Look Who's Quixotic Now, Tilting Your Head At What's Not There!
Read This Post If You Want To Understand Flannery O'Connor
I’m pulling this post from the archives because we’re reading a Flannery O’Connor short story for the Tsundoku Reading Society this month. As with all of her stories, there is “Something Awful” at work in it that she wants her readers to know is actually at work in them. Download this free short story and give it a read. If you’re interested in joining us for the Tsundoku Reading Society, just become a paid subscriber. I’ll email you a Zoom link the day of our meeting.
September’s Tsundoku Reading Society meeting is Monday, September 29th at 4:00 pm PT / 7:30 pm ET.
When you become a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to the growing resource page, all the archived content, and free books when I publish them. Plus, once you join our merry band of bards, bishops, and bibliophiles, students, scholars, and philosophers, and poets, preachers, and pirates, you’ll also be entered into a drawing for a chance at September’s Giveaway—Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories. I’ll draw a random name and announce the winner at the end of the month.
Disconcerted and Shaken
The works of Flannery O’Connor are widely recognized as possessing bizarre, protean elements and freakish characters who are morally and socially distorted. Much like one might expect of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch,1 they often demonstrate a violent will to power and carry out personal conquests, often by way of comedic or disturbing antics, to prove their autonomy and disbelief in God.
For example, In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Tarwater repeatedly tells his uncle Rayber (a modernist school teacher) that he is different from him because all Rayber can do is talk about his unbelief, but he (Tarwater) is capable of acting. At dinner just before Tarwater drowns Bishop, Rayber’s “afflicted child,” Tarwater tells his uncle, “It ain’t the same… I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.”
After he drowns the boy and makes for home, he hitches a ride and tells the stranger who picked him up, “I baptized him… it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… the words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again… I only meant to drown him… you’re only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water.”
Tarwater carries on with the driver, disconcerted and shaken, not because he drowned a boy, but because he accidentally baptized him in the process. He laments the sacramental words of baptism escaped his lips as he pushed the retarded child under the water.
By drowning the boy he believed God called him to baptize, Tarwater attempts to overcome his “bad conscience,” a conscience he believes had been spoiled by the Christian moral ideal instilled in him by his Uncle Tarwater, the crazy prophet who had kidnapped him and taken him to the woods to raise him. Drowning the boy was a way of divorcing his “good conscience” from the unnatural inclinations of Christianity which Nietzsche suggested ran counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal. In short, for Nietzsche, Christianity was an ideal that was hostile to life and slandered the world.
Nietzsche had opined that in order for the modern world to avoid its inevitable plunge into the great nausea of nihilism, it would require a man with a “different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age.” The characteristics of such a man “would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health.”
Flannery O’Connor gave the modern world such a man in characters like that of Francis Marion Tarwater. But what she did with them was loudly confront modern thought and ethics. O’Connor gave her clearest explanation for employing this style of writing in an essay titled, “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Here she reveals,
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that is does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
These distorted, repugnant, and startling figures in literature are referred to as grotesque, aesthetic elements that arrest the attention but abandon the understanding to mystery.
Arrested and Abandoned to Mystery
In his 1965 book, Rabelais and his World, literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, explores the culture of the Middle Ages as depicted by the French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais. Rabelais’ novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, is similarly full of these grotesque images within the social life of the Middle Ages. From these images, Bakhtin extracts the idea of the grotesque body, which expressed itself freely in medieval public settings such as the marketplace or carnival. Bakhtin’s definition of the grotesque body is open, porous, bulging, exchanging with other bodies and the world around it.
In his book, On the Grotesque, Geoffrey Galt Harpham explains why it is such a powerful device for fiction writers like O’Connor. He claims “As a noun [the grotesque] implies that an object either occupies multiple categories or that it falls in between categories.” These kinds of ambiguities are why the grotesque gives readers, among other things, “the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding is unsatisfied.”
Harpham introduces his study on the grotesque by providing a baseline or standard for observing or experiencing the phenomenon when he explains that
we commonly adhere to several tacit assumptions about ideas: that they can be clearly expressed; that they have kernels or cores in which all is tidy, compact, and organized; and that the goal of analysis is to set limits to them, creating sharply defined, highly differentiated, and therefore useful concepts. We assume that, however complex an idea may be, it is essentially coherent and that it can most profitably be discussed in an orderly and progressive way.
But, says Harpham, “the grotesque places all these assumptions in doubt.” Therefore, a primary consideration in understanding the grotesque is that it causes the reader or the viewer to doubt his assumptions about the coherence that is assumed to exist in categories of thought.
In the fashion of Bakhtin and Harpham’s explanations, the grotesque in O’Connor’s stories are a style of “realism” that intentionally leans “away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.” She uses the style because although her characters are really not “anymore freakish than ordinary fallen man is,” her audience is going to think that they are. Therefore, by necessity, O’Connor pushes her literature toward “possibility rather than probability,” “outward toward the limits of mystery,” toward “what we don’t understand rather than what we do.”
As a literary device, the grotesque has been used by authors since at least the sixteenth century; but as Susan Corey explains, “the grotesque has become increasingly prominent in twentieth-century literature as a means to express the fragmentations and complexities of modern life…[and] writers have found it especially effective as a tool to evoke the religious dimensions of a work of fiction.”
Hard of Hearing and Almost Blind
Fiction writers who share O’Connor’s Christian concerns about modern life and are writing for the same “hard of hearing” and “almost-blind” audience are always, according to O’Connor, “looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.” i.e., the supernatural, transcendent mystery.
The point of such a search is that fiction whose interest is primarily in mystery or metaphysical realities must make good use of the concrete—that which addresses the senses—if they are going to be successful. Good use of such, in O’Connor’s vision, is to use “the concrete in a more drastic way.”
Because her writing seeks to combine elements in this manner, she acknowledges that her fiction is naturally “going to be wild;” and it “is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic.”
In O’Connor’s estimation, such ambiguity and distance as is possessed in the grotesque relationship between violence and comedy, for example, rightly reflects the nature of mystery in a fallen world. The fact that her characters “are forced out to meet evil and grace” and “act on a trust beyond themselves—whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not,” is an affront to the modern mind who look on them as Quixotic characters, tilting their heads at what is not there.
Friedrich Nietzsche had asserted that “we modern men are the heirs of the conscience-vivisection and self-torture of millennia” and that “man has all too long had an ‘evil eye’ for his natural inclinations, so that they have finally become inseparable from his ‘bad conscience.’” In Nietzsche’s estimation, “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadow over Europe.” He meant that the concept of a divine creator and ultimate moral purpose for humanity can no longer be conceived of except in terms of a socially constructed morality clandestinely curated by the weaker, namely the slave class of society. Although he did not think the West was aware of its condition, yet.
In essence, Nietzsche believed modern man, attempting to legislate civility, turned back upon himself his own ressentiment, that self-abasement born out of the inability to act upon one’s envy and hatred of the suppressor of his will. Thus, man became the sole creator of his own guilty conscience; and subsequently, he became the creator of the concept of “god” and eternal punishment. He argued that because modern man has continually mortified his true animal nature, that nature “which is bent upon power, and [is] subordinate to its total goal as a single means: namely, as a means of creating greater units of power,” he has bound himself to, and cannot escape, that reigning ideal out of which grows “the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism.”
The only hope against nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is to “‘let ourselves go’ like all the world.” That is, the modern man must find a way “to wed [his] bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world.” While the solution is theoretically possible, Nietzsche quips, “who is strong enough for it?” Only a man whose spirit is “strengthened by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become needs.” In sum, Nietzsche frames his conception of a distorted soul in terms of ressentiment that cultivates a bad conscience in mankind, and suggests man’s inevitable doom is sickness and despair, nihilism—unless of course there is an Ubermensch, a superman who is strong enough to will into power his animal nature and learn to tie his bad conscience to moral ideals like those found in Christianity.