The Body in "Flowering Judas"

Usually we talk about O'Connor's focus on the body, and specifically how it makes her work Grotesque. (Most recently in my mind is the film reel that Mrs. Shortley saw of the heaped up bodies after the Holocaust; her revelation, and the question, Who will remain whole? and the stroke when she joined that heap of bodies in the family car.)

But "Flowering Judas" has a real dismemberment of character, their limbs removed from their selves. Braggioni considers Laura the "simple girl who covers her great round breasts with thick dark cloth, who hides long, invaluably beautiful legs under a heavy skirt," her clothes the physical manifestation of that "holy talismanic word" No. (97) Laura keeps her body hidden away.

Whereas Braggioni puts his body on full display. He spills over the "straight-backed chair [that is] much too small for him", and "heaves himself into song", his fatness affecting not just his appearance but his behavior, his actions (90). When he's singing to Laura, "he sits pampering his bones in easy billows of fat" (98), his skeleton swallowed by the rest of his body. Even before Braggioni's fat years his body had nothing to hide. When he was young and desirable "he was so scrawny all his bones showed under his thin cotton clothing, and he could squeeze his emptiness to the very backbone with his two hands" (98).

Why the disconnect between young, skinny Braggioni and fat, older Braggioni? Is his hidden skeleton the core of him, those experiences in youth which direct a man in maturity? Is Braggioni's fat holy and talismanic, like Laura's No?

And what of the body of the guitar? When Braggioni plays it, "the strings of the instrument complain like exposed nerves" (98); Braggioni "curves his swollen fingers around the throat of the guitar and softly smothers the music out of it" (100). Braggioni is murdering the guitar, he's strangling the music from it; Laura is confined within her thick, unbecoming clothes (who is she under there?); Braggioni's skeleton is hidden deep within him.

Are they all so different, after all? All of them surrounded, all of them confined . . . Laura denies temptations, Braggioni denies himself nothing, and the guitar is something to be played, and used, at his discretion. For Braggioni, Laura is much the same as the guitar: an instrument of revolution. But Laura and Braggioni bear more resemblance to each other than they would probably like to admit, each of them hidden within themselves, Laura keeping her motives and desires safe and Braggioni swallowing his jilting and the kitchen sink.