The grotesque and the transcendent

“[In Art and Scholasticism, Jacques] Maritain writes in a passage O’Connor underlined that ‘art endeavors to imitate in its own way the condition peculiar to the pure spirits: it draws beauty from ugly things and monsters, it tries to overcome the division between beautiful and ugly by absorbing ugliness in a superior species of beauty, and by transferring us beyond the (aesthetic) beautiful and ugly. In other words, art struggles to surmount the distinction between aesthetic beauty and transcendental beauty and to absorb aesthetic beauty in transcendental beauty.’ Though Maritain uses the term ‘transcendental’ to characterize this kind of beauty, it is not the beauty of the Transcendentalists — not a beauty the artist creates, but one he discovers and tries to show to others. And the artist discovers that the grotesque things, the imperfect things, the unbalanced things are uniquely able to point to the transcendental realm. As Maritain expresses it, ‘a totally perfect finite thing is untrue to the transcendental nature of beauty. And nothing is more precious than a certain sacred weakness, and that kind of imperfection through which infinity wounds the finite.’

“What O’Connor wants to accomplish [in The Violent Bear It Away] with Bishop’s imperfection can be further clarified with a look at an article O’Connor read in 1956 in the middle of her most focused work on The Violent Bear It Away. In a letter she wrote in December of that year, she writes to Hester (‘A’), ‘Apropos of the Christ image business, the fall issue of Cross Currents has an essay on The Idiot as a Christ symbol by Msgr. Guardini.’ The article to which O’Connor refers is Romano Guardini’s ‘Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, A Symbol of Christ.’ In the next paragraph, she writes, ‘in my novel I have a child — the school teacher’s boy — whom I aim to have a kind of Christ image, though a better way to think of it is probably just as a kind of redemptive figure. None of this may work however; but I have made some progress these last three months or think I have.”

“This letter strongly suggests that O’Connor read Guardini’s criticism in the formative stages of her development of Bishop. Although O’Connor does not make Bishop a copy of Myshkin, her goal to make him a ‘redemptive figure’ clearly parallels Guardini’s description of Dostoevsky’s goals. Guardini clarifies that Dostoevsky does not create Myshkin to be some mystically pure or ideal character; Myshkin is, instead, real. He has an ‘authentically human existence’ and is a ‘man with a name,’ but to that human existence the artist adds ‘many signs to suggest to us that there is something in it which goes beyond man. Everything here has its own meaning, but at the same time everything reveals something else which is of a decidedly superior order.’ This ‘superior order’ is the transcendental character of beauty as I have just described it.

“Guardini argues that Dostoevsky created Myshkin as an idiot character in order to point to the scandalous character of the Incarnation, the absurd and grotesque act of God’s becoming man. Dostoevsky deliberately did not choose a ‘perfect’ being in the world’s eyes, but one whose very lowliness would most strenuously point to meaning that lies beyond him. In a passage O’Connor marked in her copy of the article, Guardini writes, ‘that which is highest in the ladder of being will be feeblest in its external manifestation. The existence of Myshkin would seem to be a direct verification of this axiom: the highest values raised to their maximum, but incarnated in an existence which is incapable of affirming itself in this world.’

“Myshkin, like Bishop, has been ‘constituted according to the logic of heaven’ and consequently mysteriously draws and repels everyone around him. Myshkin, like Bishop, becomes the center of all glances, the trigger and testing point of one’s vision. Guardini explains that Myshkin controverts and confuses all who look at him: ‘a mysterious presence is there which stirs up mysterious resonances in their deepest recesses, and yet at every moment there falls from their lips the word, “Idiot!” What is there to say? In a crowd, Myshkin immediately, without in any way seeking it, becomes the center of all glances.’ The scandal of Christ and Myshkin (and Bishop after them) is that people will reject the holiness present there and their reasons will be good ones. Guardini continues that ‘the fact that Christ is man, is the crux of “objections” to his divinity. This very gesture of divine love which assumes the form of a slave seems to contradict the essential and personal presence of the Love of God: “Is he not the son of a carpenter?”’ [Bishop’s father] Rayber has reason enough according to the world’s logic to think of Bishop as a mistake. In the end, the logic of heaven is designed to cause those who say only ‘I think, therefore I am’ to reject Christ and to leave the children in the lead. Guardini argues that Christ is revealed only to children and to those who ‘do not listen to logic’ because people can always use reason to protect themselves from that which would displace them.

“Belief in the Incarnation does not require one to forsake logic. But one can rationalize away belief in order to protect oneself from having to follow Christ into a life of selfless behavior. All the ‘reasons’ the young [evangelist] Tarwater finds for not baptizing Bishop come from the voice of his ‘friend,’ who, diabolical or not, appeals to Tarwater’s selfishness with an accurate description of the nature of the choice he has to make: ‘it’s Jesus or you.’ When Tarwater has his vision of Bishop in the fountain, the ‘friend’ is ‘silent as if in the felt presence, he dared not raise his voice,’ but soon after he begins to make Tarwater doubt his own eyes: ‘well, that’s your sign, his friend said — the sun coming out from under a cloud and falling on the head of a dimwit. Something that could happen fifty times a day without no one being the wiser.’ The voice of the self always argues for self-protection and against displacement. And the voice has no difficulty lumping other members of the human race in with the dimwits; he tells Tarwater to keep his violent love in check the way Rayber has done because ‘if you baptize once, you’ll be doing it the rest of your life. If it’s an idiot this time, the next time it’s liable to be a nigger. Save yourself while the hour of salvation is at hand.’

“O’Connor believed incarnational art could defy the modern age’s efforts to separate body from mind, imagination from reason, and nature from grace. A character like Bishop epitomizes this effort because we readers, just like Rayber and Tarwater, cannot leave him alone. Indeed, for O’Connor the beauty of the work of art derives from its ability to evoke this kind of response. She accrues detail and compounds signification not to present some esoteric romantic symbol that purposely resists interpretation, but in order to make readers work for the meaning — meaning that must be thought as well as felt; meaning that must be experienced. The stories are like parables, as several critics have pointed out, because they preserve the literal sense but also drive the reader into a deeper well of meaning. William Kirkwood explains that Jesus’ parables were designed to ‘provoke acts of self-confrontation’ in listeners and that they often ‘operate beyond (or prior to?) the realm of logical, discursive thought,’ without trumping their intellectual function.”

— from Christina Bieber Lake, The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor (Mercer University Press, 2005)