The Ridiculous and the Sublime> The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor Marian Bums A thesis ...

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The Ridiculous and the Sublime> The Fiction of Flannery O'Connor
Marian Bums
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts
May, 19#+
Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been
submitted in support of an application for another degree
or qualification of this or any other university or other
institution of learning.
Abstract
The premise of this thesis is that in the work of Flannery O'Connor
there are two major forces« the religious vision and the comic sense.
The former has been examined repeatedly by her critics, but the latter,
despite its evident centrality to her vision, has for the most part been
ignored. The thesis reinstates the comic to its proper place in her
writing. By way of introduction it examines the relationship in general
between humour and other forma of creative activity, according to the
theory of Arthur Koestleri all are forms of extraordinary "bisociated"
vision. The range of O'Connor's fiction demonstrates a growth in
extraordinary vision from low comedy to mysticism.
The first chapter analyses O'Connor's early work in order to
initially distinguish the two impulses. Poe's influence is crucial here«
the comic and the metaphysical are in an uneasy relationship, the comic
overly facetious and the religious melodramatic. "A Good Man Is Hard To
Find" demonstrates a sudden maturity of bisociated vision and serves to
illustrate O'Connor's emergent idiosyncratic mode.
Wise Blood expresses O'Connor's comic zest at this stage as well
as a strong experimental mood. O'Connor takes the traditions of American
evangelism and makes them her own paradoxical instruments in a comedy that
approaches religious ritual. Ehoch's role is examined in depth, as is the
novel's grotesque imagery and its function.
O'Connor's work is rooted in native American and classical comic
structures, particularly in the middle period of her career. Trie confid­
ence man theme, folk motifs, regional satire, joke structures, comedy of
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manners and classical paradigms, are all examined in O'Connor's stories of
the 1950s to demonstrate both her traditionalism and her individuality,
her ability to turn this material into metaphysical dramas.
O'Connor’s use of the common figure of the freak in Southern
literature has a theological rather than a moral function. Congenital
deformity in her fiction is emblematic of congenital, or original, sin.
The problem of human suffering, the issue of theodicy, as raised by
O'Connor's fiction, is discussed with reference to West, Dostoevsky, Camus
and others. Human grotesquerie and suffering is encompassed in O'Connor's
essentially comic vision.
One of the models from native humour that O'Connor turns to
repeatedly in her writing is the "Great American Joke," the dichotomy
between highbrow and lowbrow. In her work this is visible in language,
action and image, and in time it becomes a function of her religious
vision too. Thus her use of the model is flexible and her intellectual
characters are far from homogeneous.
The Violent Bear It Away contains farce and pure mysticism. It is
a parody of Faulkner in many waysi that is, it is comic, but its rhetoric
serves a prophetic function also. The novel illustrates the growth of the
visionary element in O'Connor's work.
The issue of race also responds to analysis of the two dynamics of
the comic and the religious. O'Connor's black characters are based on
classic comic traditions, or employed in a metaphysical symbolism of the
"other," the mysterious. Thus they are not realistic. One can question
O'Connor's refusal to commit herself to a political consciousness of race
in the South, and trace this to her Christian attitudes about human
suffering in general, and her teleological view of justice.
The final chapter regards the two prophets in O'Connor's fiction,
Mrs. Turpin and Parker. It discusses the comic paradigms of their stories
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and "radical amazement" in them both. It questions morality and mysticism
in O'Connor in general, her substitution of the numinous for the moral.
Symbol and cartoon technique are examined in "Parker's Back."
Hie conclusion places O'Connor's humour in the perspective of
Christian comedy afforded by Wylie Sypher’s comments on theory. O'Connor's
is a radical comedy that exploits the techniques of black humour while
remaining metaphysically affirmative. Her work dramatises an acceptance
of the irreconcilables in human existence.
v •
Preface
"Humor," wrote E. B. White,"can be dissected like a frog can, but
the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but
the pure scientific mind.This attitude has long prevailed, and may
account for the scarcity of practical critiques of the comic sense in
literature— though there are more than enough theoretical works on humour
and comedy. This critical distaste is perhaps why, despite her very
obvious comic talent, this aspect of Flannery O'Connor's work has been
resolutely ignored.
The majority of articles and books written about O'Connor addresses
itself to what it sees as the other, "spiritual," side of her writing.
There is no denying the importance of O'Connor's religious preoccupations,
but the exegesis of such matters should be weighted, in any comprehensive
evaluation of her work, against a consideration of its other properties;
and comedy is the other major imperative inevitably involved in O'Connor's
fiction. This has been the point of departure for the following thesis.
It identifies the two major forces operating in O'Connor's writing—termed
for simplicity's sake "the sublime" and "the ridiculous"—and examines how
the two work together to produce that singular effect which is O'Connor's
grace and her limitation.
I have repeatedly risked killing the joke— or the frog. Those
theoretical works I have found most cogent and relevant to O'Connor are
Arthur Koestler’s theory of the bisociation of ideas and particularly his
recognition of the continuum of human creativity; and 'Wylie Sypher's
perceptions on the links between comedy and religion. Both works afford
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insights into the nature, origins, forms and functions of the comic
spirit. Koestler's argument is psychological and structural, while
Sypher's is based in anthropology and philosophy. I have used Koestler's
model for the overall plan of this thesis, and Sypher's ideas in a final
interpretation of O'Connor's purpose and effect. In the end, I hope to
illuminate Flannery O'Connor's contribution to modem fiction» a
religious sensibility speaking in a comic voice.
Note»
1 E. B. White, "Some Remarks on Humor," in The Second Tree from the
Comer (New York» Harper, 195*0. P- 173- Quotations in this thesis
retain the original spelling of the text.
CONTENTS
Note on Abbreviations 1
Chapter
I Early Work» The Ridiculous and the Sublime 9
II The Fhll Tide of Merriment » Wise Blood 37
III Traditional Structures« Allegorical and Analogical 79
IV Temples of the Holy Ghost« O'Connor's Grotesques 132
V The Great American Joke 167
VI The Violent Bear It Away» Comedy, Rhetoric, and Vision 203
VII Black and White Issues 228
VIII Amusement and Amazement« "Revelation" and "Parker'sB ack" 261
Conclusion 282
Selected Bibliography 290
viii
Note on Abbreviations
The following abbreviations are used for convenience in the text
and the footnotes to refer to primary works by Flannery O'Connor»
CS The Complete Stories (New York» Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971)
HB The Habit of Being» Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by
Sally Fitzgerald (New York« Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979)*
Individual letters are identified only where relevant.
MM Mystery and Manners, occasional prose selected and edited by
Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York» Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1969). Essays are identified only where relevant or necessary.
VBIA The Violent Bear It Away (London» Longmans, i960)
VjB Wise Blood (London» Faber and Faber, 1962), second edition.
Page numbers in parenthesis in the text and footnotes refer to these
editions.
The Oxford Ehgllsh Dictionary used is the 1977 edition, identified
by the abbreviation OED. The Dictionary of Literary Terms referred to in
the.text is by J. A. Cuddon (Penguin, 1982), and may be identified by the
abbreviation DLT.
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Introduction
It is a phenomenon of Flannery O’Connor's work that her last
story is a palimpsest of her first. "Judgement Day," written in extremis
in 196*+, and "The Geranium," written for her Master's thesis in 19^6, are
effectively the same story of an old Southern white man living in New
York recalling his life with his black friends down South. In between
these two versions, another one had occurred in an unpublished but
complete story, "An Exile in the East," in 195*+.1 The basic story-line
can thus be seen to develop over the entire span of O'Connor's career.
This is convenient for my purpose here, which is to illustrate what seems
to me a progression in O'Connor's vision.
In "The Geranium," the following passage occurs 1
Niggers don't think they're dressed up till they got on glasses,
GCLd Dudley thought. He remembered Lutish's glasses. She had
saved up thirteen dollars to buy them. Then she went to the
doctor and asked him to look at her eyes and tell her how thick
to get the glasses. He made her looka t animals' pictures
through a mirror and he stuck a lightt hrough her eyes and
looked in her head. Then he said she didn't need any glasses.
She was so mad she burned the com bread three days in a row,
but she bought her some glasses anyway at the ten-cent store.
They didn't cost her but $1.98 and she wore them every Saddey.
"That was niggers," Old Dudley chuckled. (The Complete Stories.
p. 10)
Hiis is clearly a patronising traditional comic anecdote about blacks,
who are seen stereotypically as illiterate (hence the childish animals in
the eye test), vain, and easily pleased by trifles. In "An Exile in the
East" this joke is excised and replaced by a scene at a sawmill, in which
the glasses offered to appease the black person's vanity are carved from
pine bark. In "Judgement Day" ten years later, the glasses are present
in the sawmill scene and also in the fancy horn-rimmed spectacles worn by
the black New York actor in the story. The latter instance constitutes
1