When Flannery O’Connor called the south Christ-haunted, she was thinking not least of its freaks. The role of the freak takes on a theological tone in grotesque southern fiction because “it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” The freak becomes the medium of the prophetic for the southern writer much like the fool did for medieval literature.
In the same way that Chrétien de Troyes has the fool declare “like a prophet” that the young Perceval will become the “knight of all knights” despite his being girded about with clothes that Welsh peasants usually wear, so the southern novelist uses the freak to see “near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.” This is the prophetic in fiction according to O’Connor, which she goes on to describe as a realism of distances.
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