If I had a tattoo for every time I have told my students to read “Parker’s Back,” which is one of my absolute favorite Flannery O’Conner stories, I’d probably look just like O.E. Parker, the lead character in the story, whose body, by the time it’s over, is completely covered with them. But my students remain strangely resistant—at least until I’ve walked them through the story, at which point they are positively riveted, spellbound even, by the experience.
They find it quite funny, too. Well, not all of it, of course, but there are moments of undeniable humor awaiting their attention. It certainly gives new meaning to the phrase “I’ve got your back!”
What the story especially excels at, and in every concrete particular O’Connor brings to the page, is the sudden awakening of astonishment, of stunned surprise—in a word, wonderment, the human capacity for which appears to be in very short supply these days, especially among the young, who are often no less jaded and bored than their parents. “I will sit and let the marvels and the adventures settle on me like flies,” exclaims G.K. Chesterton, a writer for whom wonderment was a chronic condition. “The world will never starve for want of wonders,” he adds, “but only for want of wonder.” When we give up on wonder, we might as well be dead.
Mr. O.E. Parker, for all his shortcomings—and Miss O’Connor is wonderfully unsparing in her exposure of them—is not dead, his sense of wonder remaining on high alert throughout the story. Until age 14, in fact, when he sees a man tattooed from head to foot at a local fair—“flexing his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own”—Parker had never himself felt the slightest motion of wonder in himself. “That there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed” had simply never entered his head, had never crossed his mind.
And yet, an awareness of that fact, of the sheer wonderment occasioned by the accident of birth, of actually being alive, represents the indispensable intuition without which none of us will ever grow into maturity, will ever be able to face a world we did not make, even as we remain blessedly free to receive it as pure unadulterated gift. Given the statistical improbability of any one of us being alive at all, it must surely be a miracle of grace to find that, in fact, we are alive, endlessly enthralled therefore by the sheer serendipity of our existence. “It must be a gift of evolution,” writes the poet Robert Hass, “that humans / Can’t sustain wonder. / We’d never have gotten up / From our knees if we could.”
If a man is not moved by wonder, moreover—if he refuses to be astonished by the fact that he exists and that, like all things contingent, there is no need for him to exist—how then will he ever arrive at the vastly more stupendous fact that God exists? That God remains the only explanation for everything else existing? Nor, for that matter, will he ever experience the wonder of a God who actually became one of us; who, at a certain pre-determined moment in time, chose to become a clump of cells in the womb of a 14-year-old Jewish girl.
If a man is not moved by wonder, moreover how then will he ever arrive at the vastly more stupendous fact that God exists?Tweet This“Infinity dwindled to infancy,” is how the poet Hopkins puts it. A God, in other words, who needing nothing from us on which to subsist, nevertheless chooses to enter into a state of becoming one with us: the human being Jesus who is at the same time God Himself. How can that be? “To live is so startling,” exclaims the poet Emily Dickinson, “it leaves but little room for other occupations.”
Which brings us right back to O.E. Parker, who, following his numinous encounter at the fair, will soon be festooning his own flesh with tattoos, not fussing unduly about their message, only that the colors be as bright and vivid as possible. And so, by the time the action of the story gets underway, all but the space on his back will have become a kind of display case filled with tattooed inscriptions.
And yet there remains always this persisting emptiness left in the wake of each fresh tattoo, an acute longing for something more. Like a drug, the least dosage of which will never be enough, he must constantly ratchet up the score. “Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker,” writes O’Connor, “that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo.”
How he will meet this challenge, finding a way to assuage a need that has grown so insistent, so consuming even, is what drives the story. But it does not account for how it ends, nor can it explain the drama of a judgment hanging over every moment of it—the ultimate source of which will be God Himself, even as the mediating instrument of application will prove to be no less an avenging spirit than his own wife. What a piece of work she is! And yet she remains entirely essential to the mystery into whose depths poor O.E. Parker finds himself. It is a mystery not only of divine judgment—both certain and swift—but of possible salvation as well.
For what other reason did God come into this world if not to first judge and then to save it? Like any honest storyteller, God does not merely love His creations, He judges them as well—without the least hint of sentimentality, too. The fact that, in the case of poor Mr. Parker, it all happens on a piece of human real estate that happens to be his back—indeed, a space on which a stern and mysterious Byzantine Christ has been tattooed—is surely one of the many astonishments of this amazing story.
So, go ahead and read it. And if it does not awaken your sense of wonder, however dormant or dull it may be, then it could well be that you are already dead, only no one has bothered to tell you.
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