LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 15:10 October 2015
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Ineptitude and Value for Community in Ernest J. Gaines’
A Lesson Before Dying

M. Rajalakshmi, M.A., B.Ed. and R. Lissy, M.A., M.Phil., M.Ed., (Ph.D.)


Abstract

Gaines presents a paradoxical view of religion that positions personalism as both an indictment on and antidote for the Church’s ignorance of tangible injustices. Because personalism connects the doctrine of inherent human dignity to action, the failure of Gaines’s preachers to act in accordance to their community’s vision for social action adds to their impotence and informs the critique of the Church as being divorced from human suffering. The preachers’ ineptitude, however, points to the reality of a solution, alluding to the possibility of reconciling Christianity with social action if the Church seeks to relieve both the physical and spiritual suffering of the oppressed much like the Catholic Worker Movement. At its most effective, personalism, like that of the Catholic Worker Movement, links organized Christianity with social action and reveals that religion does not have to be incompatible with progress.

Keywords: Paradoxical view, Personalism, Human dignity, Social action.

Introduction: Ernest Gaines

Growing on a plantation, Gaines found his childhood experiences central to the formation of his identity as a man and later as a writer. Although he left Louisiana to pursue an education in California, Gaines discovered amazing peace in the works of literature he studied: the stories of his people. Perhaps atoning for this lack of representation, his fiction centres on the “people back home” and reflects upon his responsibility to tell their stories. Gaines fills his oeuvre with representations of the ordinary, of the human, depicting the struggles facing his fictional communities. Being steeped in the culture of the South, he also views organized religion as an inevitable presence in any community, and his exploration of religion occurs in the context of tight-knit communities. Though attending a Baptist church and a Catholic school as a child, Gaines takes a paradoxical approach to organized religion, claiming that “not any of them are goanna really cure things” while asserting that believing in a force “greater than what you are” is necessary I for survival. This view of religion mirrors a central tension in his novels: reconciling the value for community and the importance of social change with the established Church.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

M. Rajalakshmi, M.A., B.Ed.
M.Phil. Research Scholar
PG & Research Department of English
SVM Arts & Science College
Uthangarai 636902, Krishnagiri District
Tamilnadu
India

R. Lissy, M.A., M.Phil., M.Ed., (Ph.D.)
Assistant Professor
PG & Research Department of English
SVM Arts & Science College
Uthangarai 636902, Krishnagiri District
Tamilnadu
India
lissyjashwanth@gmail.com
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