South Atlantic Modern Language Association

The Moral Function of Distortion in Southern Grotesque

Author(s): Delma Eugene Presley
Source: South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 2 (May, 1972), pp. 37-46
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3197720
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THE MORAL FUNCTION OF DISTORTION

SOUTHERN GROTESQUE

IN

DELMAEUGENEPRESLEY

Georgia Southern College

Interpretations of the grotesque in recent Southern literature
often seem as diverse as the offhand comments of the blind men
about the proverbial elephant. Most agree that this massive body
of works has a shape unlike other objects they have encountered.
But from this point on, there is a multiplicity of explanations. A
common description has to do with causation: Southern grotesque
is often said to be the literary aftermath of historical misfoitune.
William Van O'Connor, in a volume called The Grotesque, maintains that the "old agricultural system" of the South depleted the
land and left an economically unstable and emotionally underdeveloped society. He reasons: "Poverty breeds abnormiality; in
many cases, people were living with a code that was no longer
applicable, and this meant a detachment from reality and a loss
of vitality."' Another critic, Lewis A. Lawson, adds to this theory
the explanation that the Southern experience is characterized by
"cultural confusion" having to do with its agrarian heritage. The
South, Mr. Lawson points out, has "retained a provincial, insular,
conservative culture. It is even totlay more agrarian-minded than
the remainder of the country. The setting of its novels is still in the

country or the small town, whereas most 'American' novels have

an urban setting .. ."'
Given such a culturally-oriented analysis, it should come as
no real surprise to learn that we are said to be at the end of the
period of the grotesque since "the South in the last fifteen years
has rejoined the cultural union."3 Furthermore, the grotesque
mode is said to contain a vision characteristic of a philosophical
movement, the absurd. Mr. Lawson's essay ends with this statement: "If the world is absurd, then one must embrace a philosophy
of the absurd; consequently

several recent novels . . reveal existen-

tial professions of faith."4

Not all treatments of the grotesque attempt to explain it in

terms of its cultural and philosophical

tendencies. Irving Malin,
for example, says his examination of
grotesque works (he prefers
the term "gothic") is fundamentally a
description of their surface

characteristics. Mr. Mlalin finds himself in agreement with John

Aldridge, who speaks of a "poetry of disorder." The disorders are
threefold: narcissism, familial conflict, and dream-like confusion.

38

Grotesque

The evidence of distorted love suggests to Mr. Malin that the

grotesque reflects radical narcissism: "Although it is easy to dismiss
the cripples and homosexuals in new American gothic as sensational cardboard figures, they are frequently symbols of disfiguring,
narcissistic love. They 'work' as does Frankenstein."5 Since self-love
usually begins at home, Mr. Malin's second definition of "new
American gothic" includes the belief that "the family dramatizes
the conflict between private and social worlds, ego and super-ego."
The third characteristic accounts for chronological confusion and
personal disengagement in "gothic": "This total effect is that of
a dream."6
One would be both presumptuous and wrong to dismiss completely the insights into the literature of the grotesque which
issue from the critical approaches of William Van O'Connor, Lewis
A. Lawson, and Irving Malin. However, there is good reason to
question each, for not one of them pays enough attention to the
function of distortion-a function Flannery O'Connor considered
the sine qua non for the grotesque mode. The fact that the grotesque
is seldom understood properly, according to Miss O'connor, is related to the critic's lack of familiarity with the Southern experience.
She once told students at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia: "I
have found that anything that comes out of the South is going
to be called grotesque by the Northern readers, unless it is grotesque,
in which case it is going to be called realistic." Miss O'Connor then
pointed out that grotesque works present a "mystery and the unexpected" which refer to unusual experiences not included in the
"manners and customs" of everyday existence.7 Literature of the
grotesque, according to the authoress, is distinguished by a moral
or theological vision not usually associated with realistic works.
Freaks appear in her fiction, she said, to reflect quite simply what
man is like without God:
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 conception of the whole man,
and in the South the general conception of man is still,
in the main, theological.8
We might think of Miss O'Connor's remarks in the following
way: Imagine that the surface of grotesque literature is like that
of a three-way mirror found in most tailor's shops. The only problem is that each section is broken and often pieces of mirror are
completely missing. What you get is an image of depth, but it is
also an unpleasant collection of unrelated and distorted parts of

South Atlantic Bulletin

39

the human body. Yet the tailor continues to use the mirror with no
problems because he remembers what it was before it was broken
and has confidence about what the whole man is supposed to resemble; the reflection gives him enough to work with. Miss O'Connor, functioning as an experienced and confident tailor, assures us
that, while we see distortion, we should also remember that the
proper understanding of the image is available to one who remembers the nature of the unbroken image. Let us finish with this
limited analogy by referring to the problems of the three views of
the grotesque presented earlier: William Van O'Connor attempts
to explain what broke the mirror-cultural dislocation. Lewis A.
Lawson, influenced by existential philosophy, sees beyond the distorted image only to suggest that some writers are now doing what
they should-their "existential professions of faith" signal that they
have accepted man's brokenness as an unavoidable absurdity. Mr.
Malin, confining himself to the surface appearances, accepts the
cracks as literal defects in the characters: They love themselves, hate
their families, and live as in a dream. Not one of the three scholars
explores the possibility that the mirror is itself imperfect and that
a proper interpretation must take into account an understanding
of what the mirror reflected when it was whole.
Flannery O'Connor's point is that grotesque literature exists
because writers are faced with the reality that they live in an age
whose distortions function as indicators of how far man has drifted
from his true image as a creature of God:
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact
and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and
judge. The novelist can no longer reflect a balance from
the world he sees around him; instead he has to try to create
one. It is the way of drama that with one stroke the writer
has both to mirror and to judge. When such a writer has a
freak for his hero, he is not simply showing us what we
are, but what we have been and what we could become....
In such a picture, grace, in the theological sense, is not
lacking.9
Miss O'Connor would not have us believe that Southern writers are
the only ones sensitive to an age of doubt. Neither does she imply
that the South is the last stronghold of the true gospel. She said,
"While the South is hardly Christ-minded, it is most certainly
Christ-haunted.
"She meant that the Southern experience is
of
those
elements necessary for an interpretation
capable
offering
of man which takes into account the theological concept that man
is a creature of God. Grotesque characters exist, therefore, to bear

40

Grotesque

witness about human possibilities in the light of God's grace as well

as the inhuman possibilities of lives lived without that light. Thus
the function of distortion in Southern grotesque is essentially moral
in nature; this mode presents simultaneously an image of man's
incompleteness and an understanding of what he ought to be.
The theological nature of grotesque is appropriated usually by
critics to the works of Flannery O'Connor who, incidentally, makes
it no hard task. However, there are good reasons to bear in mind
her point of view when we examine other grotesque works. While
the focus may not be the same, the vision is there for sure. For
example, contrary to the general opinion of critics, both Carson
McCullers and Tennessee Williams draw upon a view of man informed by the redemptive potential of love. Their grotesque creations proceed on the assumption that there exists a norm against
which the aberrations of their characters should be judged. The chief
difference between these two writers is that, whereas Mrs. McCullers
emphasizes the darkness of life without the light of love, Williams,
particularly in the works written since the mid-fifties, speaks of
the benign possibilities of living in that light.
Carson McCullers' fictional creations appear as stiff puppets
performing in front of a hazy yet constant backdrop. Her concern
with twisted lives, as early as "Reflections in a Golden Eye," first
published in Harper's in 1941, seems to be related to a larger truth
about life's meaning. Tennessee Williams, a loyal friend and interpretor of McCullers' work, wrote an introduction to the 1950
edition of Reflections in a Golden Eye. He suggests that there is a
mysterious "Sense of the Awful" in Mrs. McCullers' writing. On
the surface are "crazy people doing terrible things." But these are
external symbols of "a kind of spiritual intuition of something
It is the inalmost too incredible and shocking to talk about....
communicable something that we shall have to call mystery. . .10
The closest we get to that "incommunicable something" in Reflections is that "ghastly green" peacock with a golden eye-drawn in
watercolor by Anacleto, the Filipino houseboy and constant com
panion of Alison Langdon. Mrs. Langdon and her friend speak of
"grotesque" reflections in the "immense golden eye." (This concept
of reflection is not far removed from our interpretation of Flannery
O'Connor's position.) One assumes that the mirror device in this
novella reflects the distorted images of those surrounding them:
the sadistic Captain Penderton and his masochistic-voyeur Private
Elgee Williams; the Captain's sensual yet dumb wife, Lenora, and
her lover Major Morris Langdon-the handsome but insensitive
husband of the semi-invalid Alison. We see three couples in this
work: the Captain and the Private, Lenora and the Major, Alison

South Atlantic Bulletin

41

and Anacleto. The first two couples, probably seen through the eye
of the watercolor peacock, engage in actions which reflect that,
despite their need for love, they are committed to nothing less than
distorted images of their own selfishness; this is not merely narcissism, as Malin suggests.11Alison and Anacleto, on the other hand,
want to leave this grotesque menagerie and begin a new life together
untainted by sexual contact. Alison's fatal heart attack prevents this,
yet an ideal exists in Reflections although doomed from the start.
The publication of "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" by Harper's
Bazaar in 1943 demonstrated that Mrs. McCullers' earlier story was
not as insignificant as both she and her most sympathetic critics
contended. Instead of expurgating her earlier fascination with the
grotesque, this effort clarifies and refines that fascination into a
piece of short fiction which many consider to be the best from her
pen. Carson McCullers' Ballad is an attempt to go beyond her
earlier tale and fashion her materials into an allegory embodying a
moral point of view. Her experimentation with allegorical technique
is precisely what Mark Schorer says all technical experimentations
are-a discovery of "intellectual and moral implications."12 After
telling the story of Miss Amelia Evans' unsuccessful search for love
with two kinds of men-the stud Marvin Macey and the queer Lymon Willis-Mrs. McCullers ends her story with a parable which
clarifies the issue presented so subtly in the preceding narrative.
The parable concerns "twelve mortal men," all prisoners and mem,
bers of the chain gang. They cannot avoid their task of breaking
the "clay earth" on sweltering August days. They are condemned
to an earthly hell-separated by the chains that bind them together.
Yet condemnation does not preclude human hopefulness:
And every day there is music. One dark voice will start
a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be
singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, and the
music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The
music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does
not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the
earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the
heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy
and fright.13
The hopefulness of this music, as Oliver Evans notes, is love:
"They
escape temporarily through their singing (love), which it is significant that they do together in an attempt to resolve, or rather dissolve, their individual identities."14
Even though one seldom finds examples of durable love
among

42

Grotesque

members of a group or between two people in McCullers' fiction,

one is nevertheless struck by the fact that she considers it both
good and necessary that her characters seek love. Love brings out
the best in either partner, as evidenced by the noticeable amelioration of Miss Amelia's manner after the hunchback Lymon takes
up with her:
Miss Amelia was the same in appearance. During the week
she still wore swamp boots and overalls, but on Sunday
she put on a dark red dress that hung on her in a most
peculiar fashion. Her manners, however, and her way of
life were greatly changed. She still loved a fierce lawsuit,
but she was not so quick to cheat her fellow man and to
exact cruel payments. Because the hunchback was so extremely sociable, she even went out a little-to revivals,
to funerals, and so forth.15
The relationship between Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon is
similar in kind to that of Alison and Anacleto; it exists on an
ideal level transcending mere carnal knowledge. Occasionally the
partners seem to possess the rare gift of clairvoyance. Each knows
instinctively how to please the other. Alison and Anacleto eagerly
engage in delicate rituals of tea and conversation about art and
travel. The knowing glances exchanged between Amelia and Lymon
indicate a similar depth of knowledge which even the townspeople
acknowledge. Despite these moments of personal transcendence,
however, each couple ultimately fails to stretch the moment into
a lengthy relationship, a way of life. Their failure to achieve lasting love, let it be noted, is a comment as much upon their inimical
environment as it is upon their own incompleteness. The failure
certainly does not suggest that it was wrong for them to seek love.
And the benefits of living in the light of love, as evidenced in the
relationships of Alison-Anacleto and Amelia-Lymon, far outweigh
the shallow selfishness of those surrounding them. Because Malin
overlooks McCullers' understanding of the salutary nature of human
love, his thesis about narcissism in her works must be set aside as
a limited criticism.16 He has failed to notice the way distortion is
used to call attention to what is sadly lacking in the lives of most
of Mrs. Cullers' stiff characters-love.
Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams have a great deal
in common. Their characters are vexed by frustrations of the mind
and the body, and their styles have strong poetic touches. Williams'
introduction to Reflections, aside from his critical comment about
the role of "mystery" in her vision, is an open affirmation of his
warm personal regard for her. But the view of man that ultimately

South Atlantic Bulletin

43

emerges from the body of Williams' works makes him more akin
to Flannery O'Connor. His works published since the mid-fifties
often tend to surpass Miss O'Connor's in terms of their obvious
theological meaning.
Williams' short story, "Desire and the Black Masseur," is perhaps the earliest and clearest example of his grotesque vision. A
small man, aged thirty, named "Burns," had "no idea of what his
real desires were." He had an "instinct for being included in things
that swallowed him up." He was engulfed by his relatives and employer. One day, while visiting a turkish bath, he discovers that his
masseur is a huge Negro man. The masseur goes about his work with
a strange violence which produces in Burns masochistic pleasure;
for this he returns regularly until the manager discovers one day the
bruised body of Burns. He shouts to the masseur: "Get the hell out

of my place! . . . Take this perverted little monster with you, and

neither of you had better show up here again!"17The masseur takes

Burns to his place in the town's colored section. While Burns' body
is being dissected and eaten by the giant black man, across the street
a preacher admonishes his worshipers:
Suffer, suffer, suffer! Our Lord was nailed on a cross for
the sins of the world! They led him above the town to
the place of the skull, they moistened his lips with vinegar
on a sponge, they drove five nails through his body, and
He was the Rose of the World as He bled on the crossl18
Note that this tale of grotesque horror takes place during the
celebration of the death of Jesus. The only connection one can
make between these two events is that the pain and pleasure of
human violence has a theological counterpart. This early story
simply states, without clarification, that a relationship exists between human actions and theological meaning.
Other works by Williams are similar in one way or another
to "Desire and the Black Masseur." Yet the author has not often
left unexplained the connection between human actions and theological meaning. In a play of 1958, Suddenly Last Summer, one
finds among references to homosexuality and cannibalism an overt
moral point of view. We learn that last summer Sebastian Venable
was devoured by street urchins-many of whom he had formerly
entertained and selfishly indulged. Sebastian never appears in the
play. The story of his bizarre death is the awful burden of his
cousin, Catharine Holly. Sebastian's mother refuses to believe Catharine's story and tries to keep her in an asylum to protect her son's
"good name." But we know, as does the psychiatrist Cuckrowicz,
that the girl's story is true. And we also know that her concept of

44

Grotesque

the incident's moral meaning is central to this play: Sebastian's

utterly selfish life and his shocking form of death are a parable of
"our times." His destiny perfectly symbolizes what happens to one
who possesses a daemonic vision of God and lives completely unto
himself.19 Catharine cannot accept either Sebastian's view of God
or his distorted concept of mankind. She proposes that, while the
human situation may well be compared to the fate of passengers
aboard a ship wrecked at sea, "that's no reason for everyone drowning for hating everyone drowning!"20The modern problem is ethical
in nature: "We all use each other and that's what we think of as
love, and not being able to use each other is what's-hate. . . "21
Catharine explains that Sebastian's fundamental problem, like mankind's, concerns misconceptions about the true God: "We're all of
us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with
the wrong alphabet blocks."22
Even in the early plays, Williams' concern with moral issues
is fairly obvious. In A Streetcar Named Desire the conflict is clearly
the flesh versus the spirit; not only is the clash evident in the mutual
antagonism of the "brute" Stanley and the "moth" Blanche, it is
the major tension within the lives of each. Blanche's aestheticism
is overbalanced by her alcoholism, nymphomania, and debauchery;
Stanley's tender love for his wife, Stella, is undermined by his
coarse brutality. The inability of the flesh to coexist harmoniously
with the spirit-a classical theological problem-is once again
seen in the allegorical Summer and Smoke, produced shortly after
Streetcar. It is important to remember that the bulk of Williams'
so-called grotesque works have a moral focus. Indeed this focus has
become so adjusted, so refined, in his recent works that we no longer
see distortion, only clear pictures of reconciliation in progress. In
The Night of the Iguana (1961) the neurotic minister finally finds
peace with God and man. In The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here
Anymore (1964) a dying affirmer of the flesh learns a spiritual lesson from a mystic who has more than surface resemblances to Jesus
Christ and other bearers of God from the Orient. Despite the existence of theological content in Williams' works, the critical, or
rather uncritical, myth continues that he is a playwright obsessed
with sex and violence. The truth is that he has interpreted the
moral function of his grotesque vision to unheeding critics and
interpreters to the point of oversimplification, and in so doing
has lost what he once described as the grotesque's sense of "mystery."
The function of distortion in recent Southern grotesque literature is to set forth an interpretation either of the whole man or
of what might make him whole. Flannery O'Connor's conception
of man is rooted in Christian thought, as is Tennessee Williams'

South Atlantic Bulletin

45

conception with some modifications. Carson McCullers' distortions

reflect her characters' need of the salutary quality of a human love
which transcends the limitations of the flesh. Although the views
of the whole man are not always shared by the three writers, the
function of the distorted images in each is moral in nature. Louis
D. Rubin, Jr., would probably have us add to this list the name of
William Faulkner-once described by Tennessee Williams as a
"most notorious and unregenerate member" of the "Gothic School."
Professor Rubin explains that the aberrations, frustrations, and
failures in Faulkner's world are there to reveal a larger view of
the potential of human love:
He wanted the world to be a place where love is
stronger than fear, compassion is stronger than hate. It
was not such a world, and so he composed tragedies, showing what happened to people when love was absent. He
showed the destructiveness of hate, the futility of selfishness, the viciousness of fear. He created human beings
dominated by these passions, showed the ruin they
wreaked.23
The grotesque mode in recent Southern literature cannot be understood when one fails to grasp the moral function of distortion. That
most critical responses to the grotesque have not taken this into
account is evident in the repetition of irrelevancies about decadence
which are often based on untenable theories of cultural causation
and which usually result in unimaginative interpretations. The
image of man is broken in this vision, but it has not always been
nor should it necessarily reniain. But since the present image is
broken, the grotesque mode continually reminds us of what once
was and, better still, what yet might be.
NOTES
1. William Van O'Connor, The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other
Essays (Carbondale, Illinois, 1962), p. 6.
2. Lewis A. Lawson, 'The Grotesque in Recent Southern Fiction" in Patterns
of Commlitnment in American Literature, el. by Marston LaFrance (Toronto,
1967), p. 175.
3. Lawson, p. 178.
4. Lawson, p. 179. He thinks of the following as "existential affirmations
of faith": Styron's Set 7'his House on Fire, McCullers' Clock Without Hands,
and Percy's The Moviegoer.
5. Irving Malin, New American Gothic (Carbondale, Illinois, 1962),
pp. 5-6.
6. Malin, p. 9.
7. Flannery O'Connor, "Sonie .-spects of the Grotesque in Southern
Fiction,"
in Mystery (aid Man,lers, ed. by Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald (New York, 1969),
p. 40.

46

Grotesque

8. O'Connor, Mystery and Manners. p. 44.

9. Ibid., pp. 117-18.
10. Tennessee Williams, "Introduction," Reflections in a Golden Eye
by Carson McCullers (New York, 1950), p. xiii.
11. Malin overlooks the relationship between Alison and Anacleto and treats
only the violent aspects of the Captain's and the Private's various encounters.
See pp. 23-25.
12. Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery" in Critical Approaches to
Fiction, ed. by Keith McKean and Shiv K. Kumar (New York, 1968), p. 273.
13. Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories (New
York, 1958), p. 71.
14. Oliver Evans, The Ballad of Carson McCullers (New York, 1965), pp.
133-34.
15. McCullers, Ballad, p. 24.
16. Mr. Malin's point about narcissism is limited with reference to McCullers. However, he seems pretty much on target when he turns to Capote
and Salinger. See pp. 14-19.
17. Tennessee Williams, One Arm and Other Stories (New York, 1948),
p. 92.
18. Ibid.
19. For a clever treatment of this play as a well wrought didactic drama,
see Paul J. Hurley, "Suddenly Last Summer as a Morality Play," Modern Drama,
IX (February, 1966), 392-402.
20. Tennessee Williams, Suddenly Last Summer (New York, 1958), p. 64.
21. Ibid., p. 63.
22. Ibid., p. 42.
23. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The Curious Death of the Novel: Essays in American
Literature (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967), p. 150.
Southern Books
Exhibits of the Southern Books of 1971 chosen by a jury of bookmen in
Detroit are available to libraries which have locked display cases. Some thirty
books, selected on the basis of typography and design, are available for an
exhibit of one month. Apply to Lawrence S. Thompson, Department of Classics,
1169 Patterson, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506. A printed
handlist will be available in the latter part of the spring, and typed lists are
available at present.
Mr. Thompson also arranges for exhibits of a comparable group of Midwestern Books, Russian Books, and Swedish Books. Of the first the 1971 books
are now available, and of the Russian and Swedish the 1970 books are now available. There is no charge for any of these exhibits, but libraries which show
them must handle carriage charges, including insurance en route to the next
exhibitor.