Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

 

Wise Blood was Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, a philosophical/religious allegory written in 1952 and called by the author herself her ‘opus nauseus'. As a first novel, it is remarkably assured. It is, however, an ultimately unsatisfying piece of propoganda in which she creates a Nietzschean straw man so that she can knock him down and claim victory for God.

The novel tells the story of Hazel Motes, just released from the army at the end of the war and drifting in and around his home state. In a series of encounters he repeatedly claims to believe in nothing and argues that while others are seeking redemption he is not. “I reckon you think you been redeemed,” he says to one character on the train:

 “If you’ve been redeemed,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to be…. Do you believe in Jesus? … Well I wouldn’t even if He existed. Even if He was on this train.”

To another character he asks: “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” He continues in this vein with everyone he meets, while insisting that he is not a preacher. “You look like a preacher,” a taxi driver tells him. “That hat looks like a preacher’s hat.”  And Mrs Watts, the prostitute he visits, tells him: “Momma don’t mind if you ain’t a preacher.”

But of course he is a preacher. He is a preacher of nothingness.  “I don’t say [Christ] wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere [sic], I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth…. I’m going to preach a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” Later, he rationalises his thinking:

“Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

While Haze is not seeking redemption, he is, as he repeatedly stresses, in search of truth. This is O’Connor’s take on Nietzsche’s assertion that God is dead and that man must seek instead to break free from conventional, Christian morality and move beyond good and evil. What Haze and the other characters represent is the Nietzschean will to power, as it is progressed through a search for truth. Truth, for Nietzsche, was something of a chimera: it was not an absolute or a universal, but manufactured through, by and because of the moral fashions of the time. Clearly, this is the converse of an O’Connor view of life and so O’Connor, in this novel, seeks to portray Nietzsche’s will to power in entirely negative terms. Motes tells a crowd (and us):

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach!”

So Motes is a true nihilist, a believer in nothing. And thus, as Henry T Edmonson explains,  the novel: ‘illustrates the dangerous pursuit of nihilism through the rejection of God and traditional morality. Edmonson then points out that Haze’s ‘arrogance consists of his assertion that he can believe in nothing and still avoid evil.’ That, essentially, is a summary of the plot of the novel. In a series of encounters, Haze preaches nothingness and tries to prove that he neither seeks nor requires assistance from God in facing down mortal dangers. He is, of course, doomed to failure, because the human conscience will not allow such degeneracy. Of conscience, Haze says: “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.” This novel is the story of that hunt.

There are a number of additional characters, the most important of whom is Enoch, who becomes Haze’s only disciple and who steals for him the mummified remains of an Aboriginal from a museum, believing it to be the personification of the  ‘jesus’ of Haze’s Church Without Christ. Edmondson identifies Enoch as evoking:

nihilism’s most salient promise, the creation of a race of “overmen”, those individuals superior to the rest because of their rejection of bygone moral restraints, who by the courageous exercise of their will, lead everyone else into the promised land beyond good and evil.

Thus, we are again being encouraged to believe that Nietzsche’s search for life beyond good and evil is doomed to failure. Edmondson notes that: ‘O’Connor believed that the Nietzschean pursuit of the Overman will not be an evolutionary leap forward, but a long disastrous step backwards.’ O’Connor amplifies this graphically in Wise Blood with Enoch’s final scene, when he is dressed in a gorilla suit and creeps up on a young couple in the woods:

No gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

As so often with O’Connor, her desire to deliver a message results in spectacularly unsubtle symbolism. Enoch, the supposed Overman, is here a symbol of mankind in his rejection of god, as a result of which he has become a mere animal. This, according to O’Connor is the Nietzschean future. Mankind, she is saying, in thrall as it is to nothingness and sensation and godlessness, is regressing into barbarity. No Rousseauian noble savage here, this is baseness personified.

So much for the message. Does it work? This is a fascinating novel, tussling with genuinely meaty issues, but in the end it is not satisfying. As with The Violent Bear It Away, the characters here are ciphers, objects to be played with by the author and manipulated to suit her ends. Haze is a nihilist, but he’s a very Christian sort of nihilist. True nihilism is not premised on a lifetime of denial of God: that is taken for granted. Only a Christian could draw a nihilist in such terms. And so we are told:

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

This gets to the central weakness in the story – it shows precisely where and how O’Connor is manipulating her character. He is supposedly the nihilist who determinedly believes in nothing, yet O’Connor is planting the seed of something in him, so that it can later be exploited. She is trying to have it both ways – painting him as believing nothing, yet having him know, deep down, that there is a blankness that once was something. So he is not a true nihilist, but a Christian caricature of one. He is a straw man. For this reason his downfall, although interesting, is of no philosophical consequence. Rather than a critique of nihilism or a refutation of Nietzschean beliefs, the story is ultimately a representation of Christian insecurity.

And read in that light it delivers the exact opposite message from that which O’Connor intended. And that, to me, is a delightful irony.

The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

The title of The Violent Bear It Away  comes from the Rheims-Douay translation of the Bible, Matthew 11:12. The version is important because its sense is different from most translations of this text. It is an enigmatic sentence, open to widely differing interpretations. Some critics suggest this violence – in and/or to Heaven – is undesirable, others that it is desirable, others still that it isn’t violence at all but rather a cherished prize. Some think it is passive, some active. The particular version used by Flannery O’Connor is suggestive that heaven can only be attained by force, and more than that, by violence against one’s self. What O’Connor seems to mean by it in this novel is that violence is a means of delivering spiritual awakening, of finding one’s mission in life and one’s place with God. And if that truly is O’Connor’s belief, then it is a worldview that is utterly repellent. As, indeed, is this novel, despite being brilliantly written and containing a prose so pure and perfect it is dazzling.

The Violent Bear It Away is a religious allegory full of mysticism and Biblical resonances. It is a story of prophets and baptism, of the struggle that is (apparently) inside us all between the love of God and the love of man. It tells the story of three generations: a mad prophet who dies early in the novel, plus his nephew, Rayber, who has shunned his uncle’s extreme views, and his great-nephew, Tarwater, who lives alone with the old man in the wilderness and whom the old man is training to also become a prophet. There is also an important fourth character, Bishop, the slow-witted son of Rayber, but it is Tarwater who is the main character of the novel, and it is his journey, unwilling but inevitable, that forms the basis of O’Connor’s bitter message.

The story begins with the death of the old man, and his insistence, before he dies, that Tarwater must ensure he is properly buried  and that there is a cross over his grave. At this point, however, Tarwater first begins to hear the voices that are initially described as those of a ‘stranger’ but which gradually through the course of the novel become the ‘friend’. Margaret Earley Whitt identifies correspondence from O’Connor in which she declares she ‘certainly’ intended Tarwater’s friend to be ‘the Devil’. On two occasions in the novel, these voices take physical form: first in the form of Meeks, who seeks to take advantage of Tarwater; and then, more horrifically, in the guise of the ‘lavender man’, who we will examine in more detail later.

At this early stage in the novel, suddenly freed from the influence of his great-uncle, and under the sway of his new ‘friend’, Tarwater is sceptical. He does not obey his great-uncle’s wishes that he be buried and his grave given a cross, but instead sets fire to the house, supposing (wrongly, as it turns out) that he is thus cremating him. He then seeks out his uncle, Rayber, who has long since abandoned the old man as a madman. At this stage one might consider that reason is prevailing, but Tarwater, as his name suggests, is a boy in whom there is constant conflict. Doubts remain. Throughout the novel there is a brooding tension over whether Tarwater will obey the old man’s third stricture – that he should baptize Rayber’s dim-witted son, Bishop. This conflict presents a striking symbol of Tarwater’s internal struggle between the path of God and the road of man.

Given that, ultimately, it is the view of the old man that prevails, one must assume this is what O’Connor wished to promote in the novel. It’s worth looking at him in more detail, then. ‘“The world was made for the dead,”’ he tells Tarwater and us, and we are later told that: ‘He was a one-notion man. Jesus. Jesus this and Jesus that.’

His relationship with Tarwater is complex. A stylistic tic, in the early part of the novel when they are the only characters, is the use of repetition. Sometimes facts are reported first, then we are given the same events as dialogue a couple of pages later. On other occasions events are simply reported twice, in almost identical terms. This gives a sense of the claustrophobia of their situation and, as you are reading, it seems as though the message this is conveying is one of an abuse of power: this is brainwashing. Nonetheless, the old man justifies himself. He tells Tarwater: ‘“I saved you to be free, your own self!”’ But in the next breath he adds:

“and not a piece of information inside [Rayber’s] head! If you were living with him, you’d be information right now, you’d be inside his head, and what’s furthermore,” he said,”you’d be going to school.”

The word ‘information’ is instructive, as is the warning of being sent to school, where he would be merely ‘one of the herd.’ The message is clear: learning is dangerous. There is only one word, the word of the prophet which is, in turn, the word of God. And it must not be questioned. Again, from reading the early stages of the novel, one’s sympathy would not be with the old man. And yet, as the novel reaches its climax, the tragedy is that, ultimately, the author agrees with the old man and this preposterous notion, and she manipulates her characters to make it so.

One of the key exchanges in the novel comes between the old man and his nephew, Rayber. Rayber is symbolic, in this novel, of detached man, someone who has fallen out of love and grace with God. In O’Connor’s terms he is living a life of absurdity and pointlessness because his existence is not rooted in God’s. He is, of course, merely a cipher. As a character he is the weakest in the novel because he is not allowed by his author to develop. His one fine speech comes in an exchange with the old man which begins:

“You’re too blind to see what you did to me. A child can’t defend himself. Children are cursed with believing. You pushed me out of the real world and I stayed out of it until I didn’t know which was which. You infected me with your idiot hopes, your foolish violence.”

That is clear and impressive, but it is immediately followed by:

“I’m not always myself, I’m not al…” but he stopped. He wouldn’t admit what the old man knew. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. “I’ve straightened the tangle you made. Straightened it by pure will power. I’ve made myself straight.”

“You see,” the old man said, “he admitted himself the seed was still in him.”

That seed is God, religion, the sacred word. What we are being told here is that even with Rayber, the man who has denied God, the seed remains inside him. It is his human frailty that is preventing him from allowing it to germinate. And now we come to the real symbolism of this novel. It is about God and man; Him and us; God with his prophet, and man, represented by the weak Rayber and his dim-witted offspring, a blank canvas who stands ‘dim and ancient, like a child who had been a child for centuries.’

Of course Rayber loves his son, and can we assume he loves humanity? Yes, O’Connor seems to grant him (and us) that. We are told: ‘[Rayber’s] pity encompassed all exploited children – himself when he was a child, Tarwater exploited by the old man, this child exploited by parents, Bishop exploited by the very fact he was alive.’ But O’Connor can’t help pointing out Rayber’s weaknesses. He is literally deaf in one ear, the result of having had it shot at close range by the old man. And just in case the reader is too slow to grasp the metaphorical meaning of that, a minor character later asks him: ‘“Are you deaf to the Lord’s Word?’

We are told that once he tried to drown his son. He explains to Tarwater that his inability to do so was ‘a failure of nerve’. But his love for his son remains absolute, and it is the love of mankind for mankind. It is a ‘terrifying love’ which he can control as long as Bishop remains with him, but if he were ever to lose him then ‘the whole world would become his idiot child.’

So, on one hand, we have mankind as mute, dim-witted, helpless bearers of love and their equally helpless, weak parents, involved in some form of dance of death, denying God even to the point of their annihilation. And on the other hand we have Tarwater, the boy marked out to be a prophet, the boy who carries the seed. It is to him we must look for the final message in the novel. For this novel is about redemption and salvation. Ironically, Tarwater thinks otherwise. He knows that the seed remains in his uncle. He tells him: ‘“It ain’t a thing you can do about it. It fell on bad ground but it fell in deep.”’ The uncle, he is saying, will not ultimately have free will. But he, Tarwater, will. ‘“With me,” he said proudly, “it fell on rock and the wind carried it away.”’

But it didn’t. Not in O’Connor’s world.

This tension reaches its inevitable conclusion when Tarwater, Rayber and Bishop have a day out and Tarwater takes the child for a boat trip. At this point the constant references to baptism, and to Tarwater’s duty to ensure that Bishop is properly baptized, reach a climax. And here the carefully arranged narrative starts to become utterly constricting, as O’Connor’s plot is wrapped ever tighter around her messianic theme. Tarwater, the central character, isn’t allowed the luxury of free thought, not in the end. Right at the start of the novel, when his great-uncle explains that the responsibility to baptize Rayber’s son will fall to him if he, the uncle, dies without having achieved it, Tarwater replies: ‘“Oh no it won’t be…He don’t mean for me to finish up your leavings. He has other things in mind for me.”’ But, of course, that is exactly what happens, because O’Connor is telling us that mankind has no free will.

Therefore, Tarwater does what is expected of him, but in the course of baptizing Bishop he drowns him. Is this killing an evil act? O’Connor is highly ambiguous on this point. It is never quite clear whether it was an accident or intentional. And yet, in an exchange immediately prior to the death, a hotel worker says to Tarwater: ‘“Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.”’ So, clearly, we’re being directed towards this being deliberate, an evil act. Yet in the description of the baptism and drowning itself, we are told that ‘in a high raw voice the defeated boy cried out the words of baptism.’ Defeated is a very precise description. Classifying this as the crux of the novel, Whitt calls Tarwater ‘broken’ and suggests 'he has capitulated to a power he cannot understand. He has done the deed that the old man ordained him to do.'

Violence thus resides in Tarwater, whether the drowning was intentional or not. Later, in a highly curious passage with the ‘lavender man’ who is the devil incarnate, Tarwater seems to admit the death was intentional, and it was the baptism that was an accident. Indeed, the baptism appears to affect him more than the death itself:

“I baptized him.”

“Huh?” the man said.

“It was an accident. I didn’t mean to…it didn’t mean nothing. You can’t be born again… I only meant to drown him,” the boy said. “You’re only born once. They were only some words that run ot of my mouth and spilled in the water.”

However, this act of violence is only the dress rehearsal for the real violence that is presaged by the book’s epigraph and title. That comes next. The lavender man picks up the fleeing Tarwater and plies him with ‘strange’ cigarettes and alcohol. He rapes him and leaves him naked and bound in a clearing in the woods. When he comes to, Tarwater, in a rage, burns the clearing, removing every vestige of what occurred. We are told: ‘He knew that he could not turn back now. He knew that his destiny forced him to a final revelation.’

And this, incredibly, is the ultimate message of the novel. Through this act of wickedness, Tarwater is resolved with his God. Through violence he finds a spiritual awakening. He returns to the burned out house, to discover that a kindly Negro neighbour had, in fact, buried the old man. The hunger he has increasingly felt throughout the novel, without any means of satisfaction, is finally sated as, with the old man and a multitude of the dead, he is fed the bread of Christ. He is free to move on to the ‘fate that awaits him’.

Meanwhile, Rayber, the man who believes in man and not God, and is rewarded for that by having a retarded son who dies violently, is shown to be living a futile  existence. This is the choice O’Connor leaves us with. As Whitt explains:

The Violent Bear It Away delivers two symbolic alternatives for the reader: choose the way of Tarwater, which is less choice than a violence racked upon its chosen, or the way of Rayber, the ultimate torture because it yields only nothing disguised as free will.

This strikes me as so perverse as to be close to evil. To suggest that man can find salvation and harmony through the violence of rape is profoundly disturbing. To suggest that the glory of heaven should be predicated on such violence is surely contrary to any sane understanding of the Christian religion. This book delivers a terrible and repulsive message, one which can only be understood as a deep loathing of humanity. To suppose that a deity would exact this sort of duty from his followers is to create a deity who is not worthy of an iota of humanity’s compassion or consideration.

Erasure by Percival Everett

 

Erasure, published in 2001, is a wildly funny novel that works on a number of levels and is so playful that one feels constantly there are little jokes and references that are sliding by and will need a second reading. But much, much more than that, it is an immensely brave novel that is challenging some of the shibboleths of American culture and literature.

At its heart is a biting satire on the way race is handled in the US and, in particular, the constant stereotyping of black people that obtains – not only by white people but by black people themselves. The narrator, loosely based on the author himself, is Thelonius “Monk” Ellison a writer of avant-garde novels that even his agent thinks are challenging, brave, but ultimately unreadable. Monk despairs of a modern culture that puts his novels in the African-American section in bookshops, even when they are about Greek myths. In particular, he despairs about a culture that celebrates novels like We’s lives in da ghetto by Juanita Mae Jenkins, with its stereotyped depiction of black culture, hackneyed plots and over the top use of black idioms. This is false, he rails, it perpetuates the myths that black men are either sportsmen, musicians or drug dealers. And yet it is feted. Jenkins is interviewed gushingly on the Kenya Dunston Show, in a hilarious parody of Oprah Winfrey. Its paperback and movie rights sell for six figure sums. Meanwhile, Monk cannot find a publisher for his latest novel. ‘The line is,’ his agent tells him, ‘you’re not black enough’.

In a rage, Monk thrashes out a novella, My Pafology, into which he crams all the stereotypes he can muster. The protagonist has fo’ children by four different mothers, to none of whom he pays any maintenance. We see him indulge in casual sex that borders on rape. He turns quickly to violence. When a helping hand is offered to him by a wealthy individual who takes him on, he spurns the opportunity, and ends up raping the man’s daughter. The violence spirals into murder and he flees in an OJ Simpson type car chase, live on national television. My Pafology is included in its entirety in Erasure, running to 70 plus pages, and such is Everett’s skill that, while laughing at the parody, one still becomes caught up in the drama.

And this, of course, is exactly what happens in the novel. Monk pitches it to his agent who pitches to a publisher under the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh, and Monk is astonished – and appalled – to discover that his angry parody is immediately snapped up. He changes the title to Fuck in an attempt to put the publishers off, but they agree. It becomes a bestseller. It is nominated for a national award. It becomes the talk of the literary world and Stagg R. Leigh is the most sought after author in the country. This, naturally, causes Monk considerable difficulty, particularly when, under his own name, he is asked to be a judge for the award for which Stagg’s novel is nominated. He is the only judge to argue against it. ‘I should think as an African-American you’d be happy to see one of your own people get an award like this,’ one of the other judges says to him. 

All of this is brilliantly handled, and through the wonderful humour there are still uncomfortable truths about race and perceptions of race in America today. Much of the stereotyping is perpetuated by black people themselves and, at the very least, they are complicit in perpetuating those stereotypes. In a culture where African-American writers from Alice Walker and Toni Morrison onwards have been celebrating blackness as something to celebrate in itself, Everett is brave in standing aside and saying ‘no, the mark of the person resides not in his or her skin colour, but in their morality.’ Through Monk, he expresses his exasperation at being defined by the colour of his skin. Monk is asked by a taxi driver, ‘Are you Ethiopian?’ ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’m just Washingtonian.’ But as the novel progresses he is in danger of being swallowed by his own stereotyped invention and becoming that which he despises.

There is much more at play in this novel. Everett pokes playful fun at the American publishing scene, with the crazy deals being offered to flavour of the month writers, the outrageous promotion of junk novels and the mutual back-scratching of award judges. Erasure also memorably takes on academia, with a brave and funny parody of Roland Barthes’ S/Z in the second chapter (if I hadn’t been warned about it in advance I would have been completely flummoxed by it) and deliciously cruel pen pictures of those postmodernist authors who subsist by publishing each other often enough in their journals to qualify themselves for professorships. That Everett himself plays some delightful postmodern tricks in the novel – for example conversations between, amongst others, Rothko, Hitler, de Kooning and Rauschenberg – merely adds to the sense of enjoyment.

At the novel’s heart, and this is what transforms it from a good into a great novel, is a series of erasures from which it gains its title. Monk’s mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, is slowly having her mind erased; Monk himself is being erased by his alter ego. His sister, who works in an abortion clinic – itself another form of erasure – is killed, erased, by pro-lifers. His brother, a married man with children, comes out as gay and is thrown out by his family, his past erased. And so on. In this way, Everett takes on many of the issues that form the faultlines of current American society and offers a humanist response. Take me as I am, he says. Reward ability. Do not judge by appearances. Do not take a binary, yes-no, black-white approach to life. In a deliberately ambivalent ending, we are left wondering which way Monk will turn. I have no doubt, though, that he will turn to the good, to the moral. A flawed character, for sure, but a good man.