The Stylistics of Syntactic Complements: Grammar and Seeing in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Donald E. Hardy, David Durian

4. Quantitative Analysis

There are at least two quantitative issues of see complements that can be investigated in the Brown and O'Connor texts: proportion of see tokens and proportion of various types of complements to the verb see. Table 1 indicates that there is a significant difference in the frequencies of see tokens in the Brown versus O'Connor texts:

The difference in the frequencies of see tokens in the Brown versus O'Connor texts is significant to the .001 level, meaning that the difference could be the result of chance less than one time in a thousand. In the Brown corpus, 2.7 tokens of see occur for every thousand total words, while the rate in the O'Connor texts is 4.2 per thousand total words. The stylistic impact of this statistical significance could easily be overlooked without pausing to consider the qualitative effect of the sheer concentration of the verb see in O'Connor's texts, regardless of type of complement. The following presents Mrs. Turpin's visionary revelation near the end of the story "Revelation":

[I] She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through afield of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. [2] Yet size could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hand and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahe ad. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. (Everything 217-18; italics ours)

Ruby's revelation, in which the top rail is put on bottom and the bottom on top, is framed by the verb see. The passage begins with a transitive clause in [1], but each of the following sentences is framed by this first clause and thus is implicitly "seen" as well by Ruby. And finally in the sentence marked [2] the narrator uses a finite, presupposed clause to present the paradoxical fact that the fierce and burning heat of God's revelatory fire will burn away the "virtues" of even his most dedicated disciples. Thus, the effect of these tokens of see, as well as the high frequency of see tokens in O'Connor's fiction, is to frame action and thoughts through characters themselves as perceptual focalizers rather than through the narrator. Two terms for this narrational device, which is very close in structure and function to free indirect discourse, are "substitutionary perception" (Fehr 98) and "narrated perception" (Fludernik 305-09). The frequent use of see in O'Connor's fiction is, then, one of the technique s in modern fiction that make possible what O'Connor calls "the disappearance" of the author. O'Connor writes that the Victorian novelists