Some critics would say that a fiction writer's Christianity, or his understanding of ultimate reality in terms of the fall of humanity and redemption through Jesus Christ, automatically disconnects this writer from “reality”. " as the modern world defines and experiences it, thus confining this writer's work within a closed system of possibilities and goals. Yet Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor directly opposes this notion in his prose, creatively demonstrating the scope and completeness of her vision Perhaps the modern "horror" she found most contrary to her faith and vision was her world's belief in human self-sufficiency. The human individual apart from God. John F. Desmond believes that the motivation behind his work was "rooted in the age's specious belief in its own ability to achieve wholeness to the exclusion of the divine, a situation it found truly grotesque” (53 Although this general human tendency to rely on oneself rather than on God as the source of truth and fulfillment in life is hardly a modern development, O'Connor identifies and counters with it). insight into the particular “shapes and colors” in which this age-old error appears in its modern world. Through many of his educated (or "philosophically sophisticated") characters, O'Connor effectively exposes the limited "field of vision" of his world and attempts to open eyes to an all-encompassing reality: the mystery and limitless possibilities of grace of God. .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay THEORY OF THE CHRISTIAN WRITER “Connor sought, in his personal belief system and in his fiction, a comprehensive view of the world that did not separate reality. of human experience and knowledge from abstract or spiritual truth. In her essay “The Nature and Purpose of Fiction,” she acknowledges that this Manichean separation of “spirit and matter” is “pretty much the modern spirit” (68). She complains of critics who approach her stories only as statements of abstract truth and forget that "the whole story is meaning, for it is an experience and not an abstraction" (73). Furthermore, she believed that the Church too had focused for too long on the abstract to the detriment of the imagination: Christian writers "will therefore attempt to consecrate the mystery without doing so, and a new series will follow of separations which are judgment will be separated from vision, nature from grace, and reason from imagination” (“The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” p. 864). Therefore, O'Connor saw a unique and important vision for her fiction: she called it "an incarnational art" ("The Nature and Purpose of Fiction" 68) – an apt description for her work which certainly embodies the truths spiritual firmly in the “flesh” of a visible, tangible and often grotesque reality. O'Connor uses several of her characters to show how the modern mind is guilty of the "separations" she mentions, particularly the separation of "reason from imagination", or what I also call the separation of the head of the heart. A firm believer in the need to convince his readers "through the senses" ("The Nature and Purpose of Fiction" 67), O'Connor reveals the inconsistencies and ineffectiveness of these worldly philosophies, often through entirely "natural" means. ". She brings these proud, intellectual characters into a confrontation with real, undeniable evidence of invincible evil or unfathomable love to expose their own blindness and helplessness. Critic Carter W.Martin divides O'Connor's atheists into several groups, one of which includes those who "reject Christianity on the basis of existentialist philosophical positions that lead them to believe only in nothingness" (55). He includes Joy-Hulga from "Good Country People" and Hazel Motes from Wise Blood in this group, and I would also add Julian from "Everything that RisesMust Converge", Asbury from "The Enduring Chill" and Thomas from "The Comforts of Home ". There is a certain danger in stereotyping O'Connor's characters; O'Connor herself, I believe, would have argued against removing characters from their unique experiences within a story and placing them under an abstract label. Neither all intellectuals nor all philosophies in the world are alike. These characters (mentioned above) are true to life; O'Connor "embodies" various deviations from divine truth in the complex realities of human experience. She does so, however, to identify their common philosophical errors and practical ineffectiveness and to reveal the limitless powers of her own broader view of reality.JOY-HULGAJoy-Hulga is perhaps one of O's most famous intellectuals. 'Connor, and this moment when someone with such a proud and tough exterior is brought to a state of complete vulnerability and helplessness is probably one of his most humorous. With his Ph.D. in philosophy, Joy-Hulga seems confident and comfortable in her nihilistic beliefs: “'some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there is nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation’” (280), she tells Manley Pointer. O'Connor cleverly uses Joy-Hulga's mind to give the reader a more realistic view of her. Her education seems to have brought her no practical good: she is lazy, unpleasant, and has an exaggerated view of her own intellectual significance. She sees philosophical significance in what is mundane or inconsequential: she considers the name “Hulga,” for example, to be “the name of her highest creative act” (267). She also reads philosophical significance into her first conversation with the Bible salesman and claims that their arranged meeting has "profound implications" (275). She imagines taking him out of his innocence to bring him to a “deeper understanding of life” (276). Ironically, he is the one who ultimately gives Joy-Hulga this opportunity. This moment comes as Joy-Hulga gradually makes herself more and more vulnerable to Pointer. Of course, the humor lies in the fact that Joy-Hulga, who prides herself on her knowledge and intellectual abilities, is completely ridiculed by a calculating conman whom she sees as the face of "true innocence" (281 ) and who has “an instinct coming from beyond wisdom” (281). Joy-Hulga, of course, is not whole; his physical imperfection is the symbol of a spiritual handicap. She remedied her physical handicap with the artificial leg, as artificial and clumsy as the intellectual “leg” she uses to compensate for her crippled soul. Her own intellectual “self-sufficiency” became a false “wooden” shell of protection against the exposure of her childish heart and weak soul: “She took care of it as someone else would take care of her soul , in private and almost with her. my own eyes were turned away” (281). Because Joy-Hulga's mind is not as strong as she thinks, and because her soul still has a longing for love that her worldly philosophy has not satisfied, Pointer is able to make her believing that exposing his leg “was like losing it.” own life and find it, miraculously, in his own” (281). At this point, however, she doesn't know how prophetic, in a spiritual sense, her thoughts will prove to be. Just as shefound in a completely helpless situation when Manley Pointer steals her wooden leg, she also becomes more vulnerable (or open) to receive grace when evil takes away her "leg" of pride and intellect to leave a soul naked and helpless. In this moment when evil stands before the soul, all autonomy and all intellectual strength prove lacking or useless: “Without her leg, she felt entirely dependent on him. "His brain seemed to have completely stopped thinking and devoted itself to some other function that it's not very good at" (282). O'Connor emphasizes the weakness and vulnerability of human powers, whether physical or mental, faced with the difficulties and evils of real life Having brought her character to this condition, O'Connor generally leaves her with only two options: accept or reject the available grace HAZELI It is this same dilemma that Hazel Motes faces in. Wise Blood attempts to escape Although his upbringing is not mentioned in the novel, Hazel is clearly seeking a "philosophical" path as an escape route he wants to believe he does not have the "longing for Jesus in;" his voice” (27), as Hawks correctly realizes about him. However, in striving to prove this to be true, he runs into contradictions or circumstances that he cannot control. to run away from this truth (and to deny that there is any truth), he only shows that in reality he is always searching for some kind of truth. It is the absurdity and contradiction of nihilism that O'Connor attempts to demonstrate; she believes that those who seek to “convert to nothingness instead of converting to evil” (12) are only deceiving themselves. The novel thus traces Hazel's attempt to escape this truth and his encounters with numerous obstacles which end up blocking all his paths and leaving him, like Hulga, faced with his own helplessness. Hazel attempts to proclaim (with her words and actions) that sin does not exist. He knows that recognizing the forces of good and evil is therefore recognizing God and this would mean that he must make a conscious choice between the two. However, as he tries to deny sin, he eventually realizes that it is pointless if sin does not exist in the first place: "I don't need to run from anything because I don't believe in nothing” (43). But this realization does not cure his guilt. He must ultimately resort to killing Onnie Jay Holy's false prophet, Solace Layfield – Hazel's "conscience" in that he is a reflection of Hazel's own hypocritical life. He is as incapable of denying sin as he is of desiring Jesus or salvation. He can't help but be interested in Hawks, for example, and he finds himself preaching the need for a "new Jesus": "'What you need is something to take the place of Jesus'” (80). Obviously, “nothing” is not enough. His rejection of the mummy that Enoch proposes as the “new Jesus” is another moment of truth for Hazel. Even though he tries to run away from it, Christ remains a dominant force in his life and actions. His Church without Christ is also a comic irony. If Jesus is only a man and therefore insignificant, why specify his absence from the Church? By denying it, Hazel is actually affirming its importance. It is also ironic in this sense: it demonstrates that while denying Christ, he simultaneously affirms a new truth, a new religion. This is, of course, contrary to what he says he wants to do: believe in nothing. Yet Hazel is determined to convince everyone that he is not a preacher of Christ, but he cannot escape his role as a preacher of something (even if that something is "nothing"). He is still trying to achieve some sort of salvation. Once again, O'Connor seeks to targetthe logical inconsistency of nihilism. Since he had previously decided to ignore the contradictions of his new truth – that “he would forget it, that it was not important” (69) – he seems to become more and more irrational. O'Connor comments that nihilism and other human philosophies do not make Jesus irrelevant or erase humans' need for him; they simply try to replace it with something else. The destruction of Hazel's car – her “trusty” means of escape – is the final obstacle preventing her from escaping the truth. It is through this gradual process of truly reducing his nihilistic beliefs to “nothing” that his nihilism, as O'Connor writes in a letter, begins to bring him “back to the fact of his Redemption” (923). Suddenly, without hope, "his face seemed to reflect all the distance across the clearing and beyond, all the distance that stretched from his eyes to the empty gray sky that stretched, depth after depth, into the “space” (118). . His eyes are open to a reality greater than himself: “Hazel’s vision is her first and last. In fact, it's all-inclusive; after having seen it, it no longer has anything to see” (Bumbach 342). When he receives this vision of grace, he devotes his life solely to paying the debt of his redemption. JULIAN Julian may seem like an entirely different person from Hazel, but his fundamental problem is the same: he believes in his own self-sufficiency . Although he thinks he can appreciate his southern heritage better than his naive and thoughtless mother, he can only appreciate with his mind, not his heart: "'True culture is in the mind, the mind '" (489), he told her. Julian believes he has escaped the prejudice and narrow-mindedness of his upbringing and that "instead of being blinded by love for her [his mother". ] as she was for him, he had “freed himself emotionally from her and could see her objectively” (492). This is ironic in light of the ending, in which he discovers that he truly loves her. Given his lack of "mind" and Julian's lack of "heart", I think O'Connor's suggestion is that the truth lies somewhere in between. This is perhaps also the meaning of the title “All that rises must converge”: history gradually evolves towards a convergence of heart and mind. Julian, like Hulga, is educated but always supported by his mother. He is intelligent, but “too intelligent to succeed” (491). He too, like his mother, seeks to escape the unpleasant realities that surround him. She lives in the "heart" of his past, but he retreats into the "mental bubble" (491) of his own mind: "From there he could see and judge, but inside he was safe from all kinds of penetration of without" (491). This is a further criticism on O'Connor's part that intellectuals frequently separate themselves from real life in diagnosing the world's problems without ever actively participating in the correction of these problems. Julian's mother realizes that Julian is right: the world of the past has disappeared, and she is a stranger in the present. It is a moment when her heart, which is good but lacks the. direction of his mind, converges with Julian's mind to bring him to a moment of truth. In the same way, Julian's mind, which functions quite well but which has been separated from his heart, will have to converge with the. his mother's heart In the moments of panic when he realizes that his mother is having a stroke, his love for her seems to come back in force. This moment of convergence for both brings true self-understanding and exposes all ignorance and pride. To her mother, this seems like a reality she cannot face; she wants to escape it in the familiarities of her home and her former nurse, Caroline. ForJulian means “his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (500). ASBURYA Asbury is another proud, failed intellectual who will enter this same world of guilt and sorrow, albeit through an entirely different type of experience. If we can give him a specific philosophical label, he seems to be more of an existentialist than a nihilist. While Julian is proud to have overcome (he thinks) his stifling upbringing, Asbury believes it ruined his artistic ability and imagination: "I have no imagination. I have no talent. I cannot create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn't you kill him too?'” (554), he wrote in a letter to his mother. It is true that he has this desire, but blaming his upbringing for his own failure to find a way to satisfy this desire is just a way of escaping responsibility. He obviously uses Kafka as inspiration for the letter to his mother (554), and indeed, its content seems "Kafkaesque". He tries to turn his death into something tragic and heroic like Kafka's and morbidly enjoys the idea of ​​everyone realizing it after he's gone. He considers this death as a “victory” and “his greatest triumph” (560). Asbury, like Hazel, seems to be trying to escape something he knows deep within his being. He is “tormented now thinking about his useless life. He felt as if he were a shell that needed to be filled with something but he didn’t know what” (568). His solution to this feeling, however, is himself: he seeks "one last significant culminating experience which he must do for himself before he dies – to do for himself out of his own intelligence" (568 ). Of course, this is impossible, and he becomes even more frustrated that he has failed to create this meaning for himself. In this sense, he is artistically “paralyzed”. He realizes that “there would be no significant experience before his death” (570). Even his last hope that his death will be this "meaningful experience" is dashed when he learns that he only gets a "undulating fever" from drinking raw milk and will not die. Although he had hoped to leave his mother with “a lingering cold” (555), ironically, it is ultimately he who ends up with the lasting “ice” (572). Like undulating fever, it will keep coming back but will not kill him. THOMAS Thomas, in “The Comforts of Home,” is more comparable to Julian; he also seems satisfied with himself in his “mental bubble”. He tries to ignore his natural inclinations toward love and pity, but can't really escape them. For example, he admits to loving his mother "because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not stand her love for him." There were times when it became nothing more than a pure stupid mystery and he felt strength within him. , invisible currents totally beyond his control” (575). He is unable to understand his mother's love for him and Sarah Ham because love is not something that can be completely understood by the only faculty he pays attention to: his mind. O'Connor acknowledges that humans have been given both reason and the capacity to love, but clearly suggests that people like Thomas are wasting both faculties: "Thomas had inherited his father's reason without his cruelty and his mother's love without her tendency to pursue it. The plan for any practical action was to wait and see what would happen" (577). Sarah Ham provokes an inner conflict between Thomas's heart and mind. Sarah Ham's literal intrusion into his house reflects the The intrusion of the moral and intellectual dilemma that it introduces into Thomas' once well-fortified and comfortable "mental bubble" is no longer protected.by “the comforts of home” or by the sharp boundaries and order of his rationalist approach to life. His mother's "irrational" love for Sarah places this contradiction squarely in front of him. Sarah Ham, as an unworthy object of her mother's compassion, is outside her "powers of analysis." He believes that without Sarah he might have continued to ignore or rationalize both the evil in the world and his mother's love: "The blast [of the gun] was like a sound destined to end the evil in the world . “Thomas heard it as a sound that would shatter the sluts' laughter until all the cries were silent and nothing could disturb the peace of perfect order” (593). But by following his father's evil spirit, he silenced not the "sluts' laughter" but the loving heartbeat of his mother. By her final act of self-sacrifice – the ultimate “irrationality” in Thomas's worldview – his mother forever disrupts the “peace of perfect order” that he thought existed in the world and in his own mind . Like Jesus does to the misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she “upset the balance” of Thomas’s life and, like Christ’s, her sacrifice brings divine grace to a corrupt earthly reality. RAYBER Two other important intellectuals in O'Connor's work, Rayber from The Violent Bear It Away and Sheppard from "The Lame Shall Enter First", look very similar but are quite different from the other characters examined so far. Martin places them in his group that rejects Christianity "as a dangerous myth that interferes with the psychological and social adjustment of the individual" (55). They are not like Hulga, for example, who is content to believe in nothing. They're not like Asbury, who is desperate for meaning other than "nothing." They are not like Thomas, who wants to remain isolated from the problems of the world. Rayber and Sheppard firmly believe in their own minds and in the "saving" power of human knowledge for all humanity. Once again, O'Connor opposes this philosophy, not by abstract arguments, but "by the senses", by dramatic confrontations with the very real but "irrational" parts of human experience. Rayber's problem is that he persists in believing that he can, through his own efforts, overcome this "madness" in himself and in Tarwater: "'This is the path I have chosen to myself. This is the path you take after being born again naturally---through your own efforts'" (451). Although Rayber realizes that Tarwater's problem is "a compulsion" beyond reason (421) and that his own love for Bishop comes from an uncontrollable source, he still believes that he can raise Tarwater "so that he is his own savior” (375) and that he can control himself “by pure will” (376). The irony is that, as reasonable as Rayber thinks he is, this thinking is actually quite unreasonable. His own failure to reform Tarwater and the repeated reminders that Tarwater's "affliction" is not something responsive to reason do not rid Rayber of his notions. Like Hazel, as his own philosophy crumbles before his eyes, he must ultimately resort to even greater irrationality to protect his "rational" beliefs. The result, as O'Connor demonstrates, is a kind of "numbing" or ineffectiveness of both the mind and the emotions: "it should resist feeling anything, thinking anything . He should anesthetize his life” (443). Even after it seems all his efforts have failed, Rayber hatches one final plan to "save" Tarwater: "It was to bring him back to Powderhead and make him face what he had done... His fears and his impulsesirrational. “would break out and his uncle – sympathetic, knowledgeable, one of a kind – would be there to explain them to him” (423). Once there, he continues to "preach" that Tarwater needs to be "saved" and that he is the only one who can truly save it. O'Connor's description at this point – that “he looked like a fanatical country preacher” (438) – suggests that Rayber is not suppressing all religion but creating a new one. Rayber never expects that returning to Powderhead would have the effect on him that it does: he is overcome by a "dreaded sense of loss" (445). Every time the old, uncontrollable "madness" within him threatens to rise to the surface, he pushes it away with his mind and continues planning to defeat Tarwater's "problem." The moment when he realizes that his failure is complete – that Tarwater has not only baptized but drowned Bishop – could have been his moment of grace. It's the equivalent of when Hazel loses her car, but unlike Hazel, Rayber rejects his opportunity. He truly “anaesthetized” himself in the face of the vision and grace that could have been his: “He waited for the raging pain to begin, the intolerable wound that was due to him, so that he could ignore it, but he continued to feel nothing" (456). SHEPPARD Sheppard's similarities to Rayber are clear: his faith in the mind, his "Enlightenment" optimism, and his equally unsuccessful attempts to reform troubled youth. His final choice, however, is acceptance rather than rejection The story evolves into a conflict between Sheppard's desire to see Johnson "make the most of his intelligence" (600) and Johnson's insistence that Satan "has me in check." its power” (600). Sheppard has great faith in the human mind and in scientific knowledge: “He wanted him [Johnson] to see the universe, to see that its darkest parts could be penetrated. » (601). This knowledge is therefore the answer to “evil” and is dedicated to improving the human condition: “Where there was intelligence, everything was possible” (601). Norton, while less intelligent than his father, clearly has more heart. Faced with Norton's desire to believe that his mother is in heaven (which is his heart's natural response), Sheppard can only draw a lofty comparison between man reaching the moon and "the first fish crawling out of the earth." water on the earth billions and billions of years ago » » (612-13) demonstrates the inability of the mind to meet needs. of the heart, or the inability of man's knowledge to fulfill the heart's natural desire and need for God. This is also the ultimate reason why Sheppard fails with Johnson. Johnson believes what Sheppard doesn't: "No one can save me without this." Jesus'" (624). Sheppard continues to believe that humans can save themselves. However, he encounters the same problems as Rayber. Despite his exposure of the world's knowledge to Johnson, Johnson reverts to his "old ignorance" (601) and life from crime and poverty It becomes clear that reforming Johnson is actually about protecting the "security" of Sheppard's own beliefs: "Secretly, Johnson was learning what he wanted him to do." learn: that his benefactor was impervious to insults and that there was no crack in his armor of kindness and patience where a successful stroke could be thrust in” (611). armor of his "philosophy", and his failure with Johnson is the "well" that sinks and causes it to completely collapse. This defeat, however, has still not brought Sheppard to the point of admitting his mistakes and accepting. the truth. He still mocks the Bible and Christianity, saying, "It's for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and stand tall.", 1961. 63-86.