The Violent Bear It Away

The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2018

Flannery O'Connor doesn't make it easy to like her characters. Protagonist Francis Tarwater vacillates between the obsessive religious dogma of his great-uncle Mason and the atheistic revolt of his uncle Rayber, and isn't sympathetic in either mindset. Rayber and Mason are equally intolerant and unreasoning, coming from opposite sides, and Francis holds the same flaws. His faith is a compulsion, and his atheism puts him at war with himself. It's a morality tale, but one that almost excludes the possibility of goodness.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2013
National Book Award

According to the Wikipedia page for one of the stories in this collection, Flannery O'Connor once said:

 "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

The collection contains stories about a family getting murdered by a serial killer, a 5-year-old who drowns himself, a father who so neglects his son that the child hangs himself, a one-armed man who abandons a mute girl at a diner, and many more. It's not hard to see why most would categorize them as "hard, hopeless, and brutal."

"Grace" is a difficult theological concept as it is (as defined by the Catholic Church), "free and undeserved." It's easy to feel that the central characters in O'Connor's stories are "undeserved." They are frequently short-sighted and act against themselves and their best interests, usually with tragic results.

O'Connor generally does not portray the artists in her stories favorably. In modern America, we often value the independent mind and spirit, the iconoclast, the maverick. O'Connor does not share this view. One example is "The Partridge Festival," where a young would-be writer returns to the hometown he disdains out of a fascination with a spree killer, who he sees as "a man who would not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors." But when he meets the man, he finds a lunatic. He runs from his true calling, sales:

Selling was the only thing he had proved himself good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.

It's hard not to wonder how O'Connor felt about her own vocation, especially considering how laborious she found the writing process, as described by editor Robert Giroux in the introduction. Did she forsake some more natural grace? Or did she feel she was doing God's will with her writing? Maybe she was uncertain - one memorable story, "Parker's Back" tells of a man who is inspired to impress his very Christian wife by getting a large tattoo of Jesus on his back, only to have her throw him out of the house for idolatry. This is not an easy set of stories to read, and it sounds like it was equally difficult for O'Connor to write.

Wise Blood

Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2012

What a weird book.  I must have uttered that phrase aloud a dozen times while reading Wise Blood, and thought it to myself at least twice as often.  It's not that it's complex structurally or features bizarre phrasing or supernatural occurrences; it's the basic behavior of its characters.  Everyone in the story is odd, unlikeable, hypocritical, terrible at communicating, lost, and lonely.  There is a lot of humor in the story - I laughed out loud a few times - but it is often at the characters' expense.  The prime example is when Enoch Emery shakes hands with a gorilla and poignantly realizes that "it was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city," then immediately after discovers it's just a man in a suit, a man who tells Enoch to "go to hell."

This is the second book for the Yale class on post-World War II American novels, and it is an interesting study.  Flannery O'Connor suffuses the novel with symbolism.  Religion is the most obvious; protagonist Hazel Motes' theological struggle is the central conflict in the book, and there are symbols of Jesus, God, The Holy Spirit, the cross, etc., everywhere he looks.  Sight is another big symbol: glasses, blindness, eyes are everywhere.  Professor Hungerford argues that the novel can be read through the prism of Southern racism or sexism, and that body parts are often described as having an agency apart from the person they are connected to.  Bottom line: there's a ton of subtext and context here.

The thematic element I latched on to was the role of faith in the story.  Motes rejects his Christian upbringing, but rather than turning into a doubting agnostic, he becomes emphatically atheist.  He proselytizes his nihilism from the roof of his car outside movie theaters.  His rejection of God is characterized by an absolute and unyielding faith in nothing.  He sins and blasphemes out of a conviction that there is no sin or blasphemy.  Yet he shows faith in other things, notably his car, which he believes to be a superior automobile despite unrelenting evidence that it is a lemon.  Faith is crucial to the other characters, too: Enoch Emery has faith in own "wise blood" and is driven by his instincts to undertake endeavors he doesn't rationally understand.  Sabbath has a kind of perverse faith in sin and blasphemy.  Her father Asa is defined by his lack of faith; at his moment of testing he was found wanting.  Haze's landlady Mrs. Flood has a mundane but unshakable belief that she is being taken advantage of even when it becomes clear that is impossible.  Each character is defined and shaped by his or her faith (or lack thereof) in the unseen and unknowable, whether that takes a Christian form or some other.