The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel
by Flannery O'Connor

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Book Reviews of The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel

Book Review: Grotesque?
Summary: 5 Stars

"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."

O'Connor is certainly a "novelist with Christian concerns." Some of her early reviewers misread her as satirizing her protagonists, in the manner of Erskine Caldwell's THE JOURNEYMAN. Nothing could be further from her intention. In THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY (VBIA), for example, she says that she if 100% on Mason Tarwater's side; that is, on the side of a violent old man, a self-styled backwoods prophet, who had been locked up four years in a mental institution.

Francis Tarwater's urban uncle Rayber sometimes experiences an "unhealthy" surge of absolute love, and with it, "a rush of longing to have to have the old man's [Mason's] eyes-insane, fish-colored, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured-turned on him once again." O' Connor sees Mason as a true prophet, in the line the equally mad OT prophets-Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, etc. And she shares his insane vision of "a world transfigured"; ie, the Kingdom of God. Jesus himself may not have been a comfortable person to be around.

An interesting aspect of O'Connor's fiction is that she was a devout Catholic, yet Catholicism and Catholics play only a very small part in her fiction-and none at all in VBIA. She wrote about what she knew about, which was Southern evangelism. Indeed, in VBIA, no church is featured, and only once do we see Tarwater happening into a store-front church. Other than this, there is no churchgoing. The Christianity of her characters is a difficult, lonely one.

The psychological structure and center of VBIA, like that of WISE BLOOD and many of the stories, is the protagonist's resistance to vocation. Perhaps O'Connor would agree with Heraclitus that "character is fate," that is, that our true vocation is programmed deep within us. Tarwater expressed this in the trope "seeds dropped in the blood." The mark of one's true vocation seems to be the calling we fight hardest against. Rayber wages a successful fight against his vocation; Tarwater, an unsuccessful one.

The thematic center of the novel, as I see it, is the passage dealing with Rayber and divine love:

"For the most part Rayber lived with him [his retarded son Bishop] without being painfully aware of his presence but the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity. It was only a touch of the curse that lay in his blood.

"His normal way of looking at Bishop was as an X signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God, but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of an equation that required no further solution--except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. . . .

"He was not afraid of love in general. He knew the value of it and how it could be used. He had seen it transform in cases where nothing else had worked, such as with his poor sister. None of this had the least bearing on his situation. The love that would overcome him was of a different order entirely. It was not the kind that could be used for the child's improvement or his own. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all-demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. . . ."

For O'Connor, God's love is "imperious and all-demanding," and "exists only to be itself."

Summary of The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel

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