Customer Reviews

The Violent Bear It Away: A Novel

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I think it's important to correct a common misperception that's been cropping up in the reviews here. I can understand how someone might come to the conclusion that The Violent Bear it Away is an exposure of, or an attack on, religious fanaticism, but I can say with almost absolute certainty that this was not the author's intention. Flannery O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic, and nearly all of her stories (check out especially A Good Man is Hard to Find) carry a very extreme and uncompromising religious message. Everything connected with her - the other stories, her personal correspondence, and the text of Violent itself - suggest that it was meant as, crudely stated, an endorsement of fanaticism; or more accurately, a spiritual call to arms, and an attack of meek secularism. This doesn't mean that the book is only for religious people. Someone reading it from an antifanatic standpoint might well benefit, if only by discovering in the person of the author herself an example of the fanaticism they find so distasteful. A religious reader, though, should not be frightened away by all these reviews suggesting that The Violent is a plea for religious moderation. O'Connor's vision, above all, was radical and unconventional, and for either a religious, an agnostic or an antireligious reader, it presents something to think about.

As for the book itself, I only give it four stars because I think O'Connor's short stories are a better exploration of her themes. In the long form, instead of presenting a more nuanced view of the world, there is only room for more brutality and meanness; which isn't neccesarily a bad thing, but which isn't a good thing either. I would reccommend either of O'Connor's short story collections before The Violent, but for a fan of her work, The Violent is indispensable.

This book is probably O'Connor's finest work of fiction. The story itself is much stronger than the more highly acclaimed Wise Blood, as are its characters. I find it interesting that one reviewer referred to disliking the grotesque characters, while admiring O'Connor's use of symbolism and metaphor. One who has read O'Connor knows that there are few characters in the author's opus that could not be classified as grotesque. As far as her use of symbolism, one must certainly recognize that O'Connor's characters were the most obvious manifestations of her symbolism and metaphor. As she herself said, when drawing for a child, one makes the figure overly-clear. Also, while this book, might seem to tread between rational humanism and religion, the end finds O'Connor squarely on the side of the seemingly tyrannical, certainly unbalanced uncle. The story is funny, full of observation and commentary, and endowed with the wisdom of one who has seen the world and is on their way out, as O'Connor was by the time the Violent Bear it Away was written. In short, no library is complete without this work-the paramount achievement of one of the century's greatest authors.

What a compelling, gripping book, that I first read in September of 1996 and promised myself to read again someday. It has lost none of its power for me. Almost a thriller. After about halfway through, I simply couldn't put it down - again. The two main characters, Rayber and Tarwater, mesmerizing. But to correct a misconception - this book was published in 1960. And since Flannery was born in 1925, she was 40 when it first came out, a matter of simple math. Not 30, as one reviewer noted. She did not even complete the first draft until 1959.
About bible-belt southern poor, that, being from the South, I recognize and know. These people are not as far-fetched as many might think. Yet it is such an unlikely plot for such an incredible read.
Flannery, a life-long staunch Catholic, is not at all satirizing here. Quite plainly nature in the novel is used as a kind of sacrament, and Tarwater (the boy) does indeed emerge as the prophet from the wilderness (Powderhead). She sets Rayber, the intellectual humanist and rationalist against both the Tarwaters. Rayber is total commitment to disbelief; old Tarwater a total committment to faith. In the novel, there is no middle course. But Rayber's is the way of self-deception and self-destruction according to Flannery. In the end, he just collapses and that is all the further we hear of him. But Tarwater is given, so he comes to realize, a vision of his prophecy that he cannot deny, no matter what the cost to himself. In another time these people would not have been looked upon as freaks, mad and compulsive, certainly not in Biblical times.
Rayber's love for his son just dissolves, while Tarwater's vision for his nephew, young Tarwater, takes wing.
Of course, there is one staggering problem - that the boy Tarwater commits a murder on his way to salvation. Flannery seem not to consider this as of much importance. What exactly is Bishop to Rayber and the boy? I'm not sure. But I do know that this book is not easily forgotten, nor the questions it raises. Is it that Rayber, by constantly fighting against forces in himself, and thus denying his true nature, collapses, while the boy finally gives in? Read it and ask yourself.

The Violent Bear It Away was O'Connor's second and last novel. Gripping and sickening, it tells the story of a strong-willed, self-declared prophet in a Georgia backwater, his rationalist nephew struggling to free himself from the influence of his uncle's misguided zeal, and his reluctant successor grandnephew, all of them working out their destiny frenetically and enthusiastically, with terrifying consequences.

The world of this novel is a place where familial relations exist, but appear as if in funhouse mirror images. The odd circumstance is that apparently almost everyone is someone's uncle. Prophet Mason Tarwater is schoolteacher Rayber's uncle. Rayber is, in turn the uncle of prophet-in-training Francis Tarwater, who has lived all his life with his great uncle Mason. These avuncular relationships approximate and seem to replace the paternal ones, but inadequately. And mothers qua mothers are absent entirely: women are only referred to in conversation, never seen in the actual novel, and the characters can only see the women who are mothers as whores or as confused women on a voyage of self-discovery. "Mother" is not in our characters' lexicon.

Reflecting this, the actions of the Tarwaters reveal a distorted and truncated trinitarianism, in which Father and Son are subsumed into the Spirit and vanish, leaving blind enthusiasm outside of relationship and fellow feeling. Similarly, Rayber is possessed of an impersonal drive to rational goodness, to the betterment of his fellow man. His uncle rejects him because he insists on holding all things and persons in the world in abstract judgment within his mind; both elder and younger Tarwaters refuse to let Rayber place them "inside his head," to reduce them from acting subjects to intellectual objects. Rayber paradoxically struggles to deny his natural affections for his retarded son Bishop. He seems capable of loving only in the abstract, indeed, to be following some rationalist maxim to stamp out the irrational wellsprings of love for his insufficiently gifted son.

It's powerful work. The first two parts in particular are tight and arresting leading to a tragic climax. The third part is somewhat cryptic. I have no idea how O'Connor intends us to take Francis Tarwater's resolution at the end of the novel, but that's a strength. This is a novel to be read again.

John Huston created a movie adaptation of O'Connor's first novel, Wise Blood, which I saw many years ago. Of directors working today, someone like Robert Duvall seems well-suited temperamentally and artistically for realizing O'Connor's terrifying and befuddling visions. However it happens, Flannery O'Connor's work deserves to be brought to life for another generation of viewers and readers.

The Violent Bear it Away is a disturbing example of the unique gothic tradition of America's Southern writers. The story centers around young Francis Tarwater, nephew of a self-styled/self-proclaimed prophet, Mason Tarwater. Mason's purpose for living is to prepare Francis for his own prophetic ministry. However, Francis has a very different idea of what a prophetic ministry should be like. Hence, the conflict of the story is contained in Francis's trying to divest himself of his uncle's influence, an attempt that the story interprets as rebellion, which the Bible states is as witchcraft. Thus, the reader can expect young Tarwater to pay an awful price for his rebellion
Like almost all of O'Connor's stories, The Violent Bear it Away is essentially a tale of how the supernatural intrudes and imposes its will on the lives of ordinary people. The story is further given a divine theme by frequent symbolic elements, such as Francis's hat being something like a halo, and another child in the story serving as either an angelic or Christ-figure. The story even opens with an African-Amerian man erecting a cross at a grave, a scene reminiscent of the Biblical Simon of Cyrene being pressed into carrying the cross of Jesus on the way to Golgotha. Occasionally, the supernatural is not fully explained by the story, and there are some unanswered questions when the story ends, the main question concerning the reality of young Tarwater's mysterious, almost Svengalli-like friend.
The narrative structure of the story is very interesting, as O'Connor allows each character to give his own accounts and assessments of the same events, a technique that is somewhat similar to that used by William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying and Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter.
As O'Connor's second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away represents the maturation of her technique. The narration resembles that of her first novel, Wise Blood, but shows the refinement wrought by the several years of thought between the two works. The story is easy to follow despite its several twists and its couple of very disturbing scenes.
Although not my favorite work by Flannery O'Connor (her short stories are much better), The Violent Bear it Away is an essential read for anyone wanting to understand Southern Literature in general and the Southern Gothic tradition in particular. And even if the reader isn't interested in such literary specialties, The Violent Bear it Away is a good enough story to stand on its own.

O'Connor second and last novel is a sometimes comic yet ultimately tragic novel about a young Southern boy's spiritual development. Francis Tarwater, who is fourteen years old, has been sheltered from society in the Alabama boondocks by his great-uncle, Old Tarwater, who is grooming the boy to be a somewhat reluctant prophet, espousing a unique hybrid of countrified Christianity.

The novel's plot is simultaneously bizarre in event and puzzling in intent, and it is heavy with Old Testament imagery. At the opening of the novel, Old Tarwater has died, leaving Francis with the task of burying him. The boy abandons his assignment and flees to the city, searching for an atheistic uncle, George Rayber, who had spurned Old Tarwater's lessons decades earlier. During his life, Old Tarwater had been obsessed with need to baptize Bishop's mentally handicapped son, and Francis wavers between the need to complete his great-uncle's mission and his reluctance to follow in the old man's footsteps.

The bulk of the story, however, concerns the struggle between Francis and his uncle George--between metaphysical belief and secular knowledge. George is a parody of the arrogance of modern thinking; he is wedded to the belief that humans are shaped by their environment and by the atoms of which they are composed. Francis, on the other hand, is a portrait of the mysterious and even violent nature of religious passion.

Scholars and a legion of the author's fans have pointed out (correctly) that O'Connor did not mean Francis's character to be a satirical depiction of religious fanaticism. Yet the many critics and students who have mistaken both Francis and Old Tarwater as caricatures underscore the novel's greatest weakness; the social context has run away from the author. Even in 1960, when the novel was published, the two "hicks" seemed vaguely preposterous and dangerously harebrained to many reviewers (much to O'Connor's chagrin), and today's readers have an even more difficult time seeing these two-would be prophets as anything more than backwoods stereotypes.

Yet this tension between the author's intentions and the reader's reception hardly diminishes the power of O'Connor's vision; if anything, its accidental parody of fundamentalism offsets her deliberate (and undeniably unfair) satire of secularism. As in her other work, O'Connor is exploring the difficulty of seeking (and of finding) spiritual deliverance, especially since the path to salvation often leads the seeker away from the individuality of his or her own identity. The struggle that O'Connor portrays--between religion and secularism--is surely as present and relevant today as it is was fifty years ago.

I am new to Flannery O'Connor. My introduction to her was through popular culture. She was mentioned in an interview with Bono and Sufjan Stevens adores her. And who hasn't heard of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," even if they haven't read it? Regardless, I don't read a lot of fiction, and am by no means a literary critic, but some thoughts follow.

I can't say why I started with this book and not "A Good Man...", other than that I wanted to start with something that was not as familiar. Having read nothing about the book prior to reading it (which is the best way to experience it), I came away utterly astonished at what I had read. To echo another reviewer's comments, sometimes it becomes excruciatingly painful to continue reading, but I was so drawn into the story that I couldn't put it down. I knew of O'Connor's penchant for shock, but there was one event in particular that I was absolutely unprepared for, and I'll let the reader discover what that was.

I'm very impressed with O'Connor's crisp style, which is intelligent yet accessible and capable of vividly portraying the internal transformation of her characters. She is also gifted in her manipulation of her characters' faults to serve the drama. One example of this genius was revealed when I found out why Rayber had a hearing aid--not why he needed one, but why the story needed him to have one. It was a masterful stroke.

My only complaint is that Frances, at age 14, seemed far more sure of himself and the world around him and what he wanted and didn't want than are most real children his age. In that regard, he was a little unbelievable, but it didn't take too much away from my enjoyment of this haunting, beautiful, and astonishing novel.

O'Connor defended the grotesque element in her fiction this way:

"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."

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the
violent bear it away.
-Matthew 11:12

Flannery O'Connor wrote with one of the most distinctive voices in American Literature; a kind of grotesque amalgam of Jonathan Edwards, Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Faulkner. She perceived the world in starkly Manichean terms, as a struggle between the forces of Light and Dark, Good and Evil. The Violent Bear it Away is a psychomachia--literally a battle for the soul--the story of a backwoods Southern boy named Francis Marion Tarwater (see The Violent Bear it Away and The Bible by Angela Lucey for more on this). The boy's great uncle, an Old Testament style patriarch, kidnapped him away from an uncle, George Rayber, and has raised him to be a prophet of God. Upon his great uncle's death, Tarwater rejects the prophetic mission and heads to the city to live with his uncle, who tries to wean the boy away from the teachings of the great uncle. Through a series of increasingly violent actions Tarwater is eventual driven back to the woods and a final acceptance of God and his own role in God's plans.

This is powerful stuff, O'Connor felt that exaggeration and caricature were more likely to reach a modern audience than more subtle styles ever could. Combine that with her vision of violence as a sort of crucible which forces the individual to make a final choice between Good and Evil, and you've got the makings of a truly disturbing fiction. The book will surely not appeal to all tastes, but it is undeniably affecting and thought provoking.

GRADE: B-

Fourteen-year-old Francis Marion Tarwater has been raised by his great-uncle Mason Tarwater, a backwoods prophet. Mason keeps young Tarwater on a fairly straight-and-narrow path, at least according to his version of the straight and narrow. However, when Mason dies, a "stranger" appears in young Tarwater's mind with a point of view very different from Mason's. He suggests that Tarwater ignore Mason's burial wishes and go live his own life. There are only two things that Tarwater can do with his life, after all, says the stranger. "Jesus or the devil," Tarwater responds. The stranger contradicts him: "No no no...there ain't no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own self-experience. I know that for a fact. It ain't Jesus or the devil. It's Jesus or you." Tarwater listens, drinks himself into a stupor, and then attempts to burn Mason's body along with their house. Finally he hitchhikes to a distant town where his uncle Rayber, an atheistic schoolteacher, lives.

Though living in defiance of his religious upbringing, Tarwater instantly sees the staleness of Rayber's city-bred atheism and reacts by despising Rayber along with Rayber's retarded son Bishop. His dislike of Bishop, however, is a result of Mason's prediction that Tarwater's first mission will be to baptize the child. He sees himself in Bishop's empty eyes, "trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus....The Lord out of dust had created him...and set him in a world of loss and fire all to baptize on idiot child that He need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish." But Tarwater is incapable of shrugging off his calling. Eventually he decides that he will free himself by destroying it and doing as the stranger, whom he eventually calls a friend, suggests. I will refrain from describing exactly what happens so as not to spoil the plot for any potential readers, but suffice it to say that Tarwater fulfills Mason's prophecy almost by accident.

Rebelling even more, Tarwater deserts Rayber and attempts to hitchhike back to Mason's homestead. But the second man he rides with, an odd-looking fellow with violet eyes who drives a lavender and cream-colored car, turns out to be a predator. Wanting to appear tough, Tarwater accepts the whiskey the man offers him, not knowing that it has been spiked. The man victimizes the unconscious Tarwater off-stage in a secluded patch of woods and abandons him. Upon waking, Tarwater is furious, and he recognizes that his "friend" and the predator are one and the same person--the devil. (If you doubt whether they are the same, watch the color imagery carefully. The color purple characterizes the predator and eventually Tarwater's "friend.")

As a Catholic herself, O'Connor is not intending to criticize or mock religion by the extremism of her characters; instead she draws a larger-than-life portrait so that modern eyes, clouded by humanism, postmodernism, and several other "isms," cannot gloss over her message. The dominant theme of "The Violent Bear It Away" is revealed by Tarwater's "friend" in the original exchange just after Mason's death: there are only two paths in life, Jesus or the devil. And the devil intends to destroy us. Living for self is a mere illusion.

I couldn't have said it better.