The Violent Bear It Away—Flannery O'Connor

Between The Rock and a hard place

If Cormac McCarthy and Nathaniel Hawthorne could collaborate on a novel, they might produce something like The Violent Bear It Away.

All the main characters in this novel come from one family, so to avoid confusion I’ll call the granduncle, Mason Tarwater, “Mason.” I’ll call his nephew “Rayber,” and I’ll call Rayber’s two sons, born of different mothers, “Tarwater” and “Bishop.”

Mason, a self-proclaimed prophet, kidnapped Rayber at the age of seven, hoping to make him into a prophet as well. Rayber only stayed with Mason for four days before his father rescued him. While the brainwashing he received from his uncle haunted him for years, he nevertheless managed to overcome it enough to join modern society and live a normal life, marry twice, and have a son by each wife. The first son, Tarwater, whom Mason kidnapped when only a few months old, did not so easily escape, but lived under his granduncle’s tutelage until fourteen years old when the old man died suddenly at the breakfast table one morning. The novel opens with Mason’s death and Tarwater’s failed attempt to give him the Christian burial he had demanded. Tarwater, raised in a secluded shack in the woods by a fanatical prophet, knew virtually nothing about the modern world. But he launches out into that alien world intent on doing something, some very important thing, he knew not what.

For Tarwater’s entire childhood, his granduncle had groomed him to take up the mantle of prophesy, and, in particular, to baptize his half brother, Bishop. Most of the novel consists of young Tarwater’s struggle between this calling his granduncle put on him and the urging of a voice in his head, “the friend,” calling him to reason, science, modernity, and normalcy. This fierce, inner struggle plays out in the real world, terribly, as Rayber takes Tarwater back into his home and tries to save him—or as we would say, deprogram him. The battle between reason and emotion, education and ignorance, secularism and zealotry only resolves in the final chapter, with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, but without its predictability.

Tarwater remains inscrutable and unnerving throughout. He resists any attempts by others to control or define him—that much we come to expect—yet he reacts to other types of experiences in less predictable ways. In fact, he doesn’t seem to abide by any psychological or sociological rules. He stands outside of all those comforting laws or generalities by which we think we understand each other, and thus startles or shocks us at every turn. In retrospect, however, we see his choices and actions, which seemed arbitrary at the time, as a long trajectory of a pitiless, implacable fate—and not a fate that he wanted. He does abide by some rules, however. Not psychological rules, but ancient rules possibly known to the Pythia or to the author of Ecclesiastes.

As with many stories that confuse me, this one only made sense when I realized I had pegged the wrong characters as good or bad. I naturally sided with reason and against fanaticism. Indeed, O’Connor does not make fanaticism seem very congenial. But I fell into the trap of thinking that spurning lunacy means I must befriend logic. No, madness lies that way, too, it seems. I missed many of the clues, not just the clues planted intentionally by O’Connor, but also her contempt for Enlightenment ideas. She seems simply unable to paint a plausible or appealing picture of a life guided by reason. Her genius at bringing characters alive fails her when describing “normal” people. For example, she frequently gives us humorless caricatures of scientistic hubris like this.

[Rayber] settled on a rational, tiring plan for the day and by ten o’clock the three of them were on their way to the natural history museum. He intended to stretch the boy’s mind by introducing him to his ancestor, the fish, and to all the great wastes of unexplored time.

And in this next passage, O’Connor describes why Rayber’s second wife, usually simply referred to as “the social worker,” or “the welfare woman,” never made a serious effort to rescue Tarwater. At their first and only confrontation, she sees something in his expression that repelled her, something that could never coexist with her own religion of social atomism, something that made her think if Tarwater as an it.

She could not express her exact revulsion, for her feeling was not logical. It had, she said, the look of an adult, not of a child, and of an adult with immovable insane convictions. Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr’s limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential. […] The face for her had expressed the depth of human perversity, the deadly sin of rejecting defiantly one’s own obvious good.

Such passages as these betray O’Connor’s equation of science, an enthrallment to Nature’s mysteries, with scientism, the faith that technicians will sooner or later explain anything worth explaining.

Often, the key to understanding a symbol-driven work lies in those passages that make no sense. They make no sense because the author’s metaphysics, epistemology, or axiology differs from one’s own. A key moment of the novel, the point at which the attuned reader should see that Rayber has chosen damnation over grace, occurs when O’Connor describes his love for Bishop. We don’t know exactly what makes Bishop special—possibly Down Syndrome, but Rayber takes good, seemingly loving, care of him. The following bizarre passages make so little sense at first that any reader who quickly looks away in embarrassment from such children may read past it without pausing to fathom its mystery.

For the most part Rayber lived with [Bishop] without being painfully aware of his presence but the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity. It was only a touch of the curse that lay in his blood.

This last remark refers to the brainwashing he experienced while in Mason’s clutches. But also, I think, it hearkens back to Wise Blood. She continues:

His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. If, without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him—powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.

A horrifying love? One that would compel him to grovel in praise? Abnormal? This passage can only make sense to us if we live in a cosmos, a Creation, not on a planet composed of probabilistic particles. And only when we recognize as divine this all-accepting love from which Rayber shrinks in horror can we feel the emptiness of the measurable, rational love studied by social scientists. For Rayber to shrink in horror from the love that Being as Being forces from him, can only mean he flees from the love of God.

He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. … The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind of love that could be used for the child’s improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in and instant. And it only began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated.

In sum, I would say this novel shocks, horrifies, and appalls the sleepy reader. It tries to grab us and shake us awake to the terrifying possibility of God’s grace. But, in my view, it ultimately fails because it doesn’t recognize that science, too, has the power to shake us out of complacency and into awe.

Next up: True Grit, by Charles Portis.

Amazon links to works related to this post. Works in boldface are the editions I’m using.

The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O’Connor (FSG paperback)

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, (published by Library of America)

True Grit, by Charles Portis (paperback)

Charles Portis: Collected Works, (published by Library of America)

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