A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[alice wellintown]

O'Connor wrote about her stories, her Catholic faith, her use of
Grace,  and what she describes in one essay as her modern
consciouosness, the "thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary,
and guilty."

Here is of O'Connor on O'Connor & Co.
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Hawthorne knew his own problems and perhaps anticipated ours when he
said he did not write novels, he wrote romances. Today many readers
and critics have set up for the novel a kind of orthodoxy. They demand
a realism of fact which may, in the end, limit rather than broaden the
novel's scope. They associate the only legitimate material for long
fiction with the movement of social forces, with the typical, with
fidelity to the way things look and happen in normal life. Along with
this usually goes a wholesale treatment of those aspects of existence
that the Victorian novelist could not directly deal with. It has only
been within the last five or six decades that writers have won this
supposed emancipation. This was a license that opened up many
possibilities for fiction, but it is always a bad day for culture when
any liberty of this kind is assumed to be general. The writer has no
rights at till except those he forges for himself inside his own work.
We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned
liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical,
that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less
understandable.

The writer who writes within what might be called the modern romance
tradition may not be writing novels which in all respects partake of a
novelistic orthodoxy; but as long as these works have vitality, as
long as they present something that is alive, however eccentric its
life may seem to the general reader, then they have to be dealt with;
and they have to be dealt with on their own terms.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and
particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is
generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I
have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be
called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in
which case it is going to be called realistic. But for this occasion,
we may leave such misapplications aside and consider the kind of
fiction that may be called grotesque with good reason, because of a
directed intention that way on the part of the author.

In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some
experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which
the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find
that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of
realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which
anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have
left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a
coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean
away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected.
It is this kind of realism that I want to consider.


http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html