Nevinost djece i tajni životi odraslih u prozi Flannery O’Connor

Abstract

fabulation of occurs some non-transpa-rency is at work, some riddle concerning nature and the world which renders them shattered and dark. Gothic text thematizes ‘’the shadow’’ of knowing, ‘’the blind spot’’ into which a part of the story inevitably enters. Something is rendered ma-cabre because it evades thorough understanding. In O’Connor’s Wise Blood and in ‘’A Temple of the Holy Ghost’’, the child-protagonist reveals some secret feature of the life of adults but ultimately fails to understand it to the full. The child’s gaze gothicizes the enigma of adult life into a dark and ghastly story. In O’Connor’s prose, carnival tents hide something horrible and obscene, something that is only for ‘’grown-ups’’, but is nevertheless captured by a child’s gaze. Gothic fabulation emerges in O’Connor with the attempts to figure out the secrets of adults from the unprivileged epistemic position of a child. However, in her prose Gothic perspective is only a transitional phase of the main narrative. The fragmentary Gothic narrative ends up in outright sacral representation. The Gothic gap is filled with sacred imagery in order to render the story whole. The focal feature of O’Connor’s prose is precisely this change from the unstable Gothic perspective to more fixed imagery of biblical sacredness. In her work, the tents are locations of the carnival and anomalous, but, at the same time, they are the topoi of sacred, and, thus, they expose the biblical ‘’hypotext’’ of O’Connor’s prose. In a sense, children are pla-ced outside the cultural mainstream of the adult world, and by virtue of this, their visions of reality are more open to the “wondrous.” It is through the visions of children in her stories that the Gothic ‘’freak shows” (problematic entertainment of adults) are, at the final point, replaced by the spectacle of the ‘’sacred’’.