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

Renascence, Fall 2004 by Askin, Denise T

O'Connor's endings move from the horizontal axis to a vertical one, catapulting the action into a different sphere. She opens a door to another dimension, but bars entry to the reader. Her endings occur before we can see the effects of grace, before we can see whether the characters have, in fact, achieved the self-knowledge and undergone the reversal they have been offered. They are unmasked, deflated, and reduced to their rockbottom humanity, but then led offstage - or rather, left dead on stage. O'Connor's laughter is, in the final analysis, transitional.5 It drops away at the end. The transparent mode of comedy shifts to dense symbolism, even ambiguity. The concluding tableaus are stunning and disorienting to readers expecting the restored harmony and festive reconciliation of comedy. The horizontal interplay of alazon and eiron is subsumed by an overarching irony. O'Connor is not interested in getting her characters to change their ways, a moral (or "tropological") message she scorned to indulge. Her interest is in their encounter with grace, or the offer of participation in the divine life, something quite different from mere good behavior. O'Connor therefore frustrates the facile comedic resolution and demands instead the hard work of anagogical interpretation.

What we see in O'Connor's design, then, is an appropriation of classic comedic devices and structures that she employs in a truncated plot design. She reveals the ridiculous element of her characters, unmasks their pretensions, and shatters their facades. But then, instead of reforming or reconciling her comic characters in the obligatory happy ending, she shoves them into a stark encounter with the ultimate in the form of death or defeat. This shift in mode suggests an encounter with mystery, the appropriate response to which is silence. The locus of resolution is more difficult to determine than in conventional comedy. O'Connor's is thus a hybrid form, arousing, like absurd theater, contradictory responses in an audience trained to respond to a recognizable comedie tradition (Leyburn 644). Her ironic endings have the flavor of the ludicrous about them, but they open into mystery. Resolution appears to be offstage, found on the level of anagogical interpretation.

Traditional comedy is marked by circularity. By connecting the mythos of spring with the genre of comedy, Frye emphasizes the cyclic structure of comedie action. The comedie plot and its resolution replicate the seasonal circularity of the death of the old god/order succeeded by the birth of the new order/resurrection in new life and fertility. The resolution brings lovers together, and restores the harmony of the community. Both the perennial cycle of nature and comedie endings are therefore comfortably predictable. O'Connor's plots, however, are linear, not cyclic. Their conclusions, rather than coming full circle to restored harmony, remain open-ended. Her characters are free to say "no" with their last breath.

Although O'Connor begins her comedie stories with the rational apprehension of the irrational (the distinguishing mode of the comic genre), she moves at last to the suprarational - to the mystery that transcends reason. And that is where she leaves her readers - with a concrete tableau that carries an excess of signification. Traditional comedie endings distribute justice and arrive at festive, if improbable, reconciliations based on the speedy reversal of blocking characters. But O'Connor leaves the reader to struggle for "the point" - the extensions of meaning - the hard way, by staring very hard at the concrete image until it yields its anagogical secret.