The Grotesque in Southern literature

 

Sarah Gleeson-White, in a study on the southern grotesque, argues against the common interpretation of it as presenting a “gloomy vision of modernity” which acts as an allegory of the human condition as “existential alienation and angst.” Her focus is specifically on Carson McCullers, highlighting a quote from her The Vision Shared, which sought to justify the grotesque school by claiming, of its authors, “I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.” This demonstrates, Gleeson-White suggests, rather than an alienated modernity, an affirmative and transformative quality, and it is this we should be celebrating when reading the southern grotesque. 

In developing her argument, Gleeson-White adopts and adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the grotesque which, she feels, comes closest to articulating the celebratory nature of McCullers’ cry of “I am alive”. In doing so, she rejects as incomplete those traditional interpretations, as expounded by the likes of William Van O’Connor and Millichap and Fiedler, with their allusions to “dark modernism” and “alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love.” 

She presents instead, McCullers’ explanation of the grotesque: “The technique is briefly this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.” 

A key focus for Bakhtin and McCullers is the body, in particular deformity and difference from conventional perceptions of beauty, even normality. Physical freaks are, of course, a signature of the grotesque, from Faulkner’s Benjy to O’Connor’s Hulga and onwards. McCullers’ novels and stories, too, are peopled by freaks – giants or dwarves, mutes, hunchbacks and cripples, self-mutilators, androgynous men-women, and so on – but, Gleeson-White argues, and I would agree, McCullers ultimately uses these characters as a reaction against convention and as an exploration of humanity. She suggests that: “Her novels of resistance present us with unsettled identities and so push the very boundaries of how we understand human being.” 

This idea of the transformative nature of grotesque freakery is interesting. For all her brilliance as a writer, for example, I cannot see it in Flannery O’Connor. Transformation, for her, is bound to redemption, and her perspective on redemption is that of a subject reconciling him or herself to the will of the master; her works are flavoured, for me, by subjugation to the supernatural and not celebration or understanding of the human.

 

Likewise, I look at the works of Cormac McCarthy and try to discern how they might be described as affirmative or transformative. Only his early works, of course, are considered to be truly southern but I believe that typical southern transgressiveness suffuses his later works, too. And, in his collection of freaks, from Lester Ballard and Rinthy and Culla onwards through the seven feet albino judge to the morally autistic Chigurh, he presents a set of characters who are outwith anything that could be considered normal. But is he, in Bakhtinian terms, “[disclosing] the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life”? And, moreover, is he using his grotesquery to unnerve in order to enlighten? 

The answers to those questions would appear to me to be yes and possibly no, and therein lies a difficulty. Yes, McCarthy shows us a different world, most significantly in Blood Meridian and The Road. This is what mankind is capable of, he is telling us in the former, and because of that the latter he presents the road we may be leading ourselves down. It is, then, a negative view, and what positives one may take from his novels must generally be taken by this process of inversion: don’t do that, or this may be the result. Such is the approach of organised religion through the ages: behave, or else; believe, or de’il tak ye; belong, or be cast adrift. 

In this, then, we see echoes of Hazel Motes and Tarwater, even of Captain Ahab; we see the human relegated beneath the supernatural, and the result is obeisance to the godhead, whoever or whatever that might be. Rather than transformative, then, it is reactionary: it is promulgated on the maintenance of a primordial order rather than the advancement of humanity. Hence the answer to the second question may be no: McCarthy’s grotesquery does not wholly enlighten, but rather it can seem to cast us backwards, to limit our freedom. McCarthy so constructs his characters – indeed, they are often more archetypes than characters, with no psycho-social histories or motivations – that they are unable to project forward. 

It is all very well for McCarthy to warn of the dangers to human society of our inwardness, our selfishness, our self-destructive disregard for nature, because those are warnings we would do well to heed, but in presenting only the binary oppositions of annihilation and acceptance of a putative god, he is artificially defining the boundaries of the debate. His grotesques are so designed, those characterless characters, that they miss the true alternative, the human. They endure so much and experience so little. And his words, all that rhetorical portentousness, serve only to wrap a mystery around them that, in the end, overwhelms. 

It is a grotesquery which doesn’t so much say “I am alive” as “I can only die”.

 

Mrs Ritchie by Willa Muir

 

Willa and Edwin Muir escaped parochial Scotland in the 1920s, living and working in Germany and enjoying the culture of that nation and the importance the arts played in the development of its unique weltanschauung. They were true internationalists, part of the Scottish renaissance that included Hugh McDiarmid, Catherine Carswell, Naomi Mitchison and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Like others of the renaissance, left-leaning and forward-looking, the Muirs had to reconcile the inherent tension between nationalism and internationalism. These viewpoints are not, as might at first be supposed, antithetical, but rather can be combined harmoniously. This may only happen, however, if the nationalism is an open and affirmative one, optimistic, bold, aspirational.

And this was not the aesthetic the Muirs left behind in cold, Calvinist Scotland. Where Germany was devoted to new ideas and new life, Scottish society seemed premised on keeping everyone in their places, on abjuring ambition, developing almost a blockade of progress. This, of course, was particularly the case when it came to the role of women in contemporary life, and this subject was a passion of Willa Muir’s.

It is an all too predictable injustice that Willa Muir is now less well-remembered than her husband, but Mrs Ritchie, her first novel, has an absolutely savage intensity and offers a searing critique of the stultifying, unfulfilling lives of women in the 1920s and 1930s. It is somewhat old-fashioned in its approach, with its intense psychological analyses of the characters and their actions, but it remains an astonishing novel.

It follows the progress of Annie Rattray’s life, from a bright, if intense child growing up in the fictional town of Calderwick (based on Montrose) at the back end of the nineteenth century, to a broken harridan furiously awaiting judgement day in the years following the Great War. Annie, someone prone to taking any idea to its logical conclusion and then much, much further, becomes obsessed by her presbyterian fears of judgement and sin and eternal damnation. At one point, we are told:

[Annie’s] God frowned upon all other demonstrations of feeling [than indignation], for to open one’s heart in joy to the world was to invite the devil; but righteous indignation was an emotion to which no blame could possibly be attached.

What emerges is the self-fulfilling consequence of such a tyrannical imposition of social mores and religious beliefs. Young Annie Rattray grows into Mrs Ritchie and a child downtrodden and repressed becomes a woman whose sole mission is to inflict the same injustice on her own children, in the name of God and in the hope of everlasting salvation. It is an obscenity that has been wrought on generations of Scots.

However, Muir is critiquing more than Scotland’s baleful Calvinist instincts. She was deeply concerned by the dangers of patriarchy, and the wounds it inflicted on women and on society in general. While Mrs Ritchie is truly a monstrous woman, she was made so by the male-dominated society in which she lived. A clever child, she was offered the glittering bounty of a grammar school education, only for it to be snatched from her. Poor, working class girls didn’t do that. One of Annie’s earliest influences, Miss Julia, sums up what her future should be:

To wish to become a domestic [help] in some Christian family, what a proper ambition for a young, unprotected female!

The novel also offers a savage critique of war, in particular the Great War. The experiences of Mrs Ritchie’s son, John Samuel, and the psychological trauma it wreaks on him, are beautifully but harrowingly written. At one stage, John Samuel writes of his experiences to his sister, Sarah Annie, and it scars her, too:

Sarah Annie kept that letter under lock and key. But she could not keep it out of her mind, especially whenever she saw a detachment of soldiers marching through the streets to entrain for the Front. The tears would come into her eyes, a hysterical lump would rise in her throat; there went Everyman, marching to his death; there went Everyman, having shed his individuality, his spiritual values, become merely a numbered animal whose vitality and courage were doomed to mechanical extinction.

This, then, is the inevitable concomitant of a society which seeks to repress individual thought, to make hollow the hopes and aspirations of its young, to ensure that nothing changes. Because, ultimately, everything changes, for good or ill.

Mrs Ritchie is not a flawless book. Kirsty Allen, in her doctoral thesis on Muir, writes that:

the novel moves remorselessly towards its relentless conclusion and the three-dimensional complexity of human nature is sacrificed to the pursuit of a psychological absolute.

There is truth in this, and the novel becomes somewhat unbalanced by the end, something which Muir herself acknowledged many years later, when she said: “I lost control of it in the second half, although the first half is quite good.” Contemporary criticism, though, was decidedly mixed. The Scotsman wrote of it:

Mrs Ritchie is Greek drama in the kail-yard. Psychology takes the place of the gods, but is no less ruthless and long of memory than they were. . . . [T]he result is a novel more admirable than likeable. It rouses fear but not pity, and makes one wonder if ever a woman was quite so mad inwardly and so sane outwardly as Mrs Ritchie, whether in life there is not always some breaking up and blending together of that madness and that sanity.

The casual connection of Mrs Ritchie to the kailyard is inappropriate and wrong. This novel is as far from JM Barrie’s Thrums or JJ Bell’s Wee McGreegor as it’s possible to be. What it puts me in mind of most, oddly enough, is a writer for whom I suspect Willa Muir would have held no sympathy, Flannery O’Connor.

Like the distorted presbyterian lens through which Scots Calvinists viewed the world, O’Connor held a Roman Catholic worldview that was extreme in its fundamentalism. The Old Testament wasn’t enough for O’Connor: the Douay-Rhiems translation, dense and polemical, formed the basis of her thought and was the blueprint for her fiction. When I see Mrs Ritchie, systematically destroying her family in the name of God, I hear the laughter of Flannery O’Connor as she enjoyed the privations of her characters in the name of redemption, the buggery of Tarwater by the devil, the death of Haze Motes, the grandmother killed by The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

People who see only a purity of purpose lose sight of the humanity that lies shattered in its wake.

Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

 

Wise Blood was Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, a philosophical/religious allegory written in 1952 and called by the author herself her ‘opus nauseus'. As a first novel, it is remarkably assured. It is, however, an ultimately unsatisfying piece of propoganda in which she creates a Nietzschean straw man so that she can knock him down and claim victory for God.

The novel tells the story of Hazel Motes, just released from the army at the end of the war and drifting in and around his home state. In a series of encounters he repeatedly claims to believe in nothing and argues that while others are seeking redemption he is not. “I reckon you think you been redeemed,” he says to one character on the train:

 “If you’ve been redeemed,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be…. Do you believe in Jesus? … Well I wouldn’t even if He existed. Even if He was on this train.”

To another character he asks: “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” He continues in this vein with everyone he meets, while insisting that he is not a preacher. “You look like a preacher,” a taxi driver tells him. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”  And Mrs Watts, the prostitute he visits, tells him: “Momma don’t mind if you ain’t a preacher.”

But of course he is a preacher. He is a preacher of nothingness.  “I don’t say [Christ] wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere [sic], I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth…. I’m going to preach a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” Later, he rationalises his thinking:

“Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

While Haze is not seeking redemption, he is, as he repeatedly stresses, in search of truth. This is O’Connor’s take on Nietzsche’s assertion that God is dead and that man must seek instead to break free from conventional, Christian morality and move beyond good and evil. What Haze and the other characters represent is the Nietzschean will to power, as it is progressed through a search for truth. Truth, for Nietzsche, was something of a chimera: it was not an absolute or a universal, but manufactured through, by and because of the moral fashions of the time. Clearly, this is the converse of an O’Connor view of life and so O’Connor, in this novel, seeks to portray Nietzsche’s will to power in entirely negative terms. Motes tells a crowd (and us):

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!”

So Motes is a true nihilist, a believer in nothing. And thus, as Henry T Edmonson explains,  the novel: ‘illustrates the dangerous pursuit of nihilism through the rejection of God and traditional morality. Edmonson then points out that Haze’s ‘arrogance consists of his assertion that he can believe in nothing and still avoid evil.’ That, essentially, is a summary of the plot of the novel. In a series of encounters, Haze preaches nothingness and tries to prove that he neither seeks nor requires assistance from God in facing down mortal dangers. He is, of course, doomed to failure, because the human conscience will not allow such degeneracy. Of conscience, Haze says: “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.” This novel is the story of that hunt.

There are a number of additional characters, the most important of whom is Enoch, who becomes Haze’s only disciple and who steals for him the mummified remains of an Aboriginal from a museum, believing it to be the personification of the  ‘jesus’ of Haze’s Church Without Christ. Edmondson identifies Enoch as evoking:

nihilism’s most salient promise, the creation of a race of “overmen”, those individuals superior to the rest because of their rejection of bygone moral restraints, who by the courageous exercise of their will, lead everyone else into the promised land beyond good and evil.

Thus, we are again being encouraged to believe that Nietzsche’s search for life beyond good and evil is doomed to failure. Edmondson notes that: ‘O’Connor believed that the Nietzschean pursuit of the Overman will not be an evolutionary leap forward, but a long disastrous step backwards.’ O’Connor amplifies this graphically in Wise Blood with Enoch’s final scene, when he is dressed in a gorilla suit and creeps up on a young couple in the woods:

No gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

As so often with O’Connor, her desire to deliver a message results in spectacularly unsubtle symbolism. Enoch, the supposed Overman, is here a symbol of mankind in his rejection of god, as a result of which he has become a mere animal. This, according to O’Connor is the Nietzschean future. Mankind, she is saying, in thrall as it is to nothingness and sensation and godlessness, is regressing into barbarity. No Rousseauian noble savage here, this is baseness personified.

So much for the message. Does it work? This is a fascinating novel, tussling with genuinely meaty issues, but in the end it is not satisfying. As with The Violent Bear It Away, the characters here are ciphers, objects to be played with by the author and manipulated to suit her ends. Haze is a nihilist, but he’s a very Christian sort of nihilist. True nihilism is not premised on a lifetime of denial of God: that is taken for granted. Only a Christian could draw a nihilist in such terms. And so we are told:

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

This gets to the central weakness in the story – it shows precisely where and how O’Connor is manipulating her character. He is supposedly the nihilist who determinedly believes in nothing, yet O’Connor is planting the seed of something in him, so that it can later be exploited. She is trying to have it both ways – painting him as believing nothing, yet having him know, deep down, that there is a blankness that once was something. So he is not a true nihilist, but a Christian caricature of one. He is a straw man. For this reason his downfall, although interesting, is of no philosophical consequence. Rather than a critique of nihilism or a refutation of Nietzschean beliefs, the story is ultimately a representation of Christian insecurity.

And read in that light it delivers the exact opposite message from that which O’Connor intended. And that, to me, is a delightful irony.