The theatrical world of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”

Abstract

Attempting a scrutiny of Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” the reader is by no means left in a quandary as to the experience of death, pain, and suffering percolating through the very foundations of southern culture since antebellum times. Also, the phenomenon in question appears to be deeply embedded in the aesthetics of historical baroque, which allows one to notice a striking resemblance between the nature of southern experience of the 1950’s and the essence of baroque sensibility. Such an observation assumes extraordinary importance if considered in the context of modern theatricality.

Grounded upon a comparison between the seventeenth-century France of Louis XIV and the contemporary South of O’Connor’s protagonist, George Poker Sash, the article explores the transplantation of a multitude of cultural traits characterizing the baroque onto the realm of modern experience(impelled to confront southern history by the author) through the prism of such notions as the play of appearances, miseen abime, and the spaces of theatricality. These concepts, predominantly associated with the theater, are delineated in the course of William Egginton’s How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity and The Theater of Truth: Ideology of Neo-Baroque Aesthetics, which two works comprise the theoretical background of the discussion concerning the relationship between the contemporary South and its historical experience.

The argument is supported by Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the spectacle adumbrated in The Society of the Spectacle, which presents the culture of the commodity as endowed with theatrical attributes. Bearing in mind that fact that, as Christine Buci-Glucksmann argues in her Baroque Reason, the representation of a historical subject in necessarily connected with theatricality, O’Connor reader is enabled, with the assistance of the works mentioned above, to locate the tragedy ensconced in the core of southern culture enveloped in an intricately woven web of modern appearances.