Abstract.
“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being … it beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire … drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned” (Kristeva 1). In this essay, I draw upon Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection as a phenomenon which undergirds spiritual revelation in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Lame Shall Enter First” (1965). In tracing the vomiting, ingestion, and self-abjection of its focal characters, I uncover how the opposing forces of self-expulsion and self-establishment serve as processes underpinning both the aesthetic and theological facets of the text. Aesthetically, abjection foregrounds the incomprehensible mysteries of sin, evil and the divine life, denoting the diegetic universe as one in which characters’ senses of self and beliefs are fundamentally threatened. Theologically, the text expels secular humanism through exposing its hypocrisies, while establishing a de-sentimentalized Christian God aligned with filth, grotesqueness, and the subjugated human ego. As the text progresses, the human body becomes the very site of nausea, disgust and horror, assaulting characters and readers out of self-righteous secular humanism and towards God.
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Serial killers and child abuse, club feet and gorging tractors; decades of scholarship have plumbed the depths of Flannery O’Connor’s radical yet undeniably Christian portrayals of the bodily, grotesque, and violent. This essay draws upon Julia Kristeva’s concept of ‘abjection’ – the destabilizing, depersonalizing and destructive experience of “I … without border” (4) – as a phenomenon which undergirds spiritual revelation in O’Connor’s works. At its essence, abjection involves an enduring horror of the ‘Other’, no longer conceived of as external, but experienced as an ever-present invasion of one’s self and beliefs, a threat to “identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4). In contrast to the ‘grotesque’, which by definition indicates a departure from the norm (Kim 12), analysing O’Connor through abjection grants deeper insights into the sustained terror involved in revelation, predicated upon the very conditions of normal life. Centering on her short story “The Lame Shall Enter First” (1965), I posit that it is precisely abjection in its interruptive force which catapults characters and readers out of self-righteous secular humanism and towards God. In particular, I spotlight three instances which illuminate abjection’s revelatory qualities: Norton vomiting, Johnson consuming the Bible, and Sheppard’s self-abjection.
Abjection, according to Kristeva, is “double” (9), necessitating an opposition of dualities. In “The Lame Shall Enter First'', this opposition is expressed through what I term 'self-expulsion' and 'self-establishment' (informed by Kristeva’s analysis of food loathing): violent incidences of expulsion and ingestion, which go beyond the object of expulsion/ingestion to implicate the self and its identity, systems and beliefs. We first see this sense of abjection when Norton acutely vomits after breakfast – a direct consequence of Sheppard’s chastisement of him for not sharing with Johnson. Before the conversation, Norton is “collecting the ingredients for his breakfast” (445) – distinct objects, neatly measured and demarcated: a “jar of peanut butter … quarter of a small chocolate cake … and the ketchup bottle” (445). After the conversation, Norton vomits and “[e]verything came up, the cake, the peanut butter, the ketchup—a limp sweet batter” (448). While the imagery of disparate ingredients mixing into batter implies the act of baking, the sentence structure instead suggests vomiting: an experience of an amorphous ‘everything’ rising up, followed by the sequential rationalisation of the ingredients one has consumed, with the em dash representing the precise moment of expulsion, ending in ‘limp sweet batter’. Self-expulsion is evident in the word “[e]verything”, which implicitly recognises an inability to truly externalise food as a separate “Other”; this description aligns with Kristeva’s observation that through food loathing, food, the object of both expulsion and nourishment, cannot truly be considered an “Other” and must thus be considered part of the self. A further dimension is the flavours themselves – chocolate cake, peanut butter and ketchup – which do not conventionally blend, but are instead forcefully mixed, digested, expulsed, and congealed through the baking-vomiting process. The novelty of the baking-vomiting metaphor establishes an entirely new creation which is by nature abject, yet immutably part of the self. Taken holistically, the singular gesture of vomiting thus implicates the self in self-expulsion and self-establishment. In Kristeva’s words: “[d]uring that course in which “I” become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3). The result is a threading together of otherwise opposing and dualistic forces of expelling and ingesting; disintegration and integration; unbecoming and becoming.
Abject aesthetic is also uncannily effective at invoking the incomprehensible mysteries of sin, evil and the divine life, denoting the diegetic universe as one in which characters’ senses of self and beliefs are fundamentally threatened. During the same conversation, Norton is transfigured by a “knot of flesh” (447) below his “suddenly distorted mouth” (447), rendering his face “a mass of lumps with slits for eyes … [with] ketchup dribbled on his chin” (447). His face is situated in its grotesqueness, intensified through both the animation of ‘knot’, ‘suddenly’, ‘lumps’, as well as the formlessness of ‘flesh’, ‘distorted’, ‘mass’. Even familiar facial features, ‘mouth’ and ‘eyes’, do not provide an anchor point for recognition, but instead further assault categories of living and unliving, human and monstrosity, even unsettling the metaphysical fabric of the diegetic universe. In this moment, he becomes Kristeva’s abject – “[t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4), an existence “opposed to I” (1), threatening not only Norton’s own sense of identity and selfhood, but the very notions of identity and selfhood. In one reading, Norton’s transfigurations represent a void of humanism devoid of God; in another, the incomprehensible and inapprehensible mystery of evil, sin, and the divine life; in yet another, a manifestation of the innocent’s nausea towards humanism. As John Sykes asserts, O’Connor “intends readerly violence to all her readers, believers and unbelievers alike” (143); this multi-valenced violence is effectively committed through abjection.
Considering how self-expulsion and self-establishment inevitably implicate the self in its identity and beliefs, on the level of the text, such instances reveal O’Connor’s theological project: the simultaneous expulsion of secular humanism, ripe in its hypocrisies, and establishment of God’s credibility. Norton’s bodily nausea arises directly from Sheppard’s pleas for him to share his food and clothes with Johnson, and by extension, to subscribe to Sheppard’s own doctrine of altruism. Norton violently expels not only his breakfast, but also the food Sheppard intends for him to share with Johnson. Through Norton’s vomit, Sheppard’s hypocritical charity is paradoxically purged of its faux facade of altruism. Instead, it is depicted in its truest character – ‘half-digested food’ (449) with a ‘sour odor’ (449). This depiction is intensified through the image of Norton “gagging … wait[ing] with his mouth open over the plate as if he expected his heart to come up next” (448), suggestive of both waiting to eat one’s heart and vomiting one’s heart up, loading complex valences of self-ingestion and self-purging. These, while seemingly dualistic images at surface, point to the deeper, lurking evil innate within the human body, accessible only through radical self-violence. Similarly, in Sheppard’s later comparison of Man to fish, having to “grow his adjustments [lungs] inside” (462, italics mine), the expansion of lungs implied by ‘grow’ is unnaturally contained within the body through ‘inside’, signaling the inherent abnormality of Man’s measured ‘adjustments’ as compared to God’s divinity. Within secular humanism, bodily organs lose their spatial residence within the interiority of Man’s bodies, ‘com[ing] up’ and ‘grow[ing]’, pushing unnaturally outwards, rendering the human body itself an agentic being which constantly threatens the natural order of growth and evolution. By extension, humanity becomes situated within abjection – neither fish nor human, hubristically endowed with a body acting against God. A focus on abjection thus highlights a fundamental perversion of Man’s relationship with both his self and with God: through abjection, the unknowable, unseeable evil of humanity is concretised, and secular humanism’s perversions are made evident.
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If what is being expulsed through abjection is secular humanism, then what is being established is a God whose intimacy with humanity is predicated on those very conditions of abjection: filth, the grotesque, and above all, a subjugation of one’s conceptual selfhood to God. In response to Norton’s disclosure of Sheppard’s logic of buying Johnson a shoe because he eats out of garbage cans, Johnson emphatically states that he “like[s] to eat out of garbage cans” (453). Within the unassailable perplexities of Norton’s vomiting and transfigurement and Johnson’s garbage-eating lies Ariana Kim’s provocative question: “what if shit, filth, and disintegration are the very conditions by which a holy God intimately relates to us?” (13). Kim situates O’Connor’s works within a larger cultural thrust “to accept creation as broken”, embracing abject subjects in order to establish God’s credibility (13). Fundamentally, this proposition is predicated upon the simple belief that there is nothing God does not touch, and that the moment of abjection - a moment when we are estranged from even ourselves - can be a moment of profound intimacy with God. Similarly for O’Connor, rather than purification, cleansing and healing of orthodox Christianity, it is precisely alignment with filth – or, in the context of the story, ‘garbage’ – which gives credibility to God’s grace. The divine significance of ingestion is escalated when Johnson later consumes a page from the Bible, likening himself to Ezekiel consuming the sweet honey of the Word. In Ezekiel, the biblical trope of hierophagy, transformational eating, is a revelatory experience which signals a turning point for the prophet. Similarly in O’Connor, Johnson’s revelation is received through the literally abject experience of eating paper, a material unwelcome and indigestible for the body, with the vivid force behind “thrust” (477), “furiously” (477), “grinding” (477) and “burning” (477) rendering Johnson’s body an avenue of violent upheaval. This moment of abjection is juxtaposed with the simultaneous divinely revelatory experience of receiving the gift of prophecy, wherein Johnson’s ingestion gives him “a vision of splendor” with “[w]onder transfor[ming] his face” (477). Ingesting both garbage and the Bible, Johnson, an abject figure, is thus permeated by supernatural divinity – at once thief and prophet, conventionally scorned yet allied with God. Through imagining the divine’s presence even within the unimaginably profane, through positioning the abject as the very foundations of human participation in the divine, O’Connor de-sentimentalizes God and signals the universality of His presence and grace.
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As the text progresses, Sheppard undergoes a journey of intensifying self-abjection – of “finding the impossible within” (Kristeva 5) – drawing him out of self-righteous secular humanism and towards God. At the beginning of the story, Sheppard’s deceased wife’s old gray winter coat – an abject reminder of her death experienced as a continued presence – causes him to “winc[e] as if he had seen the larva inside a cocoon” (457). His wife’s death, as natural and divinely ordained as larva within a cocoon, is beyond Sheppard’s secular understanding. Sheppard then experiences recurrences of self-abjection, each also a moment of revelation. When he believes he has wronged Johnson, he feels “physically sick” (466). When he realizes Johnson was indeed guilty, the physical nausea escalates to horror, as Johnson’s shoe “appeared to grin at [Sheppard] with Johnson’s own face … He was aghast at himself” (473). Compared to mere physical sickness, abjection escalates from the physical to the more-than-physical, simultaneously signaling Johnson’s superiority over Sheppard, Johnson’s club foot imbued with mysterious qualities, and the failure of humanism to uncover truth. Yet Sheppard’s main revelation is that the root of evil is within his self. His horror escalates to repulsion as he confronts Johnson’s eyes, likened to “distorting mirrors in which [Sheppard] saw himself made hideous and grotesque” (474). Words signifying the abject – ‘distorting’, ‘hideous’, ‘grotesque’ – become continually associated with the self, indicating an underlying spiritual perversity within, which Shepard can realise only through self-abjection and his escalating emotions of nausea, horror, and repulsion.
The culmination of Sheppard’s revelation arrives within the final pages of the story, wherein self-abjection becomes a process simultaneous and synonymous with spiritual revelation. Initially, Sheppard resists this revelation; his “mouth twisted and he closed his eyes against the revelation” (481). Yet again, it is the face of the Other, Norton and Johnson, which assaults his consciousness till the revelation becomes inescapable, intolerable, inevitable. O’Connor emphasises Sheppard’s vision – “rose before him”, “[h]e saw” and “[h]is image of himself” (481) – to highlight the increasing clarity of vision which Sheppard gains, in tandem with his “constricted” (481) heart and “shrivelled” (481) self-image. Together, his clarity of vision and shrinking ego give him a view beyond himself, towards Norton’s vulnerability and grief, towards Johnson’s eyes which reveal “the clear-eyed Devil, the sounder of hearts” (481). Recalling the earlier quotation of his own image reflected in Johnson’s eyes, what he sees is thus the image of himself as Devil, “the impossible constitut[ing his] very being” (Kristeva 5). Through abjection he accesses multiple layers of meaning in a single moment: both his human sin, and the possibility of grace; both himself, and himself as Devil; both the Devil and God. Sheppard’s spiritual revelation, while belated, is ultimately expansive and complete, thus inviting with it the enduring possibility of grace.
As Timothy Basselin aptly posits, in O’Connor’s stories, “mercy is forged in the fires of suffering” (2). Through its multifold disturbance of “identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4), even of meaning, the abject consistently situates characters and readers within an ever-assaulting mystery which interrogates the dualistic, the taken-for-granted, and most of all, the engorged human ego. Yet, within a jungle of shadows, the possibility of grace endures: a single beam of light, opening towards “eternal life” (Wood 10). It is this very grace that codifies O’Connor’s abject figures, and the readers mirrored within them, as worthy of salvation.
Works Cited
Basselin, Timothy J. Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity. Baylor University Press, 2013. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/24533.
Kim, Ariana. Abject Aesthetics in Contemporary Christian Art: The De-Euphemizing Impulse in Flannery O’Connor, Andres Serrano, and Bruce Beasley, The University of Alabama, United States, 2020. ProQuest, http://libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/abject-aesthetics-contemporary-christian-art-de/docview/2426236000/se-2.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
O’Connor, Flannery. Flannery O’Connor Complete Stories. Britain: Faber and Faber, 1990. Print.
Sykes, John D., Jr. ‘O’Connor and the Body: Incarnation, Redemptive Suffering and Evil’. Flannery O’Connor, edited by Harold Bloom, InfoBase Publishing, 2009, pp. 139–45.
Wood, Ralph C. ‘Introduction, Etc.’ Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2004, pp. 6–11, 38–43.