Grotesque (The New Critical Idiom) by Justin Edwards & Rune Graulund

Author:Justin Edwards & Rune Graulund [Edwards, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781134106127
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

FREAKS AND MISFITS

Freaks and misfits populate the fiction of the American author Flannery O'Connor. One of the most consistent practitioners of twentieth-century grotesque fiction, her short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (1955) includes a band of roving highwaymen who spontaneously execute a family during a chance encounter. Grotesque descriptions also appear in her novels such as Wise Blood (1952), in which the narrator recounts, among other grotesque scenes, the theft of a mummified dwarf who is mistaken for a baby. O'Connor's fiction includes many grotesque qualities related to characterization, setting and plot, but her essay ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’ (1960) provides a particular insight into her reflections on grotesque fiction. As a Southern American writer, O'Connor partially objected to ‘grotesque’ as a blanket term, because she thought it too reductive to classify Southern fiction as defined by degeneration, deterioration and weirdness. Despite her reservations about labelling the American South weird, corrupt or in decay, O'Connor argues that ‘the Southern grotesque’ is an appropriate expression for certain types of regional U. S. fiction. Texts that include an aura of ‘mystery’ are particularly apt. She writes,

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.

(ibid.: 40)

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