Returning full circle, the primary reason for focusing on these three authors is the fact that each possessed a richly developed theological vision for writing fiction that included the use of the grotesque as a means of exploring the nature of the human being (i.e., his soul and his ability to flourish) and the human condition in the modern world.
In literature, distorted characters can be—though too frequently mischaracterized as such—referred to as grotesque characters. A fairly broad term in art and literature, one whose definition will be more fully developed in later chapters, the grotesque gives us, among other things, “the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding remains unsatisfied.” Geoffrey Harpham further explains, “As a noun [the grotesque] implies that an object either occupies multiple categories or that it falls in between categories.” That is, grotesque characters are either anomalous, ambiguous, or ambivalent to the degree that modern secular adults find them “a source of anxiety, horror, astonishment, laughter, or revulsion.”
Those familiar with the works of Flannery O’Connor will note that the characters of her stories most often, and most overtly, embody such a nature as described by grotesque. One of her characters, for example, takes up his distortion in the form of a Nietzschian Ubermensch whose conquests are typically carried out as personal acts of proving disbelief in God. In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Tarwater repeatedly tells his uncle Rayber (a modernist school teacher) that he is different than him because all Rayber can do is talk about his unbelief, but he (Tarwater) is capable of acting. At dinner just before Tarwater drowns Bishop, Rayber’s “afflicted child,” Tarwater tells his uncle, “It ain’t the same… I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act.”
Ironically, after he drowns the boy and makes for home, he tells the stranger with whom he hitches a ride, “I baptized him… it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… the words just come out of themselves but it don’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again… I only meant to drown him… you’re only born once. They were just some words that run out of my mouth and spilled in the water.” Tarwater carries on with the driver, disconcerted and shaken about the ordeal, not because he drowned a boy, but because he accidentally baptized him in the process. He eerily laments the words of baptism escaped his lips as he pushed the retarded child under the water.
By drowning the boy he believed he was called by God to baptize, Tarwater attempts to overcome his “bad conscience,” a conscience he believes had been spoiled by the Christian moral ideal instilled in him by his Uncle Tarwater, the crazy prophet who had kidnapped him and taken him to the woods to raise him. Drowning the boy was a way of wedding his conscience to the unnatural inclinations of Christianity which Nietzsche suggested ran counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short, any ideal hostile to life and ideals that slander the world. Nietzsche had opined that in order for the modern world to avoid its inevitable plunge into the great nausea of nihilism, it would require a man with a “different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in this present age.” The characteristics of such a man “would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely self-confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health.”
In characters like Francis Marion Tarwater, Flannery O’Connor gave the modern world a vision of such a man as Nietzsche described. By making her characters grotesque, she subtly confronts modern thought and ethics, demonstrates the end of its trajectory, and thereby pins down in the reader’s imagination a more precise measure for how far Western culture had already fallen from a previously higher state of existence.
Likewise, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien each gave the literary world notoriously distorted characters of a similar nature for similar reasons as O’Connor. Lewis makes his contribution to the grotesque in works like The Screwtape Letters and his Space Trilogy. For example, in the second book in the Space Trilogy, Perelandra, the modernist scientist, Weston, is possessed by the Devil. Lewis refers to him as the “Un-man” because Weston is, at this point, both like man and unlike man. He has a man’s body, distorted as it is, but the mind or soul of the Devil. While readers are often delighted by the characters Lewis’s imagination supplied the world, Chad Stutz describes Lewis’s Un-man as “an animalistic, howling, thrashing thing motivated by hatred and the will to conquer.” And he “gains pleasure purely from the malevolent destruction of the natural world as he runs through the prelapsarian paradise of Perelandra murdering defenseless frog-like creatures.” Richard Purtill says of the character, Weston, “Lewis’s Tempter… is one of the most chilling representations of sheer evil in literature.” Lewis’s fiends, therefore, make substantial payments on his debt to the grotesque tradition in literature.
Lastly, J. R. R. Tolkien made some of the most memorable and lasting contributions to the tradition of the grotesque in his fantasy literature with characters like Ungoliant, Shelob, Melkor, the Orks, the Ring-wraiths or Nazgul—and most notably, Gollum. Gollum was a Stoorish Hobbit, named Smeagol, who found the One Ring on a fishing trip and became possessed by its power. In The Hobbit, Old Gollum is described as both a “small slimy creature” and a “miserable wicked creature” with “two big round eyes in his pale face.” He gets his name from “a horrible swallowing noise in his throat” and sometimes a “whistling and gurgling sound” he makes when he cries. He lives “on a slimy island of a rock in the middle of the lake” deep in the caves of the Misty Mountains. He continually argues with himself and has been “brooding for ages on this one thing,” his “precious,” the One Ring. In terms of the grotesque, Gollum has, in effect, lost his soul to obsession and a demonic power that the ring possesses. The more he obsesses, the more it possesses him until he has less and less of his natural Smeagol soul and more and more of the distorted Gollum soul. Like O’Connor’s freaks and Lewis’s fiends, Gollum, like many of Tolkien’s other fantasy creatures, offers a picture of the distorted soul, one both possessed and unpossessed of human characteristics.
All three of these Christian Humanists use grotesque characters who are, in a word, dehumanized, and thereby illustrate what the human being may look like when not fully human; inversely, their work casts a Christian vision for the whole man in the modern world, one who possesses both faith and right reason. Said another way, these three authors share a consensus about what constitutes human flourishing in individuals, and by extension, civilizations. O’Connor’s explanation to this end certainly speaks for Lewis and Tolkien when she notes one of the primary reasons for using freaks in her novels is to show her readers, in an exaggerated form, what the distorted human being is like. In an essay titled, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” she writes, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.” O’Connor’s insight appears to answer Whitney’s quest for a precise standard—“whether measured in social, cultural, moral, or religious terms”—of the West’s previously-held higher state of existence. For O’Connor, and as will be demonstrated, for Lewis and Tolkien as well, the standard is precisely theological.
Because O’Connor’s comment on the provincial aspect of her worldview, critics often tend to relegate her to the company of writers like William Faulkner and Truman Capote. But the fact should not be dismissed or overlooked that she most notably roots her Southern conceptualization of the whole man in the South’s theological soil. As previously noted by O’Connor, she sees her Southern culture’s distorted soul through her own orthodox Christian lens. Invariably, her statements reveal what has been well-established by a number of scholars, O’Connor wrote from a Christian, and specifically Catholic, worldview. For this reason, critics who categorize her in a class with other Southern Catholic writers like Allen Tate and Walker Percy are more accurate.
However, in pursuit of this dissertation’s larger goal, it will be demonstrated that O’Connor possessed a richly developed theological vision for writing fiction that includes the use of the grotesque as a means of exploring the condition of the whole human being, and that earns her a seat with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. As a matter of apt judgment, O’Connor’s vision seems to be so closely related to Lewis’s and Tolkien’s in these terms, it is likely she would have engaged in some manner of conversation with the Inklings had an ocean and a few years not separated them. In any event, this final and primary reason for focusing on these three particular authors is their nearness in socio-theological thought that allows them a critical purchase on the visions of ethics, the soul, and human flourishing dominant in modern and postmodern thought.