Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“WISE BLOOD” by Flannery O’Connor (first published 1952); “THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY” by Flannery O’Connor (first published 1960)

            Some weeks back on this blog, looking at Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, I referred briefly to other writers of the American South who, like McCarthy, have or had some sort of religious preoccupation. Chief among them was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), whose two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away are drenched in the fervor and wildness of the South’s poor white Protestants (as are many of her short stories for which, among many readers, she is better-known) . Having made this mention, I spent some evenings re-reading O’Connor’s work and once again tasting that strange mixture of sordor and religious fervor.

            Wise Blood, first published in 1952, is the better known of the two novels. In passing only, I note it was made into a very good film by John Huston in 1979, unusual among literary adaptations in that it stuck very closely to the original novel.

Wise Blood is essentially a very simple fable. A man spends his life trying to run away from something, but ends up embracing it. More specifically, a man who spends his life cursing and denying God is finally overwhelmed by God. This is a “hound of heaven” fable.

Having its genesis in a number of separate short-stories O’Connor had written, Wise Blood, though a very short work, is very episodic. Implicitly set just after the Second World War, the novel concerns Hazel Motes, a discharged and embittered serviceman. We are early made aware that, grandson of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, he had a very hard childhood, frequently being chastised and beaten, constantly being told he should be grateful for being redeemed in the Blood of Jesus, and constantly resenting the fact. Finding his post-war home abandoned and his family gone, he heads for a (fictitous) Southern city on a personal mission of enlightenment. He aims to condemn religion as he knows it. But, being Bible-bred and in the South, the only religion he knows is That Old Time Religion. So it is as a “prophet” that he condemns Jesus, on street corners and usually mounted on the bonnet of the broken-down old car he has bought.

Hazel Motes is not an articulate or well-educated man. We piece together his anti-religious creed from statements scattered through the novel. When in the army, he was jeered by soldiers who told him he had no soul; and he “took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw the opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil.” (Chapter 1) The burden of sin weighs so heavily on him that he wants to get rid of it and of any notion of the soul. He wants his world-view to be completely materialist. He believes the idea of sin simply corrupts people, and in one argument he declares “there’s no person a whoremonger who wasn’t something worse first. That’s not the sin, not blasphemy. The sin came before them.” (Chapter 4) In other words, he rejects the notions of Original Sin and of a primal flaw in human beings even while acknowledging them. Speaking of sin simply corrupts people. And if sin doesn’t exist, there’s no need for redemption. The notion of sin itself makes us feel dirty.  “I AM clean. If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean.” (Chapter 5) Also “Jesus is a trick on niggers” (Chapter 4), as religion is only for the gullible. So he tells the crowd on street corners “I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m 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.” (Chapter 6)

Even to corral together these statements is to make this impulsive, bitter and very determined Hazel Motes sound more rational and articulate than he is. Remember, the Bible seems to be the only book he has ever read, and though he denies it, it is the “blood” (i.e. inspiration, impulse, fervor) that drives him. The novel has him developing not by reasoning with others, but in separate interactions with people. You can see how it began as separate short stories.

Hazel wants to violate the codes he was brought up in. He wants to sin as much as he can, and he begins by cohabiting with a prostitute (Mrs Leora Watts) and soaking himself in sex. But, implicitly, this is to accept the very category of sin that he denies. He wants to argue with a blind and disfigured preacher called Asa Hawks, who “blinded himself for Jesus”, but he finds himself more involved with the preacher’s daughter Sabbath Lily Hawks, a scrawny teenager who is hungry for sex and wants to seduce him – and if he is at all attracted to her it is only because he wants to violate her virginity, another blow against the notion of sinfulness. He is sometimes pursued and pestered by a naïve, randy18-year-old called Enoch Emery, who is desperate for friendship and easily latches on to Hazel’s notion of there being nothing but materiality. Indeed, Enoch tries to prove the point to Hazel by gifting him a shrunken human body he has stolen from a museum – a body without a soul. (Another point made in passing – though the novels are very different, Hazel’s connection with naïve 18-year-old Enoch is very like Suttree’s connection with naïve 18-year-old Gene Harrogate in Suttree, and I can’t help feeling that Cormac McCarthy must have read Wise Blood at some time.)

As I read Wise Blood, I often feel I am marching through a minefield of symbols. I could tabulate some of them facilely thus:

Hazel wears a black hat which makes people repeatedly assume that he is a conventional preacher. This points to the fact that he cannot run away from his connection with the religion he denies. Hazel puts a lot of faith in a broken-down, unreliable second-hand car he has bought, and at one stage says that a man with a good car doesn’t need redemption. This suggests a shallow faith in technology and “progress” and their insufficiency as a substitute for religious belief. The shrunken human body Enoch brings to Hazel (and a separate episode concerning a fake ape) suggest what a human being without a soul would look like – merely a material thing. There’s the possibility that Hazel Motes’ name has symbolic significance. He walks in a “haze” of doubt or despair; and he could be one who, as the New Testament says, sees the “mote” in somebody else’s eyes while missing the “beam” in his own. As for the bright white cloud that hangs over Hazel and Sabbath Lily Hawks when she strives to seduce him, and the “tiny point of light” into which Hazel is transformed in the very last sentence of the novel – they are so pregnant with meaning that you can give each a couple of dozen symbolic interpretations.

In the midst of all this, though, Hazel Motes is obsessed, but is also distinguished by his integrity. He is trying to spread the truth as he understands it. His articulated creed is a totally materialist and empirical view of life, a soulless life, but he is honest enough with himself to know that this means “nothing” – nihilism – and a life without meaning. He is not a saint. Indeed (I will not go into the plot details) he becomes a murderer. But he has integrity. He is genuinely outraged by those who pretend to be what they are not – in other words, those who violate the idea of truth. He himself wants something absolute, concrete and clearly-defined. He is disgusted that the blind preacher Asa Hawks refuses to debate with him. In fact he taunts Hawks by saying that if Hawks were a real preacher he would try to convert him. His contempt grows when he discovers Asa Hawks is a fake anyway. Perhaps worse, there is the huckster Onnie Jay Holy, who presumes to offer Hazel tips on how to draw the crowds and who advises “If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.” (Chapter 9) Onnie Jay Holy sets up his own fake mission on the streets, rejoicing in the amount of money he is able to make. This is the temptation of commercialised religion, forebear of televangelists and other such horrors. It disgusts Hazel even more than real religion does because it is so obviously hypocritical – things said by people who don’t really believe them.

Where does all this lead in the arc of the story? Through various disillusionments with his own rebellious creed, it leads Hazel back to the very things he set out to reject. Mortification of the flesh (in the most extreme ways); a quiet and contemplative life which absolutely rejects materialism; an awareness that his life is not his own and is guided by something much bigger than himself; and, of course, to inevitable death.

Have I destroyed this novel for you by so neatly slicing-and-dicing its main ideas? I hope not. It was only when I read the novel’s last chapter (about Hazel’s dealing with his last landlady Mrs Flood) that I saw all the strands of its story being pulled together and a clear pattern emerging. For after my philosophical and religious breakdown of it, its chief effect as you actually read it is of the oddness of it; the Southernness of it; the bizarre, eccentric strangeness of it. In that respect it is “Southern Gothic”.

But for those who don’t see its religious pattern, the story is merely about a psychopathic, self-destructive loner. Years back, coming out of a Film Festival screening of John Huston’s very good film of the novel, I heard one viewer’s intepretation of it as being “just about a psycho.” Yes, you could see it as that if you interpret Hazel Motes as a psychiatric “case”. But it would be to miss the whole point that Flannery O’Connor was making.

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In 1960, just a few years before her premature death from a congenital disease,

 there appeared Flannery O’Connor’s second, and last, novel The Violent Bear It Away. The geographical setting and the theological issues are simlar to those of Wise Blood, but the focus is quite different. While Wise Blood concerns a man trying fruitlessly to run away from God, The Violent Bear It Away stages a clash between fanatical religion and insufficient secularism – a clash resolved only by the grace of God.

As an infant, Francis Marion Tarwater (known simply as Tarwater in most of the novel) has been kidnapped by his crazed and fanatical great-uncle Mason Tarwater, a preacher and “prophet” who has spent time in a psychiatric hospital. They live in an an isolated shack in the backblocks, where Mason keeps Tarwater from any formal schooling, trains him to be a “prophet”, and tells him that his mission is to baptise the mentally-retarded son of his cousin, the heathen (i.e. agnostic) schoolteacher Rayber.  Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Tarwater comes to hate the religion in which he has been raised, and sees its promised rewards as a paltry thing:

 “In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life. Had the bush flamed for Moses, the sun stood still for Joshua, the lions turned aside before Daniel only to prophesy the bread of life? Jesus? He felt a terrible disappointment in that conclusion, a dread that it was true.” (Chapter 1)

And yet unschooled Tarwater is still saturated in that religion. Its hopes and fears are the only categories in which he can think, even as he rationally rejects them.

Tarwater is only fourteen years old when Mason dies. After disposing of his great-uncle’s corpse in a most un-Christian way, Tarwater heads out of the backblocks and into the city, looking to live with Rayber who is the only relative he knows. And here begins the novel’s battle of wills. Tarwater spits and blasphemes against the fundamentalist religion he has been taught, and Rayber clearly thinks he will be a good specimen for “conversion” to his own secular humanism. But Tarwater resists Rayber’s teachings as just another form of indoctrination which, the author implies, they really are. More bafflingly for Rayber, he himself sometimes feels the pull of religion – as in a scene where he finds himself at a pentecostal gathering, is rationally disgusted by the spectacle of a child having been trained to preach, and yet is drawn into what she preaches anyway.

Rayber’s assumption is that his calm reason will easily win over Tarwater, but Tarwater, 14-years-old, inarticulate and only semi-literate, intuits much that is wrong with Rayber’s views and is able to bat them away with uncouth but pithy arguments of his own.

The real catalyst in the novel is Rayber’s mentally-retarded son Bishop. To the utilitarian rationalist Rayber, Bishop serves no purpose. His logic says that the afflicted boy is just a thing, incapable of rational thought and therefore not really human. Indeed he is a disposable thing. Tarwater also resents Bishop because he has been given the “mission” of baptising him, which he refuses to do. Yet every time the adult Rayber and the adolescent Tarwater fiercely despise Bishop, they are thwarted by a totally irrational sense of responsbility and love. This violates Rayber’s anti-religious code of strict rationality: “If , without thinking, he lent himself to it, he would feel suddenly a morbid surge of the love that terrified him – powerful enough to throw him to the ground in an act of idiot praise. It was completely irrational and abnormal.” (Chapter 4)

What Flannery O’Connor is dramatising is the irrational inbreaking of God’s grace. You are held in the hand of God whether you like it or not. The more you kick and protest, like an angry adolescent rebelling against a parent, the more firmly you are held. This has repercussions in what eventually happens with Tarwater’s “mission” to baptise the boy, and with Tarwater himself when his time with Rayber is over.

All brief synopses tidy up and simplify what a good novel is about. This is what I have done here. Once again, as with Wise Blood, this novel presents us with an impoverished and underdeveloped South, where the white characters routinely refer to blacks as “niggers” and where That Old Time Religion has a fearful hold. There are also moments of physical violence – old Mason Tarwater shoots at the welfare people who have come to get the boy he has kidnapped; there are two attempts in the novel to kill a child; and there is an (implied) rape.

Only one part of this novel originally appeared as a short story. Perhaps because of this genesis, The Violent Bear It Away seems to me a far more “finished” novel than Wise Blood. It certainly has a less episodic and more focused plot; one that winds back upon itself so that Flannery O’Connor can introduce anterior events credibly in characters’ thoughts. Like Wise Blood, it does expect readers to pick up its symbols, but there are not as many of them as there are in the earlier novel. In this case, we note that the rationalist Rayber wears a hearing aid, which he can turn off to total silence – which is what he does whenever the word of God challenges him (maybe an analogue for the “invincible ignorance” that Saint Paul mentioned). The voice that speaks in Tarwater’s mind could be the voice of secular rationalism – or of the Devil. Along with all the watery references to baptism, there is also a literal burning bush in the novel’s conclusion.

We have to wrestle with the novel’s title. Its epigraph is “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away.” This is a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 11:12) as rendered in the old Douay (Catholic) translation of the Bible. Among other things, this points to one very obvious fact which will probably already be known to most readers of this blog. Though writing about the Protestant fundamentalists who surrounded her, the Southerner Flannery O’Connor was, lifelong, a devout Catholic, and her tales take extreme forms of Protestant fundamentalism and interpret them in very Catholic ways, especially in the way grace is handled. As for the epigraph itself, it could be interpreted in many ways. Personally, I read it as saying that the “violent” are those who would wish to destroy the kingdom of God, and they are equally religious fanatics who distort the Christian message, and rational secularists who try to suppress the religious impulse even while feeling its reality.

As I said at the head of this review, Flannery O’Connor is better known by some readers for her short stories rather than for her two novels. They appear in two collections, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, which were posthumously gathered together as her Collected Stories, together with some stories she had discarded because she had already woven them into her novels. Now that I am renewing my acquaintance with her work, I may deal with her short stories in a later blog posting.