O’Connor’s Corporeal Fiction: The Body as a Site of Social Contestation

In particular, in the work of Flannery O’Connor, being human, as well as being a member of society, is explored as inexplicably tied to corporeality.  Her fiction does not represent the body  as merely a fleshly casing, but rather as the very essence of what defines both individuals and society. In her work, the body is not transcended in favor of mind but is one’s primary location within the world. The body is not isolated, closed off, or inanimate.  Rather, her body of fiction is populated by myriad grotesque bodies, bodies which are overtly material, which defy classification, which are deeply embedded within the social fabric of culture. Her use of the body allies in particular to the notions of the Bakhtinian grotesque and eschews the concept of the classical, closed, and isolated body in favor of an open, transgressive, grossly physical and material body.[1]

What O’Connor seems to understand is that the diseased body, the abnormal body, the body in pain can lead to transgressions of bodily boundaries, to an opening out of the body which integrates it within a social cosmology.   This type of body, as her work attests, cannot be easily dismissed or transcended, but plays a crucial role in both the personal and the social.  The grotesque body places the individual body within a social network through its imperfections, its pain, its excesses. It illicits interpretation from other bodies and from the cultural body as a whole. O’Connor thus challenges the “averted stare” of culture which has a bodily pretext of normality, a culture which gasps in awe and horror at the abnormal body, the diseased body, the disfigured body.[2]  In so doing, she initiates an understanding of the corporeality of culture and society – a corporeality which infuses both personal and interpersonal relations and imagines the social as a material space of contestation.  This focus on materiality in her work is critical of any doctrine that brands the body as closed, perfectible, transcendable and/or inconsequential.  As such, corporeality is shorn of its limiting connection to the individual body and becomes instead a collective issue in which each body effects and is effected by every other body.  Or, in Bakhtin’s terms, a body which “is not individualized,” is “contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people.”[3]

       This bodily premise runs throughout the work of Flannery O’Connor.  Her characters, be they missing an arm or leg, be they suffering from eczema or acute acne, be they hermaphrodites or clubfoots, are all placed within a social realm that is in need of a renewed bodily collectivity.  The body in her work is always indicative and related to the social – the ailing, lonely, afflicted, tattooed, and/or dismembered bodies in her fiction are always presented as part of the social tapestry – a tapestry intricately woven out of many individual bodies into a combined social collective that, in O’Connor’s estimation, suffers from materialistic greed, racism, rampant individualism, and corporeal abnegation. In spite of her own ravaging illness, her works embody a triumphant and festive bodily principle.  In accordance with Bakhtin, she implicitly posits the body as site of social contestation, as open not only to pain, dismemberment, gratification and pleasure, but as open also to the surrounding world which both effects and is effected by bodily materiality.   Moreover, she does not employ a nihilistic or horrific relation to materiality but rather relies on the humorous grotesque in order to counteract a morbid or depressing view of physicality. This fictional focus on bodily affirmation runs throughout her works and is particularly evident in the story “Parker’s Back.”   Finished less than two weeks before O’Connor’s own death from a disease that ravages the body, the story nevertheless maintains that the body is a thing to be celebrated and revelled in, rather than denied or transcended.

 

Divinity Incarnate: The Body as  Spiritual Matter

“Parker’s Back,” which chronicles the mismatched marriage of Sarah Ruth and Parker, circulates around the bodily theme of materiality as divine. It scathingly mocks spiritual beliefs based in bodily abnegation and offers instead the material body as the divine incarnate.  Sarah Ruth represents the flesh-hating spiritualist who abhors carnality and eschews any type of bodily pleasure; she does not “smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face” and “she was forever sniffing up sin.”[4]  Her husband Parker, on the other hand, revels in his own corporeality and indulges in drink, sex, and bar room brawls while pursuing one of his ultimate bodily pleasures: covering his body in tattoos. Sarah is ridiculed for her high and mighty spirituality, a spirituality which is stultifying and abhors physical pleasure. As evidenced through her inhumane appearance, she is cold and cruel: “She was plain, plain.  The skin on her face was thin and drawn as  tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were grey and sharp like the points of two icepicks” (510). Conversely, Parker is depicted as a lost soul in search of physical love and affection.  His quest for ever more elaborate tattoos echoes his quest for real human contact, contact that Sarah stalwartly denies him. 

Just as Parker had initially met Sarah with recourse to his body by pretending he had injured his hand, he once again uses his body in order to try and impress her by having a tattoo of Christ emblazoned on his back.  However, Sarah is appalled by the fleshly incarnation and considers it blasphemy.  Rather than tempting her into bed as Parker had hoped, Sarah screams “Idolatry” and begins to beat Parker with a broom, continuing until he is nearly unconscious and covered in welts (529).  The story ends with Parker leaning against a tree crying, his bruised and battered body testifying that Sarah’s denial of the flesh is moot – she, as well as Parker, are bodily bound and constituted.  Ultimately, the story serves as a scathing critique of religious faith which denies materiality and instead offers a radical redefinition of the divine. The lofty spirit is not exalted but rather the fleshy body.  In this story and others, the body is the conduit and incarnation of the divine.  Those characters that celebrate corporeality are lauded, while those who suffer from a stiff, bodily abnegating spirituality are derided.[5]

In contemporary fiction, Elizabeth McCracken adapts this recurring bodily theme utilized by O’Connor and similarly employs the grotesque body to exalt the corporeal.   Her story “It’s Bad Luck to Die” echoes the themes of “Parker’s Back” and adapts O’Connor’s original interests in corporeality.  The story is narrated by a self-loathing narrator, one that has framed her own life through an attempt to deny and overcome her body.  Six feet tall since the eighth grade, the narrator is painfully aware of her bodily difference, laments being “a giantess,” and fears being a spectacle for others, a “circus act” (7).[6]  She hates any reminder of her bodily existence and eschews mirrors almost completely. However, after accompanying her cousin to a tattoo parlor, she falls in love with and marries Tiny the tattoo artist. Tiny proceeds to use her body as a slate for his most fabulous tattoo illustrations and, in spite of herself, the narrator begins to see her own body as a work of art. While she previously avoided reminders of how her body looked, after the tattoos Tiny catches her twisting and contorting herself in front of mirrors in order to view the tattoos on her back.  Eventually referring to herself as “the tattooed lady,” the narrator likens her new-found interest in decorating her body to becoming embodied within the home of her fleshy casing : “Well, getting a tattoo—its like hanging drapes, or laying carpet, or driving that first nail into the fresh plaster: it’s deciding you’ve moved in” (19).  Hence, in this modern day adaptation of “Parker’s Back,” bodily decoration allows a flesh-abnegating character to “move into” her own body.  Moreover, the story echoes O’Connor’s claim for the body as divine.  Like Parker, who has a large tattoo of Christ emblazoned on his back, the narrator has “Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder” (4).  Thus, in addition to exploring the body as a work of art, these stories portray the body as divine.  Here, the spirit/matter dichotomy is integrated into a bodily whole in which the body becomes a truly spiritual matter. [7]

 

Bodily Transcendence: The Body as Object

Another bodily theme explored by O’Connor is the objectification of the body in which the body becomes a mere casing to be transcended in favor of pure mind. For example, “Good Country People” depicts the body as an object constituted by conglomerate parts and examines how this conception of the body leads to the desire for bodily transcendence.  Hulga, whose leg was shot off in a childhood hunting accident, also suffers from very poor eyesight and a heart condition.  These bodily infirmaries are perhaps what has prompted her to attempt to live a life of pure mind, to bury herself in books and fill her head with philosophy.[8]   However, when a bible salesman enters into her life, she decides it is time to learn about sensual pleasures.  Significantly, she plots to seduce the salesman as a mental experiment, not out of physical or emotional desire.  Ultimately though, the seducer becomes the seduced.  While in the hay loft of the family barn, the bible salesman convinces Hulga to let him hold her prosthetic leg. He then fiendishly absconds with it, retorting “I’ll tell you another thing Hulga …you ain’t so smart” (291).  Left stranded in the loft, Hulga is forced to confront her corporeality and her amplified belief in her own intellect crumbles.  No longer the haughty genius spouting philosophical mumbo jumbo, Hulga is forced into a realisation that the body does in fact matter.[9]  As for the bible salesman, his eerie habit of collecting prosthetic body parts, including a wooden leg and a glass eye, points to a society in which embodied identity gives way to a view of the body as (collectable) object.  Moreover, Hulga is portrayed as suffering from an inflated view of her own intellect which is based on a denial of her bodily realities. Hence, “Good Country People” derides the abnegating conceptualization of  the body as an inert object to be transcended.  Moreover, intellectual transcendence is viewed as a foolish and wayward pursuit which will always fail due to the corporeal facticity of existence.[10]

Katherine Dunn’s 1983 novel Geek Love adapts this particular focus on the body as object, exploring the desire for bodily transcendence within the fictional setting of a modern day carnival.[11] The novel chronicles the story of the Binewskis – a carnival family comprised of dwarfs, conjoined twins, limbless bodies, and telekinetics.  In particular, the exploration of the cult that revolves around Arty Binewski, the oldest child who has no arms and has short flippers for legs,  plays into the  notion of the body as object. Dubbed the Aqua Boy by admiring carnival fans,  Arty one day happens on the idea for an “Arturian Cult.” He incites his fans to have their arms and legs amputated and creates a new bodily norm for his followers to live up to – the newly desired body becomes a  body like Arty’s – a body of head and torso only.  Like the bible salesman from “Good Country People,” Arty tries to make up for his own emptiness and bodily abnegation by symbolically collecting the body parts of others. Like Hulga, Arty, because his own body is so circumscribed, has survived mainly through intellect.  This intellectualized existence prompts Arty to start the cult – if he can live a life of “pure mind” why can’t everyone?  Those he initiates dutifully amputate ‘extraneous’ body parts, sculpting themselves closer to the Arturian ideal of mind only.  However, as the novel ultimately argues, the body cannot be denied or transcended.  The Arturian flesh-denying way of life is comically derided through the depiction of Arty as a pathetic, ego driven character who violates his own and others’ bodies in a deluded attempt to reach mental purity.  Like Hulga in “Good Country People,” Arty misguidedly attempts to deny embodiment and this attempt is seen as emerging from the conception of the body as object.  As both O’Connor's original story “Good Country People” and Dunn’s adaptations of similar themes in Geek Love testify, the material body cannot be transcended and should be exalted rather than abnegated.

 

The Normative and the Abnormal: The Body and  Marketable Value

       Another recurring bodily theme in O’Connor’s fiction is the abnormal body as symptom and symbol for an ailing society. In particular, the value and worth society places on bodily normativity is portrayed as deforming the character of society as a whole. O’Connor repeatedly examines the ways in which bodily normativity leads to a realm of abnormal bodies which become societal pariahs and outcasts.[12] For example, In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” O’Connor focuses on  the abnormal bodies of two particular characters, Mr. Shiftlet and Lucynell, to shed light on an ailing society which places more value in automobiles than in human life.  Mr. Shiftlet, the aptly named shifty main character, initially seems to be a good person.  When this homeless, one-armed man arrives at the farm belonging to Mrs. Crater, he is presented as a Christ figure and stands framed by the sunset where “his figure formed a crooked cross” (146).  However, on arrival, his “pale sharp glance  had already passed over everything in the yard” and he notices a car parked in the shed (146).  From this point on, all of Mr. Shiftlet’s supposedly benevolent actions are in actuality centered around procuring the family car for himself.  Mr. Shiftlet proceeds to do various repair work on the Crater farm and starts to teach the mentally disabled daughter, Lucynell, to speak.  At Mrs. Crater’s behest, he even agrees to marry Lucynell. However, after he has married Lucynell, Mr. Shiftlet abandons her at a roadside cafe, his only motive seeming to be that “He had always wanted an automobile but he had never been able to afford one before” (154).

Mrs. Crater is also presented as morally questionable character who barters away her daughter to a con-man.  To entice Mr. Shiftlet to marry Lucynell, “she laid the bait carefully,” offering Mr. Shiftlet a permanent place to live and luring him with reference to the fact that “under that shed is a fine automobile” (152).  Mrs. Crater also agrees to give Mr. Shiftlet $17.50, which he has claimed he needs to take Lucynell on a weekend trip.  Thus, Mrs. Crater symbolically buys freedom from the bodily burden of Lucynell, hoping that Mr. Shiftlet will take ‘ownership’ of her daughter. Mr. Shiftlet, as well as Mrs. Crater, serve as shocking examples of selfish individualism.  Moreover, the deformed and disabled bodies of Mr. Shiftlet and Lucynell serve as symbols of a society which places too high a value on bodily normality.  Mr. Shiftlet’s abnormality seems to lead to his avarice, while Lucynell’s leads to her abuse. Moreover, Lucynell, as an abnormal bodily burden first to her mother and then to Mr. Shiftlet, is representative of the comparative worth of bodies.  Had she been “normal,” she would have been more marketable.[13]

       This exploration of the body as having a marketable value is similarly adapted in George Saunders 1996 novella Bounty.  Set in a dystopian American future in which society has been divided into “flaweds” and “normals” (also tellingly called “the deserving”), the novella charts the story of a man born with claws instead of toes and his search for his similarly “flawed” sister who has a vestigial tail.  The setting is a later twenty-first century America in which anyone with a flaw may be purchased and enslaved.  As the narrator makes his way across the country, he represents a bounty to all those who realize he is flawed.  Hence, as the title symbolizes, his bodily difference marks him out as a criminal to be bought and sold on the cultural marketplace.  This valuation of bodies is exemplified through the ranking of bodies by perceived worth.  For example, “Class P” or those flaweds that are “Visually Difficult to Bear,” are ranked very low because, due to their appearance, they can only do very limited types of work that will not require them to come in contact with any other people (110). Within the novella, this dichotomy of normal versus flawed is linked to a societal fear of difference.  Government propaganda banners decorate the landscape and incite people to believe their own highly valued normalcy is threatened by the flaweds.  These banners, as the narrator explains, depict flaweds as an evil threat to the sanctity of  “normal America”: “One shows a smiling perfect blond girl flipping a burger.  Sneaking up on her is a lustful hunchback wearing a Flawed bracelet. KEEP THE AMERICAN GENE POOL PURE! the sign says” (125).  This desire to “keep the gene pool pure” similarly haunted O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”  Mrs. Crater seems to know that no ‘normal’ man will marry Lucynell, and thus she latches her hopes onto Mr. Shiftlet, cajoling him that he had better marry Lucynell because “there ain’t no place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man” (152).  Here, Mrs. Crater touches on the truth of the matter – there is no place in the world for the abnormal characters like Lucynell that populate O’Connor’s fiction or the flaweds that populate Saunders' Bounty.  But, as both O’Connor and Saunders attest, a society that places such importance on bodily normality is dehumanizing and ultimately turns bodies into mere marketable objects. 

 

The Body Re-Materialized: Contemporary Adaptations of  O’Connor’s Atypical Bodies

Many other contemporary American writers adapt these various bodily themes which originate in the work of Flannery O’Connor.  For example, Wendy Brenner adapts O’Connor’s interests in the social misfit in her explorations of being outcast due to bodily size and appearance in stories such as “The Reverse Phone Book” and “I am the Bear.”  George Saunders adapts O’Connor's original textual explorations of physical disability in contemporary stories such as “Isabelle” and “The Barber’s Unhappiness.” Elizabeth McCracken adapts O’Connor's interest in social pariahs such as the murderous Misfit in her recent story “The Goings-On of the World."  Moreover, McCracken’s novel, The Giant’s House, adapts many of O’Connor's bodily themes in order to interrogate the place of the differing body within highly normalized contemporary culture.   Like O’Connor, all of these writers utilize the body as a revolutionary catalyst for rethinking the social. Crucially, this adaptation of O’Connor’s original use of the of grotesque is rooted in a turn to the body. The body is repeatedly presented as what unites and equals us, as the common denominator whose reconfiguration could lead to the abolition of normative bodily constraints and stratifications.  O’Connor was an original progenitor of this corporealized fictional mode.  However, the contemporary writers discussed above adapt her focus in a way that would, no doubt, accord with her call for “deeper kinds of realism” which present not the normal and the typical but the mystery of “something that is alive.”[14]  That this “something alive” in contemporary American fiction is the atypical, abnormal, divine, and mysterious body would please O’Connor indeed.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Dunn, Katherine.  Geek Love.  London: Abacus, 1983. 

McCracken, Elizabeth.  “It’s Bad Luck to Die.” Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry.  New York: Avon, 1993: 3-22.

 

O’Connor, Flannery.  “Good Country People” The Complete Stories.  Farrar: The Noonday Press, 1993: 271-291.

---.  “Parker’s Back.” The Complete Stories.  Farrar: The Noonday Press, 1993: 510-530.

---. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.  Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.  London: Faber and Faber, 1972. 

---. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” The Complete Stories.  Farrar: The Noonday Press, 1993: 145-156.

Saunders, George. Bounty.  CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.  New York: Riverhead Books, 1996: 88-179.

Spiegel, Alan.  “A Theory of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” Georgia Review.  V. 26:1-4.  Spring –Winter  1972: 426-37.

 

NOTES: