C’est une expérience quasiment douloureuse que de lire Flannery O’Connor. Dans chacune des nouvelles de Everything That Rises Must Converge, elle nous enferme dans la tête de personnages dont les pensées & le monde sont étroits, gangrenés de préjugés coriaces, emmaillotés dans des couches impossibles de mauvaise foi, de naïveté & de nostalgie. C’est étouffant. C’est lourd. &, quand ça éclate, le soulagement qu’on en ressent est délicieusement malsain.

Nous sommes dans le Sud des États-Unis, toujours, dans ses petites villes & les espaces ruraux qui les entourent. Nous sommes aussi quelque part au début des années cinquante, quelques années après la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, alors même le Sud commence à changer. Les revers de fortune s’accumulent ; l’ascension sociale de certains défie les vieilles conventions ; la ségrégation meurt tranquillement de sa belle mort. On assiste, dans les histoires d’O’Connor, à la fin progressive d’un mode de vie, qui donne l’impression d’avoir cuit lentement au soleil, jusqu’à en être devenu friable sous les talons de bottes.

J’ai surtout aimé toutes les histoires de familles qui déçoivent & de fossés qui se creusent entre les générations – le motif récurrent du fils qui veut se détacher d’une mère dont les valeurs & les façons de faire lui semblent rouillées & pathétiquement petites ; la mère qui, de son côté, s’est saignée à blanc pour donner a good college education à ses enfants, pour les voir se détourner d’elle & de son milieu une fois adultes.

When people think they are smart — even when they are smart — there is nothing anybody else can say to make them see straight, and with Asbury, the trouble was that in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament. She did not know where he had got it from because his father, who was a lawyer and businessman and farmer and politician all rolled into one, had certainly had his feet on the ground; and she had certainly always had hers on it. She had managed after he died to get the two of them through college and beyond; but she had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything. (The Enduring Chill, p. 87)

L’humour y est sec, rarement tendre mais savoureux. La fin des nouvelles est souvent extrêmement, presque exagérément tragique ; la justice qui s’y dessine est tordue mais cathartique. Il y a une religiosité très forte qui m’est restée coincée dans la gorge, & une lourdeur à laquelle on n’échappe pas – mais les histoires réussissent à parler de tellement de choses en même temps, de tellement de bouleversements sociaux & de petitesses humaines, que c’est difficile de ne pas avoir envie de tout lire trop vite. Quitte à s’en tirer, après, avec quelques heures de découragement existentiel.

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them — not above, just away from — were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven. (Revelation, p. 196)