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.

Writing the Grotesque

Sarah Gleeson-White, in a study on the southern grotesque, argues against the common interpretation of it as presenting a "gloomy vision of modernity" which acts as an allegory of the human condition as "existential alienation and angst." Her focus is specifically on Carson McCullers, highlighting a quote from her The Vision Shared, which sought to justify the grotesque school by claiming, of its authors, "I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive." This demonstrates, Gleeson-White suggests, rather than an alienated modernity, an affirmative and transformative quality, and it is this we should be celebrating when reading the southern grotesque.

In developing her argument, Gleeson-White adopts and adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of the grotesque which, she feels, comes closest to articulating the celebratory nature of McCullers’ cry of "I am alive". In doing so, she rejects as incomplete those traditional interpretations, as expounded by the likes of William Van O’Connor and Millichap and Fiedler, with their allusions to "dark modernism" and "alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love." She presents instead, McCullers’ explanation of the grotesque: "The technique is briefly this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail."

A key focus for Bakhtin and McCullers is the body, in particular deformity and difference from conventional perceptions of beauty, even normality. Physical freaks are, of course, a signature of the grotesque, from William Faulkner’s Benjy to Flannery O’Connor’s Hulga and onwards. McCullers’ novels and stories, too, are peopled by freaks – giants or dwarves, mutes, hunchbacks and cripples, self-mutilators, androgynous men-women, and so on – but, Gleeson-White argues, and I would agree, McCullers ultimately uses these characters as a reaction against convention and as an exploration of humanity. She suggests that: "Her novels of resistance present us with unsettled identities and so push the very boundaries of how we understand human being."

This idea of the transformative nature of grotesque freakery is interesting. For all her brilliance as a writer, for example, I cannot see it in Flannery O’Connor. Transformation, for her, is bound to redemption, and her perspective on redemption is that of a subject reconciling him or herself to the will of the master; her works are flavoured by subjugation to the supernatural and not celebration or understanding of the human.

Likewise, I look at the works of Cormac McCarthy and try to discern how they might be described as affirmative or transformative. Only his early works, of course, are considered to be truly southern but I believe that typical southern transgressiveness suffuses his later works, too. And, in his collection of freaks, from Lester Ballard and Rinthy and Culla onwards through the seven feet albino judge to the morally autistic Chigurh, he presents a set of characters who are outwith anything that could be considered normal. But is he, in Bakhtinian terms, "[disclosing] the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life"? And, moreover, is he using his grotesquery to unnerve in order to enlighten?

The answers to those questions would appear to me to be yes and possibly no, and therein lies a difficulty. Yes, McCarthy shows us a different world, most significantly in Blood Meridian and The Road. This is what mankind is capable of, he is telling us in the former, and because of that in the latter he presents the road we may be leading ourselves down. It is, then, a negative view, and what positives one may take from his novels must generally be taken by this process of inversion: don’t do that, or this may be the result. Such is the approach of organised religion through the ages: behave, or else; believe, or de’il tak ye; belong, or be cast adrift. In this, then, we see echoes of Hazel Motes and Tarwater in Flannery O'Connor's novel, even of Captain Ahab; we see the human relegated beneath the supernatural, and the result is obeisance to the godhead, whoever or whatever that might be.

Rather than transformative, then, it is reactionary: it is promulgated on the maintenance of a primordial order rather than the advancement of humanity. Hence the answer to the second question may be no: McCarthy’s grotesquery does not wholly enlighten, but rather it can seem to cast us backwards, to limit our freedom. McCarthy so constructs his characters – indeed, they are often more archetypes than characters, with no psycho-social histories or motivations – that they are unable to project forward. It is all very well for McCarthy to warn of the dangers to human society of our inwardness, our selfishness, our self-destructive disregard for nature, because those are warnings we would do well to heed, but in presenting only the binary oppositions of annihilation and acceptance of a putative god, he is artificially defining the boundaries of the debate. His grotesques are so designed, those characterless characters, that they miss the true alternative, the human. They endure so much and experience so little. And his words, all that rhetorical portentousness, serve only to wrap a mystery around them that, in the end, overwhelms.

It is a grotesquery which doesn’t so much say "I am alive" as "I can only die".