Awakening To Grace: The Use Of The Secular Grotesque In The Short Stories By Flannery O’ Connor

Flannery O’Connor wrote about "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." She wrote about very ordinary, very "human" human-beings, but held up a magnifying glass to a part of them, so that they are shown to be exaggerated and grotesque. Chapter1focuses on past and present criticism of O’Connor’s fiction. My review of this criticism focuses on two parts: first, how critics react to O’Connor’s theology, and second, how critics explain and analyze her use of the grotesque form. Chapter2deals with two seminal grotesque theorists Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. The grotesque is a confusing mixture of tragedy and comedy, very real and very surreal, light and dark, empathetic and disgusting. Kayser resolves this tension by focusing on the dark, terrifying aspects, and Bakhtin resolves it by focusing on the light, comedic, transformative aspects of the grotesque. I show how O’Connor’s fiction does not resolve this tension, but instead holds the total depravity of man, with all its alienating, gruesome elements, in one hand, and the transformative grace of God in the other. In Chapter3, I undertake a close reading of three of O’Connor’s short stories,"A Good Man is Hard to Find,""The Lame Shall Enter First," and "Revelation," and show how, in each of these stories, a secular grotesque collides with a spiritual grotesque. As a result of this collision, the secular grotesques see themselves without all their built-up walls and masks, and are able, for just a moment, to experience the truth of their oneness with other human beings.