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
Flannery O’Connor work is full of eccentric characters, bizarre situations, violent behaviors and macabre death. Her satire can provoke laughter at the
beginning of a story, and end with panic and a heart attack. As a Roman Catholic she finds ‘the centre of existence’ in the Holy Ghost. Avowedly ‘not interested in
abnormal psychology’, Flannery O’Connor uses grotesque characters in most her
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works partly because the most enduring childhood influence on her was a volume called The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, partly because she wants to
delight in sheer originality, and particularly because she wants to show people who think God is dead that the Holy Ghost infuses grace into the most improbable
poor white souls of the Southern Bible belt. O’Connor uses grotesque characters in most her works because of the
influence of The Humerous Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. These tales consists of grotesque characters, one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses
and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece,
artificial teeth voice box, etc; another about the inmates of a lunatic asylum who take over the establishment and run it to suit themselves.
The rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S. the Slop period was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years
and consisted chiefly in a volume called The Humerous Tales of EAPoe. I went to a progressive high school where one did not read
if one did not wish too; I did not wish to except the Humerous Tales etc. Fitzgerald, 1988: 950
O’Connor’s usage of grotesque is to delight a sheer original style of the South about the place and people their minds embraced most knowingly. For
O’Connor, the South’s novel does not grapple with any particular culture and there is no genuine sense of place. The social is superior to the purely personal
and traditional manners are better than no manners at all. It is important to have senses respond to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds
and a particular idiom.
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When one Southern character speaks, regardless of his station in life, an echo of all Southern life is heard. This help to keep
Southern fiction from being a fiction of purely private experience Fitzgerald, 1988: 855
Most people in the South lose their faith of God. As a pious writes,
O’Connor wants to show people who think God is dead that the Holy Ghost infuses grace into the most improbable poor white souls of the Southern Bible
belt. Peter W. Williams writes in his book America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century 2000: 287 that most evangelicals in South
America were united in their endorsement of a strict code of personal moral behavior, which forbade smoking, alcoholic beverages, gambling, theater and
movie going, and even, especially among Pentecostals, the wearing of neckties for men and the use of cosmetics. But it contrasts with the reality, that a cultural
analyst W. J. Cash there is “orgiastic religion” in the region’s tradition. O’Connor’s usage of grotesque IS to emphasize the salvation through the mystery
of life to remind the Southerners that God is real and salvation really exists. In one of the letter published as The Habit of Being she writes:
One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present
reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audiences are the people who
think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for Fitzgerald, 1988: 943.
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O’Connor realizes that the Southern readers she faces are people who do not believe in God’s grace. The God’s grace is that God comes to the earth as a
Man
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In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us John 1:1,14a
and be crucified to save human from sins. The grotesque characters O’Connor creates are taken from Southern people who most think that God is
dead. O’Connor wishes her readers could believe that God does exist after reading her work.
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3. THE ANALISYS OF GROTESQUE CHARACTERISTICS IN WISE BLOOD
