The Catholic Grotesque: Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes a comparison of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia with Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood to consider the similar ways in which these two works of art employ the grotesque and how Gaudí’s construction might better illuminate O’Connor’s. In both works we see not just stylistic but also macrostructural elements that, paradoxically, are simultaneously grotesque and congruent. The very form of the basilica and of the novel is misshapen, but it is exactly this intentional deformity that produces balance and stability in each work. In the Sagrada Familia, structural elements such as fragmented, inclined columns give an impression of chaos and instability, but these very divergences from traditional Gothic architecture allow the building to be self-supporting. O’Connor’s Wise Blood is similarly constructed: the novel’s twelfth chapter, in which Enoch Emery’s subplot splits from the main narrative, has been criticised as an unnecessary plot point that harms the text’s overall integrity. In reality, this supposed structural weakness in Wise Blood becomes the novel’s strength as it imitates the distorted reality it aims to represent. In this way, Enoch’s split subplot paradoxically synthesises incongruity and wholeness to produce an object at once structurally grotesque and yet fully integrated as Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece.