The Genius by Frank O’Connor

The Genius by Frank O’Connor

The boy’s personality and his intelligence are swiftly established in

the opening paragraph. His mother is presented as being a strong

influence on him and appears as a kind of ‘ally’ against the rough

children – ‘savages’ as she describes them – that live and play in the

area. It is clear that she encourages him to regard himself as

‘different’ and separate from them, but it is equally obvious that he

is not anxious to associate with them anyway. He describes himself as

“a cissy by conviction” and says that he regarded the idea of fighting

as both unattractive and ‘dangerous’. He avoids rough games and

prefers the company of girls to boys only because “they don’t fight so

much”.

Religion seems to play an unusually important role in his life and it

seems probable that this is a reflection of his close relationship

with Miss Cooney. He himself uses “our Blessed Lord” as a kind of

defence against bullies who might otherwise ‘hammer’ his head on the

pavement. It is evident from the way he uses argument that he is

unusually articulate for his age, and this is a reflection of both his

natural intelligence and his strong preference for adult company.

The fact that his mother has told him “about geniuses” makes it clear

that she has high ambitions for him. This is reinforced by the fact

that she:

“Worried herself endlessly finding answers to my questions”.

Miss Cooney, however, plays an important role in encouraging and

‘feeding’ the boy’s sense of himself as someone ‘special’. Although a

very eccentric and even unstable woman, she recognises his

intelligence and, by making her “religious books” freely available to

him, seeks to plant and foster the growth of the idea th...

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...y life’, but also to Frank O’Connor’s

discussion of the short story in The Lonely Voice (1963). O’Connor

compares the novel and the short story: whereas the novel can ‘adhere

to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who

lives in a community...the short story remains by its very nature

remote from the community - romantic, individualistic, and

intransigent.’ The relevance of aspects of this will echo through my

discussion of a story by Tobias Wolff in the final section of my

paper.

For O’Connor, the short story is concerned with individuals who are

marginalised, or who marginalise themselves: these individuals are

‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society...As a

result, there is in the short story at its most characteristic

something we do not often find in the novel - an intense awareness of

human loneliness.’