Debunking Laughter

O’Connor’s narrators never sympathize with the female characters in their narratives. Sarah Gordon believes the fierce narrator is a reflection of O’Connor’s own writing situation: “It is her way of allying herself with patriarchal authority and power [...] we must remember that she writes out of a closed system, a closed worldview, whether we like that fact or not” (45). Here, Gordon provides an explanation for O’Connor’s harsh vision in the narrative in view of the restraints of her social situation.

However, the fierce narrator needs not be taken as the mouthpiece of O’Connor the

writer. Indeed, the creation of such a narrator was not merely due to Connor’s strong Roman Catholic faith, or marked her supposed submission to patriarchal norms. On the contrary, O’Connor raises doubts about the narrator’s authority through the narrative conflict prevalent in her stories. By means of the trickster’s tactics, the hidden power of subversion and rejection, under pressure from the “hailing” of the fierce narrator, finds an occasional outlet in the narrative. Moreover, when this narrative strategy starts a chain reaction in the network of the reading process, the comic effects and conflicting stances begin to multiply.

The relentless narrator and the narrative conflict are part of the narrative strategy O’Connor deployed to help build up incongruities. However, O’Connor remained the one who had the last laugh. With the power to make fun of her characters, narrators, fictional settings, and social cultural norms, she openly laughed at and punished the

“proud,” “disobedient” female characters in the narrative through the narrator,⁴³ and then stood back to laugh at the patriarchal socio-cultural norms. If she could not freely make fun of the “monologic” narrator, as some critics have noted (Brinkmeyer 1989), she was nevertheless successful in arranging the narrative conflict to provide chances for rebellious Southern women to question and bitterly laugh at the “hailing” of the patriarchy.

Gordon notes that O’Connor’s characters “reflect their author’s subversion of the ideal of the docile, submissive ‘Lady,’” and “[m]oreover, in countering the ideal of the pretty, sweet, docile female, O’Connor is in a significant way freeing herself, perhaps in the only way her situation allowed” (13-14). If O’Connor allied her narrators with the male tradition and patriarchal norms, and caused her female characters to rebel against those norms so as to subvert the idealized image of the docile, submissive “lady,” then, without doubt, her stories would seldom be short of narrative subversive power.

Finally, the narrative conflict brings forth a sense of uncertainty in the reading process. No matter whom the reader laughs at or what she laughs at, the reader is forced to face contradictory judgments and ambiguous feelings towards the grotesqueries. This is because even when O’Connor laughs at her characters, there is still some irritation churning in the flow of the narrative. The ridiculed women, Mrs. May with her iron hand, Mrs. Chestny with the “hideous” hat, the ugly Hulga-Joy with her wooden leg, all suffer in their own special circumstances. Their self-pride, as many critics would explain, can never be the sole factor for their being punished by a final stroke of violence, ordained by the narrator. The violent stroke of fate, as the narrator would have us believe, is in a sense the event that brings forth the conflict and turns the freakish little characters into victims of their situation in the patriarchal South. This is the laughter of understanding—the revelation of the binding power of the Southern social and cultural system that keeps the fictional characters captive. In O’Connor’s stories, laughter is the recognition of the causes of what happens, a proof of the discovery of both the socio-cultural confinement in reality and the intended hidden declaration of O’Connor’s challenge and repudiation of the “hailing” that recruits Southern women to return to a state where they are protected like helpless children.

If the comic’s “social usefulness lies in its debunking power” (Berger 24), then, in O’Connor, the comic brings forth the laughter that challenges the social norms and exposes the mutilating power of the fierce narrator, who tries hard in ordaining exact

43 Gordon notes that “O’Connor’s embrace of the power and authority of the patriarchal tradition” (47) can be part of the reason that her narrator is so fierce and relentless towards the woman characters that strongly demonstrate their sense of self-independence. Gordon believes that these woman characters

“must derive in some measure from O’Connor’s rebellion against southern expectations of female propriety” (47). However, the traditional religious interpretation always emphasizes that these female characters deserve fierce punishment because self-pride is the first and most severe sin that human beings could ever commit.

“arrangement” for those “unfaithful” daughters of the South. As Parks points out, O’Connor’s powerless characters have a chance of playing a joke on their own lives.

“This is a kind of ‘heroic powerlessness,’” Parks says, “O’Connor’s modern men and women must lose their self-reliance before they can gain true self-knowledge [...]. These are great comic moments which seek to scour the reader’s sensibilities with a redemptive laughter” (121). But Parks is not justified in saying that O’Connor’s female characters are heroic, as they are not given the chance to gain “true” self-knowledge.

They are forced to die an improper death (or semi-death).

Like her female characters, O’Connor the writer/trickster keeps challenging and questioning the dominant opinions in the narrative. O’Connor and her characters both use “the only force” (the power of words⁴⁴) that the powerless can resort to, to resist and deconstruct the interpellation of the cultural codes and the narrative. O’Connor’s narrative conflict indicates more than the theological emphasis on the loyalty and obedience of women and the patriarchal punishment of their self-sufficiency and pride.

Behind the narrative conflict, O’Connor highlights the sense of humor with every possible grotesque scene, and from this crippled laughter shines forth a profound understanding. This is the laughter that discovers the discrepancies between reality and belief, that sneaks beneath the patriarchal narrating voice and male dominance of the social norms, and that leaves its trace by laughing first at the “disobedient” women and then, at the patriarchal concepts lurking behind the narrator’s interpretation. This is the laughter that both exhilarates and slashes.

Works Cited

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Berger, Arthur Asa. An Anatomy of Humor. New Brunswick, State: Transaction Publishers, 1993.

Berger, Peter L. Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience.

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997.

Brinkmeyer, Robert H. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Gordon, Sarah. Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2000.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and

44 Following Saul Bellow’s comment (from his review of a book by Shalom Aleichem) that

“powerlessness appears to force people to have recourse to words,” John G. Parks observes that words are usually used and celebrated to demonstrate the power of the powerless. This is the “heroic powerlessness”

that the weak and the powerless adopt to question the arrangement of God-almighty and demand justification. Parks refers to the story of Job to illustrate the tactical use of this verbal power by the weak and powerless:

This is a comedy in the tradition of Job, who, daring cosmic iconoclasm, refusing pat and pious answers, demands of God an answer to the question of gratuitous suffering. In his poverty,

weakness, and solitude, all Job has left is words and the courage to put the universe on trial. This is a kind of “heroic powlerlessness” that is celebrated in a number of novels published since the Second World War. (118-9)

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Holman, C. Hugh. “Detached Laughter in the South.” Comic Relief: Humor in

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Trickster as Interpreter. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 1994.

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——. Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.

——. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969.

Parks, John G. “The Comedy of Powerlessness: The One Modern Joke.” The Midwest

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