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

Renascence, Fall 2004 by Askin, Denise T

Ruby Turpin's vision of the motley hallelujah procession at the end of "Revelation" and the silent communion of the grandfather and grandson at the end of "The Artificial Nigger" are relatively rare instances of comedic resolution in O'Connor's plots. The concluding scene in "Revelation" depicts a transformed society and an un-illusioned individual, both freed from familiar forms of moral bondage. In some extreme cases, such as those of the doomed characters Thomas ("The Comforts of Home"), or Mr. Fortune ("A View of the Woods"), O'Connor does employ comedic devices to serve satiric/ironic ends, but she omits the comedic deliverance to freedom. More commonly, however, the locus of freedom in O'Connor's fiction is in the deliverance of neither society nor the individual character. Rather, it lies in the formal pattern itself that exposes the tawdriness of clichéd virtue, the demonic aspect of conventional mores, the perversion of grace in "respectable" people, and the seductive rationalizations of "intellectuals."

If, as O'Connor claims, the kind of freedom she values is the "mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity," then it is possible to trace its lineaments or at least its potential in the Grandmother, Hulga, Parker, Tanner, Mrs. Cope, or even Julian and his mother; but their deliverance is by no means certain. In the final analysis, then, it is the reader who "apprehend[s] the form" that can experience the comedic liberation from illusion. As Frye puts it, "illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negative: whatever reality is, it's not that" (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 169-170).

O'Connor's revelations overturn the worlds of her characters without giving definitive formulation to what is revealed. This comedic way of negation suits O'Connor's anagogical design. A foundational claim of apophatic theology is that anything one says about God must also be seen as not absolute. O'Connor's emphasis on "seeing the form" points to the importance of seeing "the unspeakable or ineffable relationships that constitute the form, the interstices" (Noyalis 1). Characters such as Parker's wife need to live within clear, delineated certainty, but they are, in fact, "wineskins that cannot receive the new, non-delineated, ambiguous awareness of the mystery found only among things, never apart from things" (Noyalis 2). O'Connor's patterns negate the world's certainties - science, knowledge, hard work, cleanliness, respectability, even formulations of doctrine - ("whatever reality is, it's not that"). Her comedic forms may deliver her characters, but can deliver her readers to apprehend her own brand of "freedom" - the encounter with mystery.

FOR better or worse, the generic classification of comedy has traditionally hinged on the ending of the work. Dante entitled his opus magnus a comedy because it began in hell and ended in paradise. Byron stated baldly that tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage. One need not have read much of Flannery O'Connor to realize that her endings do not fit the comedic paradigm. She described the reaction to her reading of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The listeners roared with laughter for the first half, and sat in stunned silence for the second half. The trajectory of her plots consistently departs from the comedic contract with the audience, the serene expectation of a happy ending. O'Connor appropriates the comedic paradigm as we have seen, in developing plot, character, and mode in her stories. She distances the action comedically, barring emotion and engaging the intellect. But her typical outcome leaves Julian's mother dead on the sidewalk, Hulga without a leg to stand on, Mrs. Cope watching fire consume her farm, Parker weeping, Bevel drowned, Mary Fortune and her grandfather dead, and Mrs. May gored by a bull.