4« / 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 iii 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 iv 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 vi 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. ix 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