A Southern Allegory
The Violent Bear It Away.
by Flannery O’Connor.
Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy. 243 pp. $3.75.
The Violent Bear It Away, second novel of the remarkable young Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, is about people whose psychopathology can never for a moment be mistaken for anything else, so that from the outset it is free to communicate to us on other levels, to take hold of our imaginations in the manner of myth or parable or allegory, to make its own connections with the world in which we live. Whether the novel successfully exercises this freedom is another matter. Its characters and the world they live in—the last outposts of unregenerate Protestantism—seem so bizarre, irrelevant, and remote that one is tempted to dismiss the book as a virtuoso fantasy in the Southern “gothic” mode. But there is something about the literary gift of Miss O’Connor that holds one back from so easy an exit. She is a writer whose dedication to the craft of fiction, and to an evocation of the atavistic. experiences of a vanishing rural breed, is so relentless and intense that there is no question she intends more than we are able to receive. What her intentions are may never be available to us in any immediate and lucid form, but they are felt, nonetheless.
The novel focuses upon a few days in the life of a fourteen-year-old orphan boy called Tarwater, whose great-uncle, a self-appointed “prophet” who has reared him in the backwoods of Tennessee, has just died at the breakfast table. The boy, who has been raised “to expect the Lord’s call himself,” begins digging a grave, and then is interrupted by two Negroes who come to buy some of the old man’s moonshine. Tarwater goes to the still to fetch it, gets drunk himself instead, and passes out. After nightfall he rouses, sets fire to the house (in which he thinks his great-uncle’s corpse still sits), and flees. He then hitches a ride to the nearest town and winds up at the house of his uncle Rayber, an atheist schoolteacher who lives with his idiot son. Rayber has been his great-uncle’s direst enemy, and his idiot boy the object of the old man’s fiercest obsession: to kidnap and baptize him—a “duty” he has enjoined Tarwater to fulfill should he not do so himself. The boy stays with Rayber just long enough to translate the inscrutable conflict that has taken hold of him into an act of violence: he drowns the idiot, and as he does so finds himself performing the baptismal rites learned from his great-uncle.
Stunned into yet deeper stupefaction by what he has done, Tarwater then strikes out for home territory. He hitches a ride with a homosexual, who tenders him drink, sedately ravishes him after the boy has passed out, and leaves him naked in the woods with his clothes piled neatly beside him. When Tarwater comes to and perceives what has happened, he burns the leaves and bushes at the profaned spot and then sets out for his backwoods clearing on foot. When he finally reaches the charred house he discovers that the old man was properly buried before he set fire to it by one of the Negroes who came for liquor. In “a final revelation” Tarwater beholds his dread destiny, understands that he has at last been called by the Lord, and goes forth toward the city to meet “the fate that awaited him.”
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Behind the gross topography of the plot, Miss O’Connor gives us a close squint at her characters—and from a perspective that has a marked tendency to favor the double image. Thus, when Tarwater is digging the old man’s grave, all his rebellious and “rational” impulses materialize into the hallucination of another person standing at his side—a “stranger” who becomes a “faithful friend,” a “wise voice,” a “mentor.” Tarwater’s relation to his double, this other self, refers of course to the traditional conception of man’s dualism of his being half angel, half devil; and things go pretty much his “friend’s” way—until the murder is done. Then the boy begins to perceive him as sinister, as “his adversary”; and after the rape, he becomes aware that he had recognized this adversary in the person of his homosexual ravisher. Later, on a hill overlooking his great-uncle’s place, this “counselor” returns again to tempt him with freedom from bondage to “the life the old man had prepared for him.” But the boy, fresh from the outrage of having been violated, repulses him, “making a rising wall of fire between him and the grinning presence.” “Burned clean” of his demon, Tarwater thinks he is free to live his own life—until he discovers the old man’s grave.
During the few days Tarwater is with him, the novel’s focus shifts to his uncle Rayber. One can scarcely avoid the impression that in Rayber Miss O’Connor means to represent not only a more elaborate version of the boy’s personal devil, but also a grotesque view of one of the horrors of the modern world. Rayber, supposed to be a thoroughly secularized type, feels himself “divided in two—a violent and a rational self.” His “rational” half is the “expert on [psychological] testing” who thinks in the jargon of the social worker and wants to reduce the boy to “a piece of information inside his head.” His other half is “the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made.” The most irrational aspect of his split, we learn, is a “secret affliction” which attacks him as a “horrifying love” for his idiot son, “a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity.” The child has always resembled the old man, the “prophet,” we are told, by whom Rayber himself was kidnapped and baptized at the age of seven—an event to which he refers as “his own childhood’s seduction.” In Tarwater, too, Rayber sees “his own imprisoned image,” and is driven to wrest him from “the old man’s ghostly grasp.” At every turn, what Miss O’Connor has made of Rayber’s divided self is quite devastating; every representation of what he takes to be his rationality reveals to us another monstrous irrationality: “He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance, he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”
What seems to lie at the heart of all this dualism and image-splitting and spiritual tug-of-war is an elaborate fantasy of what one can only call homosexual incest. The language of the novel is penetrated with images that suggest it. Tarwater is afraid of the “seeds” his great-uncle has planted in him, which “might strike some day” and subject him to the “calling.”
It was as if he were afraid that if he let his eye rest for an instant longer than was needed to place something—a spade, a hoe, the mule’s hind quarters before his plow, the red furrow under him—that the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and terrifying. . . . He did all he could to avoid this threatened intimacy of creation.
He senses Rayber, too, as someone who wants to get inside him, to expose and violate his most private parts. The old man himself was once outraged by Rayber when after living with him for three months he discovered that “‘all the time he was. . . . Taking secret tests on me, his own kin, crawling into my soul through the back door.’” Rayber himself feels he has never gotten rid of the old man’s “seeds,” and is aroused by Tarwater to a desire to avenge his own early “seduction” by “saving” the boy and shaping him in his own image. And Tarwater, thinking himself purged at last of the insidious invasions of both these men, finds himself literally raped by someone he takes to be the “stranger-friend,” his other self, who in turn bears unmistakable resemblances to Rayber. Finally, the boy is driven to submit to what he was most trying to escape, the old man himself. In his last ecstasy Tarwater feels the “seeds opening one at a time in his blood”: the impregnation burgeons and he can no longer deny its fact. Thus he is taken over and seduced, in these symbolic ways, by all his known kin—by the old man, by Rayber, even by himself.
But in drawing attention to this strain in the novel I do not mean to suggest that it is really (i.e., surreptitiously) about incest. The Violent Bear It Away is fundamentally about Tarwater’s conflict over the question of his identity—which is tantamount to his “destiny”—and all its evocation of incestuous dread and longing, in conjunction with its character-splitting and dualism, informs that conflict. Tarwater is a boy who doesn’t know who he is, who doesn’t belong to himself, who is a battlefield for the warring identities of the old man and Rayber. Possessed by both of them, he is struggling to wrench himself free, to expel them from inside him (his very name is the name of a purgative, and he literally vomits and starves himself as his conflict intensifies). He is engaged in a desperate and doomed attempt to find a third, a separate, an independent self.
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This way of dealing with the problem of identity—an implication that at its roots are incest fantasies—may impress us as a device suited only to Miss O’Connor’s very peculiar and morbidly eccentric characters. On second thought, however, it strikes me as having some relevance to the “religious” origins of the problem, even as we experience it today. One of the distinguishing features of Protestantism has been its belief in direct, private, and intimate connection with God. (“Nearer My God to Thee” is one of its cherished hymns; “to walk and talk with Jesus” one of its pleasantest pastimes; and even the popular song in America has recently included “religious” ballads that sound very like erotic yearnings toward God and Christ.) At the same time, however, Protestantism has always been identified with, if not actually held responsible for, the new social organizations which have issued in what we call “modern man”—man alienated from himself and others. Furthermore, Protestantism has long been associated with modern man’s attempt to be “self-made,” to create himself, to become, so to speak, his own father—an aspiration that suggests limitless possibilities for getting itself mixed up somewhere along the dark psychic line with the kind of homosexual, incestuous fantasy that Miss O’Connor insinuates into her novel.
How literally are we to take all this? In some sense, I believe, Miss O’Connor takes it literally herself and wants her reader to as well. The kind of Protestant experience she depicts is above all a literal one; for the fundamentalist there is nothing symbolic about the Book of Revelation—the beast with seven heads and ten horns is as palpable to him as the unicorn in the garden turned out to be. What Miss O’Connor seems to be saying in The Violent Bear It Away is that the primitive Protestant experience is a breaking loose into consciousness and activity of fantasies which can be recognized as unconscious components of the modern experiences of alienation and self-creation—and that the very primitiveness and literalness of that experience constitute its modernity. It is Miss O’Connor’s brilliant, if oblique, way of seeing that the unleashing of the unconscious which Protestantism represents has largely shaped the perilous conditions of existence in the modern world.
Yet for all its quasi-allegorical, fantastic brilliance, The Violent Bear It Away doesn’t quite persuade us to suspend our disbelief. Kafka, one recalls, also wrote out of “pathological” fantasies, and often assimilated them to a theological point of view. But it was Kafka’s genius to use this fantastic material as if it were common, ordinary experience, to establish the grotesque and incredible in the rather banal and matter-of-fact context which made them seem an integral part of it. Miss O’Connor’s fantasies, on the other hand, come at us too abruptly, too nakedly, too literally from the realm of the unconscious; and therefore it is as if her characters are strangers from a foreign land, without an emissary to translate their story into the language of the kind of experience we understand.
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