully ambiguous line leaves the reader (well, leaves me at least) uncertain as to whether Nick means that a force beyond his control has freed him from the symbol of his life of passive consumption, or if he is simply deflecting responsibility in extension of this mode of existence.  

O’Connor’s stories bring her characters to moments of loss—sometimes violent or deadly, but often simply humiliating—in order to force them to a transformative moment that they would never have reached on their own.  Moshfegh’s stories often bring her characters into contact with these moments only to see them sliding by them, correcting course back into tortured mediocrity.  There is a beautiful way, however, in which this refusal to transform is itself the sort of trauma that O’Connor wanted so badly for her readers to believe could be healing, and this leaves me guardedly hopeful for most of Moshfegh’s characters.

But, honestly, transformation doesn’t seem to be the point.  And it is the second difference between Moshfegh’s fiction and O’Connor’s that I find more telling as to what the point, if there is one, might be.

This difference is evident from the passage excerpted at the beginning of this post.  Notice the first person?  That’s it.  Moshfegh’s stories are often delivered in the first person, and it makes all the difference in the world.

O’Connor’s stories, to the very last one, come to us through the voice of a third person narrator who is…many things.  Although capable of moments of cutting compassion and sublime transcendence, O’Connor’s narrator is also merciless in presenting the deluded egos of O’Connor’s characters and, usually, the shattering of those egos.  Through the eyes of this narrator, readers can easily discern the cultural and intellectual patterns by which these characters enmesh themselves in false-selves (Southern cultural/religious gentility in stories like “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Greenleaf”, academic/artistic elitism in “The Enduring Chill” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, and a host of others).  This perspective is perfect for the process of caricature-critique in which O’Connor engages, but it usually leaves the reader unable to discern any sort of self-awareness on the part of the characters.  Generally (though with some possible exception) O’Connor’s characters appear confoundingly unaware of their own hypocrisy, self-contradiction, absurdity, and callousness.  It is this stubborn refusal to see the cracks in their own edifices that, in O’Connor’s world, necessitates their shattering to make room for something more spiritually authentic.  This aesthetic makes O’Connor’s moments of violent transcendence utterly captivating.  I have come to believe, though, that the disposition of the narrative voice makes O’Connor’s depiction of the human psyche and its motivations frustratingly problematic. 

This is why I appreciate what Moshfegh does with her first-person narratives.  Although Moshfegh’s characters are often as absurd or clueless as O’Connor’s (particularly in the third-person narratives like “An Honest Woman”), the use of first person in some of the stories allows readers to see that these characters are, in fact, aware of the cracks in their edifices.  It also allows readers to see that the efforts to keep the edifice intact despite these cracks are exhausting and agonizing to these characters in ways that would never be evident from a third-person narrator that is not committed to sympathy.  Nick from “Dancing in the Moonlight” gives a glimpse of this in describing his lonely Christmas-night visit to a patron-less bar staffed by a lone woman who, for just a moment, he feels is scorning him:

So much of my life I’d been faking my reactions, claiming to myself and others that I liked what I
liked because I believed it was good for me, while in fact I didn’t like that shit at all.  This woman could see that I wanted to be ruined.  I wanted someone…to come and destroy me.

Not all of these confessional moments, however, contain as much direct self-loathing as Nick’s.  Stephanie, the narrator of the story “The Surrogate,” is my favorite.  Committed to upholding and enacting an unfailingly attractive public personae by virtue of her job, Stephanie is locked out of true physical intimacy “due to a pituitary situation” (I’ll let you read about this yourself, should you choose).  Stephanie’s physical abnormality is accompanied by an agonized sense of her own perceived internal inadequacies—articulated beautifully, I believe, in the passage with which this post begins.  Of all Moshfegh’s characters, Stephanie’s story is the one that comes the closest to something we might call healing, and, though it is not in the fashion of her flying-saucer-dream, I think it is her dream that gives me a centralizing theme for Moshfegh’s stories. 

A small emblem on the cover of Homesick for Another World depicts something much like what Stephanie describes from her dream.  A human form stands beneath a descending ray of light.  The person looks for all the world as if he or she is going limp, ready to be pulled up in the tractor beam or simply overtaken by this alien ray.  “Resistance is futile,” the posture seems to say.  “I know because I’ve tried.”  Moshfegh does not bring her characters to the same moments of ego-shattering trauma that O’Connor does in her expressions of divine tough-love.  What Moshfegh does, however, is beautifully depict characters whose way forward is going limp,  allowing the flow to carry them somewhere beyond the comfortable confines of their ego-prisons.  Whether they achieve this posture or not is not often clear, but the rendering of the struggle is hilarious, uncomfortably familiar, and irresistibly poignant. 

I said, “On a good day, every small thing is enchanting.  Everything is a miracle.  There is no emptiness.  There is no need for forgiveness or escape or medicine.  I hear only the wind in the trees, and my devils hatching their sacral plans, fusing all the shattered pieces together into a blanket of ice.  I have found that it’s under that ice that I can feel I am just another normal person.  In the dark and cold, I am at ‘peace.’”      
                                    -Ottessa Moshfegh, “The Surrogate”     

*Quotations taken from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, published by Penguin Press in 2017.