美国南方社会变革主题研究——狂欢化视域下的《人造黑人》

A Study on the Themes of Social Changes in the American South in“The Artificial Nigger”——From the Perspective of Theory of Carnivalization

弗兰纳里·奥康纳的《人造黑人》讲述了一场南方乡下人祖孙俩的进城旅行。其创作的20世纪50年代,美国农业南方正处于工业城市化改革和民权运动的社会剧变时期,革故鼎新的狂欢气氛弥漫其间。本文运用巴赫金的狂欢化理论探析其中的社会变革主题,从中发现,作者借助祖孙这对狂欢化人物及其在“狂欢广场”亚特兰大城中上演的“加冕-脱冕”式互动,揭露父权家长制和重农主义思想在南方的没落以及种族等级制的悖理,并反衬重商与平权的城市观念的得势。调和祖孙的黑人雕像作为二者的“讽拟同貌人”,则影射南方乡下人衍变为城乡“边缘人”后所产生的身份认同危机。

Flannery O’Connor’s short story“The Artificial Nigger”describes a journey to the city initiated by a rural Southerner and his grandson.In the 1950s when this short story was composed and published,agricultural South was undergoing a period of drastic social changes of industrial urbanization reform and Civil Rights Movement,and the whole southern society was permeated with a revolutionary and carnivalesque atmosphere.Therefore,this article employs Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnivalization to analyze the theme of social change in the South of this work,from which it is found that,with the help of two carnival characters and their“crowning-discrowning”interactions in the“carnival square”Atlanta,the author reveals the decadent and declining patriarchy and agrarianism ideology and the inhuman racial hierarchy in the South,and shows the superiority of urban concepts of mercantilism and the Egalitarianism.The statue of black which reconciled the grandfather and the grandson,as their“parodical double”,reflects the change of the rural Southerner to the urban-rural“marginal man”and their consequent crisis of identity.