SAXTON-THESIS.Pdf

Abstract Grotesque Subjects: Dostoevsky and Modern Southern Fiction, 1930-1960 by Benjamin T. Saxton As a reassessment of the southern grotesque, this dissertation places Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in context and conversation with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. While many southern artists and intellectuals have testified to his importance as a creative model and personal inspiration, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s deeply positive understanding of grotesque realism, I see the grotesque as an empowering aesthetic strategy that, for O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, captured their characters’ unfinished struggles to achieve renewal despite alienation and pain. My project suggests that the preponderance of a specific type of character in their fiction—a physically or mentally deformed outsider—accounts for both the distinctiveness of the southern grotesque and its affinity with Dostoevsky’s artistic approach. His grotesque characters, consequently, can fruitfully illuminate the misfits, mystics, and madmen who stand at the heart—and the margins—of modern southern fiction. By locating one source of the southern grotesque in Dostoevsky’s fiction, I assume that the southern literary imagination is not directed incestuously inward toward its southern past but also outward beyond the nation or even the hemisphere. This study thus offers one of the first evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group. Acknowledgements I am very thankful for my professors at Rice University for their intellectual stimulation and continued support. My advisor, Colleen Lamos, has offered me guidance and encouragement on every step of the way. I’ll remember our long talks and walks. Wesley Morris was always generous with his time and his thoughts (especially on Faulkner!). Thanks also to Ewa Thompson, who read my chapters with scrupulous care and was always eager to discuss Dostoevsky, hiking, and all things Russian. Big thanks go out to my friends and fellow graduate students who supported this project in more ways than they could know: Kattie Basnett, Sam Beck, Matt Caputo, Nathan Carlin, James Clancy, Lilian Crutchfield, Sarah Graham, Jesse Johnson, Andy Klein, Levent Kutlu, Ben Lourence, Jared Mast, Amelia Scholtz, AnaMaria Seglie, Ryan White, and (of course) the Constitution of 117. You have all taught me that the journey, not the destination, matters most. A special thanks to Tom Cole, an invaluable mentor and friend. Tom, you’ve made me a better writer and a better person. This dissertation is dedicated to my family: to Mom, Dad, Dan, and Tyler. Table of Contents Page Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter One Dostoevsky and the South: Critical Connections….………..……………………..….11 II. Toward the Southern Grotesque..……………….……………………………22 III. Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Realism and the Grotesque……………………..….34 Chapter Two From the Incarnational to the Grotesque in O’Connor’s Fiction and Crime and Punishment……………………………………………………………..48 II. An Overview of the Critical Debate…………………………………………..51 III. Raskolnikov, Haze Motes, and the “Negative” Grotesque…………………..59 IV. “God Made Me Thisaway”: Marmeladovs, Mary Graces, and the “Positive” Grotesque…………………………………………………………73 V. Living Icons in Crime and Punishment and “Parker’s Back”…..…….……...83 Chapter Three Finding Dostoevsky’s “Idiot” in the Fiction of Carson McCullers………………....93 II. From The Idiot to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter…..……..…..……………...95 III. Sickly Saints…………………………………………………………….....106 IV. Silent Lovers……………………………………………………………….114 Chapter Four Destructive Dialogue and Grotesque Perception in As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Brothers Karamazov………….……..126 II. Grotesque Laughter………………………………………………………….132 III.Grotesque Visions…………………………………………………….……..157 Conclusion………………………………………...…………………………………...177 Works Cited……...…………………………………………………………………….183 1 Introduction This panoply of bodies in process or bodies in pain, this parade of beings on the rim, the painful margins of southern society, appear without ceasing…Why? What causes this obsessive presence in southern literature? What is the source of this impressive display of misfits, dimwits, giant women, and lunatics? —Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire (2000) In her insightful discussion of southern women’s writing, Patricia Yaeger gleefully makes the usual expectations strange. Why are there so many deformed and distorted bodies in southern fiction? Where do they come from? Refusing to rely upon the conventional southern fixtures of family, memory, or community, she tackles these questions with new categories that privilege the dirty, the feminine, the wounded, and— most of all—her “not-so-secret-obsession, the southern grotesque” (259). The southern grotesque also occupies the center of this study. I locate one of its sources, however, in a place where few, including Yaeger, might expect: in the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Despite obstacles of language, culture, and his peculiar religious conservatism, Dostoevsky’s fiction has always seemed contemporary if not prophetic, even today; his memorable heroes and anti-heroes have been quoted (and misquoted) by all sorts of writers and public figures, from Albert Einstein to the Beat poets to George W. Bush (Bloshteyn, Icon 3). But it has been U.S. southerners, especially, who have pointed to Dostoevsky as a crucial source of inspiration. In his fiction they found, despite different locales, a mirror of lives and bodies in the South: religious mystics and madmen, tormented intellectuals obsessed with God and with the past, diseased fools and 2 epileptics. As an exploration of the strangeness and vitality of the southern grotesque, this study reads Dostoevsky alongside Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in an effort to understand those misfits, dimwits, giant women, and lunatics who stand at the heart—and the margins—of southern fiction. Critical remarks mentioning this literary kinship are not hard to find. In 1941 Carson McCullers boldly claimed that “Modern southern writing seems rather to be most indebted to Russian literature, to be the progeny of the Russian realists” (“Realists” 252). It has also been said that Faulkner is the Dostoevsky of the South; that O’Connor’s fiction is populated with “countrified Karamazovs”; that McCullers’s lovelorn protagonists are straight out of a Dostoevsky novel; and, most repeatedly, that Dostoevsky’s emphasis on alienation, suffering, and deformity finds its analogue in the darker side of southern fiction.1 The chief problem, however, is this: in spite of these and similar comments that one finds strewn about southern letters, interviews, and essays, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Maria Bloshteyn, who has recently traced Dostoevsky’s reception in American literary culture, has observed that, even as they were quick to acknowledge their debt to him, “there are virtually no scholarly evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on Southern writers as a group” (“Southern”1).2 By placing Dostoevsky in extended contact and 1 These comments appear in Gray (Faulkner 8), Wood (169), and Evans (70), respectively. I explore the implications of these and many other remarks throughout this study. 2 Certainly, some scholarship connects Dostoevsky to the southern literary tradition, but often in terms that are too broad or too specific—that is, he is either lumped together with other Russian writers (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov) or confined to the context of a single southerner’s fiction. Bloshteyn’s recent comparative work on Dostoevsky is the best resource available for tracing his reception in the South and American culture. Only Bloshteyn, Pachmuss, and Marion Montgomery consider Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group. Myler Wilkinson has examined the intercultural dialogue between American writers and their nineteenth-century Russian counterparts, while Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a prominent southern historian, has analyzed the historical and psychological affinities between nineteenth-century Russian writers, including Dostoevsky, and modern southern writers. Single-author comparisons, which 3 conversation with O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, I undertake precisely this kind of evaluation. Bloshteyn’s own article offers an insightful (albeit brief) discussion of Dostoevsky’s importance to southern writers, focusing on cultural parallels and, like Yaeger, on the grotesque. Although they both acknowledge its positive dimensions— especially as an aesthetic strategy of conflation and subversion—not all critics regard the term with approval. Mab Segrest and others have argued that the grotesque further marginalizes the already marginalized, choosing “the most vulnerable among [us] to punish for [our] own secret alienation, to bear the burden of strangeness” (24). Within the burgeoning field of disability studies, the grotesque has often been dismissed as an imperfect tool, at best, for reading disabled and deformed bodies. For Rosemary Garland Thomson, far too many critics (Flannery O’Connor scholars in particular) view the disabled body merely “as a sign for a degenerate soul or a bankrupt universe” (112). “The term ‘grotesque,’” she adds, “prevents their seeing [O’Connor’s] work as perhaps an exploration of physical disability” (168). Real damage can be done, it is suggested, by reading deformed bodies as symbols. Given

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