I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
Interpretation
The grotesque serves as a tool to awaken people's understanding and perception.
In the quote, Flannery O'Connor expresses her belief that society often overlooks important truths and realities. By employing grotesque elements in her work, she aims to shock and engage her audience, compelling them to really see and hear the underlying messages that are often ignored or misunderstood in everyday life.
In practice
During a lecture on modern literature, I quoted OβConnor to illustrate the purpose of using shock in art.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
What people donβt realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves.
Perversity is the muse of modern literature.
If you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture... _x000D_ βIf you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture. That is my way of seeing things.
While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
I'll never get bored of seeing flawed women on the screen.
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