Intelligent blood

Author: (American) Flannery O'Connor / Zhou Xin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-12-01
Features: Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old from Tennessee, returns to a Southern city after leaving the military and immediately clashes with a street preacher named Asa Hokes. Hazel desperately tries to outdo Hokes in preaching and intellect, establishing his own "religion without Christ" in the process. But in the end, he blinds himself and dies in a drainage ditch. [Preface] The Light of Hope in the Spiritual Desert – Preface (Flannery O'Connor) (1925–1964) was an important Southern woman writer in the United States after World War II. Her debut novel, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was published in 1952. After its release, the novel was translated into multiple languages and adapted into a film with the same title in the United States in 1972. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a grotesque novel with a comedic style. When it was published, its bizarre plot and absurd characters made many critics find it difficult to accept. Half a century later, its Gothic horror and chilling style still shock readers who first encounter the book, making them feel it is obscure and incomprehensible. To better understand the themes and style of the entire book, it is necessary to review the regional and historical background of O'Connor's creation. O'Connor was a native Southern writer. Historically, slavery and plantation economies brought prosperity and comfortable, elegant lifestyles to the Southern United States. People were fond of pastoral landscapes, enjoyed listening to witty stories and beautiful music, and were enthusiastic about holding various grand celebrations. As contemporary American literary critic Ben Franklin said, Southern literature and Southern culture grew in a unique environment where "people valued the autonomy of individual states more than the authority of the federal government; people recited, memorized, and cherished every word of the Bible; people maintained family harmony more through traditional agricultural methods; and everyone revered dignity and treated others with courtesy as a way of life." However, after the Civil War, the South was shrouded in the shadow of defeat, and people began to experience the trauma of war, the humiliation of failure, and the weight of history. Traditional lifestyles declined, and former pride was replaced by inferiority. Later, capitalist industrialization had a huge impact on the old feudal agricultural system, and the transition between the old and new orders made Southern society turbulent and disintegrated traditional morals and values. Against this backdrop, Southern writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries inevitably expressed nostalgia for their glorious past in their literary works, and Southern literature as a whole took on a melancholic tone. The outstanding representative of modern Southern literature, Faulkner, depicted the rise and fall of two fictional Southern families in his novels, presenting a panoramic view of Southern society and history. In 1925, O'Connor was born into a Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia, in the Southern United States. Savannah was the oldest cultural center in the state, with a strong Catholic atmosphere and was an important part of the Southern "Bible Belt." O'Connor spent her girlhood under the influence of evangelical doctrine and prophetic books. At that time, the South had gradually shaken off the shadow of war defeat depicted in Faulkner's novels, and the once declining economy was gradually reviving. With the development of a market economy, people's lifestyles changed dramatically. On one hand, their religious customs and beliefs remained deeply rooted; on the other hand, their faith was constantly challenged by materialism, leading to increasingly cold, utilitarian relationships between people and their hearts being filled with negative emotions such as loneliness, confusion, loss, and dissatisfaction. Having been immersed in Catholic culture from a young age, O'Connor learned to focus on people's spiritual world and analyze the complex inner lives and twisted souls of people in a turbulent society. After graduating from the Sacred Heart Academy, she attended Georgia State Woman's College (now Georgia College) to study English and social sciences. During her studies, her writing talent began to emerge: she published several short stories and served as an editor for a literary magazine, earning a scholarship to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Two years after earning her master's degree in English from the University of Iowa, she moved to New York to pursue a career in writing and began serializing her first novel, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, in magazines. In late 1920, O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus. This disease had caused her to suffer the loss of her father at the age of 15; now, the shadow of death had fallen upon her again. Throughout the rest of her life, she endured the torment of this chronic illness: first joint pain and fatigue, then gradually failing heart, lung, and kidney function. After her diagnosis, she returned to Milledgeville, Georgia, a quiet, flower-filled small town. In the early years, she still had the ability to move independently. Driven by her passion for writing, she continued to write, completing most of the works in her first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). Later, O'Connor had to live with her mother on a family dairy farm with 500 acres, leading a reclusive life. Between writing, she read and wrote letters on the farm and kept a large flock of peacocks. In addition to the Bible, she read extensively in theology, such as the works of famous theologians Augustine and Aquinas. Due to her illness, she gained a deeper understanding of religion. Now, religion was not only a way for her to perceive the world but also her spiritual pillar, helping her overcome inner pain and fear of death. She saw the power of religion in everyday life, the beauty of peacocks inspired her creativity, and their periodic reproduction, molting, and growth seemed to her like an epiphany of Christ's resurrection. In her short life, O'Connor, in addition to writing two novels, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Revelation (1960), published 32 short stories and numerous literary reviews, receiving numerous awards and honors, and was known as the "Southern lady of letters." Her two short story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), earned her the title of "master of the short story." The short story The Firebaptized and The Green Leaf won the O. Henry Award for Short Fiction in 1955 and 1957, respectively. In 1957, she received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1972, her Collected Short Stories won the National Book Award. After her death, in addition to A Good Man Is Hard to Find, many of her works were adapted into films, such as The River, The Firebaptized, The Displaced Person, The Good Country People, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own. Today, her alma mater, Georgia College, has established the "O'Connor Collection" in its library, and the English and Journalism departments have also set up the "O'Connor Electronic Bulletin Board." Additionally, the "Flannery O'Connor Short Story Award," established after her death, holds a prestigious position among American short story awards. All of this proves O'Connor's outstanding achievements in literature. It's no wonder that when she died at the age of 39, the American literary critics called her early death "the greatest loss to American literature since F. Scott Fitzgerald's death." As a native Southern writer, O'Connor's works are filled with "Southernness." First, her novels are almost entirely set in the South, depicting ordinary people in Southern society, especially those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Her works defy the nostalgic, sentimental tradition of Southern literature, as Alice Walker said, "you won't find a single scent of Southern magnolia" in them, only real Southern men and women from life. Second, in her character portrayals, she employs many traditional Southern literary techniques, such as using vivid Southern dialects, slang, and Southern-style black humor, which gives her novels a touch of comedy and cartoon-like qualities. Of course, O'Connor excelled at the Gothic techniques widely used in Southern literature. Due to her long struggle with illness, she had a special sensitivity and focus on the sickly, vulgar people and things in society. Her works are filled with grotesque, mentally retarded, eccentric, and even psychologically disturbed characters. She combines mysterious religion with morbid violence, enveloping her novels in a strange and grotesque atmosphere that is shocking and terrifying to read. In a sense, the historical aspect of the Southern society in O'Connor's works is greatly diminished, replaced by a modern material society filled with spiritual and moral chaos, bloodshed, and violence. Influenced by Catholic culture from a young age, O'Connor did not, like Faulkner, depict the transformation and historical changes of the entire Southern society in grand strokes, but instead used religion as an entry point to analyze Southern society. She often explored themes such as original sin, the evil of the devil, and the grace of God in her works. Her devout religious faith and the habit of exploring her own soul from a young age gave her profound thoughts and sharp insight, allowing her to look down from a certain distance at the Southern society she knew and loved. O'Connor's literary career was concentrated in the 1950s and 1960s, a time of rapid economic development in the Southern United States. Through the glittering facade of urban prosperity, she saw a commercial society filled with bloodshed and corruption, people alienated by material and commodities, and their moral decline and crisis of faith. She despised modern people without spiritual faith, once comparing them to monkeys on trees "catching delicious fleas on their own bodies" in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and describing them as "vile, ugly pigs" in her novel Revelation (1971). The actions and words of such characters in her works often appear absurd and ridiculous, emotionally exhausted and spiritually numb, making them appear quite ugly. However, she showed sympathy for those who struggled in contradictions and pain, seeking faith. O'Connor once said, "My readers are those who believe God is dead, and I know exactly who I am writing for." Therefore, when portraying characters suffering from a crisis of faith, she focused on exploring their inner worlds, revealing their deep conflicts and conducting moral exploration. In her view, "I only care about the relationship between this world and Christ's redemption," and "the core of existence is the Holy Spirit." Thus, the identity and existence of characters in her works are often closely tied to their faith and redemption. With her delicate, tragic writing, the various small characters and the strange, absurd phenomena of life together form a metaphorical world filled with moral and cautionary fables. Of course, she did not write her novels as religious doctrines but transformed them into religious fables like those in the Old Testament through simple, natural language and abundant metaphors and symbols. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is such a religious fable that discusses redemption through faith. The protagonist, Hazel, grows up in a simple, deeply religious country pastor's family, and his grandfather is a traveling preacher. From a young age, he dreamed of becoming a pastor like his grandfather when he grew up. However, during his years serving in the military abroad, his faith wavered. On the battlefield overseas, he tried to distance himself from sin, making his soul "unblemished by the government or any other country," but he discovered that his soul no longer existed. After returning from the military, he tried to break free from his religious beliefs. Therefore, he left his hometown and went to a city called Tinkham. There, Hazel met Asa Hokes, a fake believer who pretended to be blind to preach, and his illegitimate daughter, Sabbath Lily Hokes, as well as an 18-year-old boy named Enoch Amery. In Tinkham, Hazel not only told people that blasphemy was the only way to truth but also openly preached a "new Protestantism without Jesus" in the streets. In this new religion, "the blind do not see, the lame do not walk, the dead rest," there was no savior, nor "blood to waste." However, he was shocked to find that the public paid no attention to his talk about sin and faith, and the new religion he preached was even used by a man named Hoover Shoats as a money-making scheme. After running over the fake "prophet," Hazel blinded himself and soon died in a stormy night, eventually dying in his landlord's bed.