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ornamental line

Diluted Senses

"The reader of today looks for [the redemptive act], and rightly so, but what he
has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking
altogether and so he has forgotten the price of restoration."
Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque" (1960; 1965)

Points for Reflection

The Bible: Leviticus 19:33-34

  1. Do you think the principle of loving the stranger who "sojourns with you in your land" (33, ESV) applies to only some immigrants under certain conditions, or to everyone?


The Bible: Micah 6:6-8

  1. What do the prophet Micah's observations about blood sacrifices suggest about the guiding principles undergirding grain, oil, and animal sacrifices--in light of what follows?
  2. Is "justice" (v.8) a highly malleable concept, or relatively fixed?


The Bible: Isaiah 58:1-10

  1. The prophet Isaiah, relating the perspective of God, lists many ways that fasting from food can go off the rails. What is the proper goal of fasting, according to this passage?


The Bible: 2 Corinthians 8:8-15

  1. In what way might Jesus have become "poor" (v.9)?
  2. In this letter to the church at Corinth, does Paul weigh either intentions or actions more heavily than the other?
  3. To what end does Paul recommend sharing physical possessions?


The Bible: Galatians 3:26-28

  1. What is the single variable that, from a Godly perspective, obliterates all the distinctions that tend to divide humans?
  2. How might we resolve the tension between Paul's using gendered language in v. 26 and then dissolves gender differences in v. 28?


C. S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain (1940), chp. 4

  1. At the opening of the chapter entitled “Human Wickedness,” Lewis restates the thesis of chapter three, that whereas kindness only wishes others to feel good, love wants what is ultimately best for others, even if it involves pain and suffering (48, 32). He proceeds to argue that modern society has fixated on one of the traditional virtues above all others, kindness, and on a single vice, cruelty.  Do you agree with this distillation of contemporary morality, with Lewis’ claim that we are much less interested in such virtues as mercy, temperance, chastity, and humility (49, 58)?
  2. Do you accept Lewis’s assertion that shame can be beneficial in helping us to confront such failings as cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy (50, 61), or do you consider shame to usually be an unhealthy anxiety about very natural behavior (49-50)?
  3. Why is a guilty conviction of our own sinfulness so foundational to Christianity (50-52)? Does this passage privilege one gender over the other?
  4. What various defense mechanisms do humans apparently deploy to avoid facing up to the deep-rootedness of their sin?
  5. What do you make of Lewis’ theory that salvation may consist of perfected humans rejoicing in those shameful sins that made God’s compassion more palpable, instead of the utter erasure of those sins (55)?
  6. Do you agree both that all virtues are interconnected, and that every vice ultimately leads to cruelty (59)?
  7. Why does Lewis value the insight involved with shame more than its concomitant emotion (61-62)?


Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" (1957; 1965), 813-21

  1. Flannery O'Connor implies that she is one of those "for whom the ordinary aspects of daily-life prove to be of not great fictional interest" (813). She is less interested in the typical/normal than the atypical/abnormal (814), preferring the deeper if eccentric realism that concerns spiritual truth to a shallow realism of fact only (814-15). Such "grotesque" realism might contain "strange skips and gaps" in the narrative, along with elements of "mystery and the unexpected," while retaining an "inner coherence" faithful to individual human psychology and spiritual experience (815). Do you share this preference? Consider the types of film and television towards which you gravitate . . .
  2. Why does O'Connor claim that the "social sciences have cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction" (814 top)?
  3. What once-hidden aspect of human experience has ridden the wave of realism in twentieth-century fiction, according to O'Connor (814 mid-bot)?
  4. O'Connor notes that one's definition of "realism" hinges on what one considers to be "the ultimate reaches of reality," that many post-Enlightenment optimists convinced of science's ability to (eventually) rid human experience of all suffering focus their attention on the agents of that suffering--on economic, social, psychological, and other quantifiable variables (815 bot). She, by contrast, believes that human life--while describable--remains inherently mysterious because it stands atop a great mystery we only partially understand (816 top). As a Christian writer whose life rest on faith in Divine Grace, then, is O'Connor primarily interested in what we do completely understand as humans, or what we do not? Is she more interested in probability or possibility (816)?
  5. Why does O'Connor claim that writing grotesque fiction is, in one way, easier than writing the kind of realistic fiction produced by Henry James (816 bot)?
  6. N/A in F26: Does O'Connor call authors to be compassionate, to place feeling over morality (817 mid)? (For those familiar with C. S. Lewis, would he agree? See pp. 32-33 of The Problem of Pain).
  7. What definition of prophecy, as it applies to the novelists, does O'Connor offer up (817 bot), and what does she mean when she casts herself with other writers as a "realist of distances" (817 bot, 819 top)?
  8. O'Connor writes, in 1957, that Southern writers can identify "freaks" so readily because they retain a theological conception of the "whole" human (i.e. soul, as well as body and mind) against which the freak is measured (817 bot). Is this true today? Do the majority of those living in the South see reality through a theological lens? Are they, like Southerners sixty years ago, "Christ-haunted" even when not "Christ-centered" (818 top)?
  9. Does O'Connor identify herself as one who speaks "with" or "counter to" her own era's "prevailing attitudes" (819 bot)?
  10. O'Connor provocatively asserts that if a reader's heart is in the right place, s/he will indeed find her/his heart "lifted up" by reading her stories (819 bot), that her fiction points to the "the redemptive act." She claims that her stories highlight the high cost of such restoration (though they rarely narrate the actual restoration itself) (820). Do you agree that her stories are uplifting in this way?
  11. When O'Connor claims that "distortion" is necessary for certain writers to get their "vision" across to the reader, what does she mean (816-17, 821 top)?
  12. Is it possible to reconcile O'Connor's call to create "grotesque" fiction filled with atypical scenarios with the Biblical call to fill one's mind with "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable . . . [with] anything [that] is excellent or praiseworthy" (Philippians 4:8)?


A large, wooden, yellow cross made of conjoined panels hovers over a table with flower and food. Wooden rods explode out from behind the cross in everything direction around it.
Arithmosophic Cross (1952)
oil on canvas
Salvador Dali



Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu