Abstract
Savoy attempts to define two structural aspects of O’Connor’s Gothic: the horizontal (or spatial) axis and the vertical (or temporal) axis that organize her narratives of chance encounters with potentially redemptive violence. O’Connor’s characters are comically abject beings who traverse a realistic Southern landscape toward a shattering encounter with what Christian theology understands as the Incarnation, and Lacan understands as the Real. These narratives are parables of ‘human folly confronted by mortality.’ In temporal terms, O’Connor’s agents of violence are prophetic figures: figural beings, they crystallize at once the promise offered by the Old Testament and the accomplishment of the New Testament. From spatial and temporal distance, a paradoxically redemptive violence arrives to shatter her characters’ fatuous self-satisfaction.
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
(Emily Dickinson, Poem 435, ll.1-2)
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References to Flannery O’Connor’s writing are cited parenthetically in the text. The abbreviation LA indicates a quotation from the Library of America edition of her collected works, while the single use of the abbreviation MM indicates a quotation from Mystery and Manners.
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Savoy, É. (2016). Flannery O’Connor and the Realism of Distance. In: Castillo Street, S., Crow, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47774-3_11
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