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

Renascence, Fall 2004 by Askin, Denise T

Mr. Greenleaf's signature action is procrastination, a kind of evasive passive resistance that thwarts the force of Mrs. May's will. He seems startlingly out of character, therefore, when like clockwork he appears at her door precisely at the moment that her sons have broken into a violent brawl. As Mrs. May "stiffens" to conceal this reality from the elron at her door, her dialogue bulges with inflation: she is the wounded victim of ingratitude, unfairly treated because she is a lone woman. This blatant imposture triggers the eiron to throw off his disguise and puncture her pretense: "Quick as a snake striking, Mr. Greenleaf said, 'You got two boys'" (302). This deflation threatens her at her core. From this point, it is a straight path to the concluding scene.

It is Mr. Greenleaf who exposes the mechanism of the final comedic trap. He tells Mrs. May (and thereby alerts the reader) that the bull (an enemy of the mechanical) "don't like cars and trucks" (296). Mrs. May, relentless in her determination to bend Mr. Greenleaf to her will and make him shoot the bull, predictably starts the engine of her car and drives to the center of the field. O'Connor here creates a comic suspense rivaling Chaucer's in "The Miller's Tale." Mrs. May honks the horn and then sits down on the bumper of the car to wait, thereby maddening and summoning the bull, a deliciously predictable result. It is her own will to power, of course, that springs the comic trap. But her resulting death comes as a shock to the reader, nonetheless.

Mrs. May's journey toward her final encounter with the Greenleaf bull, a seemingly definitive but ultimately ambiguous cognitio scene, leads naturally to the question of how O'Connor typically treats the comedic plot drive toward freedom and recognition. Frye argues that the conventional comedic plot moves toward freedom - an individual's freedom from the bonds of a restrictive society, or a society's freedom from bonds imposed on it by "humorous" characters (that is, people in some kind of "mental bondage" like the humours of Ben Jonson). The freedom toward which O'Connor's plots move, however, needs some clarification. Her protagonists are "humours" as Frye describes the type:

helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness .... [They are] people who do not fully know what they are doing, who are slaves to a predictable self-imposed pattern of behavior. What we call the moral norm is, then, not morality but deliverance from moral bondage. ("Argument" 237, emphasis added)

It is easy to trace society's deliverance from moral bondage in Volpone or Tartuffe; and it is easy to trace the deliverance of the individual from society's moral bondage in, for instance, A School For Scandal. But while O'Connor's humours characters and morally depleted societies are recognizably part of the comedic tradition, O'Connor's movement toward freedom is not. She exposes societies for their deformities, but she does not "free" them at the conclusion of the story. O'Connor subjects her characters to shocking confrontations with reality, but her plots often lead them only to the threshold of freedom.