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2. The Grotesque Good in O’Connor’s Fiction
- Baylor University Press
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33 CHAPTER 2 The Grotesque Good in O’Connor’s Fiction The “mud in man” is nothing to be ashamed of. It can produce . . . the face of God. . . . To recall this, to recall this incredible relation between mud and God, is, in its own distant, adumbrating way, the function of comedy. —William Lynch, Christ and Apollo There can be little doubt that the primary purpose of the grotesque in O’Connor’s fiction is to hold up a mirror to her readers’ own sin and weakness, to break through cultural facades of strength and lay bare the human soul’s deformities. O’Connor provides a visible metaphor for a non-visible deficit and uses disability with great precision to accomplish her task. Her grotesque characters challenge readers’ perceptions of “good” and “bad,” exposing the perceived good—whether it be sympathy, human progress, or “good” country people—as actually well-endowed with original sin. Where disability is perceived negatively, it can remind us that we are all limited and all carry a death sentence. For O’Connor, the implication concerns more than a physical reality. Important to her is the truth that we also all share a spiritual death sentence. 34 Flannery O’Connor Many, if not most, of O’Connor’s stories deal with social expectations of normality/abnormality and goodness/evil, ending with the reversal of these expectations. O’Connor’s satirical deconstruction of the socially defined normal and good is also an ironic appreciation of difference and bad.The good she questions in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “A Stroke of Good Fortune ,” and “Good Country People” is society’s misrepresentation of what is good. Opposed to this perceived good, the authentic good in her stories shows up in what are perceived as grotesque places. She reverses these social expectations perhaps most explicitly in the story “Revelation.” “Revelation” From the very first paragraph of “Revelation,” Mrs. Turpin sizes up and judges the occupants of the doctor’s waiting room, beginning with their footwear. The white trash lady’s shoes are “exactly what you would have expected her to have on.”1 Mrs. Turpin’s social hierarchies, based upon physical appearance, provide the framework for the entire story. Later, referencing the “colored farm help,” the narrator makes one of the most ironically misguided statements in O’Connor’s work: “There was nothing you could tell [Mrs. Turpin] about people like them that she didn’t know already.”2 Mrs. Turpin’s social constructs go far beyond simplistic social expectations of people and include the bigotry of naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her.3 She gets confused because some people with good blood have lost their money and have to rent, while there is one colored man in town that owns two red Lincolns, a swimming pool, and a farm [3.146.107.180] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 18:57 GMT) The Grotesque Good in O’Connor’s Fiction 35 with registered white-faced cattle. “Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”4 The Holocaust image foreshadows the impending decimation of Mrs. Turpin’s social constructs, but it also serves to remind the reader that all people share the same fate without deference to society’s perception of them as good or bad, rich or poor. At the beginning of the story, the waiting room where Mrs. Turpin and Claud have gone to get his leg examined is waiting for a revelation. The room itself is layered with grotesques. Mrs. Turpin is “very large,” so much so that she is “a living demonstration that the room was inadequate and ridiculous.”5 Claud has an ulcer on his leg, “a purple swelling on a plump marble-white calf.” The table is cluttered with “limp-looking...