The Grotesque in Flannery O’Connor

Art by Elliot Skow

Flannery O’Connor’s stories are, by her own account, “preoccupied with the grotesque.” The reason, some argue, is that the grotesque is fascinating to the southern imagination. And indeed her grotesques have many southern precedents, most notably those of William Faulkner, whose novel The Sound and the Fury is famously narrated in part by an idiot. But even if writing about freaks is a natural impulse for southern writers, and has a natural appeal to southern readers, O’Connor denies that this explains their appearance in her fiction. Her grotesques are due, not to a sensibility she and her readers share, but to convictions of hers that her readers reject. O’Connor was Catholic, writing largely for (what she took to be) a secular, nihilistic culture. And

the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him,

but which his audience does not regard as distortions at all. Now maybe every writer is out to change their readers’ way of seeing. Still, some changes are harder to bring about than others. Charles Dickens succeeded by describing, in lurid detail, the concrete reality of factory work and child labor. But if one wants to open people’s eyes to the spiritual sickness of their society—well, how is one to do that? O’Connor’s challenge is to make the “distortions in modern life”

appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.

Dickens’ audience was (I would guess) largely receptive to his ideas, just ignorant of the facts. But O’Connor’s audience was, in her words, actively “hostile” to the vision of reality she wanted to convey. Difficult ends call for extreme techniques; for O’Connor, the grotesque was among those techniques.

But how does that technique help achieve her end? Part of the answer is in O’Connor’s remark, that