Monsters of Distorted Vision: The Poetics of Flannery OConnor Ilana Shiloh

Abstract Monstrosity is usually defined as a grotesque deviation from the norm. But what if the norm itself is deviant? This apparent paradox is at the core of Flannery OConnors world-view and fiction. OConnor, a religious author writing for a secular audience, a devout Catholic living in the Protestant South, an ailing and physically deformed human-being surrounded by the healthy, was a perennial misfit. So are her fictional characters. The gallery of her protagonists conjures up an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque.1 Her preoccupation with the deformed and the grotesque cannot be accounted for only in terms of her affiliation with what she ironically calls the School of Southern Degeneracy, whose notable members include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote. OConnors sense of the grotesque derives from her conception of the norm, and the norm, for her, is mans Redemption by Christ. Everything she sees in the world she sees in relation to that. From this absolute perspective, the normal and the aberrant exchange places the grotesque is domesticated and the mundane is revealed as monstrous. This is the case in OConnors short story A Temple of the Holy Ghost, which is the focus of the present paper. Key Words: norm, deviation, perception, Christianity, the South.

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________________________________________________ Many years ago a group of people became trapped in the mountains of Ecuador. They settled there, completely isolated and cut off from all civilisation. Over time they developed a genetic disease that caused the blindness of all the inhabitants. The inhabitants also lost all memory of sight, and the entire population lived as if blindness were normal, organising all aspects of their existence around the senses of hearing, touch and smell. Fifteen generations later, an outsider arrives in the remote valley. Nunez, the guide of a mountaineering expedition, lost his footing and is now stranded in the Country of the Blind. When he realises that none of the people around him can see, Nunez at first thinks he has an advantage, trusting in the old proverb In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But he is profoundly mistaken: in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is a monster. The doctor of the blind believes that in the case of Nunez those queer things that are called the eyes, and which exist to give an agreeable depression in the face, are diseasedin such a way as to affect his brain.2 And the community decides to surgically remove Nunezs eyes, the source of his aberration. H.G. Wellss story, The Country of the Blind (1927) memorably illustrates the relative nature of monstrosity. Monstrosity can be defined as a grotesque deviation from the norm, and norms are socially conditioned. Even though they may lay claim to universality and objective validity, norms reflect neither biology nor a transcendent reality. All they reflect is our perception of how things are or how they should be. The Country of the Blind, where perception is both the allegorical purport and the explicit theme of the story, strikingly dramatises this point. Normalcy and aberration do not exist out there in the world they are culturally constructed. The implicit belief in the relative nature of monstrosity informs the fiction or Flannery OConnor. OConnor, a religious author writing for a secular audience, a devout Catholic living in the Protestant South, a female intellectual rooted in a society valorising feminine gracefulness over intellect, an ailing and physically deformed individual surrounded by the healthy, was a perennial misfit. So are her fictional characters. The gallery of her protagonists conjures up an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque.

Ilana Shiloh

________________________________________________ Her preoccupation with the deformed and the grotesque cannot be accounted for only in terms of her affiliation with what she ironically calls The School of Southern Degeneracy, whose notable members include William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers or Truman Capote. OConnors sense of the grotesque derives from her perception of the norm, which is, due to her four-fold marginalisation (as a believer, a Catholic, a female and a disabled), radically at odds with the central tenets of her social community and her reading audience. In OConnors fiction, the normal and the aberrant exchange places, so that the grotesque is domesticated and the mundane is gradually revealed as monstrous. This paradigm shift underpins all her fiction, destabilising the perception of her fictional characters as well as that of her readers. One of the works that symbolically foreground this altered perspective is A Temple of the Holy Ghost, a short story first published in 1954. The storys protagonist and centre of consciousness is an unattractive, smart and irreverent twelve-year-old girl, who is visited by two fourteen-year-old cousins. The cousins, convent girls sent to a religious school to shelter them from males, address each other with hilarity as Temple One, and Temple Two, quoting a nun who had used the term while cautioning them against encounters with boys. The nuns warning unsurprisingly achieves the opposite effect, and the two girls are preoccupied with the subject of boys, their changing bodies, and their selfproclaimed sophistication. The child helps her mother entertain by suggesting local dates for the visiting cousins. Her first suggestion, a fat and elderly farmer by the name of Mr. Cheatham, is rejected by the mother. The child is more successful with her second attempt at matchmaking, and Wendell and Cory, the two country yokels she suggests, take the two cousins out to a country fair. The child stays behind, daydreaming and fantasising about possible futures for herself. When the cousins come back from the show, they tell the child of a freak they had seen: a hermaphrodite who exposes his/her secrets to the audience. The child is profoundly impressed by the description and in her imagination the freak-show assumes the pattern and rhythm of Mass. The mother and daughter attend Mass the next morning, when they return the girls to the convent. It is then that the child looks out of

Monsters of Distorted Vision

________________________________________________ a window and perceives the huge red ball of the sun as an elevated Host drenched in blood. A Temple of the Holy Ghost is an initiation story, tracing a young girls passage from childhood to puberty. But the story departs from the traditional narrative formula by dramatising a double initiation the protagonists discovery of sexuality and her realisation of Christs mystery. The two rites of passage converge in the figure of the hermaphrodite. Their convergence subverts customary distinctions between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the debased, and redefines the concepts of normalcy and of monstrosity. The conflation of contrasts is suggested in the opening sentence, which establishes the tone and the thematic purport of the story. All weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne, who had spots on her face anyway.3 The sentence coalesces sanctity and ridicule, ugliness and the implied beauty of budding sexuality. This reconciliation of traditional opposites informs all levels of the narrative. Thus the two visitors, Joanne and Susan, are at once homely and attractive. Joanne talks through her nose and turns purple in patches when she laughs, but her yellow hair is naturally curly; Susan is very skinny but has a pretty pointed face and red hair. Similarly, the childs reaction to the two older girls is a mixture of contempt and envy. On the one hand, she decides that they are practically morons and is glad that they are only second cousins, so she couldnt have inherited any of their stupidity. On the other hand, she is intrigued by their practices of selfembellishment and seduction and feels out of it, excluded from the mysterious rites of puberty.4 The convergence of apparent opposites also functions on other, more thematically meaningful levels. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist is consistently referred to as the child, an epithet suggesting her basic innocence and purity. In spite of her irreverence, sassiness, and unattractive physique and demeanour, the child is innocent in matters of the body and pure in matters of the spirit. When she wants to impress the older girls, she shares with them the secret of procreation: a rabbit has rabbits by spitting them out of its mouth. When the cousins make fun of the nuns cautioning that their body is a Temple of the Holy Ghost, the child sees

Ilana Shiloh

________________________________________________ nothing funny in the claim. She regards the phrase as an unexpected present. But the term child is also gender-neutral and thus conveys one of the storys central concerns - the conflation of the feminine and the masculine. This theme is symbolically suggested in one of the protagonists daydreams, in which she fantasises about being a soldier in World War II. In her dream, she is the hero who has five times rescued her subordinates, Wendell and Cory, from Japanese suicide divers. The fantasy of empowerment humorously subverts the Southern ideology of female passivity and reverses customary gender stereotypes. Thus, when she visualises the overwhelmed Wendell and Cory proposing to her, and thereby attempting to re-instate her in the traditional role of a marriageable woman, the child turns both of them down, indignantly threatening to have them court-marshalled. The most radical embodiment of the convergence of opposites is the hermaphrodite. He is the freak in the story, scandalising the fictional characters and the reading audience alike. But his freakishness is a matter of perception; and the protagonists perception, like that of her creator, Flannery OConnor, casts the hermaphrodite in a role that ironically questions our deeply entrenched notions of both monstrosity and normalcy. The theme of perception is already introduced in the first paragraph, through the motif of the mirror, in which the two cousins admire themselves. A mirror, as Lacan teaches us in his account of the subjects entry into the imaginary order, may offer an inaccurate version of reality. What we see in the mirror depends on what we look for. Here, the cousins perspective is undermined by the perspective of the protagonist and of the omniscient narrator. The girls see the hermaphrodite as a freak, but the storys consistent imagery suggests that freakishness is situated in the world outside the country fair. Thus, when the child inquires whether the cousins have seen the monkeys and the fat man in the show, her question echoes the description of the characters outside the show. Wendell and Cory, the girls suitors, court the cousins sitting like monkeys, their knees on a level with their shoulders and their arms hanging down between.5 And Mr. Cheatham, the first prospective suitor, is the fat man, whose protruding stomach he press[es] tenderly from time to time with his big flat thumb.6

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________________________________________________ The thematic significance of this symbolic correspondence is clarified in the storys climactic scene, in which the child falls asleep and dreams about the freakshow. Profoundly impressed by the cousins description of the creature who was a man and a woman both, and who pulled up its blue dress, the colour of divinity, to expose its double sex, the child imagines the circus performance as a religious ceremony and the hermaphrodite is another Temple of the Holy Ghost. In her minds eye, the freak becomes Jesus and Jesus turns into a freak. The logic behind OConnors apparently preposterous analogy, the common ground between the figure of the Saviour and the figure of the hermaphrodite, is their reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable contrasts. In the same way that the androgynous body conflates the masculine and the feminine, Christs body on the cross conflates the human and the divine. The hermaphrodites carnality evokes the Saviours incarnation. In contradistinction to the traditional Christian dualism valorising the soul over the body, the Southern writer accepts Christs example literally. The body is the soul. The soul partakes of the bodys imperfection. And the body partakes of the souls sacredness. The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life, writes OConnor in her collection of occasional prose, Mystery and Manners. Both the freak and the Saviour embody a mystery, what I term an inverted paradox. While classical paradoxes prove as true what we know to be false, the example of Christ proves as false what we believe to be true. Zeno demonstrated that Achilles would never overtake the tortoise and this proof, although perfectly logical, is a fallacy. Christ demonstrated that the Son of God could take a human form and be crucified like a thief, and this demonstration, although perfectly illogical, is the truth. For OConnor, mystery is the norm, and the reduction of reality to reasonable phenomena is an aberration. As in Wellss Country of the Blind, so in OConnors textual, and extra-textual South, monstrosity is a matter of perception. The hermaphrodite may be perceived as an outrageous anomaly, but it can also be regarded as a manifestation of wholeness and perfection. That was indeed the hermaphrodites symbolic meaning in antiquity, as we can learn from the figure of the bisexual prophet Theresias, or from Aristophanes account of the origin of desire in Platos

Ilana Shiloh

________________________________________________ Symposium. In Wellss story, the norm was defined in terms of lack those who lacked sight condemned the one who had it. This is also the case in A Temple of the Holy Ghost. Those who ridicule the freak would equally have stoned Jesus, for their vision is basically distorted. The Son of God who died on the Cross, a hermaphrodite exposing himself in a country fair, a child who is also a combat pilot these are embodiments of the norm. All the others are monstrous exceptions.

Notes
1. F OConnor, The Fiction Writer & His Country in Mystery and Manners, Faber and Faber, London, p.28. 2. H G Wells, The Country of the Blind in Litrix Reading Room 2003, viewed on 11 October 2006. < http://www.litrix.com/cblind/cblin001.htm>. 3. F OConnor, A Temple of the Holy Ghost in The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1971, p. 236. 4. Ibid., p. 236. 5. Ibid., p. 240. 6. Ibid., p. 237.

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M., Rabelais and His World. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1968. Caruso, T. (ed.), On the subject of the feminist business: re-reading Flannery OConnor. Peter Lang, New York, 2004. Di Renzo, A.., American Gargoyles: Flannery OConnor and the Medieval Grotesque. Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Lamar Nisly, L., Impossible to Say: Representing Religious Mystery in Fiction, by Malamud, Percy, Ozick and OConnor. Westport, Greenwood Press, 2002. OConnor, F., The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1971. ____. The Habit of Being: Letters. Ed. S Fitzgerald. Vintage Books, New York, 1980. ____. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. S and R Fitzgerald. Faber and Faber, London 1984..

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________________________________________________ ____. Spiritual Writings. Ed. R Ellsberg. Orbis Books, New York, 2003. Srigley, S., Flannery OConnors Sacramental Art. University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Thomson Philip. The Grotesque. London: Methuen, 1972. Wells, H G., The Country of the Blind. Litrix Reading Room 2003, viewed 11 October 2006. <http://www.litrix.com/cblind/cblin/001.htm>. Ilana Shiloh received her Ph.D. in American Literature from Tel Aviv University. She is currently lecturer and Head of English Studies at the College of Management, in Rishon Lezion, Israel. She is the author of Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest (Peter Lang, New York 2002) and has published a range of articles on contemporary fiction and film.