The Grotesque in Modern Literature:
Still more ideas to gnaw on:
From Flannery O'Connor's "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," in her collection
of essays Mystery and Manners
1. "I think that every writer, when he speaks of his own approach to fiction,
hopes to show that, in some crucial and deep sense, he is a realist; and for
some of us, for whom the ordinary aspects of daily life prove to be of no great
fictional interst, this is very difficult.
I have found that if one's young
hero can't be identified with the avarage American boy, or even with the
average American deliquent, then his perpetrator will have a good deal of
explaining to do." (p.37)
2. "I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all
the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads
exterminating families, nor Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with
wooden legs. [paragraph] The social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the
public approach to fiction.
When I first began to write, my own particular
bete noir was that mythical entity, The School of Southern Degeneracy. Every
time I heard about The School of Southern Degeneracy, I felt like Br'er Rabbit
stuck on the Tarbaby." (p.38)
3. "When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction,. and particularly
Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in
a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that
comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader,
unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. But
for this occasion, we may . . . consider the kind of fiction that may be called
grotesque with good reason, becauuse of a directed intention that way on the
part of the author. [paragraph] In these grotesque works, we find that the
writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe
every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.
We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of
realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone
trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the
characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social
framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns,
toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to
consider." (p.40)
4. ". . . if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially
mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose
laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to
him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind
of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of
mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin
except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and their
various determinations have been exhaustead. Such a writer will be interested
in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested
in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters
who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond
themselves -- whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not."
(pp.41,42)
5. "He's 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 firmlly, just as real to him, really, as
the one that everybody sees. [paragraph] It's not necessary to point out that
the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity
going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to
combine." (pp.42, 43)
6. "In nineteenth-century American writing, there was a good deal of grotesque
literature which came from tghe frontier and was supposed to be funny; but our
present grotesque characters, comic though they may be, are at least not
primarily so. They seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a
reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I believe that they come about from the
prophetic vision peculiar to any novelist whose concerns I have been
describing. In the novelist's case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things
with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The
prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find
in the best modern instances of the grotesque." (p.44)
7. "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for
writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one."
(p.44)
8. "The Southern writer is forcec from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond
th4e surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the
concern of prophets and poets." (p.45)
9. "The novelist must be characterized not by his function but
and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted
limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely
he is able to show what he sees. This is another thing which
increases the tendency toward the grotesque in fiction." (p.47)
by his vision,
and that thhe
affect the way
in these times
10. From "On Her Own Work," in Mystery and Manners
"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do?
I think that
usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills
conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery
and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen."
(p.115)
11. From "Catholic Novelists" in Mystery and Manners
". . . dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality.
Christian dogma is
about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery.
The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an
adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those
who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain
merely relative;
they are always raising it to the level of an absolute. The Catholic fiction
writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of
God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we
already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize
for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For
him, to "tidy up reality" is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride. Open
and free observation is founded on our ultimate faith that the universe is
meaningful, as the Church teaches."(p.178)
But, from William Van O'Connor "The Grotesque: An American Genre" in his The
Grotesque and Other Essays (1963):
12. "[O]ur novel is not, unlike the English novel, domesticated. We write the
"romance," what Richard Chase calls "a profound poetry of disorder" and F.
Frohock calls "the novel of violence." Whereas we might expect neatly ordered
novels our tend to churn and dream and writhe. Our poets try to contain
disorder. . . . As citizens we seem satisfied to be children of the
Enlightenment and of the Romantic movement. Yet our literature is filled with
the grotesque, more so probably than any other Western literature. It is a new
genre, merging tragedy and comedy, and seeking, seemingly in perverse ways, the
sublime." (p.3)
13. "There is of course a deeply existential drift in modern fiction, European
and American.
Medieval or REnaissance man could dream of the harmonies
implicit in the doctrine of the microcosm-macrocosm relationship. Citizens in
Pope's world could dream of the harmonies of a mechanistically ordered
universe. Shelley and Byron could reassert that man was a Prometheus. Herbert
Spencer and others testified to having observed that evolution is biological,
social, and moral. Common to all of these doctrines is the belief that man may
rely on spiritual and rational forces in the universe. There was an order of
things upon which he couuld depend for succor, a sense of purpose, and the
assurance that he was rational. The modern writer seems certain only of
uncertainty. [paragraph] Our writers believe that man carries in his
unconscious mind not merely wilfulness or the need to indulge himself, but a
deep bestiality and dark irrationality. In civilization a convention or a mode
bay be sloughed off, forgotten, or become a detritus. But whatever was once in
man's mind remains there.
Impersonal civilization, free from biology, helps
man, and conscious man strives to follow its "laws." In the nineteenth century
civilization had the appearance of natural law. . . . A generation or two
later, with Conrad, Jopyce, and Mrs. Woolf, civilization had a quite different
look." (pp.17,18)