Chapter 10 Religion, Revolution, and "Private Suffering"

(1) The second reading is already three years later.I have graduated from high school and am receiving re-education from the poor and lower-middle peasants in the countryside. It's almost time for corn harvest.In order to guard against weasels snatching the fruits of production, the teenagers, youths, and middle-aged members of the production team have to take turns to watch the night in the cornfields, sleep in the cornfields all night long, and yell a few times every hour to drive away the weasels that may appear in the imagination. After several years of revolution, perhaps because I never met a Gemma, I became a little lazy.In order to revive the revolutionary spirit, I took my lantern and re-read it in the cornfield at night.This time I found a complete book and read the last three missing pages: the Gadfly's biological father, Cardinal Montanelli, died of heart dilation and rupture; the Gadfly expressed his lifelong love to Gemma in his suicide note , making Gemma cry into tears, this revolutionary woman has never cried like this; Martini, who has always been in love with Gemma secretly and is actually in a love rival relationship with Gadfly, was forgiven by Gadfly, and Martini's love for Gemma , ignored by Gemma.

The end of the story made my heart tremble: Martini hugged Gemma who was crying to death.Why does Martini comfort Gemma's crying?I know that Martini loves Gemma.However, what Martini comforts is Gemma's crying for losing her beloved lover, which is equivalent to saying that Martini comforts Gemma's crying for the person who may lose her beloved.I suddenly felt that what fascinated me was not Gadfly's revolutionary experience, but the human relationship entanglement of his personal fate: Gadfly and his father, lover and her lover.As far as the revolutionary story is concerned, there is nothing thrilling about it, but his ethical relationship with his father, his lover and his lover's lover makes my heart flutter.

The human relations entanglement in Gadfly was not entangled by revolutionary activities, but because of "a slap in the face of his lover" and knowing that he was an illegitimate child.A misunderstood slap in the face and the identity of the illegitimate child hurt Arthur's self-esteem and made him feel that he was living in humiliation.Arthur felt that he had to leave the place where he grew up, escape the ethical context woven by his father and lover, and go to a place where no one knew him. Arthur faked his death and went into exile.Nineteen years later, he returned to his place of humiliation with wandering scars. He dared to come back because he was already a member of a secret radical group. Besides, he had changed his name to the Gadfly. People can no longer recognize him as the Arthur of the past.

Changing the name to Gadfly was not a symbol, but a sign of the maturity of the revolutionary consciousness.Once upon a time, Arthur was a devout monk who participated in the revolution—as Mazzini said—"for God and the people."Today's Gadfly hates God, Christ, and the church with eerie but firm hatred. The revolution is no longer for the democratic republic of national independence, but for his own "private pain"——Gadfly himself said that he and his own way Bian lover Qida lives a comfortable life in a foreign country, and only accepts the invitation of the revolutionary comrades because she has the opportunity to solve her "private pain".

(2) In the past, Arthur disapproved of Gemma's "activism" and advocated that the revolution "must be endured".Arthur once said to Gemma, "Great changes cannot be accomplished in one day", and "What Italy needs is not hate, but love."These are like the words of a priestly revolutionary.Today, the Gadfly stubbornly believes that "a short knife can solve many problems".He said to Gemma in the tone of a senior revolutionary activist: "When the revolution comes,...shouldn't the people get used to violence?" Gemma, who always had a mysterious serenity on her face, felt that the Gadfly had gone too far.

Of course revolution requires action, but the so-called action is just propaganda and agitation, and violence is at best a means to "force the government", not the goal.Gemma criticized the Gadfly's theory of violent revolution: "Accustoming the ignorant people to the scene of bloodshed is not a way to enhance the value they ascribe to human life."Gemma pointed out to the Gadfly that "every assassination is only enough to make the police more ferocious and the people more accustomed to violence and brutality, so that the final social order may be worse than the original."The Gadfly smiled contemptuously at these views of Gemma, and replied in his heart: This is outright revisionism.

The Gadfly and Gemma often quarreled, and they couldn't agree on human nature, morality, religion, and even the root of the chaos and scourge of human society.Gemma believes that the source of human society's misfortune lies in "not paying enough attention to the sanctity of human nature". Gadfly ridiculed Gemma's view as a "morbid" religious psychology, and "we must establish something to worship it."The Gadfly's revolutionary motivation is obviously mainly aimed at the church, and he wants to break with his own birth.He said bluntly to Gemma: Assassination is of course only a means, but its purpose is not to oppose the government, but to "root out" the "prestige" of the church.Although Gemma is a revolutionary, she still respects the church. She thinks that the Gadfly's revolutionary concept is to arouse the "sleeping wildness in the hearts of the people".To this, Gadfly replied frankly: "Then I have completed the work that will live up to my life."

Gemma still appears to be a monk-like revolutionary, but the Gadfly has changed from a monk-like revolutionary to a cynical revolutionary of the kind that both Turgenev and Dostoevsky have profoundly described. How did Arthur become the Gadfly?Why did this revolutionary change?It is the consciousness of "private pain".What was the "private pain" that the Gadfly himself called? (3) It was just an accidental and common love affair.Father Montanelli fell in love with a girl in his youth, and during what must have been a brief intercourse, accidentally created a baby.Montanelli, who was a monk at the time, could not have been the legitimate father of the baby unless he had renounced the path he had vowed to follow.Arthur was raised by his mother, but Arthur had little memory of his mother.Perhaps Arthur has been looking for his biological father since he was a child, longing for noble fatherly love.If you can't find it in secular life, you can find the noble father's love you need in sanctuary life.In front of the priest, Arthur really looked like a good son.It is not difficult to imagine: when Arthur knew that the priest he admired had committed the crime of adultery, and that he was the physical imprint of this crime, he felt that his life was predestined to be broken.

The Gadfly's "private pain" is the result of his father's private love, and he feels this result as the injury of his own existence.Once the Gadfly said harshly to Gemma, "I never had a friend in this life." What this really meant was that he never had a father. From then on, Arthur began to have an affair, which was the process of Arthur becoming a gadfly, and the revolution was to erase the humiliation brought to him by his father.What is unforgivable is not that the priest has an affair, but that the priest cannot bear the consequences of the affair and be a father.The Gadfly's hatred of his father was justified against the church. Without the temptation of the church's holy way to the priest, Montanelli might just be the father of a man, and Arthur would not have become an illegitimate child, nor would his individual life. become a disgrace.The church made Arthur an illegitimate child without a legitimate father, an outcast in an affair.Of course, the Gadfly felt that his biological father was also abominable. If this man hadn't been obsessed with life in the sanctuary, an affair would have been nothing more than a romantic love affair, and Arthur would not have had a father.Hatred of the Church because it killed or took away a man's father, hatred of Father Montanelli because he made himself a bastard.

The Gadfly's revolutionary motives left little to think about.An ethic—an ethic based on "private pain"—has attracted me strongly.It is clear that Lillian is not telling a revolutionary story, but an ethical one.Without those revolutionary events, the story of the Gadfly would still be thrilling, but without those ethical entanglements, the story of the Gadfly’s revolution would become dull, not as good as the revolutionary events I personally experienced.