Depth and Grotesquerie in the Short Stories of
Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connor
Dr. A. Sridevi
& A. Venkanna
Edgar Allan
Poe’s contemporaries and successors, theorists and practitioner of
story-writing, have immensely benefited from the work he had left.
Flannery
O’Conner, a Southern writer like Poe, continuing to write in the grotesquerie
vein, was much influenced by him. All
the nightmarish symbols in Poe’s writing can be read as testimony from the
unconscious of a writer in the back drop of modern world. This type of fantasy tradition, with its
beginnings in the Gothic tales of Poe, continues to be present in the twentieth
century fiction in a somewhat modified form.
All of the
Poe’s stories were fantasy tales written in romantic tradition. In a fantasy, the reader and writer are
committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of story. Poe’s great success as a story teller lies
in maintaining such an illusion in the course of his narration. Modern American
writer of fiction have developed these main principles of narration while
depicting the discontinuities of modern life.
Edgar Allan
Poe’s continuing significance today lies in his imagination of destruction
figured by annihilation, because he anticipated the enthronement of death in
the twentieth century.
In Poe’s
tales the protagonists meet death in a gruesome manner. Some of them are perverse and are inclined
to embrace death that they are so much afraid of. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Masque of the
Red Death” not only depict the plunge of the propagation into the abyss of
death, but they are also parables of the destruction of the universe.
O’Connor
acknowledges for mystery of the supernatural and abiding sense of evil that
prevails in modern society, reminding us of Poe. In the major Gothic tales of Poe, the death of the beloved
totally wrecks the protaganist’s life.
In spite of all the protagonist’s intellectual and artistic attainments,
his obsessions drive him to death.
Flannery
O’Connor’s famous novel The Violent Bear it Away starts with death, and
the novels Wise Blood ends with death.
Both these events in the two novels have religious, sociological and
psychological significance. Both of
O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood and Violent bear it Away depicts man
in modern age and his suffering. Modern society affects man, offering no love
and compassion but restlessness, loneliness, dissatisfaction, alienation,
hatred and bursts of violence.
As in
O’Connor stories, in Poe’s Gothic tales also, the theme of death is very
prominent. The main character spending
a life of great happiness suddenly encounters death. In “Ligeia” the protagonist suddenly dies. And when her husband marries, lady Rowena,
the spirit of Ligeia haunts the couple, causing the destruction of Rowena. In “The Masque of the Red Death”, Prince
prospero and his companions shut themselves off in an abby in an attempt to
escape death but they are within no time engulfed by death. What is an ironic comment in man’s ultimate
fate in these gothic tales is given a grotesque twist in tales like “King Pest”
and “A Predicament”. Poe’s nightmare
world presented in tales like “The Masque of the Red Death” and “Pit and the
Pendulam” is essentially surrealistic.
By means of dream distortion, he is able to achieve surrealist effects
in the Gothic tales. In “The Pit and
Pendulam”, the intensity of effects is produced by the protagonist facing the
descending pendulum in alternate status of consciousness and
semi-consciousness. The atmosphere is
horrifying with the pith dark and dank and dank pit causing “agonizing dread”
and “Suffocating sense of oppression” and the protagonist feel the terrific
experience. In the work of Flannery
O’Connor , we come across the nightmare world filled with violence. O’ Connor dramatizes the fear that modern
man lives in. In her story “The View of
the woods”, she insists that the new mechanical world causes death and
destruction to man. It is truly a story
about the drastic change in the society.
Acceptance of the machine by modern man is seen in the very opening
lines of the story. Mark Fortune, the
grand father and Mary Fortune Pitts, the grand daughter, calmly watch the
yellow monster eating away their land.
Mark Fortune Pitts, the landlord is a 79 year old grandfather who loves
his grand daughter, Mary Fortune Pitts excessively. She doesn’t accept the idea of her grand father who wants to sell
their land for making a fishing club.
She does not want to sacrifice the “View of the Woods” for some modern
comfort. O’ Connor repeatedly insists
on the point that the vision of future, fully mechanized, causes disturbance
and distraction to man in the society.
Mary Fortune, though a child, acknowledges this fact. She disagrees with materialistic attitude of
her grand father. The conflict in the
story is between the grand father and the grand daughter, between the machine
and the woods.
Mr. Fortune’s
secular vision and his concern for the “rattle of everything that leads to
future” make him realize that man and nature are part of the whole
creation. In the process of
modernization, the bound between man and nature is lost. In O’Connor’s idea this is a great harm the
modern man does to himself blindly.
In O’Connor’s
“View of the Woods” the old man, Mark Fortune, tries to teach Mary Fortune a
lesson by whipping her. But
accidentally he kills her. Her death
brings him a revelation. The excessive
love he has for her leads him act perversely.
This perverse love, confused by mechanized thought, leads him to the
disaster of the death of his grand daughter.
In the last scene of the story, the old man is not cared for. He runs towards the lake to escape the
situation. He is left alone in the
chaotic word full of machines. He wants
a desperate help but there is the only “huge yellow monster[….] gorging it self
on the clay”. (Complete stories 81)
Death in the
story “A view of the Woods” is the result of mechanized thought of Mark
Fortune. O’Connor offers him a machine, a common need of man in modern age for
his comfort. O’Connor’s main concern is that if there is no bond between man
and nature, desolation, destruction and death will be inevitable.
Poe says in
his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque that the terror of
his tales is “not of German but of the soul”. This statement of the author is
taken by the psychology critics as a warrant for reading Poe’s personal
psychology in to his tales. It would be
more appropriate to say that he meant here not the Gothicism of his own soul,
but that he was referring to his aim of exploring certain states of the human
psyche for deliberate artistic purposes.
In denying German influence, Poe meant that he avoided the
“Pseudo-horror” in the works of second-rate German writers. What Poe obviously
meant was “Psychological terror”, which he deduced “Only from its legitimate
source”, that is, from the human nature. Having been thrust into a world of
nightmarish experience, the reader of the Gothic story finds himself confronted
with the element evil. This foreboding
and intensity of the Gothic fiction is achieved by means of its ominous
atmosphere and mood created by the physical settings and the corresponding
mental states of the characters.
Reading Poe’s tales the reader must feel beyond the letter of the
narrative. The presence of a spirit
confers on all the detail and incidents the meaning, but is inexpressible. Poe wants his tale to bring the reader into
contact with what he called “the ideal”.
Such was his ultimate aim. His
tales were not ends in themselves, but a means to make us feel the mystery and
horror of our condition. We must go
beyond the surface of his narratives.
His purpose was not simply to build perfect plots, but to make us show
his dreams. His writing anticipate the
20th-Century neurotic.
Thus, both
Flannery O’Connor and Edgar Allan Poe have a creative vision to see the dark
side of the human psyche. Edgar Allan
Poe’s prophetic vision influenced O’Connor to notice and write fiction about
the new society around her. Both Poe and O’Connor, belonging to the 19th
and 20th century respectively, still influence the present-day
writer with their important theme of “Death”, after the incident on 11th
September 2001 in the 21 century where man is threatened by war &
destruction engulfing him.