The Violent Bear It Away

Religion in its fiercest form has never been a part of my life, but I have seen it from a distance. This story brings the war of faith into painful, desperate detail.

Three men, one of them still a boy, really, are poised in a triangle of stress regarding the depths to which they will go to respond to a call to God. Tarwater the elder is totally submerged in that call. Thinking he had the call to preach when he was younger, he instead had some sort of mental collapse he interprets as God striking him instead of the sinners to whom he preached. He tried to inculcate his beliefs in his nephew, who was saved from that particular fate by his father. Tarwater spends time in a mental hospital, learns to keep his trap shut as a way to convince show more the powerful that he is recovered, and is allowed to return to his small farm and house in the forest.

When his niece dies in a car crash, leaving a newborn, he manages to kidnap the child, run off his nephew and the social worker come to claim him, and raise him in his own philosophy as a prophet to be.

All this has happened by the time the story begins, with Tarwater dead and young Tarwater responsible for burying him.

And now the youngster must find his own way, decide to resist or accept a call, decide if his uncle who takes him in is in the right. The uncle is complicated with his own pulls, and with responsibility which tests everyone's faith.

The writing is exact and intense. O'Connor was a devout Catholic who often wrote about people who wrestle with their beliefs, and about people in the small-town and backwoods South. Yet here, I don't think she takes sides so much as reveals the struggles faith can incur, and the devastation it can create. I found it quite powerful, and pitied them all. show less

I've just completed The Violent Bear It Away. I love southern gothic and I loved this. It is such an arresting snapshot of rural southern life in the time period.

Like everything of hers I've read, this has a strong religious overtone. I found the debate among how to raise a child to be religious quite overbearing which I suspect is the point. When this is what life is like -- very nearly a Levianthanesque nasty, brutish and short -- religious matters take on a different sheen. Even for minor characters this is true. I don't think I'll ever forget how O'Connor paints the eleven year old forced into worldwide evangelism by her parents.

Something that caught my eye in this novel which is quite different from others of the genre and time show more period (at least what I've read) is gender roles. Quite contrary to typical portrayals, this novel has multiple women who are actively disinterested in motherhood, even abandoning their children outright, and multiple men who take on extensive caregiving responsibilities. This is partially out of a sense of religious obligation to raise and baptize the children (baptism being a big topic in this book) but also has an emotional component not often conveyed for male characters in father figure roles at the time.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading American literature for sure. It's clear why O'Connor has the role she does in the canon for such a short bibliography. show less

Modern vs. past, urban vs. rural, intellectual vs. spiritual, words vs. deeds, and above all, secular vs. religious. There came a point where I saw this struggle as an epic prizefight between Tarwater and Rayber, and wondered who would be left standing.

Years ago, I experienced the battle of belief vs. non-belief within myself, and belief lost. So, naturally, I was on Rayber's side. And not knowing anything about O'Connor or her work, I had assumed she was as well. Obviously, I was letting my own experience and way of seeing cloud my judgment.

Even though the ending left me feeling somewhat betrayed, still the work stands on its own as a great work of literature. I could go on and on about all of the symbolism, but won't. Suffice it to show more say that I find it a bit ironic that all of the acts of violence (arson, murder, rape) were vehicles on the side of religion, to carry it to victory. So I'm left feeling a bit justified that intellect took the higher ground; for whatever that is worth. show less

Populated with religious lunatics, and spiritual eunuchs; naturally I loved it.

However, it's been four years, and I'm still hesitant to read more from O'Connor; I don't trust her motivations.

The Violent Bear It Away was my first experience with writing by Flannery O’Connor and reading it demonstrated precisely why she is so highly regarded. O’Connor’s use of nuance and innuendo give a strength and power to her writing that could not otherwise have been achieved. The Violent Bear It Away seems a strange title for a book, is taken directly from a Bible verse and makes sense only when the reader reflects long and hard about the novel when finished reading it.
I read the book as a “Buddy Read” and our discussions of it made it clear that each of us got different things from the book and that each of us could contribute to each other’s deeper understanding of the novel. This is an important point because In a lesser show more novel, the storyline and plot would suffice to make readers enjoy the book. The Violent Bear It Away offers readers more than a straightforward plot. In fact, the plot is rather incidental to the overall impact of the book. This novel deals with human motivations, with the goals and desires we try to impose on others because they are important to us and without regard to what the other person needs or wants.
The Buddy Read approach to this novel helped both of us see deeper into the message O’Connor wanted readers to understand. The novel doesn’t deliver a moral, it develops an insight, “teaching” rather than “telling,” and discussing the book helped each of us as readers see and understand more than either of us could have on our own.
But that should not stop someone interested in reading the book from doing it even without a partner. Just be aware that your enjoyment of the book will come not from reading and finishing it, but from thinking about it a lot after you close the cover. show less

Flannery O’Connor.

The two words shine like a pair of headlights in the dark highway of my life. To say the Southern writer has had some impact on my life would be like saying a flaming meteor the size of Manhattan slamming into the earth would have “some impact.�€?

Just writing her name causes me to quiver, to shiver down to the cellar of my soul. I regard her name with such awe that, were I one of those early-century monks who had to do a full body wash and change the ink in their pens each time they wrote the word “God,â€? I would be changing printer cartridges each time I wrote Miz O’Connor’s name. In terms of influencing my own writing—the dozen or so short stories and one show more as-yet-unpublished novel sitting in my desk drawer—she is the blinding sun on my road to Damascus.

Make no mistake—she is often as unfathomable as that holy voice on the road Saint Paul (nee Saul) traveled. Unprepared readers coming to O’Connor are in for the shock of their lives as they encounter all manner of grotesque characters who collide with religion in ways that slyly unbuckle the Bible belt. Her stories are filled with the racist and the pious, the ugly and the profane, the horrifying and the hilarious. A woman is gored by a bull. A Bible salesman steals a girl’s artificial leg. A boy worships a museum’s mummy he believes is the new Jesus.

There’s a profound and beautiful purity at the heart of O’Connor’s writing; but to get to it, you must first meet the obscene and startling characters who populate her works.

All this from the pen of a plain-faced Southern belle—a girl who looked like she could be the dateless, lonely spinster who never went out with the rest of the secretarial pool, the prim church lady who, potluck after potluck, brought Jell-o fruit salad then stood demurely in a corner of the church kitchen. Ah, but what a brilliant, churning, seething mind was contained behind those homely cat’s-eye glasses!

Flannery O’Connor was only 39 when she died in 1964 of lupus at her mother’s farm near Milledgeville, Georgia. In those brief years, she had written many stories which are now the pillars of textbook anthologies. She also wrote two of the most influential religious novels of this or any other generation: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. Influential, at least, to me.

I have had many writing instructors who taught me everything I need to know about plot, coherence and character. With all due respect, none of them amounts to a hill of beans when compared to what the long-dead spinster from Milledgeville has taught me about the sentences roiling around in my brain, the words I wrestle to pin onto the page (mostly to my dissatisfaction).

I believe there are times in our lives when we encounter the holy apart from the church, the folded hands, the crackling pages of the Bible. Sometimes, we round a corner and run smack dab into a religious experience like it was a lamppost in the middle of the sidewalk.

The best religious conversions always come in the guise of the everyday. If you are a young impressionable girl, maybe it’s being dazzled by Tom Cruise’s billion-watt smile up on the big screen; if you are a first-year law student, maybe it’s reading—really reading—the First Amendment for the first time; if you are a writer or a reader, maybe it’s stumbling across a writer like John Steinbeck or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or James Joyce on a forgotten shelf of the library. Anything that stops your life in its tracks, takes you by the shoulder, gives you a rough shake, then growls, “No, not that direction! This direction! Follow me.â€?

I can remember the exact moment I rounded the corner and ran smack dab into Flannery O’Connor.

In November 1985, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon enrolled in a course called The American Novel. We’d started with Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, blazed a path through James Fenimore Cooper, continued through Hawthorne and Melville and now, with the end of the term approaching, we charged down the final stretch into the 20th century. The next-to-last book on our reading list was O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away.

I had (and still have) a cheap Signet paperback copy which combined both of the books published in her short lifetime (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away) plus the posthumous collection of short stories (Everything That Rises Must Converge). For some reason, that garish-covered and battered-spined book always stood out from the rest of my course books that semester. For weeks, it sat there on the shelf in the shoebox-sized married student housing into which the university had seen fit to squeeze my wife, my newborn son and I.

For six weeks, I eyed that book warily, never once opening the front cover and getting a taste of what was inside, vowing to wait until we reached that point in the syllabus where we all dove headlong into The Violent Bear It Away. That paperback sat there on the little bookshelf I made from boards and cinderblocks and, I swear to you, sometimes when I tiptoed out to the refrigerator in the middle of the night for a glass of milk, I swear to you, I could hear it humming. Yes, that little book was so vibrant, it hummed. This, of course, made me all the more frightened to peek inside.

But when the day arrived and the professor announced, “Next time, Flannery O’Connor!â€?—his voice tolling like a bell—then I knew the inevitable was upon me.

I turned to page 1 and read:
Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

With that one sentence (yes, one sentence!), so completely packed with necessary information and the promise of even greater things to come, my earth stopped spinning, paused, then started rotating in the opposite direction. My hair stood on end, follicles like exclamation points. Water flowed uphill. Clock hands whirred in a counter-clockwise direction. Somewhere in America, a little old lady helped a Boy Scout across the street.

Saint Paul had nothing on me. When I finally got back on my feet, my eyes still burning, I continued to read about fourteen-year-old Tarwater and his dead grandfather. And I kept on reading until the sun came up and my baby squalled and my wife rose with a groan for another day’s feeding. I wanted to get up and help her, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed with fear and trembling and everything else that takes place in your body when you realize your life is setting out on a new course. My now-wise blood was starting to tingle with bubbles.

The Violent Bear It Away, with all its horror and humor, spoke to me in the deepest onion layer of my soul. It is an odd, shocking novel which begins with a death (the old man, a modern-day, bellowing John the Baptist who raises his grandson to be a prophet) and moves, inch by inch, toward rebirth (that of Tarwater, the reluctant Jonah). It is, among other things, a satire on modern psychology and old-time religion. Most importantly, it is a primer for writers like me on how to wield language like a razor blade.

I sat there, stunned and dry-mouthed, reading The Violent Bear It Away as quickly as I could. O’Connor’s firecracker language seemed to catapult me from that first startling paragraph all the way to the final, blazing-hot words of the novel:
By midnight he had left the road and the burning woods behind him and had come out on the highway once more. The moon, riding low above the field beside him, appeared and disappeared, diamond-bright, between patches of darkness. Intermittently the boy’s jagged shadow slanted across the road ahead of him as if it cleared a rough path toward his goal. His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.

The End. But, really, the beginning of a fresh and green period of my life. Flannery O’Connor had jiggled something loose inside that gland of my brain I call the Inspir-muse, that place that secretes equal parts inspiration and voice-mails from my Muse. The Inspir-muse stretched, yawned, then went straight to work.

One thing you should know…Prior to reading O’Connor, I’d been writing stories—really boring stories—about men and women who stood around and carried on dull conversations. I had no idea who these characters were, these pale cardboard people I created. These earlier fictions were full of a young writer’s mistakes—flashy, self-indulgent language; dialogue full of clichés; climaxes that seemed to end abruptly like bad punch lines. Nothing was coming out right. My Inspir-muse had faulty wiring.

Flannery O’Connor, my greatest teacher, saw to it that my brain corrected itself when she wrote sentences like: The poor girl’s face was blue with acne and Mrs. Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age and His black eyes, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus and descriptions like a rat-colored car and a glare-blue suit. When my eyes encounter writing like that, something large and exciting moves inside me like icebergs calving.

Fueled by what I read in that cheap Signet paperback (I subsequently went through Wise Blood and Everything That Rises Must Converge like flames through a Kleenex factory), I started writing stories filled with oddball characters who did things like vomit in the middle of their baptisms or buy black velvet paintings of Jesus at roadside stands out in the Wyoming desert. For the first time in my life, I was excited about what I was writing and the words just seemed to tumble out unfettered. Best of all, I knew these characters and the terrible, loving, vibrant God who hovered over them.

When, a year later, I discovered her collected essays on writing, Mystery and Manners, it was my second startling revelation. As a young struggling writer and an equally struggling Christian, I treated these essays like they were illuminated manuscripts—especially ones like “The Church and the Fiction Writerâ€? and “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.â€? Flannery seemed to be sitting down at the desk with me, delivering a five-step writing lesson in that shy Southern murmur of hers.

The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience…You have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
—The Fiction Writer and His Country

I had found my Gospel According to Flannery. Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid to write with large and startling figures.

How much of my raised-from-the-dead Inspir-muse was due to Flannery O’Connor? I’d like to think the answer to that is “all of it,â€? but the truth is, she was probably just there at that intersection at the right time, directing my Inspir-muse down a side street and into a better flow of traffic. Maybe I was primed for the Gospel According to Flannery. Who knows?

One thing is for certain, when I read a passage like this, from the story “The Enduring Chillâ€? (in which an invalid pining away in his childhood bedroom sees the Holy Ghost in a water stain), my whole body starts to secrete excitement:

He lay for some time staring at the water stains on the gray walls. Descending from the top molding, long icicle shapes had been etched by leaks and, directly over his bed on the ceiling, another leak had made a fierce bird with spread wings. It had an icicle crosswise in its beak and there were smaller icicles depending from its wings and tail. It had been there since his childhood and had always irritated him and sometimes had frightened him. He had often had the illusion that it was in motion and about to descend mysteriously and set the icicle on his head.

Enduring chill? Hardly. Flannery O’Connor has left me with an enduring warmth, like a tongue of fire licking the air just above my head. show less

No character comes off well in this book, my first foray into the works of Flannery O’Connor, and I believe this is her point.
Mason Tarwater (Old Tarwater) lives in the Southern backcountry and considers himself a religious prophet. He kidnapped his orphaned great-nephew Francis Tarwater as a baby from the child’s uncle Rayber in an effort to bring the child up with his fanatical brand of religion and to save Francis (who prefers being called Tarwater) from Rayber. Rayber, a teacher lives in town and is rearing his mentally disabled son named Bishop. Francis is 14 when his great-uncle dies and he must fulfill Old Tarwater’s final two wishes – to be given a Christian burial and to ensure that Bishop is baptized. The story show more revolves around Tarwater’s brutal struggles to reconcile the fanaticism of Old Tarwater with the strident rationalism of Uncle Rayber and culminates in a brutal reckoning.
Though the book is unwaveringly dark, the writing is engrossing, and the characters are vibrantly written. The story presents us with questions about the nature of good and evil, right and wrong and faith and reason and upon finishing the novel we are no closer to answers than when we started. I couldn’t help but think about today’s environment where strident and self righteous views too often obstruct and frustrate any attempts at exchange of ideas show less