Aesthetically Speaking

Recently, I've been thinking about the aesthetics of art: visual, auditory, etc. This week on CSI , the team dealt with an artist who killed his victims and posed them as statues. In the criminal's mind, and some other individuals', the victims became artistic expression. However, grotesque, morally objectionable, or downright villainous the process may have been, the "artist" made a work that he would be remembered by. In many ways, this reminds me of Sander Cohen in Bioshock. He does the same thing, creating art out of the dead, and along the way, asking you to assist, in order to produce his magnum opus.
Ultimately, this comparison leads me to the one thing that has started to garner my interest in the past few years: video games as visual art. I will probably post other blogs on their importance their literary merits. One of the new documentaries for Gears of War 2, "Making Gears 2: A Pixel is Worth 1,000 Words," addresses this thought, with the developers comments. Of course, this argument has occurred before, but I believe it's interesting in this case, because of the game. The first Gears looked amazing, creating an atmosphere of "decaying beauty." I don't remember the exact words that Cliff used, but those sum it up. The team wanted the landscape of Sera to carry the weight of an old world and a modern war: diminishing culture. The only difference between Gears and "traditional" visual art arises in the method that one interacts with the work.
A video game gives the gamer (admirer) the ability to interact with the world in full. He or she can delve into the story, overlooking the minute details, like the way the grass sways back and forth in Far Cry 2 or the way the sheep wander aimlessly in Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. The player could also overlook the magnificent effects that encompass the day-night revolutions in Grand Theft Auto IV, along with the spectacular moon. In all honesty, the player can do what he or she wants. Ultimately, in order to appreciate the game as a visual art the player needs to stop, explore, and take in the breadth of the world.
I know that more can be said about this, but I am tapped out at this point. I would just like to leave you with the new trailer for Gears of War 2. It brings to mind the "Mad World" trailer for the first game; however, this one has a more beautiful feel, in my opinion. Here is the "Last Day" trailer.
In closing, the next post will explore this discussion in more detail, based on a thought by Ranier Maria Rilke on art. In his letters on Cezzane, Rilke writes,

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity. . . Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,--: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him whil appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, existing merely as necessity, as reality, as being--.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Here, you will find an essay I worked on last summer. I tried to get it published; how ever, I did not have any success. At some point, I will go through and rework it to hopefully resubmit it to a journal again. In a week or two, I will post an essay on The Blood Brother's "The Salesman, Denver Max" and its relationship to Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" For now, enjoy this essay on O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Equality in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

During my first reading of O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I struggled with the ubiquitous nature of sin, from the children’s disrespectful nature to The Misfit’s blatant killing of the family, which pervades the work. The grandmother’s “minor” missteps that undercut her grasp of true salvation puzzled me the most. While she continuously laments the fact that good individuals have become few and far between and perpetuates the belief that she, in fact, lives a good life that will see her into heaven, she reveals herself as one of the “soul[s] in this green world of God’s that you can [not] trust” (122). Obviously, one could argue that she receives salvation and entrance into heaven at the end of the story: she “half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (132). However, the crux of this salvation really comes from the fact that the grandmother, while putting on airs, does not attain salvation until seconds before she dies. Her sin causes her death, and her salvation does not come through her hypocritical ways.

I could have just concluded with the message of salvation coming “through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). If I placed the story aside and left it, I would have missed the more important point: sin, no matter the severity, causes death. Upon first reading, I did not grasp the equality of sin in relation to death. When I discovered Sufjan Stevens’ song, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” I started to realize that I had missed a deeper meaning hidden within O’Connor’s story. Stevens constructs his song from the Misfit’s point of view, until the final stanza, which comes from the grandmother’s. Placing both characters’ points of view in the same song, sung in the same voice, Stevens’, lead me to reexamine the story with his lyrics in mind.

Stevens’ song opens with a stanza told from The Misfit’s point of view. He sings, “Once in the backyard, / she was once like me,/ she was once like me.” Here, the Misfit compares the grandmother to himself, and he goes on to say, after he murders the family, that “they were once like me,” thus saying the same about the rest of family. The second stanza continues in the same way, describing the murder itself: “Hold to your gun, man,/ and put off all your peace,/ put off all the beast.” The second stanza, in closing, repeats The Misfit’s sentiment that “[s]he was once like me.” As the third stanza opens, Stevens switches perspectives to the grandmother. She says, “I once was better./I put off all my grief./I put of all my grief.” Of course, this matches with the grandmother’s attitude in O’Connor’s story. She perceives herself as a superior individual to those around her, even saying she cannot trust anyone because no good individuals remain. At the end of the song, Stevens’ grandmother goes to hell, not heaven. Of course, Stevens does not make this the central argument. He makes it abundantly clear that part of the message he receives from the work, and the one that he wants to convey, centers on the biblical teaching that “all have sinned and fall[en] short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Tied in with this idea, O’Connor also presents the reader with the message from Romans 6:23: “the wages of sin is death.”

Upon rereading O’Connor’s story, with this new focus, I discovered the same idea. The Misfit, while a dubious character, speaks truthfully in his conversation with the grandmother, especially when it comes to the idea that all have sinned and require punishment. When the grandmother asks The Misfit about his incarceration, he responds by telling her, “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it is you done and just be punished for it” (130-31). Through this statement, The Misfit draws a concrete correlation to both passages in Romans. In saying that “the crime don’t matter,” he tells the grandmother that “all have sinned.” When one becomes “punished for it,” his or her sin causes death. Before the grandmother’s ultimate demise, The Misfit poses one final question to her. He asks, “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” (131) By asking this question, he restates the same ideas proposed earlier, and he causes us to view his sins as a criminal and murderer and the grandmother’s minimal sins as equably punishable by death.

Ironically enough, O’Connor presents us with more correlations to Romans 6:23, in the most unlikely place: the children’s names. O’Connor places the number six throughout the story, five to six graves, six columns on the house, and six family members. She also gives us the numbers twenty, “twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city” (118), and three, men in the car and shots that kill the grandmother. However, these numbers do not correlate into a reasonable pattern. The only pattern that works presents itself in the children’s names. To begin with, John Wesley contains both six and twenty three in his middle name. Wesley contains six letters, and “w” is the twenty third letter in the alphabet. While this may appear to be a coincidence, it gains more credibility when compared to June Star’s name. June, of course, is the sixth month of the year. During June, John the Baptist’s birthday is observed, on June 24^th. Part of this celebration also takes place on Midsummer’s Eve, June 23^rd. June’s middle name, Star, relates to the thought that John the Baptist represents a morning star to Christ. He came before Christ to prepare the way: “I [John] am not the Christ but am sent ahead of him. . . He must become greater; I must become less” (John 3:28-30). It could also be added that John the Baptist relates to John Wesley through their respective names.

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor presents us with two extremes of sin. On one hand, the grandmother, according to our hierarchical ranking of sin, appears to be good, or at least a minimal sinner. The Misfit, on the other hand, commits murder, one of the highest ranking sins on our scale. However, O’Connor informs us that neither one of the individuals, no matter the difference we may see in them, can escape the punishment of sin. She shows us that death comes to a liar the same as it comes to a murderer.

Works Cited

Life application Study Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997.O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,

1971. 117-133.

Stevens, Sufjan. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Seven Swans. Sounds Familyre, 2004.