第几

Apart from inhibiting emotions and disguising linguistic asymbolia, the melancholic subject uses monotonous but ambiguous speech to serve the purpose of evading public conflicts, regardless of whether or not she understands the full implications of her discourse. For example, both Mrs. McIntyre and Mrs. Shortley avoid direct confrontation with each other, using indirection, pauses, metaphors, change of subject and gestures to circumvent certain central issues. While talking with Mrs. Shortley, Mrs. McIntyre takes pains to dodge asking the Shortleys to leave, which she desires to do, and meanwhile she underscores her superior social position by using innuendoes indicating that she knows about Mr. Shortley’s bootlegging business. In response, Mrs. Shortley masks her disapproval not with direct challenge, but with parodies of the Judge’s often-quoted sayings. Fearing externalized skirmish, the characters repress their anxiety and aggressiveness with equivocation. To them, it is best that communication remain opaque, involve unresolvable deficiencies, and even resist the speaker’s own conscious comprehension.

Such language of clichés, to some extent, enables the speaking subject to control the communicative flow and to invalidate his own intentions, when necessary, by eliminating the statement’s reference, thereby directing it to nothing but its own emptiness. O’Connor’s melancholic speakers try to utilize such a linguistic strategy to maintain their personal affective boundaries. For instance, In “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Pritchard’s speculation about neighborhood accidents dramatizes Mrs. Cope’s restrained apprehension, but Mrs. Cope obliterates the fear provoked by Mrs. Pritchard’s discourse by platitudinous emphases on the importance of gratitude, which she does not believe in herself. And Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation,” although distracted by the college student Mary Grace’s silent rudeness, continues her clichéd conversation in the hospital waiting room, while at the same time guessing at the reason why the girl singles her out for impoliteness.

The melancholic subjects are oftentimes narcissists lacking in the capability for empathy. Their language bears strong feelings of omnipotence, which is typical of the pre-object stage, wherein the infant senses no boundaries between the exterior and interior. And they are inclined to turn dialogue into a performance of magical thinking showing their self-assumed omnipotence. Hence, discourse is oftentimes monologue masquerading as dialogue for them. In O’Connor’s fiction, neither the female farm owner nor her employee is able to speak with emotional connection, yet each needs the other as an addressee to conduct her solo performance. The narcissistic character dismisses her addressee’s potential response, assuming that her words have a telepathic quality requiring no explanation. For example, in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. McIntyre derives satisfaction from her semi-monologues, while the more radical Mrs. Shortley gains inspiration for her prophetic imagination from banal conversations, during which her thoughts wander freely. Following Mrs. McIntyre’s words that Mr. Guizac is her salvation, she instinctively says that she “would suspicion salvation got from the devil” (CW 294). But since her “reply” is essentially a monologue of intuition uttered to herself, she cannot clearly explain its meaning to Mrs. McIntyre.

There are also cases in which conversations are monologues for the sake of filling in social space. The protagonist does not intend to communicate anything sincere to his partner, while his partner, who is likewise a narcissist and weak language user, willfully takes his words at face value in an oversimplified way. Apart from social purposes, each party partially interprets the other’s words, rendering them favorable to his own interest. And by creating an illusionary conversational atmosphere, the speaker can give vent to her pre-linguistic narcissistic feelings using simple phrases, and with the aid of an imaginary “understanding” listener. In “Good Country People,” Mrs. Hopewell and her employee Mrs. Freeman’s dialogues demonstrate this kind of narcissism in social interactions. Mrs. Hopewell often resolves to clichés so as to mimic a meaningful conversation with Mrs. Freeman, and by so doing she exhibits her sophistication to handle the troublesome Mrs. Freeman; while Mrs. Freeman, an insensitive listener, tends to deliberately misunderstand Mrs. Hopewell’s fragmented phrases as a sign that the two women have come to a communicative understanding, which reinforces her narcissistic belief in her intelligence. For example, even though Mrs. Hopewell is troubled by Mrs. Freeman’s prolonged presence in their home, she does not explicitly communicate her displeasure to Mrs. Freeman, but engages herself in a linguistic ritual indicating her worldly wit:

Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it, I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”

“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.

“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.

“It takes all kinds to make the world.”

“I always said it did myself.” (CW265)

As such, both parties create within the social space a narcissistic castle wherein they only receive what they would like to hear, and toy with their effortless “cleverness.”

Since the melancholic is unable to effectively convey meanings and is accustomed to restricting his emotions, he is sometimes compelled to find an outlet in the other polarity of inadequately symbolized language- emotional excess. This is often found in O’Connor characters’ compulsive speech in moments of intense pressure. This kind of language derives from intuition instead of logical thinking. Kristeva reminds us that the melancholic subject may experience “accelerated, creative cognitive process” of hyperactivity. In this state, “bouts of associative accelerations…destabilize the subject and afford it an escape route away from confrontation with a stable signification or a steady object” (Black Sun59). The melancholic subject’s inability to inhabit any fixed symbolic framework forces him to return to the realm of imaginary, wherein the object of loss arbitrarily attaches itself to multiple ideational presentations and reemerges as a variety of phantosmatic representations due to free association. Repressed feelings give rise to a linguistic carnival: “the psychic representative of affect erupts into the domain of language and thought, and it produces not a somatic symptom, but a ‘symbolic monstrosity’” (Kristeva New Maladies of the Soul48).

Such language of excess is composed of words that precociously erupt from a pre-symbolic system. A large portion of language spoken by O’Connor’s self-proclaimed prophets and prophetesses with manic traits, such as Mrs. Shortley, fit well into this category. This kind of speech emerges from unconscious chaotic affective assemblage and imagination fragments. As Mrs. Greenleaf in “Greenleaf” hysterically cries out “Jesus, stab me in the heart” in her prayer healing, she performs a “linguistic carnival” to weave out an imaginary web of unstable signification and emotional implications. This impulsive language springs from feelings they are unable to accurately name, but nevertheless exist in their unconscious minds as condensed products of the body’s emotional images. Also, a single word can signify multiple objects simultaneously, and these objects are oftentimes drastically different.

In O’Connor’s fiction, the sun as a linguistic symbol, in particular, is capable of simultaneously embodying the messenger of God and denoting the speaker’s aggressive desire for retribution. Yet, both meanings and their surrounding affects are unstable and fragmented. For example, Mrs. Shortley shouts out her “prophesy” when seeing the sun: “The children of wicked nations will be butchered…legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand, Who will remain whole? Who will remain whole? Who?” (CW301). Mrs. Shortley’s “prophesy” communicates this sort of signifying fragmentation. It precisely displays the “symbolic monstrosity” Kristeva has advanced: meanings undulate in pre-symbolic space of incessant alternations between association and diffusion, which is highly dependent on the compulsive speaker’s transient affective states.

Similarly, old Tarwater utters his ambiguous “prophesy” in compulsive ways. Because of the spontaneity of his passionate outburst, the “prophesy” reflects more than the surface religious message it attempts to convey:

With no one to hear but the boy, he would flail his arms and roar, “Ignore the Lord Jesus as long as you can! Spit out the bread of life and sicken on honey. Whom work beckons, to work! Whom blood to blood! Whom lust to lust! Make haste, make haste. Fly faster and faster. Spin yourselves in a frenzy, the time is short! The lord is preparing a prophet. The lord is preparing a prophet with fire in his hand and eye and the prophet is moving toward the city with his warning. The prophet is coming with the Lord’s message. ‘Go warn the children of God,’ saith the Lord, ‘of the terrible speed of justice.’ Who will be left? Who will be left when the Lord’s mercy strikes?” (CW 368)

Ostensibly, old Tarwater is delivering a sermon to his sole audience and disciple Francis Tarwater, yet, it is the old man himself who “spins” in Dionysian frenzy, for he anticipates that he does not have much time left, and will die in obscurity. Because his desired audience has denied him the opportunity to distinguish himself, apocalypse seems to be the ideal ending, when the symbolic domain would be totally subverted and all people would plunge into the delirium of linguistic fragmentation. With such emotional excess, his speech opens up the pre-symbolic space of monstrous imagination characterized by disordered passion outpoured too hurriedly to be able to be checked by consciousness. It is permeated with feelings of omnipotence and anxiety, fear of death, wish for retribution, and fascination with the apocalypse. The “prophesy,” due to its compulsiveness, intrinsically defies accurate meaning identification. In the end of the novel, Old Tarwater’s voice reappears in Tarwater’s mind - “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY” (CW478). This transmitted linguistic frenzy foregrounds their shared obsession with emotional excess and compulsive pleasure to shock the listeners.

Minor examples of compulsive speaking abound in O’Connor’s world, and all cases show fluidity of word representations typical in O’Connor’s work. Tarwater assumes that “drowning” and “baptizing” do not make much linguistic difference for him. After drowning Bishop, Tarwater says to a driver, “I baptize him…It was an accident. I didn’t mean to…The words just come out of themselves but it doesn’t mean nothing…I only mean to drown him…. They were just some words that run out of my month and spilled in the water” (CW458).” Earlier in the novel Tarwater says to Rayber: “I’m out of the womb of a whore” (CW397). Johnston says to Sheppard in “The Lame Shall Enter First,” “I lie and steal because I’m good at it…The lame shall enter first…The lame’ll carry his prey” (631). Mrs. McIntyre bursts out to the priest that “Christ was just another D.P.” (320). And in “Revelation,” Mary Grace finally angrily whispers to Mrs. Turpin: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (644). All these utterings cannot be understood univoqually. They exhibit symbolic volatility characteristic of the speech of compulsive speakers.

We already know from Kristeva that the melancholic subject refuses to, or is unable to, substitute the lost object with signs. Hanna Segal has pointed out the possibility that the psychotic patients take words to be concrete objects in her discussion of symbol formation and communication (“Notes on Symbol Formation” 396). In fact, both psychotics and neurotics with melancholic traits are predisposed to treats words as unformed chunks. And since they are incapable of translating the bereaved object into linguistic symbols, they are liable to take fragmented objects as words. Untranslatable emotional assemblage also plays an important part in forming linguistic chunks. As the melancholic tends to restrict words and replace them with magical thinking, he is likely to rediscover words and affects in all kinds of supernatural phenomena and religious signs. More specifically, loss’s resistance to linguistic and affective representations is often given shape in the image of a wound. In O’Connor’s melancholic characters’ imagination, untranslated words in particular assume the form of broken bodies and corpses. These graphic images of maimed objects bespeak unarticulated loss of her protagonists.

There are many examples of “wounded” traces of language that appear in visual forms in O’Connor’s work. For instance, in “The Displaced Person,” Mrs. Shortley’s outburst in her hallucination aptly illustrates the close link between inadequately symbolized words and wound, corpses and ineffable affective clusters of the manic-depressive. The arrival of the Guizacs undermines Mrs. Shortley’s sense of sovereignty on the McIntyre farm. Even though she is deeply attached to the land, and almost considers herself to be the guardian goddess of the place, she cannot impede her sense of being abandoned by the place, which is caused, most humiliatingly, by a Polish immigrant who can barely speak her language. She feels herself to be reduced to a foreigner on her own land. This lost sense of sovereignty constitutes the loss that she is unable to articulate. This inexpressible feelings of deprivation affect her employer Mrs. McIntyre as well. Box cars, ovens and dead bodies appear in Mrs. Shortley’s hallucinations and also in Mrs. McIntyre’s nightmare. Since the two women cannot communicate their traumatic feelings and objects of loss with words, the primal objects and affects return to them in the disjuncted forms of visual illusions filled with wounded dead bodies. These bodies dramatize words’ regression into fragmented chunks owing to the melancholic’s failure of transposition. Such shared phantasmal images function as their indescribable words and emotional feelings, mostly of anxiety and fear.

However, the corpses beguile the women’s conscious awareness. They fail to realize these images’ signifying trace and emotional implications for them, and mistake them for revelations of completely different natures. Mrs. Shortley reads into the maimed bodies her rage at the territorial “intruder” Mr. Guizac, who supposedly pulls the strings behind her pain. Mrs. McIntyre views the sign as a reminder of her loss related to economic impoverishment and other factors. Visual and acoustic illusions overwhelm Mrs. Shortley while she is absentmindedly engaged in conversations with others. Past trauma and ongoing dispossessions haunt her as fragmented chunks of horror. In her imagination, she sees the English language suffering contamination and in combat with the Polish language:

She began to imagine a war of words, to see the Polish words and the English words coming at each other, stalking forward, not sentences, just words, gabble gabble gabble, flung out high and shrill and stalking forward and then grappling with each other. She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty. She saw them all piled up in a room, all the dead dirty words, theirs and hers too, piled up like the naked body in the newsreel. God save me! She cried silently, from the stinking power of Satan! (CW298)

Since Mrs. Shortley is weak at spoken language and abstraction, unformed words representing loss in her illusion become bodies to be polluted, wounded and maimed. And her ineffable feeling of deprivation materializes into a grisly scene:

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, “Time marches on!” (CW287)

The image of death represents Mrs. Shortley’s feelings of disinheritance. Her implicit emotional memories of loss attach themselves to the visual memory of a massacre she once saw in a documentary, and under the effect of free association, the visual manifestation of her unconscious feelings are entangled with scenes in the documentary. But, as the manic-depressive’s defense mechanism, the affectless voice that says “Time marches on” forcefully suppresses her unconscious struggle with the symbolic rule in terms of linguistic expression. In the end, it should be noted that Mrs. Shortley’s hallucination reflects her racism.