Everyman by Philip Roth

 

Everyman, Philip Roth’s 2006 novella, is a meditation on life and death. It takes its name from the fifteenth century allegories in which a man is told by Death to prepare for judgement day. One by one his friends desert him, along with his wealth and his health and his strength and his beauty. Finally, he is alone before the almighty with only the sum of the good deeds he has done throughout his life to stand beside him as he awaits the final judgement. Such are the ways the Churches use guilt and fear to rein us in.

Roth is having none of that. His main character, an unnamed man, is approaching death – indeed we start with his funeral – but while this is indeed a novella about atonement, it is a very human atonement and it is peopled by real human beings, in all their frail, failing discomfiture. Religion, for this man, ‘was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers.’

Instead of that, then, we have a study of character, and particularly of character shaped by death and the fear of death and the mourning for it. Death stalks these pages. (Indeed, possibly too much: at one point, he discovers the death of one former colleague, the terminal cancer of another and the attempted suicide of a third, all in the same morning, and later we have two members of his art class dying of cancer ‘within a week’ of one another. Pathos can easily become bathos.) But, those examples aside, death here is a powerful adversary. We are told: ‘Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.’ And we, the readers, are placed centre stage for each enactment of this massacre, uncomfortably, unavoidably complicit.

‘Worry about oblivion when you’re seventy-five!’ the man tells us on page 32. He can swim across the bay. He is at the height of his powers. He has no need to worry. ‘The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate catastrophe!’ he tells us. And that is how humans live their lives, day-by-day, trying to deny the curse that is uniquely humanity’s, that we are burdened by foreknowledge of our own deaths. And so it is that, by page 161 we find, ‘It was time to worry about oblivion. It was the remote future.’

The character in this novella is a flawed individual (naturally, since he is an ‘everyman’) who has been married three times, only once to a woman he loved, and has three children, only one of whom matters to him. The plot catalogues his illnesses, from the trivial hernia for which he is treated as a child, to a series of increasingly complex problems which meant that, in later life, ‘not a year went by when he wasn’t hospitalized’ and, ‘now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.’

His story is told through his eyes and through the eyes of his family. There is the ‘incomparable’ Phoebe, his second wife, and their daughter, the ‘incorruptible’ and ‘miraculous’ Nancy. There are his sons, Randy and Lonny, the younger of the two, who, standing by his father’s graveside, ‘was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release.’ There is Merete, the third wife, a Danish model twenty years younger than him who is ‘basically an absence and not a presence.’ And there is his brother Howie, six years older, but indestructibly fit, in contrast to the increasing frailties of the younger man.

Roth doesn’t deal in black and whites. The man is neither good nor bad. The true loves in his life were his second wife, Phoebe, and their daughter, Nancy, but he deserted them both to live with the feckless Merete. Their break-up is painful, and relayed in detail. We are assured that he loved his older brother, a ‘very good man’ who had been the ‘one solid thing throughout his life’ but, as illness and fear overtook him, we are told, ‘He hated Howie because of his robust good health.’ Later, he describes his sons as ‘You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits!’

All of this could come across as unpleasantly self-pitying, but Roth is clever in the way he fleshes out the character, who at one stage calls himself a ‘cunthound’, a superbly violent demolition of his own ego, and any self-pity is immediately dissipated by the depth of his self-loathing. As his catalogue of illness unfolds, and as he becomes ‘a decidely lonelier, less confident man’ we are made to confront, with him, the nature of death. And, of course, we don’t – we cannot – approach it with equanimity. There is little honour in the way we sidle towards it. A woman weeps uncontrollably at the two funerals of the art class cancer sufferers and her husband asks the man why he thinks she is doing so. “Because life’s most disturbing intensity is death,’ the man replies. No, says the husband. “She’s like that all the time… She’s like that because she isn’t eighteen anymore.”

It is a truth, uncomfortable though it may be, that all grief is felt through the prism of our own mortality. When we mourn, we mourn for ourselves, too. All we can do, suggests Roth, is try our best and, at the end, come to an accommodation with ourselves. This is what Nietzsche was trying to tell us a hundred and thirty years ago, but we are slow learners. There is no day of judgement. Atonement is not a matter for the sky gods, but for oneself and one’s own. In a moving scene at the end of the novella, the man stands at the graves of his parents and speaks to them:

“I’m seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one.”

“Good. You lived,” his mother replied and his father said, “Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.”

It is that final statement that is so important. Make the best of what’s left, because what is done is done. Nietzsche pointed out one of the great tragedies of humanity:

The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time’s desire – that is the will’s most lonely affliction.

Atonement is only possible in one’s own mind, as a personal act. Time cannot be recreated. The man’s treatment of Phoebe cannot be changed. He cannot undo the damage he did to her and Nancy by leaving them for Merete. Nor is there time to discover love of his sons. He has done what he has done. “There’s no remaking reality,” is his repeated stricture to his daughter and, at the start of the novel, standing by his grave, she repeats his words to him. As the novella unfolds, both the truth and the lie of those words becomes clear. The past remains, but atonement is possible, in the shape of memory.

As he leaves the cemetery, he gives some money to the gravedigger, who he knows will soon dig his own grave.  He tells him: “My father always said, ‘It’s best to give while your hand is still warm.”’ And with that one act of warmth the man finds redemption.

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.