Abstract

In "The Incarnational Art of Flannery O'Connor" I argue that O'Connor designed her unique sacramental aesthetic to defy the Cartesian divisions between self and other and between mind and body that have characterized American intellectual and spiritual life since Emerson. Through a careful reading of the philosophical and aesthetic texts O'Connor knew, I focus on stories with artist figures, objets d'art, child protagonists, and embodied images to describe her vision of the artist's charge to reunite what the modern mind has severed. For O'Connor, art, like the Incarnation, presents a grotesque body instead of making an abstract argument; it reveals through the concrete, particular, untidy and communal nature of human experience---not in spite of it. Drawing on Bakhtin's early essays, which have only recently been published, I analyze the development in her fiction from one kind of revelatory grotesque to another. In Wise Blood and the early stories she employed the grotesque to figure the reality of human perversity that we must not ignore; in The Violent Bear It Away and the late stories she employed it to figure Christ in the body of the other that we must accept. As such, O'Connor's fiction prefigures recent developments in feminist theory that critique Cartesian objectivism and insist that an embodied and local epistemology revise it.