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Depth and Grotesquerie in the Short Stories oftc "Depth and Grotesquerie in the Short Stories of"
Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O’Connortc "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 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 20^th-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 19^th and 20^th century respectively, still influence the present-day writer with their important theme of “Death�, after the incident on 11^th September 2001 in the 21 century where man is threatened by war & destruction engulfing him.