美国南方“圣经地带”怪诞的灵魂写手——论奥康纳和她的小说

作为一个生活于美国南方腹地的作家 ,宗教对于奥康纳不仅是一种认知世界的方式 ,也是一种精神的支撑。由绝症所造成的内心痛苦和绝望 ,使她对现实的病态与卑俗有特殊的敏感。她把宗教的超验和道德寓意 ,对南方社会的独特反应和自我的生命体验融汇、演化为充斥暴力的幽默和怪诞的艺术画面 ,激起读者去发现或感受日常生活中的“荒谬行为和古怪感情”。她打破了南方文学写惨烈、完整的悲剧的传统 ,以一个个“支离破碎”的故事 ,宣布了后来发展极盛的自我探索、自我反映小说的原则 ,并使当代美国社会精神文化的忧虑不安获得一种恰当的表达

A Spiritual Writer of the Grotesque in the "Bible Belt" of the American South: Flannery O'Connor and her Novels

As a writer from the American deep South, O'Connor took religion not only as a way of knowing the world, but also as a spiritual support. Miserable and despaired because of the incurable disease, O'Connor was particularly susceptible to the morbidity and vulgarity of reality. She mingled together religious transcendence, moral significance, her peculiar reaction to the southern society, and her personal experience of life, evoking her readers to feel or to discover "absurd behavior and grotesque emotion" in their daily life. She broke through the tradition of creating complete and pathetic tragedy, announcing, with one fragment after another, the principles of self explorative and self reflective novels that were flourishing later, thus giving an appropriate expression to the anxiety in the spiritual life of contemporary American society.