Blooms Literary Themes - THE GROTESQUE.pdf - ymerleksi - home

180Flannery O’Connoradvantage of being a Southern writer is that we don’t have to goanywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we’ve got them in abundance.We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction,rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in speech.” 6 Thissense of historical ambiguity, rooted in the concrete, extends outwarduntil it embraces the realm of mystery, and the coincidence of thesetwo qualities, as Robert Heilman has observed in one of the mostpenetrating essays on the nature of southern literature, is what makesthe fiction of this region so distinctive. Heilman terms the sense ofmystery a “sense of totality,” yet it is easy to discern that he and MissO’Connor are discussing the same phenomenon:Inclined to question whether suffering is totally eliminatableor unequivocally evil, the Southerners are most aware that,as Tate has put it, man is incurably religious, and that thecritical problem is not one of skeptically analyzing the religiousimpulse of thinking as if religion did not exist for a matureindividual and culture, but of distinguishing the real thing andthe surrogates. . . . For them, totality is more than the sum of thesensory and the rational. The invention of gods is a mark, notof a passion for unreality, but of a high sense of reality; is not aregrettable flight from science, but perhaps a closer approach tothe problem of being. 7The burden which a sense of reality and of mystery imposes upona writer is one of honesty toward one’s region, rather than of slavishdevotion to it. As Miss O’Connor mentioned in “The Fiction Writerand His Country,” truthful depiction of these two qualities requires “adelicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds, in such a way that,without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world,and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.” 8 To bean exile from the world implies a detachment from it, and this in turnpermits a degree of objectivity in rendering it. This feeling of exileplaces O’Connor at the center of what Lewis Simpson, in an elegantand carefully wrought investigation of the southern writer, terms theGreat Literary Secession. 9 Miss O’Connor is able to appreciate thecultural and historical richness of her region because of this detachment,which does not negate her willingness to utilize the South’s