In a Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm in 1950, William Faulkner famously refused to accept the end of man. Elaborating, Faulkner goes on to promise that “man will not merely resist: he will prevail.” This faith, he insists, has its roots in the human soul, "a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice, and endurance," and Faulkner's speech closes triumphantly in a melodious hymn of polysynthetic optimism, affirming man by calling for "courage and honor, hope, pride, compassion, mercy and sacrifice that were the glory of his past Say no to plagiarism Get a custom-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned" author who, perhaps more than any other, embodied the Southern Gothic genre, is striking. The champion of a literary tradition unapologetically characterized by decadence and disintegration seems, in his fiction, quite willing to accept the end of man hope and desperation, resistance and decadence, constitutes one of the fundamental tensions of American modernism. In the face of the absurdity of the postwar world, American literature – its writers and its characters – presses forward in the realist tradition that has become a hallmark. of literary modernism. However, these modernist attempts to cope with an absurd reality remain obsessed with the idea of ​​universal truth, and therefore tormented by the desire to return to an earlier romantic tradition. Attempting to venture into realism but unable to cope with its abject lack of universal truth, American literature is suspended between the real and the romantic, distorting itself into a grotesque caricature of itself. In this way, the Southern Gothic genre emerges almost accidentally from this tension. between romanticism and realism, past and present, universal truth and absurdity. Looking at two canonical texts from the Southern Gothic tradition, Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I analyze the ways in which these texts address this conflict, arguing that their ultimate l The inability to overcome it ends in the grotesque. Like their authors, divided between the traditions of romanticism and realism, the characters in these texts are repeatedly drawn to the past in search of universal truth. In the same speech, Faulkner calls for a return to “the old truths and truths of the heart, the old universal truths without which all history is ephemeral and doomed: love, honor, mercy, pride, compassion and sacrifice.” However, for both Faulkner and O'Connor, it is this attempt to return to a previous state of being that ultimately condemns the characters to their grotesque end. In “A Rose for Emily,” narrative time is fractured, bucking the traditions of linear chronology and instead leaving a sort of patchwork quilt of fragmented reality. The story's collective first-person narration suggests a kind of mass, collective rejection of linear time, which is echoed in the narrator's account of the old people's misplaced memories, "confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old people do, to whose all the past is not a narrowing road but, instead, a huge meadow that no winter ever quite touches, divided now by the narrow bottleneck of the last decade of years” (Faulkner 497). This rejection of the progression of time and the desperation to return to a previous state manifests itself in the grotesque of Emily Grierson. His mad attempt to discover and preserve universal truths that Faulkner suggests are alive in a state prior to the physical realities of time, and resultinevitably in a literal decay. Meanwhile, the desire to resurrect the past also serves as a catalyst for the ultimate future. disappearance of O'Connor's characters. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the characters are led to the site of their downfall by a sudden whim of their grandmother.to visit an old plantation from her childhood. Like the old men in “A Rose for Emily,” the grandmother is ultimately mistaken in her memories, and her realization that the plantation is actually in an entirely different state pushes the family to their ironic end. Thus, despite Faulkner's call to return to the "old universal truths," the characters who answer this call are inevitably condemned for their efforts. For Faulkner, this conflict between the old and the new parallels a tension between the spiritual and the physical, silently ushering “A Rose for Emily” to its jarring conclusion. The story's Gothic heroine is so desperate to hold on to the spiritual that she attempts to preserve it through the physical. This conflict results in literal decay, giving the story its bizarre and baffling conclusion. Of the decaying corpse, the narrator notes, "The body apparently once lay in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that overcomes even the grimace of love, had betrayed it" (Faulkner 497 ). Here Faulkner illustrates the physical reality of death overpowering the spiritual forces of love. Unable to face the abject realities of the physical world, Emily attempts to merge them, and the result is a horrific cacophony. Trying to hold on to spiritual truth in a world that ultimately has nothing to offer, Emily gives the otherwise realistic story one of the most iconic images of the grotesque in the Southern Gothic genre. The story's corpse, in such a state of decay that it has "become inextricable from the bed in which it lay," emerges at the story's conclusion as a grotesque manifestation of American literature's failed attempts to reconcile the need for spiritual truth with a world completely devoid of of reality if not empty and physical. O'Connor's realism is similarly adulterated and rendered grotesque by his attempts to discover and establish universal truth through the revelation of the spiritual in the physical world. While Faulkner, through Emily, seeks secular truth, O'Connor attempts to combat the absurdity of a fallen world with religion. It is this search for the spiritual itself, as well as its failure to enjoy it, that not only gives life to The Misfit but simultaneously disrupts O'Connor's realism, leaving instead another grotesque monument to Southern Gothic. The Misfit emerges in the text as the embodiment of the disillusioned modernist who, faced with an abject lack of meaning in the world, adopts a kind of moral nihilism. The Misfit claims not to remember what his initial crime was, while also insisting that his imprisonment was no mistake. From this, The Misfit dissolves into nihilism, insisting that “crime doesn't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you will forget what you did and you will be punished for it” (O'Connor 19) . For The Misfit, the abject and meaningless order of the universe makes all acts equally punishable, and therefore no act – including murder – worthy of abstinence. However, The Misfit departs from traditional modernist realism, as its universe is not informed by the atheism characteristic of the modernist tradition, but rather by a somewhat dark theological argument. The Misfit blames Jesus for the lack of order in the world, insisting that “He threw everything out of balance.”. 1-22.