Robert Coles’s Mouth

Flannery O’Connor’s South By Robert Coles Louisiana University Press, 175 pp., $14.95 Robert Coles is the well-known author of the Children of Crisis series as well as works on Erik Erikson and Walker Percy, among others. He says in the introduction to his latest book, consisting of three essays on Flannery O’Connor, that he wrote it to live up to a promise he’d been making to himself for some time. The rest of his book is equally self-referential. He can write, “I count in my library ten books, and two major and widely distributed monographs devoted to an understanding of her work.” This is his count of his library, somehow, and not a bibliographical reference to public information. He asks the question, “How much more critical attention can a couple of dozen stories and two quite slim novels, however brilliantly and originally crafted, manage to sustain—without some recognition from all of us that the time has come for a bit of a pause?” Apparently we must pause after, not before, the publication of yet another book—the one by Robert Coles.

The trembling of anxiety ripples through his text. When he describes the entry of the Displaced Person and the consequent threat to Mrs. Shortley, he expands the reference so widely that we are back again with Coles: “There is always a competitor, we have all learned—in rural Georgia, on Madison Avenue, of course, and it has to be added, within our academic enclaves. Just as someone writing about Flannery O’Connor counts nervously the number of published [sic] articles that address that writer’s work, so it was that a Georgia mother began to eye suspiciously …,” etc.

JT

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J. O. Tate

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Flannery O’Connor’s South By Robert Coles Louisiana University Press, 175 pp., $14.95 Robert Coles is the well-known author of the Children of Crisis series as well as works on Erik Erikson and Walker Percy, among others. He says in the introduction to his latest book, consisting of three essays on Flannery O’Connor, that he wrote it to live up to a promise he’d been making to himself for some time. The rest of his book is equally self-referential. He can write, “I count in my library ten books, and two major and widely distributed monographs devoted to an understanding of her work.” This is his count of his library, somehow, and not a bibliographical reference to public information. He asks the question, “How much more critical attention can a couple of dozen stories and two quite slim novels, however brilliantly and originally crafted, manage to sustain—without some recognition from all of us that the time has come for a bit of a pause?” Apparently we must pause after, not before, the publication of yet another book—the one by Robert Coles.

The trembling of anxiety ripples through his text. When he describes the entry of the Displaced Person and the consequent threat to Mrs. Shortley, he expands the reference so widely that we are back again with Coles: “There is always a competitor, we have all learned—in rural Georgia, on Madison Avenue, of course, and it has to be added, within our academic enclaves. Just as someone writing about Flannery O’Connor counts nervously the number of published [sic] articles that address that writer’s work, so it was that a Georgia mother began to eye suspiciously …,” etc.