The Use of Grotesque in Literature

Christine Ku

13 December 2010

ENGL-213, Pollack

The Use of Grotesque in Literature

While we can make some useful generalizations about the purposes to which the grotesque may be used, it is clear that the range of possible functions is very broad. Some instances of the grotesque serve no purpose at all apart from a purely ornamental or personal one; some have no function except the fulfillment of a whimsical and capricious desire to invent something bizarre and eccentric. In some works, satirical points are made through the use of the grotesque, while others have a comical twist about them. Using the technique of grotesque in art and literature allows the reader to be stimulated in finding new meanings towards the boundaries of normalcy that society has set in place. The use of grotesque allows the author to convey new meanings through the effects of disorder, contradiction and mystery. The authors Flannery O’Connor, Lewis Nordan and Eudora Welty in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Wolf Whistle and “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies”, respectively, acknowledge that by using the strategy of grotesque and intertwining it with comedy, it brings an unreal quality to the rules in which society is living by, only to degrade the standard, principle of behavior.

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, O’Connor uses the grotesque, which serves to bind the laughable and the seriousness together. The grandmother and the Misfit are two characters of the extreme. The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is the story’s main character. Her religious epiphany at the end of the story provides the philosophical thrust behind the third-person narrative. By giving her no name other than grandmother and grouchy conversation that provides much of the story’s humor, Flannery O’Conner is able to paint her as a tragically comic caricature, which the reader can feel superior to. Grandmother is selfish and pushy, which can be seen clearly in her desire to see a childhood house, which is in the wrong state, and results in the family’s death at the end of the story. The Misfit on the other hand is an absurd, demented character, but he is also the character that we can relate to. We can relate to him, despite being a criminal because he seems more ‘normal’ and seems to have a connection with the audience in ways in which the grandmother does not. The grandmother can be seen comical due to her comments towards the Misfit when she is about to die. When grandmother deals with the Misfit, she appeals to his gentility. She keeps insisting that he is a good man, from good people: “You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!” (15). She continuously insists that she is a lady and should not be shot, yet her actions throughout the story make her seem to have an unladylike appearance. This unrefined personality can be seen again when grandmother realizes that she is at the end of her life, as each of her family members are murdered in the woods. She says to the Misfit, “Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!” (21). It seems silly that the contents of her purse seem an unlikely ransom when the rest of her family has already been shot. Although the grandmother seems a bit ridiculous here, Dorothy Walters states in Flannery O’Connor that “Amusement is transformed to horror; and significantly, the reversal occurs so swiftly that we are often still laughing as the victims expire before our startled eyes. The grandmother is funny until she drops in her own blood” (31). O’Connor’s use of grotesquerie maintains a comic-tragic balance throughout her story; the disaster of the story serves as the central turning point, swinging the focus swiftly from the comic to the tragic. The Misfit, who O’Connor uses for the grotesque, could be seen as a messenger of God or an agent of grace. With this idea, grandmother’s final act of reaching out towards the Misfit could potentially be seen as a last-ditch effort to save her own life or as a messenger of God for those in need of accepting grace. The Misfit is an individual the audience can feel connected to because he asks questions about faith, which is something that takes place every day in our society. Flannery O’Connor skews the image of what the messenger of grace should be like according to most religions. The Misfit murders an entire family, yet as Geofrey Harpham says On the Grotesque, “Our ability to perceive images as grotesque may be the emblem of original sin, marking our once and future intimacy with the divine, and our present alienation from it” (19). Harpham also states that “we can see that grotesque forms present great opportunities for the imaginative intellect because they are pre-eminently interpretable”, which is one of the main reasons as to why authors use grotesque in literature. Unlike Flannery O’Connor who uses the grotesque to paint a satiric picture, Lewis Nordan in Wolf Whistle uses the grotesque to focus on shape-shifting. Nordan uses the grotesque to shift the genre visually for his audience. As Harriet Pollack states in the article “Grotesque laughter, Unburied bodies, and History”, “Nordan’s grotesque humor shifts between the absurdity of and the prevailing horror of cultural circumstance and national trauma” (1). Shape-shifting allows Nordan to intertwine comedy and tragedy. For one, damaged children and their unburied bodies shift one into the other; in other words, the comic grotesque is transformed into the comic monster, which is clearly shown through the character of Solon. This also allows one to analyze the issues of whiteness and racism, especially as the novel denies and challenges the rigid boundaries. Through this, Nordan attempts to erase the borders that have been cemented in by society. Nordan’s usage of the grotesque comes from the usage of laughter and his tone. As Pollack states, Nordan uses the grotesque in “provoking us to laugh out loud, in subversive assault, at what is not funny” (2). An example of this can be seen when Roy Dale enjoys joking about Bobo’s corpse found in the river tied to a gin fan with a barbed wire. Laughter here could be considered one way for the audience to cover the guilt of what society once was like or it could it allow Nordan to use the laughter to turn horror into a cartoon. As Smokey Viner said, “I laughed too, I couldn’t help it…Hope I live long enough to forgive myself for that laugh” (205). While Nordan has his characters feeling guilty about their amusement in a black boy’s death, Nordan makes us laugh uneasily and provokingly at the absurd class, gender and race violence that is taking place in the novel. Similarly to Flannery O’Connor’s story, the audience laughs at death taking place, when in reality death is not something society chuckles at. Unlike for religious reasons and the usage of laughter, Eudora Welty reveals absurdity and to a degree brings disorder, in her short story “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies”. Lily Daw reveals the nature in which Southern women believed that without marriage, there would be no sound option for them other than to live a lonely life. In “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” the story manifests the ways in which the southern lady had to live her life: to be married or to be viewed as mentally unsound. Lily Daw is being sent to the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble-Minded because Mrs. Watts, Mrs. Carson and Aimee Slocum – the three traditional Southern ladies – believed that Lily was facing a form of crisis for a Southern belle become of her age. This is comical because Eudora Welty seems to mock the debate that is held by the three main female personages of her story. It seems that Welty’s humor comes from the subversive mockery of the three ladies’ exaggerated self importance and a general readiness to read female outcomes as private, domestic matters. Although Lily is described “as a perfect lady – just [sitting] in her seat and [staring]”, Lily Daw is not married, which Watts, Carson and Slocum find unacceptable. As writer Peter Schmidt states, Southern women have to deal “with the conflict between [their] desires for separate identities and power and the strictures and limitations imposed on them by society” (401). This is what Welty’s audience would laugh at because to be deemed insane when one is not married by a certain age seems ridiculous; it seems unheard of in today’s society. Lily Daw becomes a target for the society to question as to why she was not following the traditional ways of being a southern wife. Even though Welty does not use grotesque the ways in which O’Connor and Nordan do, she uses it subtly in a way where it allows her audience to be possibly amused by the ways in which Southern women had to live compared to women now. When the three traditional ladies of the South in Eudora Welty’s short story are confronted by the xylophone player who wants to marry Lily, they begin to convince Lily that marriage is what is best, when all along, they have been trying to convince her otherwise. Lily goes against these women saying, “But I don’t want to get married…I’m going to Ellisville” (11). To Lily, marriage did not jump out at her as a means to escape society or a desire; to Lily, marriage seemed like an obstacle from being able to take an adventure to Ellisville. Lily Daw’s hasty marriage can be seen to be in her best interest; for Lily to have a man who had affections for her would be significantly better than being sent to a school for the feeble minded. As Peter Schmidt writes, “…the early Welty’s pantheon of madwomen [allowed] Welty to consider more fully the nature of tragedy and comedy” (402). Welty uses more comedy here than grotesque to show that in order for a women to be loved and to earn respect, it seems to come intertwined with the concept of tragedy.

Work Cited
Harpham, Geofrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print.
Pollack, Harriet. Grotesque Laughter, Unburied Bodies, and History: Shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle. The Mississippi Quarterly (2008): 1-17. Print.
Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. American Literature 64.2 (1992): 401-403. Print.
Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973. Print.

Cited: Harpham, Geofrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982. Print. Pollack, Harriet. Grotesque Laughter, Unburied Bodies, and History: Shape-shifting in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle. The Mississippi Quarterly (2008): 1-17. Print. Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. American Literature 64.2 (1992): 401-403. Print. Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973. Print.