Though unevenly matched in either wit or craft, Flannery O'Connor and Jack Chick shared one keen insight: it is great fun to see bad things happen to bad people.
By Max Lindenman
http://www.patheos.com/
An Israelite Without Guile
March 07, 2011
Jack Chick, founder of Chick Publications, is a shadowy figure, practically the Keyser Söze of evangelists.
It is not known whether he raises peacocks or suffers from lupus. Personally, I hope he doesn't, but not because I'm afraid that chronic illness or an absorbing hobby will stop him turning out more masterpieces like "This Was Your Life." I just pray that something, anything, distinguishes him from Flannery O'Connor before the two merge, in the general imagination, like Chesterton and Belloc. The Chickonnor? God save us.
Flannery O'Connor (with self-portrait) in the living room at Andalusia, June 1962. (Joe McTyre/ Atlanta Constitution)Winch your jaw back into place, reader, while I explain. Chick Tracts—those twenty-page pen-and-ink salvation dramas handed out by evangelists on street corners everywhere—have already drawn their share of bad press. Catholics and Hindus have cried bigotry. Gamer geeks, ahead of the curve as usual, have vitiated "Dark Dungeons," Chick's jeremiad against D & D, by adopting it as a camp classic. Spittle in the wind. Drawing glasses on the Mona Lisa deducts nothing from its contribution to the evolution of Western painting. Mocking Chick Tracts can't disguise their very real—if infuriating—brilliance. And nothing reveals that brilliance better than the structural resemblance they bear to the Maid of Millidgeville's estimable oeuvre.
The common formula for Chick Tracts and O'Connor stories is a simple one: some character, unpleasant yet eerily familiar, gets kicked in the spleen by the Eternal and Divine. In Chick's "Titanic," we follow Chester, a grasping, venal haut-bourgeois of the Gilded Age, as he boards the doomed ship. After violently rejecting his pious Aunt Sophie's call to conversion, he ends up . . . well, not so much nearer, my God, to Thee. The reader, it is hoped, will do better.
Compare that to O'Connor's story "The Comforts of Home." In "Comforts," readers meet Thomas, a sullen layabout forced to share his childhood home with Star Drake, a petty thief and sometime hooker taken up as a pet cause by his mother. Flummoxed by Star's sadistic flirting and disdainful of his mother's charitable impulses, Thomas hatches a plan to get the girl sent back to jail. In the interest of excluding spoilers, I'll simply say that, by the end, he might be happy to trade places with Chester.
The formula serves both artists—and I use the word advisedly—because it's great fun to see bad things happen to bad people. Schadenfreude is the emotion Christians keep tucked under our souls in brown paper bags. This is never truer than when the characters' badness is niggling and domestic rather than grand and cosmic. Anyone can imagine, say, Hitler or Stalin cast into the city of Dis. Inflicting the same fate credibly on the snowbird who rear-ended you or the dirtbag who sold you that suffocating 80/20 mortgage takes special talent.
With both Chick and O'Connor, this talent finds its apotheosis in their use of annoying, though apparently harmless, quirks to signify profound internal corruption. When we see Aunt Gladys, the eponymous heroine of Chick's caveat against psychics, sail into the room wearing a dizzily self-satisfied grin, we know she's in for a hot time. The moment any of O'Connor's backbone-of-America moms or farmwives commences firing clichés—that is, when she tells her son that Rome wasn't built in a day, or informs the patients in a doctor's waiting room that nothing beats a good disposition—we know the old harpy's due to get her mind blown, at best.
Now, it hardly needs saying that the better set of artistic chops belongs to O'Connor. When, in "The Displaced Person," she has Mrs. Shortley imagine foreigners "like the three bears, walking in single file, with wooden shoes on like Dutchmen," we guffaw in recognition. This feels like real human stupidity. When, in "The Sissy," Chick has a skeptical trucker named Duke concede that fighting Jesus must be "like fighting the bionic man, only worse," we wince. If Chick has never visited an actual truck stop, fine—the better to avoid near occasions of sin. But you'd think he could at least stand to check the TV listings from time to time.
Not all the advantages are on O'Connor's side, however. Although some of her stories—"A Temple of the Holy Ghost" and "Revelation," to name just two—end on a hopeful or ambiguous note, they are exceptions to the general rule. Far more typically, her characters' embrace their spiritual awakening as an empty Coors can might embrace a freight train. After experiencing Christ's passion, thanks to a scourging at the hands of his broomstick-swinging wife, the hero of "Parker's Back" ends up leaning against a pecan tree, "crying like a baby." And he's one of the luckiest by far.
In their own way, Chick's plots are subtler than that. Or at any rate, his outcomes show more variety. Although he consigns plenty of characters to the Lake of Fire, he makes sure that plenty of others get saved, in fundamentalist parlance, and live happily ever after. If reading an O'Connor story can feel like watching a grand and glorious train wreck, picking up a Chick Tract feels more like playing a round of "The Lady, or the Tiger?" This is especially true when Chick elects to save an apparent sociopath, as he does in "Bad Bob," or when he damns a relative naïf, as he does in "Somebody Goofed." Nowhere do prodigal sons get a warmer welcome than in Chick's sola fide universe; nowhere are dutiful elder sons in greater peril. The upshot: Chick's endings can actually catch readers off guard.Critics praise O'Connor's reliance on "dark grace," which Patrick Galloway defines as "violence as a force for good," as a sign of her sophisticated vision. It certainly is that. Living through the loss of a parent, a painful disease, and an abortive affair with a psychotic poet must have qualified her uniquely to see Grace operating like an air force in a counter-insurgency campaign—destroying people in order to save them. But there's a more basic, more strictly technical reason why O'Connor's characters must end up miserable, if indeed they even end up alive. She makes them so detestable that no other ending could possibly satisfy the reader.
Would you want to share a pew with the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," after hearing her squawk about cute little pickaninnies? What about Mrs. MacIntyre, from "The Displaced Person," after witnessing her great sin of omission? Me neither.
In comparison, Chick treats his characters affectionately. Even those who are selfish (like Mr. Bronson in "Love that Money") or downright cruel (like the platoon sergeant in "Holy Joe") seem worth rooting for. His medium, cartoons, is tailor-made for creating this effect. When we see a character with an impossibly big nose or bug eyes, we can't help regarding him with some compassion. In that light, Chick's medium and his theology are in perfect sync. A believer in free grace and eternal assurance has to view humans through compassionate eyes: people can't help being what they are.
The Catholic O'Connor, seeing the State of Grace as a revolving door, mistrusted compassion for the opposite reason. As she put it, compassion, or excusing "all human weakness because human weakness is human" makes for bad art. Strip compassion from caricature and you're left with grotesquerie, a quality often ascribed to O'Connor, and which, I think, she would have achieved even as a cartoonist. If she'd drawn, say, a guest strip for Peanuts, Lucy would have snatched the football away from Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown would have died of a brain aneurysm following his fall. Lucy, having seen Christ crucified from the goal posts, would have come down with a nasty case of alopecia that left her tonsured, crowned with thorns. Good grief indeed.
If O'Connor's principled rejection of compassion makes her a better theologian than Chick, it is not the thing that makes her a better artist. By no yardstick save the snob's has it made her a more successful one. Chick Publications claims to have sold 750 million tracts worldwide. Although the 86-year-old Chick reportedly farmed out the actual drawing to hirelings ages ago, it is his vision and formula that drives production, and has enabled the company to branch out into video. He may be a hack, but he's a supremely canny hack.
So what's the takeaway? That nobody ever went broke overestimating the public's tastes? There's no denying that. When it comes to scaring readers into turning the page, nothing works like the kind of paranoid dispensational premillennialist hoo-hah that Chick shovels up. But I'd argue Chick owes his success as much to the flip side, the feathery hope for salvation he serves up on the side.
Maybe, for writers as well as evangelists, the real lesson is that a spoonful of schmaltz helps the medicine go down.
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