2.2.7 Irony Irony is very significant in grotesque. Irony is an implied discrepancy
between what is said and what is meant. Three kinds of irony: a. Verbal irony is when an author says one thing and means something.
b. Dramatic irony is when an audience perceives something that a character in the literature does not know.
c. Situational of situation is a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results.
2.3 The Southern Grotesque
The terms Gothic and Grotesque are often interchanged when applied to the South the only place to which both rubrics have been consistently applied as
literary denominators. Southern Grotesque works usually depict Southern lifestyle, oftentimes focusing on small-minded country people who believe they
understand the world without having experienced it. The Southern Grotesque refers to literature that mixes terror and horror in order to shock or disturb. Writers
of southern Grotesque combine comic or obscene exaggeration with sometimes gratuitous violence, often within representations of physical deformity or sexual
deviance. The Grotesque genre in southern literature begins with southern-born Edgar Allan Poe, whose radical experience of repression and alienation in his
case, alienation from the upper-class Richmond society of his adoptive father is reflected in the nightmare landscapes that appear in his fiction. His gothic works
of horror appeared around the same time as southwestern humor writing, and as different as the two genres might seem, they share elements of distortion and
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displacement, gratuitous violence, and outrageous hostility. Possibly these similar traits represent a kindred response to the stultifying effects of traditional
antebellum plantation society, which in a resistance view functioned only through blindness to the horrors inherent in slavery and through pretentious rituals of
honor and obedience. In stories such as The Masque of the Red Death and The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe presents terrifying, irrational inversions of order.
His characters obsession with control explodes into bizarre excesses and disfiguring disease.
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams apply different kinds of gothic effects in some of their works, often as they address alienation and disorder
in modern southern settings. Yet the most interesting, and most radical inheritors of the Grotesque are women writers of the later modernist era, Carson McCullers
1917-1967 and Flannery OConnor, who developed this sensibility into very different strands. McCullers in The Ballad of the Sad Café and O’Connor in
stories such as Good Country People, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and Revelation displace the horrors of a world without morality or reason onto
grotesque female bodies. Their deformed, freakish, psychotic, or imbecilic female characters are inversions of the pure white southern woman, icon of the well-
ordered universe of southern tradition. The dramas of Tennessee Williams 1911- 1983 and the stories of Truman Capote and Peter Taylor reflect this iconography
of estrangement as well in physical, often sexual grotesqueries. If the South seems especially hospitable to such types, some scholars and writers speculate, it may be
because its social codes have allowed so few avenues for the expression of disagreement or even confusion about the controlling norms.
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Flannery OConnors affinity for the grotesque is unique because her explanations and usages are tied to her firm sense of spiritual realities that
southerners, she says, have always been more ready to acknowledge than other Americans are. Her imagined South is defined as that Christ-haunted landscape
in which characters can be forgiven anything except spiritual complacency. Epiphanies occur for OConnors ideal modern readers when they experience a
sense of the uncanny translated for OConnor into spiritual grace through the grotesque modes combining of strange, often violent discrepancies or
oppositions in plot, character or imagery. Following OConnor, and deeply indebted to her, are several contemporary southern writers who are interested in
her use of the Grotesque as a way to comment on a stultifying, spiritually arid modern landscape. Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, Barry Hannah, Tim
McLaurin, Lewis Nordan and Larry Brown apply the principles of the Grotesque in works of fiction that often are considered under a separate rubric. Like
OConnors grotesque comedies, some of these writers works can be violently comic, while others are more likely to shock or repulse readers through raw
portrayals of life at its grimmest.
2.4 The Author and Grotesque
