On Reading Flannery O'Connor's "“A Late Encounter with the Enemy"

“A Late Encounter with the Enemy” follows the interaction of Sally Poker, an aged woman about to graduate from a teacher’s college and her Civil War veteran grandfather General Sash. Focusing on pride, the story digs deep into the many facades that drive Southern Tradition. More than anything, the Old South lives through the collective focus on social perception and appearance. People dwell on the past, attaching themselves to both tradition and their lineage as if it is a form of nobility, a fact O’Connor never fails to spotlight.

Thus General Sash follows in a long line of O’Connor’s aged, southern males, men fixed in their racist, proper ways. These men stand above others and establish themselves through their self-importance and ability to not only be the best, but to also look the part: “he would be expected to sit on stage in his uniform …there wouldn’t be anything equal to him in his uniform” (134). The General, a man who eschews false teeth, because well, they make him look bad, isn’t even a general. A foot solider at best, over his hundred and four years he’d forgotten his rank and the war itself, leaving his pride to stand on the shoulders of false pretense, traits that O’Connor’s fiction seems to both bask in and treasure: “He had not actually been a general in that war. He had probably been a foot solider; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all” (135). But he has his new uniform, his new title, his sword, and most importantly his ego.

Likewise, Sally Poker strives to be better than the rest. She is graduating at the age of sixty-two with a degree in education despite having a career in the field. She approaches graduation with a grand reluctance, ananger over having been forced to attend school in the first place: “For the past twenty summers, when she should have been resting, she had had to take a trunk in the burning heat to the state teacher’s college; and though when she returned in the fall, she always taught the in the exact same way she had been taught not to teach, this was a mild revenge that didn’t satisfy her sense of justice” (134-135). These words ring with the very same spite as the General’s, and while they detail anyone’s anti-tenure argument, they speak to the family tradition of haughty arrogance. This is the woman who regrets attending a gala because she forgot to put on her fancy shoes—forget the fact that her grandfather was crowned a fictional general at the Confederate Ball. This is a woman who turns her nose up at the system, but parades her symbol of excellence out at the system's celebration. Yet Sally can’t stand up to grandfather, once pretending to sleep in fear upon waking up to find him staring at her naked except for his general’s hat. Such an encounter would have shredded not only her respect, but the general’s, a deed that would crush both proud characters.

Sally needs him whole, for he is her trophy, her beacon of self-worth: “If he had died before Sally Poker’s graduation, she thought she would have died herself” (139). He exists to make her proud, a fact she again voices at the ceremony itself, unaware of the man’s true fate: “she glanced at the General and saw him sitting fixed and fierce, his eyes wide open, and she turned her head forward again and held it a perceptible degree higher” (144). He is her symbol in a symbolic event.

The graduation itself, is well, a graduation. People speak, clap, stand, walk, sit, and wait. No one has fun at these, not the speakers, not the teachers, not the graduates. This is not to say that the event is not dignified and important, but rather, that the event is about the pomp: the show. The General exists as a pawn in the game as he is put on display for all dignitaries. He should love it, yet he feels lost, and confused, a victim to his age and lack of comprehension on the world: “The figure was telling him something about history and the General made up his mind he wouldn’t listen, but the words kept seeping in through the little hole in his head” (142). History contorted, existence as well, the General cannot avoid his greatest advisory: time. Time degraded his brain, brought on confusion, and thus, through a symbolic hole he endures the torment of the graduation ceremony in his own way. Names barrage him, music assails him, and unable to control his facilities, too proud to ask for help and reach out beyond the pain, the General falls, passing away in the sea of black before him. His habit of life comes to an end as a useless symbol to his granddaughter’s misplaced pride.

Favorite Lines:

• “Living had got be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition” (134). So poignant and telling—these words show the reader so much about a character as he is just being introduced.
• “The past and the future were the same thing to him, one forgotten and the other not remembered; he had no more notion of dying than a cat” (139). Here O’Connor confronts the malaise of life the General is living through, much the same as Old Dudley from “The Geranium,”and thus is set up for a fall.
• “The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them” (141).

Other posts on the The Complete Stories include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “The Geranium,” “The Barber,” “The Wildcat,” “The Crop,” “The Turkey,” “The Train,” “The Peeler,”“The Heart of the Park,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” “Enoch and the Gorilla,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” “The River,” “A Circle in the Fire,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  If the book interests you, please use the link in the first paragraph or click the picture to support my efforts when you purchase the text.

A-Skips Demonstration

Quick post here on a common drill that can help you think about your running form. In both regular speed and slow motion, I have A-Skips for your visual pleasure. Basically, A-Skips are high knees, but with a rhythm.

 

Work to get the rhythm as well as the slight jump off the ground. Feel the toes lift. While I commonly have the runners I coach do these in shoes, I taped barefoot (because my shoes were caked in mud post trail run) in order to allow you to see the actual lift off the ground. 

So how do these translate? When running, work on getting the knees up. Unless you are a sprinter, you will never get them this high, but think about getting those legs up, pushing those thighs into the air, and in the process working on the generation of power.

Intrinsic Motivation: A Second Look

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback off of a recent post on Intrinsic Motivation and have been asked to expand on the points I discussed in more depth. Thus, I am going to start here with point one:

“Break each task down into segments that have achievable goals. Write 200 (or 2000) words a day to complete your novel. Break a five mile run into five pieces, so if you need to run it in 45 minutes, you have five goals there, each of nine minutes. Hit one, you feel better, hit another, confidence and motivation grows. One run turns into two, two a week, a week pushes you out.”

Quite often, we put the cart before the horse. We have goals, big ones, but we forget what is required to reach them. For whatever reason, humans think they can blink their eye and boom: they will have a novel or a three hour marathon. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I coach many athletes who have grand plans—they want to run marathons, they want to run them fast, and they want to reap rewards (race qualifications, medals, etc). But a marathon is the sum of many, many efforts. While elites may jump out there and shatter the world with awe, the truth is that their races are the sum of years or raining, and months of specific training for that race. A quick read of Running with the Kenyans details a lifetime of running behind such performances. Some are more gifted than others, but in general, these gifts need repeated exercising for success. Once serious, this lifetime of training comes in the form of training blocks divided into segments ranging from base to quality to tapper.

Each phase is further broken down into weeks of training, training concentrating on various efforts, distances and abilities. In terms of elite runners, days often include multiple training sessions (as many as three). Each has a goal, one might have pace, the other might be strength, the next recovery. The cart is never before the horse, for they the horse is being bred, raised, trained and the cart built from scratch before one ventures out.

I know I am prattling on here, but the point is, have goals. Tons of them. Have goals all over the place. Hit your daily mileage. If the goal is to run slow (yes, this is legitimate) then do it. If you are to run for two hours and no more, then do so. Within those two hours, make an effort to set goals. Maybe to hit your interval sequence or hit a specific mileage. All in all, these daily goals allow one to build to weekly ones, monthly ones, and ultimately your dream. If you fail, and you will, use said failure as motivation. Why did you fail? What went wrong? How can you get to where you need to be? Thus, through self-reflection, reset the path, and thus strive for the end result. Likewise, if you want to write a book, write one. Start with a daily word count, a ritual. It doesn't matter if the words suck, it matters if the words get written. You can and will edit them later. Stephen King, notorious for pumping works out, writes at least 2,000 words a day. He has goals, and he hits hit goals in order to succeed.

Do it, you know you want to.

Book Review: Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken

After letting Unbroken wallow dust ridden on the floor of my room for four years, I finally endeavored to read the text. While Unbroken is not new to the world, the book was and is a bestseller and the movie already a box office smash, I had neglected it because it had been given to me through work as a part of our annual summer reading. As an avid reader I love the concept, but I tend to be quite picky on what I read, and thus left it fallow. Then through a series of conversations with runners I coach and an NPR story highlighting Zamperini, I opened it up and gave the text a go.

In some aspects I loved the text, but in others it fell short. Laura Hillenbrand is more than thorough, painting a detailed account of Louie Zamperini’s life. She takes the reader from the birth of a world class runner up until the waning moments of Zamperini’s life, one that neared a hundred years before reaching its conclusion. She combs over what she considers to be the meat of the story: not his career as a runner but his life as POW. The running career made him famous, fame that kept him alive, and as many runners and running coaches know, taught him the skills he needed to persevere. Hillenbrand brings these details out, but in comparison to the length of the text, some four-hundred pages, the running is a drop in the bucket. She wants to tell the story of a man lost at war, of a horrid experience, of a great generation that gave it their all to protect a way of life. Yet without his first life as an Olympic hero, Zamperini would not have been a household name, he wouldn’t have been the award receiving, speech giving machine he became in his third life: that as a war hero civilian. Thus I feel Hillenbrand owed us more here, could have dug deeper into his triumphs, especially those of his college years. So much content, so much that made Zamperini into the man that endured years of torture, originated from running feats on the oval.

That said, her knowledge of his war time experience is encyclopedic. Hillenbrand ventures to dig deeper than tale of Zamperini, all those he came in contact with during his internment ranging from guards to fellow POWs to liberators. These tales are interesting and as a whole Unbroken is a page a turner. The men around him, those that flew with him, that died with him, that beat him to pulp without reason, these men hold just as much substance as Zamperini. All had a role to play in a saga that encompassed the world as a whole. The reader knows Zamperini will live, but they quest to find out how. While the thirst for survival pushes Hillenbrand’s prose, a writing that is clean with a diverse lexicon, the pages turn not because of the narrative, but due to the fact that Zamperini lived a dynamic, diverse life. We thrive on knowing how he will get there, and we are driven to see him succeed one word at a time.