"Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God." -- Flannery O'Connor, Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction
A people who still recognize a standard are able to spot something askew. Those who reject the straight can no longer see the crooked. It loses context and they become blind to it. O'Connor insists here that seeing the whole gives you eyes for the sick, having an idea of the normal helps you identify the irregular. This standard is Christ. It is understanding the world as God's possession and it's ordering as His providence. The world made by His Word provides absolute zero from which other things can be measured. The world made in our own image by our open-minded words has no ability to see anything as out of bounds, because the boundary markers are invisible to them.
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