Short Stories, and My Limited Experience Thereof

I’m just discovering the stories of Ray Bradbury.  What a fascinating mind. His imaginings are weird and textured. He saw the possibility for horror in everything from a twelve-year old boy crossing a ditch in the dark to a middle-aged man’s desire to put up a hot-dog stand on Mars. He lucidly illustrated, in one story I will never forget, the old saw about not wanting someone if they were the last person in the world. A guy gets left behind when the settlement on Mars is abandoned. After a while he meets up with the only woman left behind. She’s repulsive. And he drives to the other side of the planet as fast as he can. The scenario is impossible but necessary  – what makes it Ray Bradbury is the detail about the ringing telephones.

It reminds me a bit of my old struggles with Flannery O’ Connor. The Bradbury stories give me a bit of context, that I didn’t have before, for the market that O Connor was working in.

My previous experience of the short story form is fairly limited, I suppose. As a teen I loved O Henry. He always wrote optimistic stories, in which the twists of fate work to human advantage – or at least reveal humor, or something redeeming within man’s nature. As a body of work they are unrealistic I suppose. Human life can’t always work out quite so well. However, as a teen I believed that the times when it didn’t work out were merely events, while the times when they did were stories, microcosms of a world in which God comes to the rescue, eventually, in which man comes to his senses and repents, eventually, in which the evil lasts for a time and then is forgotten in a weight of glory.

My own short stories were always quirky. If one of my faults is to dramatize myself, the corresponding virtue is that I can (or once could) dramatize anything. I laughed myself silly turning the arrival of those Japanese beetles (do you remember how annoyed we all were those first few years?) into an actual plague. I dramatized the fact that different people have different hair colors, a mean rooster we had, and the question of what women hide under their makeup. No one else ever understood the humor in my stories, so I guess my artistry was poor.

O Connor doesn’t have that problem, her artistry was great.

Ray Bradbury found scope for horror in a baby’s improbable memories, in shooting stars that are really lost astronauts. As far as I know, Flannery O Connor had one stage, she found horror in one place only – human sinfulness. She talks about the subhuman way in which we experience life, the continuous indifferent punishment we recieve for our forefather’s choices, about death without dignity and most of all, about petty evils spewing from human minds.  The sin she talks of is so often Original Sin, something that no one could do anything about if it existed. Ray Bradbury’s horror is the other side of a wonder that he never quite lost sight of. It always comes with a sense of consolation: insanity set against sanity, fear against love, loss against eternity, horror against humor. You get the sense he actually loves the folk he creates. O’ Connor achieves this far more rarely.

There’s one O’ Connor story I admire in a way.  I won’t say which one. It simply happens to speak of my own brand of sinfulness with great accuracy. I read it once and I will never need to read it again.

Yet after all, how very redundant!

Perhaps if Flannery O’ Connor were in a Ray Bradbury story, she’d be cast as a freak of nature with an endless ability to perceive people’s sins and to show them up mercilessly. As a body of work her stories are unrealistic. Human life can’t always be that devoid. (And the remnants of my teenage self persist in asking, what makes these stories and not just happenings?)

Ray Bradbury’s stories are unrealistic in their individual details, but as a body of work they are rather hopeful, for all their horror. He tells of a “spaceman” who stops believing, first in the Earth he’s left behind, then in the other levels of his “rocket,” then in the men he can see and touch, and finally in his own body. The man puts on a suit and quietly floats off into space, “nothing above, nothing below, nothing on either side,” driven to enact his own madness. The story isn’t told from the mad astronaut’s viewpoint. If it were we might think his viewpoint was valid. It’s told from the viewpoint of someone who cares, who tries to stop him. That alone is enough to remind us that the “spaceman” is wrong. The blackness of space is not our home because we were made to be filled and to fill. However much of our human destiny has been squandered, there is some of it that we still “hold in our mind” like the sane astronaut held the memory of Earth.

Of course, Bradbury is very much a modernist. Most of his stories don’t end well. Of what I’ve read so far, only one does, and it’s religious. It’s a story about a priest who goes to Mars, full of love and curiosity, looking for new sins and new sinners to convert, convinced that without bringing the Martians communion they will burn in hell. Instead he finds beings who have been given their own path to communion with God and now live in a state of grace previously unimagined by him. As he goes back to minister to his own kind he ruminates on the fact that he found Christ on Mars. It’s enough to choke up any Christian. Sadly, it contains heresies. The state of grace achieved by the Martians came by shedding their bodies and becoming a-physical.  And by “Christ” he does not necessarily mean Jesus, for he says that God gave us Christ “in Jesus, in the shape of a man” while his own intentions were to give the Martians “Christ” in a different shape.

As I think about the fact that modernists found hope through a “liberal” revised Christianity, and as I think about fundamentalism, trying to retain what the liberals were letting go ( seemingly unaware of why the liberals needed that hope so badly and why the fundamentalist version of Christianity was denying it to them) I seem to see the story of the last century a little more clearly. It’s funny that a man who claims to have found his inspiration in lunatics, in circuses and sideshows, in Buck Rogers radio shows and Lon Cheney films and dinosaurs, should have come out with something that provokes so much reflection. Once again I recall that reflection cannot really be directly provoked without great tedium. It’s through enjoyment, through delight, that our minds open up. However sinful, petty, and undeserving we are, it remains a fact that Love alone saves us.