A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[Markekohut]

"Unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. " 
Nice. 

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 1, 2012, at 6:18 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> ------------------------------------------
> 
> 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