More Relfection on Flannery O'Connor


Abstract:
What Hitchcock did with camera angles and Tarantino does with dialogue, O'Connor does with narrative.

Body:
[Spoilers!]

It's kind of odd, but I think of Flannery as a moralist, in the same way that I think of Alfred Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino as moralists. There is a kind of absurd poetic justice about their stories. I'm thinking of Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the climactic scene, where it seems John and Madeline might actually make things work out in spite of her crime, and we are actually hoping that they will, she falls to her death. In Pulp Fiction, Jules, who turns away from his life of violence, lives to walk the earth and seek adventures, but Vincent dies in the bathroom. There is the same fascination with the grotesque, the same grappling with theological questions in mundane settings. What Hitchcock did with camera angles and Tarantino does with dialogue, O'Connor does with narrative.

Posted: Wed - December 20, 2006 at 10:35 AM           |

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