ANAGOGICAL VISION AND COMEDIC FORM IN FLANNERY O'CONNOR: THE REASONABLE USE OF THE UNREASONABLE

Renascence, Fall 2004 by Askin, Denise T

FLANNERY O'Connor warns in Mystery and Manners that unless the scholar can "apprehend the form, he will never apprehend anything else about the work, except what is extrinsic to it as literature" (129). Her creative instincts drew her to comedy, a mode that served her anagogical purposes well. The congruity of comedy with Christian belief has been widely discussed by theologians, philosophers and literary critics.1 O'Connor scholars have addressed her "comic vision" from a theological perspective (Wood), her use of irony (Schloss) and her affinity for the grotesque (Gentry) as ways of approaching her comedic art. On the one hand, O'Connor uses comedy as an artistic strategy to dispatch moral tyranny and complacency, and to embody the sacred through a kind of faithful profanation. But, like Mark Twain, she is also employing in comedy an eminently rational form to purge a contemporary art corrupted by the demon of sentimentality. In doing so, she is working within a formal comedic tradition that extends back from Mikhail Bakhtin's medieval carnival to Aristotle's Poetics.

I would like to complement the discussion of O'Connor's "comic vision" by looking at the forms she employs in its service.2 To situate O'Connor in the comedic tradition we need to examine the formal aspects of her art: paradigmatic pairing of alazon and eiron, comic deflation and resolution through plot structure, timing, unmasking devices, characterization, and language. O'Connor uses classic comedic elements (traditionally the enemies of sentiment and egocentricity), and she "customizes" them for her anagogical purposes by truncating the conventional comic plot resolution, and shifting modes at the ends of her works. Her story "Greenleaf" serves to illustrate the anagogical and formal aspects of O'Connor's comedic style.

O'CONNOR gives unrivaled priority in her essays to the function of "seeing." She advocates anything that will activate the writer's obligation to "stare" at things, a species of "stupidity" she says the fiction writer cannot do without (Mystery and Manners 77, 84, 91, 177; The Habit of Being 115). This stupidity, of course, is her term for the gradual and complex process of sacramental beholding that she calls the prophetic vision, or "getting the point" (Mystery and Manners 77). When stared at thus relentlessly, the concrete thing yields its "point," that is, its extensions of meaning. The prophetic writer sees the extensions of near (or visible) things, and sees "far" (or invisible) things close up. The extensions of the near lead to the "invisible" sphere of the divine (mystery). Conversely, the distance between the "far" things of the spirit and the visible world diminishes. This is what O'Connor calls the anagogical dimension of her art, akin to what Paul Ricoeur might call an "excess of signification" (55).

In the service of this anagogical function, O'Connor looks to make the concrete image do "double time," (Mystery and Manners 96), to "suggest both the world and eternity" (Mystery and Manners 111). In her comic grotesque, she seeks a single "image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye . . . but just as real" (Mystery and Manners 42). The anagogical vision sees "different levels of reality in one image or one situation" (Mystery and Manners 72). Neither a dogmatist nor a moralist, O'Connor was in the business of seeing and trying to make others see what is there but is invisible to the secular eye. How is it then, with this serious artistic agenda, that O'Connor chose comedy as her vehicle?

First of all, it is necessary to dispel the idea that there is an inherent conflict between seriousness and comedy, or between a vision of the sacred and an affinity for the incongruous. A host of writers from Kierkegaard through Reinhold Niebuhr have found in comedy's focus on the concrete, its movement from constraint to freedom, and its anamnesis - its recall of our fully embodied humanity (Lynch 98) - to be vitally attuned to the Christian perspective. Kierkegaard makes the claim that "the more thoroughly and substantially a human being exists, the more he will discover the comical . . . [T]he religious man, most of all [must] discover the comical" (qtd. in Hyers 10-11). The unifying theme of these writers is that comedy embraces the fmiteness and incongruity of human existence, an essential perspective for a religion based on Incarnation. Insofar as it is a recognition of the incongruity of human existence, Reinhold Niebuhr claims that comedy is more profound than any philosophy which "seeks to devour incongruity in reason" (qtd. in Hyers 148). Conrad Hyers's claim that comedy is "closer to the deep springs of religion than tragedy" (233), is taken up by Nathan A. Scott, Jr.:

... it is the function of comedy to enliven our sense of the human actuality, to put us in touch with the Whole Truth - particularly when, in the pursuit of some false and abstract image of ourselves, we have become embarrassed by the limitations of our creatureliness and undertaken . . . flight into the realm of pure idea .... [T]he comic imagination, it seems to me, summarizes an important part of the Christian testimony about the meaning of life. (Hyers 73)