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Flannery O'Connor's Short Stories: The Assault on the Reader
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
Writing in her autobiography about Southern fiction at the turn of the century, Ellen Glasgow argued that it needed more violence and toughness to counteract its tendency towards “insidious” sentimentality; as she defined it later, such literature could be redeemed only by “Blood and irony.” Nearly fifty years later, she might have been gratified to see how a fellow Southern woman writer had answered this need. Violence and irony are endemic in O'Connor's short stories, which depict brutality, physical abuse, murder, and betrayal perpetrated by characters who are often termed “grotesques” –physical freaks, idiots, and maniacs. But they owe their striking impact not only to the violence which they embody in terms of character and event, but also to the violence which they enact on the reader. They implement a shock technique, dependent not so much on the nature of the fictional material, whose horrorsare objectified by a skilfully controlled comic/ironic tone, as on exploitation of the reader's preconceptions.The disjunctions of the stories, which "work," in O'Connor's words, by portraying "an action that is totally unexpected,"are reproduced in the reader's subjection to an abrupt shattering of expectation, producing a profound sense of unease or bewilderment. Thus the most exceptional and original aspect of the violence in O'Connor's fiction is found in its manipulative relationship with the audience who,as one critic has expressed it, may feel "cheated,"4 not to say victimized,by the author's mocking tyranny.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986
References
1 Glasgow, Ellen, The Woman Within (New York: 1980), p. 104Google Scholar.
2 This technique of reader disorientation is examined in Shloss, Carol, Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Univ. Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Shloss claims that O'Connor intends to undermine certain attitudes conducive to particular patterns of reading response by replacing the recognizable with the strange or disturbing; but although she sees that this creates surprise or reversal of expectation in the reader, she argues that the resulting ambiguity or uncertainty must be seen as an artistic shortcoming because it fails to make clear the absolute (i.e. that the absurdity of modern society is due to its Godlessness) which is the essence of O'Connor's moral message, and which she wishes to convey through her fiction. Thus for Shloss, the most successful of the stories she discusses is “The Artificial Nigger” because it most unequivocally explains the spiritual meaning of the experience presented. This critical approach does not attempt to suggest other, non-religious, reasons why O'Connor may have wished to alienate her audience, nor does the study explore in any detail the complex and shifting relationship between author, narrational voices, and reader, which this article will analyse.
3 O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners (London: 1984), p. 118Google Scholar.
4 See Mercier, V., “Sex, Success and Salvation,” Hudson Review, 13 (1960), 449–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Mystery and Manners, p. 124.
6 Ibid., p. 39.
7 Ibid., p. 40.
8 Ibid., pp. 42–43.
9 Ibid., p. 44.
10 Ibid., p. 98.
11 Ibid., pp. 112–13.
12 Ibid., p. 48.
13 O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find (London: 1980), p. 9Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are included in the text.
14 Mystery and Manners, p. 109.
15 Ibid., p. 111.
16 O'Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rises Must Converge (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 1975), pp. 25–26Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are included in the text.
17 O'Connor, Flannery, The Habit of Being, ed. Fitzgerald, Sally (New York: 1979), pp. 129, 178Google Scholar.
18 O'Connor, Flannery, Everything That Rises Must Converge, p. 73Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are included in the text.
19 O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find, pp. 175, 179Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are included in the text.
20 The Habit of Being, p. 75.
21 Ibid., pp. 170, 171.
22 Mystery and Manners, p. 100.