Flannery O'Connor (Bloom's Modern Critical Views), New Edtion

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views

Flannery O’connor New Edition

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor—New Edition Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informa­tion storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Flannery O’Connor / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed.    p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-60413-589-3   1. O’Connor, Flannery—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature— United States—History—20th century. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Series.   PS3565.C57Z66784 2009   813'.54—dc22 2009016388 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover designed by Takeshi Takahashi Printed in the United States of America IBT IBT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents

Editor’s Note

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Introduction 1 Harold Bloom “Coming unalone”: Gesture and Gestation in Faulkner and O’Connor Philip M. Weinstein

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Apocalypse of Self, Resurrection of the Double: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away Suzanne Morrow Paulson Intellectuals and Would-Be Artists Laurence Enjolras The Action of Mercy Joyce Carol Oates

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43

“Backwards to Bethlehem”: Evangelicalism in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood Timothy P. Caron The Prophet and the Word in the Desert Richard Giannone

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Contents

Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O’Connor’s Vision of the World to Come 103 Ralph C. Wood Flannery O’Connor: “Funny Because It Is Terrible” Michael Dunne O’Connor and the Body: Incarnation, Redemptive Suffering, and Evil John D. Sykes Jr. Chronology

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Contributors

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Bibliography

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Acknowledgments Index

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Editor’s Note

My introduction, much disputed by some of O’Connor’s more pious admirers, expresses unmixed aesthetic admiration for The Violent Bear It Away and the best of the short stories, while observing that her professed Catholic orthodoxy is far less prevalent in her work than is the ancient Gnostic heresy. Faulkner, her prime precursor, is juxtaposed with O’Connor by Philip M. Weinstein, while Suzanne Morrow Paulson studies the figure of the double in The Violent Bear It Away. Laurence Enjolras chronicles some of O’Connor’s ironical portraits of mock-intellectuals, after which Joyce E. Carol Oates finds in The Artificial Nigger one of O’Connor’s visions of divine grace. The role of evangelical religion is traced in Wise Blood by Timothy P. Caron, while Richard Giannone depicts the Tarwaters, uncle and nephew, as the prophets of The Violent Bear It Away. Ralph C. Wood emphasizes the authentically apocalyptic element in O’Connor, after which Michael Dunne uncovers what I would call a Jansenist strain in her violent comedy. In a closing essay, John D. Sykes Jr. meditates on O’Connor’s visions of redemptive suffering as our pathway to sharing the incarnation of Christ.

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H arold B loom

Introduction

A

professedly Roman Catholic prose romance begins with the death of an eighty-four-year-old southern American Protestant, self-called prophet, and professional moonshiner, as set forth in this splendidly comprehensive sentence: Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

Flannery O’Connor’s masterwork, The Violent Bear It Away, ends with the fourteen-year-old Tarwater marching toward the city of destruction, where his own career as prophet is to be suffered: Intermittently the boy’s jagged shadow slanted across the road ahead of him as if it cleared a rough path toward his goal. His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.





Harold Bloom

In Flannery O’Connor’s fierce vision, the children of God, all of us, always are asleep in the outward life. Young Tarwater, clearly O’Connor’s surrogate, is in clinical terms a borderline schizophrenic, subject to auditory hallucinations in which he hears the advice of an imaginary friend who is overtly the Christian Devil. But clinical terms are utterly alien to O’Connor, who accepts only theological namings and unnamings. This is necessarily a spiritual strength in O’Connor, yet it can be an aesthetic distraction also, since The Violent Bear It Away is a fiction of preternatural power and not a religious tract. Rayber, the antagonist of both prophets, old and young Tarwater, is an aesthetic disaster, whose defects in representation alone keep the book from making a strong third with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. O’Connor despises Rayber and cannot bother to make him even minimally persuasive. We wince at his unlikely verbal mixture of popular sociology and confused psychology, as even Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor’s partisan, is compelled to admit: Her weaknesses—a lack of perfect familiarity with the terminology of the secular sociologists, psychologists, and rationalists she often casts as adversary figures, and an evident weighting of the scales against them all—are present in the character of Rayber (who combines all three categories).

One hardly believes that a perfect familiarity with the writings, say, of David Riesman, Erik Erikson, and Karl Popper would have enabled O’Connor to make poor Rayber a more plausible caricature of what she despised. We remember The Violent Bear It Away for its two prophets and particularly young Tarwater, who might be called a Gnostic version of Huckleberry Finn. What makes us free is the Gnosis, according to the most ancient of heresies. O’Connor, who insisted upon her Catholic orthodoxy, necessarily believed that what makes us free is baptism in Christ, and for her the title of her novel was its most important aspect, since the words are spoken by Jesus himself: But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

Introduction



I have quoted the King James Version of Matthew 11: 9–12, where “and the violent take it by force” is a touch more revealing than O’Connor’s Catholic version, “and the violent bear it away.” For O’Connor, we are back in or rather never have left Christ’s time of urgency, and her heart is with those like the Tarwaters, who know that the kingdom of heaven will suffer them to take it by force: The lack of realism would be crucial if this were a realistic novel or if the novel demanded the kind of realism you demand. I don’t believe it does. The old man is very obviously not a Southern Baptist, but an independent, a prophet in the true sense. The true prophet is inspired by the Holy Ghost, not necessarily by the dominant religion of his region. Further, the traditional Protestant bodies of the South are evaporating into secularism and respectability and are being replaced on the grass roots level by all sorts of strange sects that bear not much resemblance to traditional Protestantism—Jehovah’s Witnesses, snake-handlers, Free Thinking Christians, Independent Prophets, the swindlers, the mad, and sometimes the genuinely inspired. A character has to be true to his own nature and I think the old man is that. He was a prophet, not a church-member. As a prophet, he has to be a natural Catholic. Hawthorne said he didn’t write novels, he wrote romances; I am one of his descendants.

O’Connor’s only disputable remark in this splendid defense of her book is the naming of old Tarwater as “a natural Catholic.” Hawthorne’s descendant she certainly was, by way of Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and Nathanael West, but though Hawthorne would have approved her mode, he would have been shocked by her matter. To ignore what is authentically shocking about O’Connor is to misread her weakly. It is not her incessant violence that is troublesome but rather her passionate endorsement of that violence as the only way to startle her secular readers into a spiritual awareness. As a visionary writer, she is determined to take us by force, to bear us away so that we may be open to the possibility of grace. Her unbelieving reader is represented by the grandmother in the famous story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and



Harold Bloom

shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

That murmur of recognition is what matters for O’Connor. The Misfit speaks for her in his mordant observation: “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Secular critic as I am, I need to murmur: “Surely that does make goodness a touch too strenuous?” But O’Connor anticipates our wounded outcries of nature against grace, since we understandably prefer a vision that corrects nature without abolishing it. Young Tarwater himself, as finely recalcitrant a youth as Huckleberry Finn, resists not only Rayber but the tuition of old Tarwater. A kind of swamp fox, like the revolutionary hero for whom he was named, the boy Tarwater waits for his own call and accepts his own prophetic election only after he has baptized his idiot cousin Bishop by drowning him and even then only in consequence of having suffered a homosexual rape by the Devil himself. O’Connor’s audacity reminds us of the Faulkner of Sanctuary and the West of A Cool Million. Her theology purports to be Roman Catholicism, but her sensibility is southern gothic, Jacobean in the mode of the early T.S. Eliot, and even Gnostic in the rough manner of Carlyle, a writer she is likely never to have read. I myself find it a critical puzzle to read her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and her two books of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, and then to turn from her fiction to her occasional prose in Mystery and Manners and her letters in The Habit of Being. The essayist and letter writer denounces Manichaeism, Jansenism, and all other deviations from normative Roman Catholicism, while the storyteller seems a curious blend of the ideologies of Simone Weil reading the New Testament into the Iliad  ’s “poem of force” and of René Girard assuring us that there can be no return of the sacred without violence. Yet the actual O’Connor, in her letters, found Weil “comic and terrible,” portraying the perpetual waiter for grace as an “angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth,” and I suspect she would have been as funny about the violent thematicism of Girard. To find something of a gap between O’Connor as lay theologue and O’Connor as a storyteller verging on greatness may or may not be accurate but in any case intends to undervalue neither the belief nor the fiction. I suspect, though, that the fiction’s implicit theology is very different from what O’Connor thought it to be, a difference that actually enhances the power of the novels and stories. It is not accidental that As I Lay Dying and Miss Lonelyhearts were the only works of fiction that O’Connor urged on Robert Fitzgerald or that her own prose cadences were haunted always by the earlier

Introduction



rather than the later Eliot. The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, and Miss Lonelyhearts are not works of the Catholic imagination but rather of that Gnostic pattern Gershom Scholem termed “redemption through sin.” Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and stories like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and the merciless “Parker’s Back” take place in the same cosmos as The Waste Land, As I Lay Dying, and Miss Lonelyhearts. This world is the American version of the cosmological emptiness that the ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, a sphere ruled by a demiurge who has usurped the alien God and who has exiled God out of history and beyond the reach of our prayers. In recognizing O’Connor’s fictive universe as being essentially Gnostic, I dissent not only from her own repudiation of heresy but from the sensitive reading of Jefferson Humphries, who links O’Connor to Proust in an “aesthetic of violence”: For O’Connor, man has been his own demiurge, the author of his own fall, the keeper of his own cell. . . . The chief consequence of this partly willful, partly inherited alienation from the sacred is that the sacred can only intrude upon human perception as a violence, a rending of the fabric of daily life.

On this account, which remains normative, whether Hebraic or Catholic, we are fallen into the kenoma through our own culpability. In the Gnostic formulation, creation and fall were one and the same event, and all that can save us is a certain spark within us, a spark that is no part of the creation but rather goes back to the original abyss. The grandeur or sublimity that shines through the ruined creation is a kind of abyss radiance, whether in Blake or Carlyle or the early Eliot or in such novelistic masters of the grotesque as Faulkner, West, and O’Connor. The ugliest of O’Connor’s stories, yet one of the strongest, is “A View of the Woods” in Everything That Rises Must Converge. Its central characters are the seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Fortune and his nine-year-old granddaughter, Mary Fortune Pitts. I am uncertain which of the two is the more abominable moral character or hideous human personality, partly because they resemble each other so closely in selfishness, obduracy, false pride, sullenness, and just plain meanness. At the story’s close, a physical battle between the two leaves the little girl a corpse, throttled and with her head smashed upon a rock, while her grandfather suffers a heart attack, during which he has his final “view of the woods,” in one of O’Connor’s typically devastating final paragraphs: Then he fell on his back and looked up helplessly along the bare trunks into the tops of the pines and his heart expanded once



Harold Bloom

more with a convulsive motion. It expanded so fast that the old man felt as if he were being pulled after it through the woods, felt as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward the lake. He perceived that there would be a little opening there, a little place where he could escape and leave the woods behind him. He could see it in the distance already, a little opening where the white sky was reflected in the water. It grew as he ran toward it until suddenly the whole lake opened up before him, riding majestically in little corrugated folds toward his feet. He realized suddenly that he could not swim and that he had not brought the boat. On both sides of him he saw that the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the distance. He looked around desperately for someone to help him but the place was deserted except for one huge yellow monster which sat to the side, as stationary as he was, gorging itself on clay.

The huge yellow monster is a bulldozer, and so is the dying Mr. Fortune, and so was the dead Mary Fortune Pitts. What sustains our interest in such antipathetic figures in so grossly unsympathetic a world? O’Connor’s own commentary does not help answer the question and introduces a bafflement quite its own: The woods, if anything, are the Christ symbol. They walk across the water, they are bathed in a red light, and they in the end escape the old man’s vision and march off over the hills. The name of the story is a view of the woods and the woods alone are pure enough to be a Christ symbol if anything is. Part of the tension of the story is created by Mary Fortune and the old man being images of each other but opposite in the end. One is saved and the other is dammed [sic] and there is no way out of it, it must be pointed out and underlined. Their fates are different. One has to die first because one kills the other, but you have read it wrong if you think they die in different places. The old man dies by her side; he only thinks he runs to the edge of the lake, that is his vision.

What divine morality it can be that saves Mary Fortune and damns her wretched grandfather is beyond my ken, but the peculiarities of O’Connor’s sense of the four last things transcend me at all times, anyway. What is more interesting is O’Connor’s own final view of the woods. Her sacramental vision enables her to see Christ in “the gaunt trees [that] had thickened into

Introduction



mysterious dark files that were marching across the water and away into the distance.” Presumably their marching away is emblematic of Mr. Fortune’s damnation, so far as O’Connor is concerned. As a reader of herself, I cannot rank O’Connor very high here. Surely Mary Fortune is as damnable and damned as her grandfather, and the woods are damnable and damned also. They resemble not the normative Christ but the Jesus of the Gnostic texts, whose phantom only suffers upon the cross while the true Christ laughs far off in the alien heavens, in the ultimate abyss. O’Connor’s final visions are more equivocal than she evidently intended. Here is the conclusion of “Revelation”: Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.



Harold Bloom

This is meant to burn away false or apparent virtues and yet consumes not less than everything. In O’Connor’s mixed realm, which is neither nature nor grace, southern reality nor private phantasmagoria, all are necessarily damned, not by an aesthetic of violence but by a Gnostic aesthetic in which there is no knowing unless the knower becomes one with the known. Her Catholic moralism masked from O’Connor something of her own aesthetic of the grotesque. Certainly her essay on “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” evades what is central in her own praxis: Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.

The freakish displacement here is from “wholeness,” which is then described as the state of having been made in the image or likeness of God. But that mode, displacement, is not what is operative in O’Connor’s fiction. Her own favorite, among her people, is young Tarwater, who is not a freak and who is so likable because he values his own freedom above everything and anyone, even his call as a prophet. We are moved by Tarwater because of his recalcitrance, because he is the Huck Finn of visionaries. But he moves O’Connor, even to identification, because of his inescapable prophetic vocation. It is the interplay between Tarwater fighting to be humanly free and Tarwater besieged by his great-uncle’s training, by the internalized Devil, and most of all by O’Connor’s own ferocious religious zeal, that constitutes O’Connor’s extraordinary artistry. Her pious admirers to the contrary, O’Connor would have bequeathed us even stronger novels and stories, of the eminence of Faulkner’s, if she had been able to restrain her spiritual tendentiousness.

P hilip M . W einstein

“Coming unalone”: Gesture and Gestation in Faulkner and O’Connor

I

’m going to be using these terms, gesture and gestation, literally and figuratively. “Gesture” points to the rhetorical stances of a writer’s work, its characteristic ways of implicating the reader. Analyzing Faulkner’s poetics of description, André Bleikasten noted that “what captures our attention, is not so much what is described as the sheer movement and momentum of describing . . . its headlong rush, its furious forward flight” (182). Like Van Gogh’s brush stroke that mesmerizes us more than the object it depicts, Faulknerian narrative in the early experimental masterpieces aggresses the reader, demands—through its own discontinuities, its frequent dissolving of the distinctions between narrator and character—that the reader re-orient him/herself to its stresses, accommodate its transgressions. O’Connor’s rhetoric gestures otherwise: crisp, flat, declarative rather than vocative, her prose distills a human landscape arrested and placed down to its last detail. Her relentlessly perceptive narrator never merges with her tragicomically blinded characters. As to “gestation” I mean mainly the writer’s complex of attitudes towards things that burgeon in time: things as local as a woman’s swelling body about to give birth, things as general as a novel whose plot requires several generations of behavior or a body of works where the later ones creatively draw on the données of the earlier ones. The quotation in my title comes from As I Lay Dying: “The process of coming unalone is terrible” (As I 56), Dewey Dell thinks with respect to From Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, pp. 262–75. © 1993 by A. Francke Verlag Tübingen and Basel.



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her incomprehensible pregnancy, and this thought articulates the dynamic operating more broadly in the text’s vulnerable characters, its fragmented form, and its exposed reader: the process of being invaded, becoming other within. Faulkner’s early experimental fiction engages directly the torment of self-division, and it passes this torment right into the subjective experience of the reader. At such moments “the clotting which is you” seems to dissolve back into “the myriad motion” (As I 149–150), individual identity to re-enter the floodwaters from which it arose. This experience of traumatic pre-oedipal merger fuels the texts Faulkner wrote between 1929 and 1936, and I want to examine in what follows the resonance of “coming unalone” in both Faulkner’s novels and O’Connor’s stories. Rather than focus on a few representative works, I shall touch on many of them, preferring to risk the Charybdis of excessive claim than to wash ashore on the Scylla of microscopic close readings. As I Lay Dying centers on the terror of coming unalone. Addie dies within each of her children—never was Mr. Compson’s dictum that death is something that happens to others better borne out—and her dying shatters their apparently independent identity into shards. Her existence within them all is now clamorous, useless, and inexpellable. She dies slowly, at their pace not hers, and the paradox emerges: “how can a body that still is be thought of as was? how can I, whose self has depended upon, and been defined in relation to, another self, now understand the integrity of my own identity?” (Sundquist 169). The book’s intimacy resides in its apparently unmediated access to such unspeakable thoughts within the Bundren children violated by their mother’s presence/absence—an intimacy we share every time we decode phrases as cryptic as “My mother is a fish.” (I return later to why such a phrase cannot occur within O’Connor’s rhetoric: her narratorial idiom requires no such emotional nearness to be decoded.) “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end” (As I 35). So Darl thinks, and the proposition seems irrefutable, yet Faulkner’s texts focus as much on the two that make you as on the one that dies. Those two are in you, and his great work tirelessly registers identity as beleaguered intersubjectivity, an internal terrain filled with the static of parents pronouncing and siblings squabbling. Benjy’s, Quentin’s, Jason’s, Darl’s, Dewey Dell’s, and Vardaman’s heads reel with the sayings and thoughts of others; they circle ceaselessly round the axis of other subjectivities already encamped within even if absent without. Personal identity emerges here as a sort of liquidity, a boundaryless resource within which others have already plunged their signatures. As Lacan argues, the Symbolic penetrates us long before we master and enact its logic; we are others’ long before we even think of becoming our own.1

“Coming unalone”: Gesture and Gestation in Faulkner and O’Connor

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“Coming unalone” emerges in these experimental texts as both the staple of characters’ vertiginous identity and the uncomfortable effect of reading Faulkner. Nothing stays properly possessed. Speeches said by some characters echo in the minds of others; cryptic phrases coming from anywhere—Father, Mother, Addie, Darl, McEachern, the anonymous surrounding culture— penetrate within, coil and transform; events get revisited under other eyes and appear other. The authority of a commanding rhetoric is absent, Bakhtin would claim, as various idiolects “abrupt” upon each other within a dialogic text no one linguistically owns.2 Insofar as the reader’s identity is also provisional, makeshift, open to reshaping and eager to read because it seeks out the reshaping, it becomes as well a text under siege. As Jameson has argued persuasively, the decisive ideological activity of a text occurs within its form, not its content, and Faulknerian form in the early masterpieces acts upon the reader as a dislocation if not an overwhelming.3 Bleikasten was the first to read this overwhelming thematically as “the scandal of this ‘terrible’ life” (F’s AILD 133), and Kristeva has urged us to speak of such a text’s transgressive form—with its gaps, incoherences, discontinuities—as “semiotic”: “To rediscover . . . what is heterogeneous to the system of meaning and what calls in question the transcendental subject: these, it seems to me,” Kristeva writes, “are the stakes for which semiotics is now playing” (System 31). Increasingly, this transcendental subject is revealed to be male, and the plot disrupted by the outburst of the “semiotic” is the patriarchal one of coherent male subjectivity sustained and passed on, from father to son.4 Faulkner’s undoing of this plot is inseparable from his refusal of its rhetorical decorum. What do the great novels revolve around if not the spectacle of illegitimacy and miscegenation? In this sense the scandal can be defined more precisely: illicit gestation, the swelling of life within a female body no one owns. The transgressed law of the father, the penetrated body of the errant daughter: beginning with Caddy (whose betrayal of the patriarchal enterprise launches Faulkner’s novelistic career), moving through Temple and Addie and Dewey Dell and Lena and Eula, Faulkner’s texts come upon these women as tragic or comic misconceivers, women whose defining gesture is illicit intercourse producing (or threatening to produce) offspring outside the patriarchal norms. The narrative accesses them through the hallucinatory male gaze of their brothers, fathers, uncles, and other custodians of the law. Their “coming unalone” is simultaneously the scandal of parturition—a second being lodged within a first being and laboring to exit—and the violation of family proprieties. The only birth Faulkner cares to follow is the one that transgresses normative boundaries, the offspring he most memorably explores is the orphan or the bastard, the child literally or figuratively cut off

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from maternal care, paternal training, the child whose internal boundaries have been transgressed as well. Idiocy appears in his work as the sign both of a psyche gone awry—its mental circuitry hopelessly crossed—and of a family’s illicit continuation, the line of descent inextricably befouled through figurative incest or literal miscegenation. “It takes two people to make you, and one people to die.” By Darl’s logic the world should end thus, yet Faulkner’s doomed families keep reproducing. Even the Bundrens renew themselves, and despite the accumulating corpses the Compsons and Sutpens seem immortal as those novels conclude, Caddy’s daughter Quentin and Sutpen’s great-grandson Jim Bond imagined somewhere on the periphery of the text, uncontainable by the logic of extinction through impurity. As Faulkner’s career continues, reproduction takes on new powers. Perhaps the most moving moment in Go Down, Moses’s sevengenerational history occurs when old Ike McCaslin, after repudiating the “doe” in every way he can, touches her hand: “He didn’t grasp it, he merely touched it—the gnarled, bloodless, bone-light bone-dry old man’s fingers touching for a second the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home. ‘Tennie’s Jim,’ he said. ‘Tennie’s Jim’ ” (GDM 362). Back to home, yet not so: she exits from this text to parts unknown and a future beyond narration, carrying Roth’s baby and with it the inextinguishable mixed and scandalous history of McCaslins black and white. Time that brought mainly entropy and dishonor in The Sound and the Fury still brings those bitter fruits, but it brings more as well. Memory that gives pain for Bayard or Quentin or Addie becomes generous in Absalom, restorative in Go Down, Moses, self-reshaping in Requiem, a source of joy in The Reivers. Ratliff emerges as Faulkner’s story-teller, the living integument whose vernacular recastings and revisitings bind his hearers together into a temporary community of interwoven subjectivities. Faulkner’s work is nourished by the prodigality of gestation as much as it thrives on the scandal of gestation. Sexual conception is the lifeblood of his fiction, the generating of offspring its focal event. His own career testifies to the same gestative powers: what other writer has so richly brooded upon earlier performances, drawn from them unseen potential, invented sequels, revisions, reversals? Time is the medium upon which Faulknerian creation battens. It matters not, finally, how illicit, mixed, and revisionary that creation is: the business of making exceeds that of dying. If Temple Drake embodies Faulknerian scandal, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” announces its O’Connor counterpart. Not what she might do (Temple as subject) counts here, but what God has done to her (Temple as object: of the Holy Ghost). The body emerges in this story less as a site for potential and illicit subjective encounters involving the group dynamics of race and

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class (these dynamics are superficially operative here, not fundamentally, as in Faulkner) than as the site of an already ordained freakish opposition between the human and the divine. All bodies in O’Connor’s work are passing strange. To be in a body is, for her as never for Faulkner, a spectacle unto itself. Few writers exceed her in mapping the minute bizarreness of arms, legs, noses, chins, postures, ways of walking and sitting. These eccentricities culminate in the double-sexed circus freak of this tale: She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.” “God done this to me and I praise Him.” “Amen. Amen.” “He could strike you thisaway.” “Amen. Amen.” “But he has not.” “Amen.” “Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?” “Amen. Amen.” (CompS 246)

O’Connor’s scandal, unlike Faulkner’s, is divinely decreed; its burden is to be accepted. We live daily in its midst and through our adroit maneuvers we usually manage to evade its recognition; we carry on. But the freak gives the game away: at his bodily core, at the site of his reproductive organs, he registers a grotesque flouting of natural law. Reversing Parker’s attempt to tattoo God on his back, the freak was born with God’s tattoo already in place, lower down, the male and female signs cancelling each other out in their revelation of the scandalous truth. That truth is simply the absurdity of taking human procreative power as the natural model for human well-being. If Abraham is the father figure of Judaism because God marked him as fertile long past the time of his potency—thus promising Israel its full gestation in time—O’Connor by contrast connects Abraham with bodily erasure: “God’s reasonable man,” she writes, “the prototype of whom must be Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son and thereby show that he is in the image of God Who sacrifices His Son” (HB 116). The move to yield up life characterizes the reasonable man, and the female capacity to gestate life stimulates O’Connor to some of her zaniest scenes. Here is Mrs. Freeman (“Good Country People”) describing to Mrs. Hopewell her daughter Glynese’s courtship:

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“Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she said. “She had this sty.” “Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?” “Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropracter school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.” (CompS 281)

Besides the class-coded humor that fuels O’Connor’s comedy, this passage also suggestively figures Glynese’s sty therapy as sexual intercourse, fusing the notions of illness, fornication, and the grotesque. These traits appear in perhaps their most condensed form at the beginning of “A Circle in the Fire.” There, in an echo of the Freeman-Hopewell pair of mothers, the white-trash mother gets the good lines: “You know that woman that had that baby in that iron lung?” Mrs. Cope, seeking to discontinue this discussion so promising in its vulgarity, changes the subject, but to no avail. Mrs. Pritchard gets in the last word: “Yes’m, see she was in it four months before she even got thataway. Look like to me if I was in one of them, I would leave off . . . how you reckon they . . . ?” (CompS 176–77). Mrs. Cope may see in such stories only whitetrash vulgarity, but we glimpse in them the lineaments of O’Connor’s carnal drama: that we physically reproduce ourselves within the invisible constraint of God’s suspended judgment, that catastrophe awaits us at any moment, that procreative intercourse is a seamy last-minute distraction from the arresting transactions that count. Wise Blood, as Bleikasten has noted, insistently ties the mother to the thematics of death.5 Connected with a coffin or car, a black Bible, and spectacles, the mother registers—as whore, acquaintance, or lover—as a carrier of damnation through intercourse, blindness through desire. Sabbath Hawks grotesquely gathers the shrunken mummy’s head to her breast, while a stunned Hazel Motes looks at himself and her through his mother’s glasses: “He saw his mother’s face in his, looking at the face in the mirror. He moved back quickly and raised his hand to take off the glasses but the door opened and two more faces floated into his line of vision; one of them said, ‘Call me Momma now . . . ’ (WB 102). Momma and mummy: gestation and eternal death—this sinister equation resonates throughout the stories. Ruby

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Hill whose pregnancy feels like the incursion of death, “a pain like a piece of something pushing something else” (CompS 101), Mrs. Greenleaf whose religious writhing on the earth appears to Mrs. May as white-trash sexual abandon—to come unalone is for these figures not a creative scandal but the annihilation of their deepest social identities. The stories specialize in punished mothers, in collapsing the family dynamic by undoing the fulcrum figure of the mother. Mrs. May’s fate— to be gored to death by a bull—is the extreme instance of the general fate in which a child’s self-recognition is enabled by the mother’s death. Mrs. Chestny in “Everything that Rises,” Thomas’ mother in “The Comforts of Home,” the grandmother in “A Good Man”—all these mothers are foredoomed. O’Connor writes: “I am very happy right now writing a story in which I plan for the heroine, aged 63, to be gored by a bull. I am not convinced yet that this is purgation or whether I identify myself with her or the bull” (HB 129). The meanings can be sorted out later but the final action is already crystalline: the mother must die.6 And indeed the endings are always in place; nothing gestating can alter their predetermined imposition. To come unalone in O’Connor is to undergo a violation by God or by Satan: the difference between these two violations is minimal. But the difference between her narrator’s grasp on the encounter and her characters’ blindness to it is maximal. O’Connor’s narrator never shares the narrative role with her protagonists by inhabiting their rhetoric. “You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize,” she insisted. “That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive” (HB 106). To read her is thus—by comparison to Faulkner—to remain relatively intact at the spectacle of her protagonists’ shattering. She who is unsurpassed in describing disintegration nevertheless enacts in her own narrative stance, and thus passes on to the reader’s subjectivity, the godlike survival of a catastrophe that always happens to others. Security—the bane of her fiction’s récit—reigns supreme in the gesture enacted by her discours. As Denys Turner puts it in his study of ideology, we have “a contradiction between a meaning conveyed explicitly and a meaning conveyed by the act itself of conveying” (26). Like gods we watch, mesmerized but inviolate, the increasingly predictable collapse of numberless small worlds. Put otherwise: given a spectrum of subjective positions that go from the precision of relentless insight to the errancy of comic blindness, O’Connor’s narrative voice opts for a polar version of the former in order to seize vividly upon a polar version of the latter. Cliché emerges as the distinctive tool for maintaining this separation. Unlike Faulknerian vernacular narrators, who often share—and thus subjectify—the discursive assumptions of their subjects, the O’Connor narrator eschews cliché at all cost.7 More, her assumption that cliché governs the

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discourse of communal life is fateful. It ensures that, as Hulga exclaims, we are blind to our own light (Hulga remaining the victim as well as the speaker of this insight), and that whatever is verbally shared by her characters is necessarily superficial and erroneous: “we” is the marker of an unfailingly deluded community. Her characters’ common discursive ground is a tissue of class- and race-propelled fictions, seeking to shore up status, to ward off displacement, and guaranteed to fail. The vision of radical displacement they would shield themselves from does attach to political realities—the Holocaust vision of boxcars of intermingled bodies, all heading to extinction, the lowest and the highest bound together in disaster, all hierarchy mocked—but O’Connor has no pity to waste on this nightmare image because it is simultaneously for her a prophetic image: one that reveals not the historically determinate violence visited upon a specific group—the Jews—but rather figures for us all our ahistorical and universal fate. Defending the Church’s position on birth control, she wrote: “I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice in the day when they say: This is right, whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may” (HB 338). It may take two people to make you, but O’Connor was sure that the critical fact was annihilation—not engineered by yourself alone but wrought into God’s design. Natural gestation, the premise of earthly continuity, is a dodge; social distinctions a sham. What we need to know is that our human orders (our secular arrangements) are distractions and that we are going to rot. From this frame of transcendent values any local disturbance is a tonic sign—the violent bear it away—and piecemeal or radical programs of reform receive her most withering sarcasm. I want to close, though, by briefly suggesting that for both writers the repudiation of communal possibilities—of reformable social arrangements that might better accommodate the violation of individual aloneness—is a position they arrive at not just by native genius or religious conviction but by a larger disdain for the social that is wrought into the cultural moment they share: Modernism. Richard Moreland has provocatively argued that the irony governing Modernist critique conceals the writer’s investment in the scene he would transcendently lay bare.8 Thus the stance of isolated and revelatory disillusionment—enacted at different times by Darl or Quentin or Mr. Compson or Ike McCaslin—obscures the interplay between observer and observed, and continues to repress class, race, and gender aspects within the scene being observed. With respect to “coming unalone,” I would suggest that As I Lay Dying everywhere produces it as a primordial experience of integrity violated, a metaphysical state of the loss of innocence. But suppose that such a privileged undergoing of shock—apparently beyond condition, touching down

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to bedrock—were actually dependent upon a patriarchal notion of transcendental ego, and that its Faulknerian overlay were fueled by his culture’s inextinguishable fear of miscegenation? Suppose that embattled virginity were a socially generated illness of the male mind surveying an impending and hostile world “out there”? As for O’Connor, her disdain for the topical as a shaper of subjectivity should not obscure the fact that she forged her own subjective identity through participation within a host of socially constructed economies.9 Her Incarnational Catholicism was richly supported by contemporary Catholic thinkers (Gilson, Guardini, Maritain, Marcel, Teilhard) as well as by a New Critical emphasis on the topical as ideologically contaminated, while the visionary (for them a poem, for her God’s script or the authority of her own narrative voice) remains sacred and inviolable territory.10 Trained at Iowa and in touch throughout her life with critical authorities like Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, Robert Lowell, and Robert Fitzgerald, she was no one’s mere pupil, yet her combination of aesthetics and belief is suffused with the reigning dicta of the 1940s and 1950s.11 If not a partisan, she was nevertheless highly trained—trained to believe in the insignificance of all social training. Her aloneness too was violated, thanks to which we have not the death her stories ceaselessly celebrate but that unforgettable gestation that is the stories themselves.

No t e s 1. Lacan’s argument about the mirror stage is too well-known to need rehearsal here. Suffice it to say that the child’s entry into the Symbolic field of language and culture registers not upon a blank slate but upon an interiority whose tumultuous prehistory has been shaped by the penetration of discontinuous images and phrases, molding the “moi” that precedes the “ je.” The “méconnaissance” that follows leads Lacan to state that “[t]he promotion of consciousness as being essential to the subject in the historical after-effects of the Cartesian cogito is for me the deceptive accentuation of the transparency of the I in action at the expense of the opacity of the signifier that determines the I . . .” (“Subversion of the subject” 307). Ragland-Sullivan opens up usefully this dimension of Lacan’s argument. For application of such a paradigm to Faulknerian subjectivity, see my “Thinking I Was I Was Not Who Was Not Was Not Who”: The Vertigo of Faulknerian Identity,” as well as my full-length study of Faulkner entitled Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. Warwick Wadlington makes a sustained case for viewing the generation of personal identity in Faulkner’s texts as a process of encounters with culturally proposed models of being. 2. Bakhtin explores most fully the novelistic use of language(s) as an interactive play of competing worldviews in “Discourse in the Novel.” A notably Faulknerian description of the dialogic, however, appears in his text on Dostoevsky: “Everywhere there is an intersection, consonance, or interruption of rejoinders in the open dialogue by rejoinders in the heroes’ internal dialogue. Everywhere a specific sum total of

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ideas, thoughts, and words is passed through several unmerged voices, sounding differently in each” (265). 3. See The Political Unconscious 17–102. 4. Kristeva pursues the implications of the “semiotic” most dramatically in the form and theme of her essay “Stabat Mater.” The project of disrupting the male plot of patriarchal descent—of releasing the female voices repressed in this plot—is of course common to much contemporary feminism. For a powerful commentary on the philosophical underpinnings of this male “plot,” see Irigaray. For a suggestive, if debatable, reading of Faulkner’s repressed female voices, see Gwin. 5. “But the most remarkable feature is that the themes of sin and guilt, sex and death, all coalesce around the mother figure and its surrogates. . . . It is no surprise then that Motes’ erratic quest should end in oedipal self-blinding and selfdestruction. His tragic end completes identification with the dead mother: it is both fulfillment and expiation of the same desire” (Bleikasten, “Heresy” 150). In my reading of Wise Blood the Oedipal is not the commanding paradigm. Hazel at the end escapes the suffocating hold of the mother by withdrawing from Mrs. Flood’s blinded vision: “and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light” (WB 126). For Bleikasten the religious frame finally fails to account for the savagery of O’Connor’s work. His reading assumes that a genuine religious economy would produce texts more pacified, but John Burt’s demur is pertinent: “What O’Connor’s works present the reader with is not a body of illustrated doctrine, nor even a body of doctrine hammered with ruthless irony into the minds of recalcitrant readers, but the experience of doubt whether life has any meaning at all, an experience which religion exists to enlarge, not to pacify” (138). 6. O’Connor had as much trouble getting into the middles of her fiction as Henry James had getting past the middles of his. O’Connor’s endings were less in doubt. One is tempted to speculate biographically that her incurable illness served her as the clearest index of what had not yet arrived but would indubitably come, exposing the illusory “gestativeness” of time in the interim. She writes to “A”: “I have found it out [that things cannot be worked out on the surface] . . . the hard way and only in the last years as a result of I think two things, sickness and success. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies. Success is almost as isolating and nothing points out vanity as well” (HB 163). 7. Commenting on Cecil Dawkins’ manuscript story, she writes: “Caroline [Gordon] would say that on the last sentence you shouldn’t say kept ‘right on’ praying. Right on is colloquial and lowers the tone. You might say that he continued to pray—or anything not colloquial” (HB 333). If this distinction between O’Connor’s narrator-subject and her character-object is crucial, it is nevertheless not absolute, and a good case could be made for O’Connor’s remarkable inhabiting of characterstances not her own: an inhabiting enabled (because delimited) by her scrupulous deployment of colloquial and standard English. Without such acts of brilliant “counter-transference” she would hardly be worth reading. I have wanted here to stress the other side of this dynamic: that her narrative strategy cannot permit the sustained identificatory and boundary-transgressing moves that characterize the production of subjectivity within Faulkner’s experimental masterpieces.

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8. Moreland writes: “The New Critical and modernist construction of a metaphysical opposition between reality and fiction appears hard enough on sentiment to seem the unsentimental truth, and not actually sentimentality’s self-defence, a way to avoid questions about the particular origins and consequences of particular fictions and about their possible complicity in that cruel or indifferent reality they seem to oppose” (25). This vein of flourishing Faulknerian commentary was opened by Carolyn Porter’s influential Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. As much as I welcome its attention to the interrelations between canonical texts and cultural currents, Moreland runs the risk of reifying Modernism as a set of assumptions and procedures whose lens upon the present scene was unchangingly hostile: the same stance operative in Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Faulkner . . . 9. To “A” she writes: “The topical is poison. I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes” (HB 537). This passage is often cited approvingly by O’Connor’s critics (see Kessler 44) as proof of her successful disregard of the mundane. But, as Moreland might argue, the disregarded mundane manages to insinuate itself nevertheless. In “The Artificial Nigger,” for example (one of her favorite stories), the race and gender subtext is disturbingly reactionary. O’Connor figures Nelson’s desire to see Atlanta and touch down to his origins as black: “He wanted to look down and down into her [the huge black woman’s] eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel” (CompS 262). The implications of that tunnel—that white and male have their repressed sources in black and female—are adroitly evaded by the story’s safe delivery of its chastened males back to their rural Eden, the serpents of sex and the “race business” safely relegated to the Dantesque sewer-system of modern Atlanta. 10. O’Connor writes Cecil Dawkins in 1957: “Anyway, to discover the Church you have to set out by yourself. The French Catholic novelists were a help to me in this—Bloy, Bernanos, Mauriac. In philosophy, Gilson, Maritain and Gabriel Marcel, an Existentialist. They all seemed to be French for a while and then I discovered the Germans—Max Picard, Romano Guardini and Karl Adam” (HB 231). Perhaps the most telling aspect of this passage is O’Connor’s conviction that you must “set out by yourself ”—followed by a thick cluster of names and texts and disciplines helping you to map your path. 11. Frederick Crews makes this point with characteristic trenchancy: “Like so many college-trained writers who have succeeded her, O’Connor never wrote without a sense of the critics looking over her shoulder. Nor, in her shorter fiction at least, did she ever stray from the regnant Creative Writing mode. Even the most impressive and original of her stories adhere to the classroom formula of her day: show, don’t tell; keep the narrative voice distinct from those of your characters; cultivate understatement; develop a central image or symbol to convey your theme ‘objectively’; and point everything toward one neatly sprung ironic reversal. No one has ever put it all together with greater deftness” (49).

Wor k s Ci t e d Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

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    . Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Tr. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Bleikasten, André. Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.” Tr. Roger Little. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973.     . “The Heresy of Flannery O’Connor.” In Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Melvin Friedman and Beverly Lyon Clark eds. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985, 138–58.     . “Faulkner and the Paradoxes of Description.” In Faulkner’s Discourse: An International Symposium. Lothar Hönnighausen ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989, 170–83. Burt, John. “What You Can’t Talk About.” In Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor. Harold Bloom ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1986, 125–43. Crews, Frederick. “The Power of Flannery O’Connor.” The New York Review of Books 37 (1990): 49–55. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1987. [As I] Gwin, Minrose. The Feminine and Faulkner. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1989. Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Kessler, Edward. Flannery O’Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. “The System and the Speaking Subject.” In The Kristeva Reader. Toril Moi ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1986, 24–33.     . “Stabat Mater.” In The Kristeva Reader. Toril Moi ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1986, 160–86. Lacan, Jacques. “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious.” Ecrits: A Selection. Tr. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977, 292–325. Moreland, Richard C. Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973. [CompS]     . The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Sally Fitzgerald ed. New York: Vintage, 1980. [HB]     . Wise Blood. In Three by Flannery O’Connor. New York: Signet, 1962. Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1981. Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. Sundquist, Eric. “Death, Grief, Analogous Form: As I Lay Dying.” In Philosophical Approaches to Literature: New Essays on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Texts. William E. Cain ed. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP 1983, 165–82. Turner, Denys. Marxism and Christianity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983. Wadlington, Warwick. Reading Faulknerian Tragedy. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. Weinstein, Philip M. “ ‘Thinking I Was I Was Not Who Was Not Was Not Who’: The Vertigo of Faulknerian Identity.” In Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie eds. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989, 172–93.     . Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

S uzanne M orrow P aulson

Apocalypse of Self, Resurrection of the Double: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away

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lannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away seems to resist the glimpse of the author’s “sacred consciousness” that she promised the reader.1 An odyssey toward madness rather than salvation, the novel begins with the death of Mason Tarwater and ends with a grotesque “resurrection” as old Tarwater’s will takes over the psyche of his young nephew, Francis. This “resurrection” of Mason’s evangelical self in fact signifies the boy’s psychological death: “Nothing seemed alive about the boy but his eyes” (CW 477). Are those eyes traditional signifiers (windows of the soul)? Or are they postFreudian (castration displaced upward)? Some traditionalists tend to see The Violent Bear It Away as a failure, missing the artfully interwoven but crippling interrelationships of the three main characters: Mason, Rayber, and Francis. A psychological reading centered on doubling phenomena seems pertinent to this, her second novel, which “turns” on events surrounding Rayber, the psychologist—not that this intensely complex and carefully wrought novel can be finally or easily explained or that we ought to equate the author’s views with those of Rayber. But certainly we ought to heed O’Connor’s statements in her letters: “I really have quite a respect for Freud when he isn’t made into a philosopher” (HB 491).2 We may acknowledge her belief in the “sacred” and still understand

From Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, pp. 121–38. © 1996 by the University of Georgia Press.

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that she does not primarily aim to be a philosopher in her novels. She does aim to understand human nature and modern life. Although she is a religious writer, O’Connor accepts Freudian theory and understands Freudian symbols in her attempt to come to grips with modern times and secular thinkers. Her letters reveal a keen interest in the “doubling” tradition (which includes such writers as Poe, Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Nabokov)—a modern tradition of using “eyes” in the Freudian way. And John T. Irwin’s 1975 study argues that understanding the tradition of the double figure as it relates to Freudian thought rewards the critic desiring a complete understanding of Faulkner, the southern writer O’Connor admired most. O’Connor purposefully drew her characters to render what she calls the “many wills conflicting in one man.”3 Because few critics attend to this aspect of her intention, I will approach The Violent Bear It Away through Freud and the psychology of the divided self to suggest new possibilities for all her work.4 Throughout this novel, O’Connor suggests that old Tarwater cannot transcend the physical self and the bonds of egoistic and narcissistic desires. Pathological, Mason creates Jesus in his own image. Otto Rank’s Freudian interpretation of doubling is apropos; in The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study Rank sees the double figure as “a projected wish fulfillment—and as a reflection of the subject’s narcissism” (30). Jesus is for Mason a manifest double representing his own salvation. Mason declares his transcendence through Jesus, while O’Connor paints his physicality with a vividness that negates any such possibility She draws the would-be prophet in the “bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus” (465), a symbol for entrapment and not salvation: “red ropes appear in his face” (335–36) with the death stroke. Even his corpse is trapped, unable to fall because his belly is caught under the breakfast table. O’Connor further defines Mason with imagery of the caged, erotic self: a “bull-like old man,” with “silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net” (335). Mason, portrayed as a primitive, unholy, false prophet-father, significantly builds a religion without woman, and any woman in the novel, any fleshly “goddess,” represents sin as well as death. By focusing on the father and excluding worship of the holy mother, O’Connor separates Tarwater’s religion from Catholicism—but beyond that she also suggests his severe ontological insecurity, his fear of death.5 As Joseph Campbell notes in A Hero with a Thousand Faces, the rejection of woman represents the desire to deny one’s origin in the womb and to become the omphalos, that is, to be alive without knowledge of death (129). Any acknowledgment of woman necessitates an acknowledgment of the body and its functions—that men cannot give birth and that women cannot give birth alone. Moreover, physical generation produces the son who perpetuates the Oedipal tragedy.

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Mason’s narcissistic project is to make good his own “rescue” from the “womb-tomb” by repressing his own physicality, by affirming instead his spirituality, and by appointing himself the prophet-creator of a “procreative double,” Francis, who will carry out his “calling.” Mason gives birth to Francis through the rite of baptism and then orders Francis to baptize Rayber’s son, Bishop, a dimwit, if old age or death prevents the crazed uncle from performing this sacrament in his lifetime. Francis carries out the order to baptize Bishop as though the old man were a ghost at his side. Using baptism to extend his boundaries of self like a wall around young Tarwater, Mason simultaneously performs an act of regeneration and murder—to be repeated later when Francis baptizes/murders Bishop. Francis, then, becomes Mason’s “immortal self.” O’Connor informs us that Mason “was a one-notion man” (354), and this is irony at its best when we consider the old man’s psychic fragmentation. Mason is not one, but two—or several—especially as he relates pathologically to Francis, who functions as both son and wife, offering hope for the future as a procreative double and serving as the necessary partner who staves off the loneliness of a solitary existence. Francis provides Mason with a sense of existing, but the great-uncle can tolerate his grandnephew only as a double, not as an independent human being. The fury of Mason’s efforts to save himself through the creation of a prophet-self and a procreative double intensifies each time he encounters the unwanted double, Rayber—the nephew Mason most vehemently denies. O’Connor, though, draws a parallel between them by making both men evangelical zealots. Rayber’s skepticism and Mason’s religious fervor grow out of a narcissistic drive to bolster a weak and deprived sense of self—a fearful self unable to develop meaningful relationships with others. Mason, feeling threatened by Rayber, denies his nephew’s very existence and asserts that he is “Nothing. He’s full of nothing” (366). His sense of emptiness within serves as the precursor of his schizophrenia. He denies the vacuum he feels within his own self by projection—sometimes feeling Rayber’s presence as “Nothing,” and other times, like Rayber, suffering from a pathological sense of being penetrated by a threatening “Other.” The boundaries of Mason’s self waver, sometimes projecting another self outward when he instructs Francis to follow the calling, sometimes experiencing a psychic split within when he accepts orders from the Jesus-voice, and sometimes fearing an intrusion by a completely foreign self when he encounters Rayber. Although we “know that within the territory of ourselves there can be only our footprints” (43)—to borrow a phrase from R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self—Mason feels that Rayber has been “creeping into his soul by the back door” (331). Mason feels not only that Rayber can get into his mind

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but also that by so doing he will be made into “a piece of information inside his head” (339). Rayber’s fears follow the belief in primitive cultures that death results from reproductions of the self in a mirror, photograph, or reflection. Tarwater acts “like he had been killed in his very soul” (345) when Rayber publishes his article on Mason’s pathological state. His sense of an inner void makes him vulnerable to such fears as those that cause obsessive drives toward selfpreservation—or extension of self to encompass the immortal double. Mason, then, relates to others in clear-cut ways (love or hate exclusively). By examining Francis and Rayber from his perspective, we better fathom his psyche. A similar approach to Rayber proves worthwhile because both Mason and Rayber try to generate a procreative double, Francis. Rayber, though, demonstrates a complexity of motivation that Mason lacks: he suffers from a troubled conscience, a sense of guilt, and a profound ambivalence in his relationships to others—simultaneously fearing and seeking Francis, coveting and abhorring Bishop. To understand Rayber’s character and his effect on Francis, we must first examine his similarities to Mason—especially those revealed by the Lucette incident. Moreover, understanding how Rayber differs from Mason and accounting for Bishop’s and Francis’s influence will clarify the threesome at the heart of this novel. Rayber—no less a prophet than Mason but a prophet of death rather than resurrection—tells Francis that men don’t “rise again” (399), wishing to “save” him from the notion of resurrection, from the “mad Jesus.” Likewise, Rayber wishes to “save” the Carmody girl. He feels “some mysterious connection” (414) between himself and Lucette, comparing her case to his own “seduction” (408) by Mason. Doubling here transmogrifies to exploitation of another: Lucette by her parents, himself by his uncle, Francis by his greatuncle. Of course, irony colors our perception of Rayber’s outrage as O’Connor likens Rayber to Mason. Rayber commits the same crime of exploitation by doubling when he attempts to remake Francis. In fact, Rayber’s “fanatical country preacher” side (438) mimes Mason and reveals the narcissistic nature of his endeavors to create a procreative double out of Francis. Much like Mason, Rayber’s “uncontrollable fury” (393) and “fantastic anger” (394) peak when Francis resists his efforts at “reconstruction.” Rayber condemns Mason’s “foolish violence” (377), and yet this accuser is nearly capable of drowning a child. Hypocrisy and narcissism dominate Rayber’s personality. He preaches to Mason about “the real world where there’s no saviour but yourself ” (379) and then advocates the prophet of self to Francis even more fervently because his own identity is at stake. It is soon clear that not only Rayber’s efforts at “reconstruction” but also Mason’s muddied baptismal waters threaten the freedom of Francis, who weakly

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perceives the devil-prophet within them both. Before his return to Rayber, Francis is haunted by images of his past—memories that conflate various versions of his uncle “as if the schoolteacher, like the devil, could take on any look that suited him” (365). Moreover, Francis perceives the resemblance between Mason and Rayber whenever he ponders Rayber’s eyes: “He saw them as dark gray, shadowed with knowledge, and the knowledge moved like tree reflections in a pond where far below the surface shadows a snake may glide and disappear” (365). These shadows of the old man’s bulging, fish eyes (both fish and snakes glide in water) represent sexual sublimation. The snake is hardly visible. Like Mason, Rayber eliminates the female element from his life and sublimates his misogyny, which stems from incestuous wishes as well as a fear of the “womb-tomb.” Guilt results, and he seeks the mother to make amends by marrying Bernice Bishop, a woman twice his age who could produce but half a child. He then finds it necessary to get “rid of his wife” (400). Bishop becomes the wife for Rayber, as Francis did for Mason. The relationship of Rayber and Bishop parallels an illicit marriage between “two bachelors whose habits were so smoothly connected that they no longer needed to take notice of each other” (400). They function, that is, as a “couple,” although not of the usual mixed gender. This same-sex relationship destroys the autonomy of both Rayber and Bishop. Rayber’s psychic problem becomes clear only when we better understand his relationship to Bishop. Rayber sometimes feels “a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity” (401). Algene Balliff ’s review suggests that latent wishes for homosexual incest cause Rayber’s divided self. He notes how both Francis and Rayber fear penetration by Mason’s “seeds” and how Rayber wishes to avenge his early “seduction” by Mason (360). Rayber’s ambivalent relationship to Bishop began with an ambivalent relationship to Mason. Rayber remarks that he feels a “morbid surge of a love that terrified him” when he thinks of “a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk” (401). He also feels a “longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-colored—” (401). The stick, the stone, the line, the fish, and the eyes suggest phallic symbols to a wide variety of analytical persuasions from Freud to Lacan. How does Rayber control his “longing”? O’Connor answers that question directly: “He slept in a narrow iron bed, spoke little, and cultivated the dullest of friends.” In short, he lives a half-life of sublimated, incestuous homosexuality “to have any dignity at all” (402). Moreover, the author tells us that Rayber’s “outrageous love” for Bishop is also “irrational and abnormal” (401). Bishop, then, might be defined as Rayber’s seelenspiegel, or double as mirror revealing “the imperfections of his inmost mind and soul,” as Ralph Tymms puts it in another context (Doubles 83). Rayber keenly feels himself

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fragmented and deformed, even confusing his own maimed ear with Bishop’s: “Absently Rayber put his hand on the little boy’s ear . . . his fingers tingling as if they touched the sensitive scar of some old wound” (424)—that is, Rayber’s wound from Mason’s shotgun. Even when comforting his only son, the father’s narcissism intrudes. Francis observes that the idiot child “might have been a deformed part of [Rayber] that had been accidentally revealed” (390). Bishop’s presence stokes the fire that drives Rayber to make of Francis a narcissistic reflection of his own thoughts, thus achieving a sense of wholeness and extending himself in time by establishing a procreative double. Gradually, the reader notices that the inability of human personality to establish a full relationship of communication and love—acceptance of the “other” as a person and not merely as a double—results in a setting devoid of sound. Rayber, Bishop, and Francis all share the same affliction—deafness— during the course of this novel. Rayber is deaf by Mason’s gun, Bishop by an act of God, and “the boy [Francis] for all the interest he showed might have been the one who was deaf. Silent, he viewed everything with the same noncommittal eye” (398). Others have noted the thematic importance of silence in this novel, but no one has realized that a probable source is Freud’s study on repetition—a study that discusses the basis for “the uncanny effect of silence.” Freud explains that our sense of experiencing an event as “uncanny” has to do with the return of the repressed. Silence and deafness, then, signify the return of infantile memories felt as the presence of Mason—an intruding double representing “silent seeds” of madness within Rayber and Francis. Both the nephew and the grandnephew of Mason fear that these “seeds” may open “one at a time” (478) in their blood. Rayber wants to exorcise Francis’s “morbid impulse” to baptize his son—that impulse which he considers a manifestation of the Mason within Francis. Francis therefore represents to Rayber the affliction of having Mason as the devil double within. When Francis enters his house, Rayber feels the presence of Mason: “Rayber had never, even when old Tarwater had lived under his roof, been so conscious of the old man’s presence” (398). Paradoxically, it is the Mason in Francis that Rayber fears and his own double in Francis that he seeks. The boy represents both a promise for immortality as a procreative double and a threat to Rayber’s own sanity as a symbol for Mason. Rayber struggles to save himself by saving Francis: “The eyes [Francis’s] were the eyes of the crazy student father, the personality was the old man’s, and somewhere between the two, Rayber’s own image was struggling to survive” (402). The fact that Francis also represents a fragment of Rayber’s guilt intensifies the schoolteacher’s struggle: Rayber sees “some horror of his dreams take shape before him” (386) in the form of Francis because the boy’s “eyes

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were not his own. They were the student’s eyes, singed with guilt” (392). Who is the one most singed with guilt? Rayber feels guilty because he served as a sort of pimp for his sister, failed to pursue custody of Francis, attempted to murder Bishop, and sublimated his own homosexual urges. How can Rayber claim the power to save Francis when he himself is so riddled with guilt? He bases his claim to strength on the false premise that he has exorcised himself of the old man, something he cannot substantiate. After his assertion of freedom (“I’ve resisted him”), O’Connor undercuts that claim: “He felt a madness on him to talk about the old man” (436). Everyone in this novel wants to destroy or escape from the father figure. Nobody wants to be the responsible father. Rayber’s only genuine opportunity to be the father and the savior is missed. O’Connor relentlessly depicts the isolation of each individual, the unwillingness to make sacrifices for others and to be self-giving. When at long last Francis is receptive, Rayber is unable to transcend the barriers of his own narcissism and fails to offer Francis the helping hand he so desperately needs. Rayber follows Francis through the midnight streets but rejects him when he finally finds him outside the tabernacle—although “the sight of Rayber seemed to afford [Francis] relief amounting to rescue” (415). Rayber’s wooden response to Francis’s need tells us that there is no rescue, no resurrection, no salvation—only collision of warring selves and disintegration. Every double with an open heart meets his shadow with a closed heart. Rayber realizes this the next day when he again approaches Francis—too late; he faces “the glint of a metal door sealed against an intruder” (417). Rayber’s despair reaches its apex when he, too, begins to hear “the voice of a stranger” (407) within. Finally rejecting Francis as double because Mason possesses the boy, Rayber creates his own inner double as a final, desperate compensation. Rayber faces the hopelessness of Tarwater’s schizoid self with a schism of his own psyche into “a violent and a rational self ” (417), an inner and outer voice. The schoolteacher’s story ends with Bishop’s drowning— severing the all-too-tenuous threads of his psyche. Without Bishop, Rayber cannot live with his own guilt. Being lost themselves, both Rayber and Mason direct the explosive force of their actions toward Francis. Their struggle to survive decimates their nephew. Whereas the patterns of doubling that Rayber and Mason typify are for the most part other-dependent, Francis tries to fortify his psychic energies independently. He must build the integrity of his own inner self while defending that self against intrusion by those who would remake him. To preserve his identity, he constantly battles against Mason and Rayber. Finally, Francis cannot develop his own personality because other ruthless personalities crash the soundless barrier of his consciousness. Tracing Francis’s enormous

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struggle to expel Rayber and Mason—especially Mason’s compulsion to baptize Bishop—will reveal that this novel ends by depicting a shattered form of Francis’s psyche, a form that seems to absorb the identity of his two uncles and thus is lost. Early in this novel, O’Connor establishes a relationship of doubling between Francis and the old man’s corpse. The boy’s visage is skeletal and ancient as he goes about the “bidnis” of burying his uncle. That he is double for a corpse foreshadows his psychological death—his ultimate possession by his great-uncle: “His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were as old as the world” (360). Mason’s corpse forms an alien double within Francis. Laing describes a similar sense of alien personality traits “embedded as pieces of shrapnel in the body” (105). The “corpse” later pursues Francis in the form of Bishop. Francis struggles to exorcise the father-corpse to save himself. Mason as double within (and in Bishop as double without) acts as the primary force that overwhelms O’Connor’s protagonist, who tries to overcome the father and the facts of death not by creating an immortal self in the form of a procreative double like Rayber and Mason but by making of himself a god. For one thing, he clings to the idea of being an orphan born in a wreck because this makes him unique. He strives to attain epic proportions and hopes to transcend the anonymous crowd. As a result, he believes he evades the usual male–female conception. He rejects the father much in the same way that Mason and Rayber deny the mother and for the same reasons. Indeed, the circumstances of Francis’s birth as he is extracted from his mother’s dead body seem miraculous, while paradoxically reinforcing the impression that he was doomed from the start. When Rayber tells Francis, “You have a father,” he responds by feeling “some unspeakable outrage” (407). Having a father exposes his physicality and his mortality, thus undermining his claims to special conception. Being born from the “womb of a whore” is a perverse parody of the virgin birth of Christ; Francis acts “as if he were declaring a royal birth” (407).6 Similarly, escaping school is equated with escape from mortality. It was “the surest sign of his election” to study the prophets “who escaped death” (340). He accepts his great-uncle’s religion when it includes “strange beasts with giant wings of fire” (334), but he rejects it when there is “no fire in his uncle’s eyes and [when] he spoke only of the sweat and stink of the cross, of being born to die” (334). After Mason’s death, when Francis expects “to hear a voice from on high, he hears instead the sounds of “a hen scratching beneath him” (337)—unintelligible sounds that point to his solitariness. The upper, fantasized world of the numinous universe comes crashing down when

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the voice of the despairing imagination rejects the uncommunicative chicken grubbing in the ground. Francis creates instead its own shadow-voice. He straddles two realities—a fantasized, private inner landscape and the all-tooreal, external, public “other”—until he slips and falls into the mad world of his old uncle. Francis attempts to act when all those around him are attempting to make him act for them. The essence of his struggle poignantly emerges as he looks into the fountain pool at his wavering reflection “trying to form itself ” (432)—the barriers of self, unsteady and unclear. O’Connor grounds Francis’s inability to establish a secure identity in his compulsion to baptize Bishop. This compulsion, of course, was implanted by Mason. Upon the death of old Tarwater, Francis hopes to be reborn and to build a new self. There seems to be hope for a new start early in the novel when Francis approaches the womb of the city, saying: “I’m just now waking up” (363), but he then mistakes the city lights for the burning shack. This rebirth is “earmarked” by death as surely as Rayber was “earmarked” by Mason. The Mason within lives, and the city ahead represents death as surely as the shack behind. The journey to the city appears to be an escape from Mason, but nonetheless, he is everywhere along the way. Meeks, the nameless auto-carrier driver, and the rapist are objective, “double-by-duplication” character fragments of Mason—creations O’Connor meant to further define the relationship between Francis and Mason.7 In other words, Francis journeys to his uncle’s house and along the way meets the salesman, Meeks, who represents the preaching and teaching side of Mason—not to mention the voice of the community promoting societal mandates to attend school and participate in the community. His words fall on the sleeping boy as his great-uncle’s ignored sermons often fell when the boy was busy dreaming out the window. Like Tarwater, Meeks plans to teach the boy something whether he is receptive or not. He preaches the merits of love and work while disclaiming: “I’m not going to be a preacher to you” (380). Then on his way home, Francis serves the auto-carrier driver as he served Mason in that he needs the boy to hang on to consciousness so as not to crash, much as Mason needed Francis to give him a sense of existing. Both relationships are purely narcissistic. Finally, near Powderhead Francis encounters the man in the lavender shirt. When they first meet, O’Connor tells us that the boy saw “something familiar to him” (469), perhaps suggesting both Rayber and Mason, as well as their latent homosexuality that finds expression in this incident. Francis burns the place of the rape just as he burned Mason’s shack. The rapist takes Francis’s hat just as Mason and Rayber both attempted to appropriate a fragment of his self.8

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Thus Francis struggles to expel both the will of the old man and that of his uncle. When Francis returns to Rayber, he observes: “His uncle’s face was so familiar to him that he might have seen it every day of his life” (386), perhaps even in the mirror. He brags that he burned the old man just as Rayber would have done it. And in the end, he completes the job Rayber started when he attempted to drown his own son.9 To resist becoming the double of Rayber, Francis keeps his distance from the schoolteacher, maintains his isolation, and protects himself from his uncle’s penetrating eyes, ironically becoming more and more the Mason who isolated himself at Powderhead. Francis also becomes more and more like Mason in that he fears penetration by Rayber, worriedly asserting: “I’m free . . . outside your head. I ain’t in it” (400). Francis cannot escape becoming a character fragment of both Rayber and Mason. When Rayber takes the boy to Cherokee Lodge hoping to win him over, Francis envisions the lake as a baptismal site. Then at the lodge, Rayber’s face appears in Francis’s mirror. The confused boy notices his own “weakness working itself up from his knees [and forcing] . . . a tremor in his jaw” (434), like the tremors that typify Rayber. Bishop additionally threatens Francis. The reader wonders whether Francis makes a captive of Bishop, or Bishop captures Francis? Although Rayber concludes “that it was Bishop who had . . . made the capture” (452), the interactions of these cousins go beyond a mere power struggle. The first description of Bishop bears a striking resemblance to that of Francis: Bishop: His eyes were slightly sunken beneath his forehead and his cheekbones were lower than they should have been. He stood there, dim and ancient, like a child who had been a child for centuries. (388) Francis: His cheekbones protruded, narrow and thin, like the arms of a cross, and the hollows under them had an ancient look as if the child’s skeleton beneath were old as the world. (360)

Bishop’s “ancient look” haunts Francis as a symbol for the old man’s will, which he fears yet compulsively obeys. The old man finally gets into everybody. His resemblance to Bishop unnerves both Francis and Rayber. At the lodge, it becomes evident just how much Mason has penetrated Francis when the boy writes “in an old man’s meticulous hand” (425). After Francis murders Bishop, the disturbed boy again sees the old man’s bulging, “fishcolored” (461) eyes. He seeks a sense of true self by murdering the person who represents his devil self, and in that very act he becomes a confirmed slave to Mason.

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Francis’s progress toward madness can be most clearly traced in his relationship to the strange voice that Francis hears when he digs his great-uncle’s grave at the start of this novel—a “voice” announcing the coming of Francis’s psychic split. The crack of the anguished self manufactures its own balm to soothe its sense of isolation, but the balm allows the two selves to slide apart. The creation of “another” voice marks the concluding stages of madness well documented in the literature on doubling.10 In Part 3, O’Connor manages surreal effects when she renders Francis’s struggle to repress his “momentous failure” (457) by asserting that he has been “tried in the fire of his refusal, with all the old man’s fancies burnt out of him” (464). The language and imagery of his denial contradict his claim: if he were truly rid of the old man’s thoughts (often expressed by infernal imagery), he would not be speaking in terms of “fire of his refusal” or “fancies burnt out of him.” The inner voice transmogrifies from friend or “the wise voice that sustained him” (429) to “adversary” (475). Francis burns his alter ego, clarifying the extent of his failure to exorcise Mason: he devastates his other self with fire, Mason’s element. Culminating in the image of the “crater opening inside him” (476), the apocalyptic imagery in the last pages of this novel implies the final and complete resurrection of Mason in the form of the devil-double within Francis. The significance of the seemingly apocalyptic world does not register beyond each isolated, individual psyche. The Negro Buford senses only “a burning in the atmosphere” (477). He observes but is not singed. O’Connor here affirms man’s ultimate isolation and the reality that there is no ground without a grave somewhere nearby. And where in this novel is that ground sacred? The complex patterns of doubling form an iron mesh that traps Francis. In spite of O’Connor’s belief in personal responsibility, this novel acknowledges the forces of psychological determinism.11 This is not to say that Francis lacked the freedom to struggle against the forces that undid him. O’Connor declares in her letters: “You might make a case of sorts for Tarwater being determined since his great uncle has expressly trained him to be a prophet . . . but actually neither of them [Rayber or Francis] exhibits a lack of free will . . . an absence of conflict . . . they spend all their time fighting within themselves, drive against drive” (HB 488). By emphasizing the divided self here, I do not finally wish to undermine the importance of other approaches to O’Connor’s work. Theology and philosophy ought to play a role in any analysis of her art. And yet her primary aim in this particular novel is to explore the suffering and psychology of a child and those who shaped that child. This suffering was perhaps partly caused by living in the modern world devoid of true faith, but more important, the suffering in this case was caused by parental abuse.

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That O’Connor so clearly represents the psychological realities and the inner landscapes of her characters bespeaks her intense compassion for them. Often, she objected to those who viewed her characters as if through “a glassbottomed boat” (HB 376). The author is demanding here that her reader experience sympathetically what her characters experience. We ought to feel sympathy not only for Francis but also for Mason. It is in this sense that she declares she is “right behind him [Mason] 100 percent.”12 Her assertion (HB 536) that Mason speaks the truth does not necessarily imply that his actions are divinely inspired. The irony that obtains when an evil character speaks the “truth” because an author wishes to emphasize a point is common enough in modern literature. We should not let O’Connor’s statements about Mason mislead us into assuming, as Martha Stephens does, that the author approves of Mason’s basic character (108). Another statement of this sort about another evil character in a neglected story, “The Partridge Festival,” clarifies O’Connor’s position: “I am all for Singleton in this, devil though I rightly consider him to be” (HB 443). O’Connor suggests that acknowledging man’s capacity for deviltry and accepting it as human, not alien, enables a person to “face his own psychic realities” (HB 382), exactly Freud’s goal during therapy. O’Connor studies will always be an arena for debate, given her paradoxical religious stand and yet her interest in Freudian psychology—her pious assertion that she is “against [Freud] tooth and toenail” and yet her willingness “to admit certain uses for [Freud]” (HB 110). This underlying conflict is expressed again and again in her letters and manuscripts. For example, she says that we ought to “love everything and specifically Christ” (HB 484) but admits to feeling a “lack of love for the race of man” (HB 335). How can anyone claim to solve the dilemma of what O’Connor intended?13 As the pain of living with disease gave way to the pain of facing death, O’Connor’s work and her attitude toward it underwent constant revision. Where we ought to expect her work to yield most fully and easily to religious interpretation—that is, in a novel rife with biblical references and one that even quotes the Bible in the title—she proves most resistant. What we can finally assert is that the value of The Violent Bear It Away depends on its insights into human nature and what it reveals about the psychology of the divided self. Her other works offer a rich store of possibilities for further analysis in this vein.

No t e s 1. In “Novelist and Believer” O’Connor affirms that the “sacred consciousness” of the author “will inevitably suggest that image of ultimate reality as it can be glimpsed in the human situation” (MM 158).

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2.  Although O’Connor may have said that “a Freudian could read this novel and explain it all on the basis of Freud” (HB 343) with tongue in cheek—and she certainly would not approve of the reductive notion that God is wish fulfillment—still she was familiar with Freud’s work and probably attracted to his focus on narcissism and self-awareness. 3.  O’Connor’s preface to Wise Blood here quoted seems to contradict what she says in Mystery and Manners: “[In Francis’s] compulsion to be a prophet . . . there is the mystery of God’s will . . . not a compulsion in the clinical sense. [And then she hedges.] However, this is a complicated subject and requires to be elucidated by someone with more learning than I have” (116). Many have been misled by the earlier part of this quote. The fact is that O’Connor exhibits a definite interest in Freud, even acknowledging that for her first novel, Wise Blood, “the Oedipus business comes nearer home” (AM 68) than other sources. Needless to say, I disagree with earlier critics (cf. Martha Stephens’s Question of Flannery O’Connor) that see her as a writer of “nothing . . . except pure religious passion” (131). 4.  Most of the critics dealing with O’Connor’s “double” figures lack a psychoanalytic perspective (Kahane and Rosenfield are exceptions): see Donald Gregory, “Enoch Emery: Ironic Doubling in Wise Blood ”; Claire Rosenfield, “The Shadow Within: The Conscious and Unconscious Use of the Double”; Albert Sonnenfeld, “Flannery O’Connor: The Catholic Writer as Baptist”; and Marion Montgomery, “Cloaks and Hats and Doubling in Poe and Flannery O’Connor.” In “Comic Vibrations and Self-Construction in Grotesque Literature,” Claire Kahane points out that Enoch Emery mirrors Hazel Motes and relates doubling phenomena to the uncanny in the manner of Freud. An early review in Commentary, October 1960, by Algene Balliff, considers Tarwater’s “double” traditionally, conceiving of the boy as halfangel, half-devil, thus neglecting psychological doubles, although Balliff ’s insights regarding Rayber’s split seem sound. 5.  I am indebted to Professor Chester G. Anderson’s lectures on double fictions (April 1975, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). 6.  See Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, for an analysis of how the virgin and holy births are connected in myth and pseudo-history as well as in childhood fantasies. 7.  Ralph Tymms points out that “an essential distinction is to be made between the double-by-duplication and the double-by-division, though these distinct psychological approaches constantly mingle” (16). 8.  The manuscripts collected at the Ina Dillard Russell Library in Mill­ edgeville reveal O’Connor’s ongoing interest in homosexuality. In one early draft of Wise Blood, Hazel seems to be trying to convince Leora Watts, a prostitute, that he is sexually experienced: “No,” he said, “you are not the first. I was ten years old,” he said, “and it wasn’t a girl. It was a boy named Ford Tester.” “You’re making that up,” she said. . . . Her eyes were dark and mocking, and he tried to see down into them. “There’s nothing under them,” he said. “There was nothing under this boy’s either.” “Them what?” she muttered. “You needn’t liken me to any filthy kid you jerked off.” “His eyes were clogged up,” he said. “They looked like puss.”

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In another example, a scoutmaster tries to interest one of his scouts in sex: “Johnson went forward quickly as if he had been hit on the legs from behind and when he was in reach the master caught him by the shoulder and propelled him with one push into the dark far end of the loft. Then he strode after him and disappeared. B. K. could hear their voices but not the words. He could make out Johnson’s hat and his shoulder with the master scout’s fingers clutched around it. The hand moved back and forth suddenly as if the shoulder were a broken ear. It was thrusting in and out, then he heard Johnson whine, ‘Lemme be, I ain’t going to do it’ ” (Folders 168c–168f). The master scout in other versions of this incident is called the Misfit. Rayber’s behavior in “The Barber” also should be seen in this context. The story starts with a barber asking Rayber, “You a nigger-lover?” in relation to the election of Darmon, a liberal. Rayber then notices the black helper, George, and wonders “what George’s leanings were. He was a trim-looking boy” (CS 16).   9. Robert Rogers sees the case in which one character completes what another started as a special case of doubling. 10. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Georg Büchner, and Fyodor Dostoevsky exploit the idea of the “figment” voice in their doubling fictions about madness. 11. In “Psychological Determinism and Freedom in Flannery O’Connor,” Nancy B. Barcus offers some insights on this issue and on Freudian elements in this novel, explaining that Rayber “has homosexual urges toward his idiot child, who somehow reminds him of the old man” (30). 12. Hicks, “A Writer at Home,” 22. 13. For a discussion of character fragments, condensation, decomposition, and the “composite mind of the author,” as related to the author’s intention, see Rogers, 67.

L aurence E njolras

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lannery O’Connor’s skillful use of deft and chilling irony is best demonstrated in her characterization of intellectuals and would-be artists. In five of her stories, she introduces bachelors and spinsters in their thirties who live the agony of being fully dependent on mothers whose values and petty concerns they loathe, mothers whom they can neither love nor leave, mothers because of whom they have turned into angry, isolated, impotent individuals. These smarter, frustrated individuals are trapped in a conflicting situation in which they see themselves as victims. However, as the author craftily shows, in reality they are all failures, ineffectual creatures who have deluded themselves in thinking that they know something, possess something, or can achieve something. The full irony of their situation lies in the fact that they blame their mother or their entourage for what they have become, while the core of their frustration rests in their ego. Hating the life they have to live, scorning their families, they have for the most part never made a move to escape; when they have, it was only to discover their inability to manage by themselves. Riveted to their mothers because of a weakness of body or of character, which renders them all the more furious, they turn to a world of pretense in which they suffer their martyrdom while shutting out everything that they find unbearable around them. Invariably, their ivory towers prove to be equally vulnerable shelters: in climactic instances in which they

From Flannery O’Connor’s Characters, pp. 43–58. © 1998 by University Press of America.

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are given to realize their uselessness and ridiculousness, their fragile worlds collapse, living them aghast, compelled to confront reality. In each tale, the youths’ illusive quest for values, their artistic humanism, or their deceitful identities are suddenly annihilated, and they must accept what their true nature really is, something which they have been denying all along. Joy Hopewell, in “Good Country People,” is the perfect stereotype of the intellectual. At thirty-two, she has hardly allowed herself much fun and pleasure. Highly educated, holding a Ph.D. in philosophy, she spends her time reading or retreated in her thoughts in order to avoid her mother’s affable but commonplace and mediocre conversation; she tolerates other people around only for the sake of being spared the drudgery of having to pace the farm with her mother, for she dislikes nature anyway and hates anything related to it. She cannot help being rude to everybody because of the smugness and vanity she senses in people. She has never approached young men whom she finds invariably stupid; besides, she is all mind and cannot imagine herself touched by the matters of the heart. Through the years, she has managed to make herself the personification of hatred: endowed with a sullen disposition, she has a naturally ungracious appearance which she will not even try to improve with a smile; she has a wooden leg which she stomps heavily to make it more blatant; to round off the ugliness of her character, she has legally changed her name to Hulga, one she feels best fits her on account of its ugly sound and the connotations attached to it. The rage which eats her encompasses everything, including herself, and, unable to see anything positive or pleasant in life, she wants at least to make sure people know the conclusion she has come to, even if she cannot succeed in imposing it on them. However, in the course of a few hours, this solid, fierce, knowledgeable, all-too-sure maiden is shocked into recognizing her own self-deception, a discovery ironically provoked by a simple, innocent-looking Bible salesman who tricks her ruthlessly. The blow dealt to her is subtly and progressively orchestrated. At first, with domineering superiority, she despises Manley Pointer whom she takes for a simple country boy fool enough to be concerned with the Scriptures, while she has declared herself an atheist long ago. But on seeing him to the gate, she lets herself be talked into a picnic for the morrow. At this point, readers’ suspicion is aroused as to what may be the first sign of a weakness that will later prove to be fatal, all the more so that, part of the night, she dreams of seducing the young boy, and that she goes to their rendezvous with whatever touch of femininity a whiff of Vapex used for perfume may impart. Once they are together, the boy flatters her in a deceitfully childlike way, and she vainly believes that he admires her. His kisses are so sweet, so innocent, his speech so genuine, his manners so awkward, that with full lucidity, amused detachment, and a trace of pity, she

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considers him like a baby she fancies for an instant to educate, to enlighten, and to rid of his blindfolds in order to bring him to “a deeper understanding of life” (p. 284). All of a sudden, though, the embryonic romance turns into a sadistic scene in which Joy-Hulga, who has surrendered completely to the boy by permitting him to take off her wooden leg, and, by so doing, has abandoned her very being to his care, is cruelly flouted when out of a hollow Bible he has been carrying in his suitcase he exhibits a flask of whiskey and a deck of obscene cards. Moreover, once he has disclosed his true nature to her, assuring her that selling Bibles does not necessarily imply believing in the Bible, he runs away with her wooden leg which, he says, will enlarge his collection of “interesting things” that includes “a woman’s glass eye” (p. 291) among other things. Left alone in the full intensity of the blow she has been given, with the terrible revelation delivered to her: “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” (p. 291), Joy-Hulga slowly realizes that she has been violently wrenched from her fragile pedestal. In Julian, the protagonist of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Flannery O’Connor has drawn a devastating portrait of a young, white, liberal Southerner torn between his unavowed longing for a past era and the certainty that it was one of wrongdoing, all the while finding the new one as repugnant and as insufferable in its low moral, intellectual, aesthetical, and social dimensions. Desperately trying to distinguish himself from everything which he hates in the South, he turns his wild hostility towards his mother who openly carries all the clichés of speech and manners (as to racism or class distinction, for instance) that she and the majority of her peers have not yet overcome. Sensitive, educated, with a dubious future as writer in front of him—while ironically reduced to sell typewriters in the meantime—depressed because of what he must confront, Julian can only retreat into the protecting bubble of his mind where he is free to see and condemn, and where he feels safe from any external judgment. His idealized image of himself is nonetheless very much threatened by self-doubt and self-pity, two feelings which prevent him from engaging in any creative or even relevant action. Every one of his attempts to assert his desire for integration turns awkwardly flat or takes tinges of sentimentalism. Wanting to teach his mother a lesson, he imagines all kinds of situations in which she would be so shocked that she would finally learn from her fundamental errors. Scenarios rush through his mind, which include getting a Negro doctor to save her from a desperate illness, befriending respectable Negro lawyers or distinguished Negro professors, bringing home a Negro fiancée, or demonstrating as a sympathizer at a sit-in. His efforts are miserable attempts which fall short of expectation. For instance, during the bus ride, when he deliberately addresses the Negro who is sitting next to him with the mere intention of disturbing his mother, his gesture of

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liberalism has an adverse effect: it only seems an annoyance to the Negro since the light he has asked for is of no service because of the “No smoking” sign posted over the door—furthermore, he has quit smoking some months before, unable to afford it any longer. Ironically, to Julian’s dismay, despite her condescension and racist feelings for the entire Black race, it is his mother who succeeds in establishing a friendly contact with a little Negro boy, playing hide-and-seek with him through her fingers. In Julian’s case, the pathos of his situation lies in the fact that he has genuinely convinced himself that he is emotionally free from his mother, that he can judge her with superior objectivity, that he is in no way dominated by her. It is all too obvious that these are only illusions. As a matter of fact, he is kept ineffectual and paralyzed by his unavowed emotional as well as physical dependence on her. Thus his life is a hopeless struggle against his confused feelings of guilt and frustration, of love for his mother and hatred for what she represents, of apparent detachment from human contacts and domination by them. In the final scene of the story, not only his mother, but he, too, learns his lesson. Rejoicing that she should at last realize facts in their blatant reality, ready to provide her with an explanation of their meaning, Julian’s triumph is but very short: as his mother collapses to her death on the pavement, he suddenly comprehends the full horror of his own new and complete isolation, his tragic abandonment into a world hostile to him, a world highly detestable in which he now will necessarily meet his own symbolical death in the form of his innate inarticulateness and useless, albeit remorseful grief. “The Enduring Chill” is a story which presents the progression of the inner crisis a young intellectual is undergoing just before his death which he thinks imminent, and the anticlimactic moment of revelation which suddenly destroys the sentimental world of illusions and sufferings he has created for himself when he realizes that he is not to die yet. Like every other young intellectual protagonist portrayed by Flannery O’Connor, Asbury is ill-tempered, sullen, egotistical, verbally aggressive, rude, spiteful, and highly disappointed in a family whose members he finds banal, stupid, and narrowminded. Smarter and shrewder, he also has an artistic temperament and a liberal mind which make it all the more difficult for him to cope with and to accept the coarseness he witnesses around him. Despising his rural background, he has gone to New York, convinced that he could meet true culture there as well as enlightened minds to converse with. Soon, seriously ill, out of a job and penniless, he is forced to come back to the family farm in the South to wait for his death, which he presumes to be close, but which will at least put an end to the moral agony he is sure to have to endure in the meantime. We learn that when he arrives, his self-assurance has just been dealt a serious blow, and that the false identity he has created upon assumed talents

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which he has progressively been obliged to recognize as illusory is taking blurred contours. The caustic prediction of his pragmatic sister that “Asbury can’t write so he gets sick. He’s going to be an invalid instead of an artist . . . all he’s going to be around here for the next fifty years is a decoration” (p. 373) is indeed a true one, which Asbury tries in vain to ignore or refute, but which he faces more and more acutely every day. Unable to write or to create anything, he violently puts the blame on his mother, vehemently accusing her of a pernicious influence which turned him into the failure he is. The discovery of his shortcomings is a painful one indeed. Unable to unleash his despair openly to his mother, though, he has written her a long letter which he hopes will make her realize what part she had to play in his tragedy: I came here [New York] to escape the slave’s atmosphere of home, . . . to find freedom, to liberate my imagination, to take it like a hawk from its cage and set it “whirling off into the widening gyre” (Yeats) and what did I find? It was incapable of flight. It was some bird you had domesticated, sitting huffy in its pen, refusing to come out! . . . I have no imagination. I have no talent. I can’t create. I have nothing but the desire for these things. Why didn’t you kill that too? Woman, why did you pinion me? (p. 364)

Like Julian’s, Asbury’s feelings are of a conflicting nature. He feels scorn for his mother’s vapidity, impatience for her maternal care which he finds excessive, hatred for her ego which he believes is destroying him, contempt for her lack of liberalism, self-loathing for his dependence on her, and a global devastating rage for everything that concerns her from far or near. Despite his obsessing fury, however, he is left paralyzed, with his wrath burning inside him, because of some mysterious bond which prevents him from ever attacking her directly. The conflict is entirely kept within the confines of his mind, as this is the only way he can pour forth bitter invectives against her. Only after his death will she discover the details of his living agony spelled out in the letter left for her. In reality, Asbury’s ego, not his mother, is the sole instrument of his destruction. He is a failure in whatever he tries, for his convictions are inadequate, but instead of searching himself for the reasons of that inadequacy, he sees himself as the sad victim of an order around him that has gone entirely wrong. The point of self-recognition is close, though; a first hint is given when, upon his arrival on the farm, he crosses the dull gaze of a cow “watching him steadily as if she sensed some bond between them” (p. 362); later, in a dream in which he visualizes his impending burial, with Art come to pay him his due tribute, he awakes with a shudder at the image of a “large white [cow], violently spotted, . . . softly licking his head as

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if it were a block of salt” (p. 374). In addition, Asbury’s ultimate attempt to experience a last “moment of communion when the difference between black and white is absorbed into nothing” (p. 368) and racism completely annihilated, turns into a miserable failure and proves once and for all that communication with the black hired help on the farm is impossible. Furthermore, Father Finn, a Jesuit he has asked over to have a last intellectual talk before his death, proves to be different from the person he expected: unconcerned with literature, he is obsessed with prayers and catechism and delivers an accusatory sentence: “The Holy Ghost will not come until you see yourself as you are—a lazy ignorant conceited youth!” (p. 377). Ironically, the last stroke which crowns this series of steps towards lucidity is given him by his mother and Block, the family doctor, the two persons whose common sense and practical qualities he has been despising throughout his life with superior distrust; in a humorous instant, when Block delivers his diagnosis of Asbury’s illness, triumphantly assuring that “undulant fever [will] keep coming back but . . . won’t kill [him],” comparing it with “Bang’s in a cow” (p. 381), the youth is left ranting and aghast at the sight of the bright intense smiling face of his mother and at the simultaneous collapse of all his illusions. We may suspect that the violent anticlimax, which sweeps away his fancies of a romantic death that would have delivered him from the misunderstanding of his family and pals, while unfolding his own real nature in front of him, makes him envision a new life, together with newly emerging values. Calhoun, the protagonist of “The Partridge Festival” is another example, like Asbury, of a young adolescent who has deluded himself about his talents and has created a false identity for himself; despite many evidences to the contrary, he persists in believing that he is an artist, a sensitive nature full of humanism, and that he is the only one among the people he lives with to correctly interpret the different manifestations of human behavior as well as to understand the meaning of life. Like the other youths mentioned previously, he likes to think that he is free in his doings and judgments. To be able to devote a large part of his time to art in general and writing in particular, he spends every summer busily selling all kinds of things, thus making money to afford independence the other three seasons. The fact that he is extremely good at selling, that he genuinely enjoys doing it, that he has been given an achievement scroll for his performance as a salesman casts a slightly unpleasant shadow on his ego which he would like to envision totally detached from anything material, above all from all petty concerns. He resolutely refuses any trace of resemblance with his late great-uncle whom he holds in contempt for his practical turn of mind and his calculating, businesslike character. Instead, the boy creates a fanciful portrait of himself after the image of Singleton, a murderer whose photograph in the newspaper has fevered his imagination.

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To him, Singleton is a victim of society to whom he is determined to do justice by writing a novel in which he will denounce the cruelty of the social system responsible for the man’s sufferings and tragedy. Imbued with notions such as individualism, nonconformism, depth of character, and intellectual superiority, he walks the festive streets of the town where the shooting has taken place, trying in vain to collect manifestations of the townspeople’s sympathy for Singleton, trying with equal uselessness to impose his own perception of him on the resentful inhabitants. However, such blatantly unanimous animosity on their part does not succeed in shaking his opposite convictions. Prompted by the girl next door whose sense of justice has been similarly injured by the whole case, he sets out with her to the State Hospital to confront the object of his artistic and humanistic delirium. Just before Singleton is introduced to them, Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth, whose hostility and scorn for one another have been high up to this point in the story, feel a sudden kinship overflow them in anticipation of the importance of the revelation that awaits them. The revelation proves to be important indeed, but hardly of the nature they expected. In front of them appears a hideous, gesticulating character who casts leering glances at the girl and utters suggestive remarks to her. The encounter does much to provide the two youths with an unequivocal representation of Singleton’s true nature. Shocked by the frightening show, with their illusions and ideals suddenly destroyed, they understand the full extent of their initial error. Back on the road, exhausted after so intense an emotion, Calhoun pulls the car up the side of the highway; the sight of the reflection of his face in Mary Elizabeth’s glasses precipitates his self-recognition: it is not an artist, but the master salesman he has always been who looks back at him triumphantly. As is to be expected, the portrayal of these intellectuals and would-be artists is not gratuitous. For all the irony which shrouds it, O’Connor’s point is clear: idealizing their own selves, creating fallacious identities which they praise, blinding themselves with the conviction of their superiority over their fellow men, adoring secular gods, such as Art, these heathen are on the wrong path because they see themselves as the center of a universe they interpret with erroneous values. They do satisfy Josephine Hendin’s characterization of Flannery O’Connor’s protagonists, whom she perceives as follows: Demanding neither hope nor salvation, O’Connor’s heroes need only certainty. And all they can know absolutely, “know for sure,” is isolation, rage, and death.1

Self-imposed, indeed, because self-created, isolation is their lot; a rage devastates them; and a symbolical death—the death of their old ego—awaits

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them and strikes them in an intense moment of enlightenment regarding their real nature, which turns out to be common rather than unique. The author’s treatment of this type of character is different from her treatment of other types: their encounter with God or their sudden awareness of the universe in religious terms is not a direct one. Instead of learning about the presence and power of God, thus realizing the insignificance of human beings before the Divine, they discover the pettiness of their character, their vanity, their arrogance and their smugness only in reference to their own self. Of course, in the process, they learn Christian behavior, gain Christian qualities, discover what humility, charity, and altruism are, and they will eventually understand what religious connotations and implications these notions carry. However, whereas the presence of God has been revealed to the children or to the conceited, self-righteous people we have dealt with previously, it is not immediately revealed to the intellectuals or would-be artists: they will first approach it, then will discover it only after a necessary trudging along the path of Christianity has taken place. Ultimately, though, they will learn the same lesson as other characters portrayed in the stories, and will be given the opportunity to discriminate between human nature, human matters, human vulnerability, human uncertainty, human damnation on earth, and supernatural, almighty Divinity. With this category of characters, O’Connor has pushed irony to the extreme, for she has chosen to create her intellectuals and would-be artists as declared atheists. Such a device, blatant as it may be, is nonetheless a powerful one.

No t e 1. Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O’Connor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970): 37.

J o y ce C arol O ates

The Action of Mercy

I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. . . . For me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption of Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that. Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country”

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riginally published in The Kenyon Review in Spring 1955, and reprinted in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1956), this graceful, parable-like short story, with its precise, weighted language and its comically sympathetic rural Georgians, Mr. Head and his ten-year-old grandson Nelson, is virtually unique in Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, ending not in violent death, nor even in devastating irony, but with tenderness. O’Connor’s more characteristic prose fiction bristles with cruel and sometimes savagely funny observations; “The Artificial Nigger” is comedy of another order. Because they are an old man (Mr. Head at sixty behaves rather more like a man in his mid-seventies) and a young boy (though Nelson is a “miniature old man”), the grandfather and grandson are presented as sinners of a mild, entirely human sort. Mr. Head is foolishly proud and vain (“Mr. Head could have said . . . that age was a choice blessing and that only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young”) and Nelson is impudent, vain, and quarrelsome (“ . . . the boy’s look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would From Kenyon Review 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 157–60. © 1998 by Kenyon Review.

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be pleased to forget it”). These are genial cartoonish figures, country bumpkins to be subjected to O’Connor’s typical ritual of humbling, unmasking, and redemption. On its surface, “The Artificial Nigger” is a straightforward story, hardly more than an amusing anecdote: a back-country grandfather takes his grandson to Atlanta for a day visit with the secret intention of showing the child that “he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city . . . [Nelson would] see everything there was to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life.” In Atlanta, the two become lost, quarrel; Mr. Head frightens Nelson by hiding from him, and then denying that Nelson is his grandson, when the child desperately needs him; Nelson is furious with Mr. Head and refuses to speak to him; at last, exhausted by their adventure, and having no one but each other, the two are reconciled; they return to their rural home, with Nelson determined never to journey to Atlanta again. There is a situation-comedy slickness to this resolution, which would seem to undercut the boy’s discovery of blacks and his attraction to them; he seems to have reverted to his grandfather’s ways, unilluminated by his grandfather’s religious vision. Beneath the anecdotal surface, however, the story moves toward what O’Connor calls “an action of mercy”— the mysterious operation of grace in the characters’ lives, intersecting as they do with both “real” and “artificial” Negroes, bringing Mr. Head to an eloquent epiphany that presumably changes his life and his subsequent attitude toward his grandson, himself, and God: He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.

Since there has been little to prepare us for Mr. Head’s vision, little to suggest that he is a man deeply immersed in Christian orthodoxy and the Bible, this turn of mind is not very convincing; but “The Artificial Nigger” like O’Connor’s fiction generally is not meant to be realistic. Suffused with Catholic ideology, or in any case a passionate wish to believe in Christ and salvation by way of the Roman Catholic Church, Flannery O’Connor is the most visual and relentlessly “symbolic” of writers. Her dreamlike rural landscapes are alive with that intense, primitive power of the inwardly focused imagination we find in the seventeenth-century New England Puritans and in other deeply religious individuals for whom nothing can be accidental, contingent or without meaning; on the contrary, everything is charged with significance; as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” When such believers are gifted with imagination (and what is imagination but, in part, a mysteri-

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ous metaphor-making capacity), the “natural” world scarcely exists except as a supernatural manifestation; surfaces are masks through which an underlying, far more significant reality asserts itself in ways that may be startling and original and sometimes grotesque. In Catholic orthodoxy, for instance, the communion wafer, or host, is not a symbol of Christ’s bodily sacrifice, is—literally—Christ’s body. As O’Connor has said in “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” what she sees on the surface of the world is of interest to her only as she might penetrate “through it into an experience of mystery itself.” In O’Connor’s fiction, a bird-shaped water stain on a bedroom ceiling is a manifestation of the Holy Ghost emblazoned in ice instead of fire (“The Enduring Chill”); the setting sun is “a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood (“A Temple of the Holy Ghost”); a fire started in a woods by vandals is a revisiting of the ordeal of Old Testament prophets in a fiery furnace (“A Circle in the Fire”). There are lyric passages in O’Connor that call to mind the luminous beauty of paintings by the astonishing Renaissance artist Georges de la Tour that portray ordinary domestic life (a woman placidly picking fleas off her body, for instance) in such vivid chiaroscuro as to imply a supernatural symbolic meaning. There are broadly comic passages that suggest the stylized caricatures of the American regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. O’Connor spoke of herself as a “realist of distances” for whom the grotesque—the violent, comic, and caricatured—was of primary interest; the “ordinary aspects of daily life” were of little fictional interest. The “realist of distances” looks for a single image that will connect or combine or embody two points: one is a point in the concrete, the other a point not visible to the naked eye “but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.”1 Consequently, “The Artificial Nigger” is a highly artificial, self-consciously wrought story in the mode of 1950s symbolic prose. O’Connor’s models may well have been Joseph Conrad (particularly Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer which were available in 1950 in a popular mass-market paperback with an introduction by the distinguished critic Albert J. Guerard) and James Joyce (particularly Dubliners), prose stylists notable for their reiterated patterns of imagery and their penchant for carefully phrased, musically cadenced finalparagraph epiphanies. The story’s opening is ornamental and static as an altarpiece, with an elaborate description of moonlight in the room Mr. Head and Nelson share in which “the color of silver”—“dignifying light”—“miraculous moonlight”—“snow-white in the moonlight” point emphatically away from the merely naturalistic; Mr. Head’s trousers exude “an almost noble air, like the garment some great man had just flung to his servant”; the invisible narrator informs us, with startling erudition, that Mr. Head “might have been Virgil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante, or, better, Raphael,

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awakened by a blast of God’s light to fly to the side of Tobias.” Really? the reader thinks. Who is telling us this? And in what tone—mocking, whimsical, deadly serious? Once past this tesselated opening, which seems to have been written for academic New Critics of the era, primed on Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, to decode, the story begins to breathe on its own, and O’Connor trusts to her characters, through dialogue, to engage and move us. Their wide-eyed adventures in Atlanta, which involve wandering into a Negro neighborhood where they soon get lost, are reminiscent of the cruder, bawdier adventures of Virgil and Fonzo Snopes in Memphis in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), which end with the country-bumpkin Snopeses being brought to a Negro brothel by a Snopes cousin. Mr. Head and Nelson are both fascinated by and fearful of Negroes; their reconciliation is by way of their awed contemplation of an “artificial nigger”—a vulgar lawn ornament they discover in a white Atlanta neighborhood: It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either . . . [Mr. Head and Nelson] stood gazing at [him] as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy.

The “artificial nigger” is a mysterious agent of grace, perhaps like the crucified Christ. In Mystery and Manners, the collection of essays and letters published in 1969, five years after her premature death at the age of thirty-nine, the author speaks straightforwardly of “The Artificial Nigger” in Catholic terms, stating that the “artificial nigger”2 reunites Mr. Head and Nelson in a way not to be explained except as a “working of grace.” Does “The Artificial Nigger” succeed as a story if the reader is unaware of, or unsympathetic with, its Christian subtext? Here, as elsewhere in O’Connor’s most accomplished short fiction, the story moves with its own dramatic momentum; the Christian imagery is sensed rather than made explicit; for the skeleton beneath the story is not nearly so engaging as the story itself. Amid O’Connor’s work, “The Artificial Nigger” is memorable for its portrayal of comic yet sympathetic characters and for the unexpected “mercy” of its conclusion.

No t e s 1. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), 42.

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2. O’Connor, 116. Here, the word “nigger” is used by Flannery O’Connor herself; it would appear to have been a usage common to her, as to her fellow Caucasian Georgians. Forty years after the composition of “The Artificial Nigger,” the very word “nigger” has become so highly charged with political significance that any work of art containing it, especially by a white Southerner, is unwittingly abrasive, even provocative. O’Connor could not have foreseen how the word “nigger” would have come to seem, in some quarters of America, an actual obscenity of the nature of those sexual obscenities she would not have wished to include in her fiction. (There is at least one distinguished American university in which a large-enrollment literature class petitioned successfully to have “The Artificial Nigger” removed from its syllabus as a racist text.)

T imoth y P. C aron

“Backwards to Bethlehem”: Evangelicalism in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader. —Flannery O’Connor

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Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. —Matthew 10:34

lannery O’Connor often spoke of the impact of her Christian views upon her art and claimed that her notion of reality was a supernatural one, a reality given meaning through her commitment to the Catholic church: “I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.”49 This vigorous proclamation of Christian belief, which probably sounds so alien to most of Wise Blood ’s contemporary readers, distinguishes her intertextual use of the Bible from that of Faulkner,

From Struggles Over the Word: Race and Religion in O’Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright, pp. 22–51, 147–57. © 2000 by Mercer University Press.

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Hurston, and Wright. These other authors view the Bible as a contested site where each struggles with the white South’s dominant religiosity, but O’Connor’s Wise Blood actually endorses many tenets of that dominant religiosity. Wise Blood intertextually evokes the Bible to elicit a commitment of Christian faith from its readers. O’Connor seeks to modify her readers who, like her characters, she feels have become so hard-headed through unbelief that they too do not recognize the necessity of God’s grace. While Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright invoice biblical stories to comment upon and critique prevailing Southern racial inequities, O’Connor replicates the way the white South traditionally used the Bible to deflect concern away from societal considerations toward matters of personal piety and salvation. What I am not attempting to do is to deny the strength of O’Connor’s Catholic convictions; instead, I would like bring to light the common ground that she shared with the region’s white Protestantism, namely, an emphasis upon spiritual regeneration above all else. Her work seeks to change the wandering South, to confront it with the sword of Christian conviction so that her Southern readers will return to their region’s (in her opinion) diminishing faith. An example in Wise Blood is Solace Layfield, murdered by Hazel Motes, who could be said to have been redeemed, saved by God’s grace, as Haze runs him down with his Essex and then backs over the fallen prophet. Layfield dies with God’s name upon his lips, asking for forgiveness of his sins.50 Within Wise Blood, violence is divorced from a social context and placed squarely within the theological realm; violence serves as a metaphor for Christian conversion. In a similar manner, O’Connor relentlessly pursues her readership, aggressively confronting them with the message that they are doomed if they persist in living without Christian redemption. The violence her characters experience is the means by which O’Connor’s evangelical message reaches her audience’s ear. She felt the importance of her mission justified such measures, maintaining that you must “shout” or draw “large and startling figures” to reach the spiritually “hard of hearing” and “almost blind.”51 However, when shouting to the “hard of hearing,” dissenting voices are often drowned out. To paraphrase the litany of many Southern Protestant preachers practicing baptism by immersion, O’Connor’s fiction illustrates her characters’ death to their old way of life and their rebirth into Christ to walk: with Him. As Louise Gossett notes, “the crux of [O’Connor’s] fiction is the human being’s need to recognize the peril of damnation in which he lives.”52 Because of the confrontational tone of much of her non-fiction and the impassioned instructions she often gave on how she wanted her stories and novels to be read, many O’Connor critics have aligned themselves with her passionate advocacy of the Christian message

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and read her stories and novels only through the critical lens of evangelical Christianity. A partial list of the more memorable examples of such studies would include Sister Kathleen Feeley’s Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock, John R. May’s The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, Marshall Bruce Gentry’s Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque, Richard Giannone’s Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, Robert H. Brinkmeyer’s The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor, John F. Desmond’s Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History, and Harold Fickett’s Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace. Also, any number of essays taken from almost any issue of the Flannery O’Connor Bulletin demonstrate the same orthodoxy of critical approaches. For each of these critics, identifying with the author’s faith is a prerequisite for correct reading of the fiction. In the introduction to Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, Sura P. Rath discusses the early reception of Wise Blood. Early critics were unaware of O’Connor’s devout Christian beliefs and ascribed to her an unhealthy interest in seamy characters. It has only been after O’Connor inserted her infamous preface to the novel (which is reproduced in all subsequent editions) that critics have followed her lead in reproducing the text’s theology. To take a recent example, Laura B. Kennelly’s “Exhortation in Wise Blood: Rhetorical Theory as an Approach to Flannery O’Connor” encourages us to read the novel as an “exhortative” text. Of course, what we are exhorted to see is that “contemporary society face[s] a dangerous loss of spiritual awareness” and that “the saga of Hazel Motes and those around him [can] transmit a new way of seeing life . . .”53 The rhetoric of the white South’s salvation theology is nothing if not exhortative. In the introduction to his recent anthology, New Essays on Wise Blood, Michael Kreyling announces that his particular collection “has been assembled not to reinforce the consensus on O’Connor’s literary reputation, but to shake it a little out of complacent habits.”54 Kreyling convincingly argues that the result of these “complacent habits” has been “nearly five decades of repetitive affirmations of the theological message believed to inform O’Connor’s work, reinforced by the tacit belief that her considerable suffering crowned her word with a special truth status.”55 Kreyling traces the general outline of O’Connor criticism, surveying attempts to read her works both “against” and “with” its theological grain. As a challenge, the essays in Kreyling’s collection run counter to the majority of O’Connor criticism, in general, and Wise Blood ’s criticism, in particular. In this collection, Wise Blood is variously read as a critique of Cold War consumerism, the embodiment of Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the gaze, and as an example of feminist resistance to male dominated culture and speech. Each of the essays in the Kreyling volume tacitly confronts what Martha Stephens has labeled the “problem of assent”56 in reading O’Connor’s fiction.

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What if, unlike O’Connor herself, one does not read with the eyes of faith? Or, what if one does not read with O’Connor’s faith, but with a faith more concerned with social justice? To take a smaller example before considering the novel Wise Blood, what is a critic such as Stephens or André Bleikasten, who raises many of the same questions, to make of a short story like “The River?” In this story, a young boy’s parents—who could serve as the prototypes of worldly dissolution which so dismayed O’Connor—are too hung-over to attend to their son, so they leave him in the care of a good country woman who takes him to a “preaching and healing at the river.”57 There the preacher baptizes the boy, initiating him into his new life in the “Kingdom of Christ.” The following day, while his parents are again hung-over, little Harry Ashfield slips out of their apartment and makes his way back to the river where he drowns trying to baptize himself again. As he goes under for the final time, he feels a “long gentle hand”58 pulling him along the way toward a union with the saints. O’Connor explained her recurring tendency toward depicting violent conversions by saying, “When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism [referring to her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away], I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance.”59 And the drowning of Harry Ashfield is quite jarring. O’Connor anticipated most critics’ recalcitrance to her sacramental vision and, concerning “The River” and Harry’s ultimate fate, defended her work by embracing the white South’s salvation-oriented religiosity: “[Harry] comes to a good end. He’s saved from those nutty parents, a fate worse than death. He’s been baptized and so he goes to his Maker; this is a good end.”60 The grief of the young boy’s family, the pain of his death—neither of these factors is allowed to weaken the story’s ending, nor are they acknowledged in O’Connor’s insistence that her readers view this character’s death only in the best possible terms. O’Connor’s fiction invokes the Bible not in any openly revisionary sense—neither revising the white South’s popular notions of the Bible nor that particular interpretive community itself—but as an authorization, an appeal, as if directly to the ultimate expression of God on Earth, His Holy Word. O’Connor’s evangelical intertextual appropriations from the Bible are very similar to one of the white South’s strongest biblical interpreting strategies: the Bible’s perceived evangelical thrust makes it more of a document of the relationship between God and humanity and less of a guidebook for the relationships between and among Southern whites and blacks. The title of O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, perfectly exemplifies a biblical intertext employed to spur her readers to Christian commitment.

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What could easily be interpreted as a call for political insurrection in the biblical text—“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force”61—is read by the evangelical South (and most O’Connor critics) as a challenge to one’s soul. Similarly, Wise Blood ’s revoicings of the New Testament turn away social questions of racial injustice by focusing upon the efforts of true believers to claim the “kingdom of heaven.” Thomas Schaub makes a similar point when he asserts that “throughout [her] fiction, it isn’t too hard to see that . . . these violent conversions [of characters like Hazel Motes from Wise Blood] are meant to operate as much against the liberal reader as against the central character.”62 Schaub’s American Fiction in the Cold War does a remarkable job of placing O’Connor’s fiction within the context of Cold War liberalism and its rhetoric, arguing that “the premises of O’Connor’s work were remarkably consistent with those of the very audience she imagined withering under her attack.”63 The common premises that Schaub detects between her fiction and the discourse of modern American liberalism are a belief in human imperfection, the presence of evil, and a “necessity to recognize the limitations of human control and aspiration.”64 Despite this common ground, O’Connor often saw herself as being at odds with these “liberal readers,” whom she often labeled “innerlekchuls” in her correspondence, and she was hesitant of making tactical alliances with those who did not share her uncompromising Christian faith. As she appropriates biblical material, O’Connor’s identification and shared sympathies with Southern Protestantism influence her intertextual project, giving her a different agenda from the rest of the authors in this study. For example, William Faulkner’s intertextual use of the Bible in Light in August assails the white Southern Protestantism that views the Scriptures as a divinely sanctioned statement of white superiority. Through his depiction of Yoknapatawpha County’s fear and hatred of Joe Christmas, he exposes the white community’s use of the Bible to authorize Christmas’s eventual lynching. Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain creates an alternative African-American world apart from the oppressive white South, and Wright’s Dan Taylor and Aunt Sue from Uncle Tom’s Children employ a distinctly black religiosity as a foundation for the fight against Jim Crow. Both Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Uncle Tom’s Children utilize the black church’s theological legacies to inform their respective intertextual practices. Whereas Hurston and Wright adopt elements from the black church’s struggle against an oppressive society, and Faulkner reveals the racism of a small but vocal biblical interpretive community, O’Connor’s intertextual practice replicates the white church’s silence over unjust racial practices that arose from a militant emphasis upon personal salvation and redemption.

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Kreyling is right in his insistence that the critical orthodoxy surrounding O’Connor has resulted in an “orthodox line [that] is narrow, deep, and resistant to revision.”65 And his anthology, along with Jon Lance Bacon’s Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, does much to redirect the attention focused on Wise Blood and the rest of O’Connor’s fiction. However, that is not to denigrate the theologically informed investigations which have already revealed great insights into her work or to suggest that there is nothing else to be gained from such investigations. Indeed, in one sense, this chapter is but another religiously-oriented investigation of Wise Blood, but with two important differences: first, I want to point to the shared concerns of Wise Blood and the dominant religiosity of the white South’s silence over racial matters; and, secondly, I want to place O’Connor’s evangelical fervor in dialogue with other biblically shaped texts, which reflect the variety of the Southern religious experience. This salvational emphasis of the white South, though diminished, still characterizes the region known as the Bible Belt. O’Connor stresses that the South is the last remaining region of America where Sam Jones’s66 grandma would read “the Bible thirty-seven times on her knees,” and it is “made up of the descendants of old ladies like her. You don’t shake off their influence in even several generations.”67 What white Southerners have inherited but not “shaken off ” from figures such as Grandmother Jones is a common medium of expression, a shared set of images, allusions, stories, and tropes which provides them with a common vocabulary emphasizing the soul’s need for salvation. Reading the Bible in the South is the pursuit of literate individuals from all classes, from the educated upper classes to the poorest dirt farmers.68 As a devoted reader and student of the Scriptures herself, O’Connor uses the Bible as her primary “instrument to plumb Christian meaning.”69 O’Connor uses biblical intertexts to invest her characters’ struggles with a religious urgency and ground them in the supernatural reality she believed in so strongly herself. Because of her adamant Catholicism, O’Connor might seem an outsider among a grouping of Southern writers that includes William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright. As Southern historians, and Southern historians of religion in particular, have long known, the overwhelmingly Protestant South, outside of a few areas, has not been very tolerant or accepting of Catholics. Louis D. Rubin was given perhaps only to slight exaggeration in his characterization of many Southern Protestants of the 1950s and 1960s when he described them as believing that “the Pope of Rome is a minion of Satan, and a Catholic priest a mysterious and dangerous man.”70 An earlier generation’s animosity toward and blaming of Catholics for the ills of the region and the nation can be found in an article in the Memphis Commer-

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cial Appeal from 1928 which claimed that “three of our presidents have been assassinated, and it is understood that every one of them fell at the hands of Catholics. I have never heard a statement to the contrary.”71 However, as a Southerner, O’Connor received what Rubin calls a “double heritage,”72 a Catholic doctrinal orthodoxy along with a knowledge of and affinity for the region’s evangelical fundamentalism. As to the latter component of her amalgamated theological heritage, O’Connor discusses these submerged or “underground affinities” in her essay, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.” She defines the Protestant South as the last region of America where Christianity and Bible reading have not been demoted to a “department of sociology . . . or personality development,” either of which would have appalled O’Connor. She claims that in the South, at least, the supernatural is not an embarrassment. Because of her concern with saving souls and her commitment to personal Bible study, O’Connor proclaims a religious “kinship” with Protestant “backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists.”73 As she explained elsewhere, “in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”74 More specifically, O’Connor’s kinship with her Protestant neighbors results from a shared belief in the “divinity of Christ, . . . the Redemptive Power, [and] the physical resurrection.”75 O’Connor maintained that the differences she had with Southern Protestants were “on the nature of the Church, not on the nature of God or our obligation to Him.”76 O’Connor wrote to the novelist John Hawkes that she accepted “the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and judgement”77 as her Southern Protestant fellowbelievers. Despite differences of denominational loyalty, a white Southern “Child of God”—whether Sam Jones or Flannery O’Connor—would know his or her spiritual brothers and sisters because he or she would recognize a similar concern with salvation. Samuel S. Hill characterizes the emphasis placed upon personal salvation by the white South as “verticalist.”78 This term emphasizes the dominant relationship of the white South’s theology, a relationship plotted along a vertical axis between a morally requiring God and sinful humans. Conversion, or in the white church’s vocabulary, “getting right with God,” is necessary to establish this vertical bond. Southern social ills such as child labor, sharecropping, illiteracy, and race relations received little attention from the region’s religion because the white church emphasized “the temporary nature of this world as a place whose evils must be endured.”79 O’Connor’s own verticalist disposition is apparent in Mystery and Manners when she proclaims her readers’ need to realize their “dependence on the grace of God [for salvation], and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”80 Much like the Southern white church, whose religion

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is “dominantly a conservative or reinforcing agent for the traditional values held by white Southern society,”81 O’Connor’s focus on the soul’s condition deemphasizes the region’s social concerns. The “story” necessary for constructing O’Connor’s fiction is the story of individual sinners’ redemption that white Southern Protestants stress in their evangelical, salvation-oriented interpretations of the Bible. In Wise Blood, O’Connor utilizes her familiarity with the Bible and relies upon a similar, although perhaps lesser, knowledge in her Southern readership. As she says elsewhere: “Abstractions, formulas, laws will not serve here. We have to have stories in our background. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story of mythic dimensions, one that belongs to everybody, one in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and its descent. In the Protestant South, the Scriptures fill this role.”82 O’Connor’s fiction then is to lead readers back to its narrative source—the Bible. This reading of the Bible as a single, sustained narrative which relates the Christian story of Christ’s redemption is common to Protestantism. For example, theologian Carl Ficken’s God’s Story and Modern Literature succinctly summarizes this hermeneutical principle: “The Christian’s life and faith are shaped within a community that exists because of the great story of God’s freeing and sustaining love. The Bible tells that story; the church has repeated it, lived it, been nourished by it for centuries. We are a people who know how to read a story and how to tell one.”83 Upon (re)turning to the Bible, readers will find what the white South’s Protestant tradition finds in its “infallible Bible, . . . especially the King James version of it”84: the salvation story. In white Southern religiosity, the Bible provides insight into the state of one’s soul—will you stand before a demanding God as an unregenerate sinner, or as a redeemed believer? White Southern ministers and their congregations often deflected issues of race relations because they did not conceive of the region’s “race problem” as a matter of individual morality. For O’Connor, the relationship between her fiction and the Bible is an anagogical one, revealing the link between the known world and the supernatural reality embodied in Christ’s incarnation, His redemptive death, and His resurrection. O’Connor often referred to the anagogical element present in what she considered good fiction: “The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” Within her own work, she strove to invest her writing with an “anagogical vision” in an effort to reveal “the Divine life and our participation in it.”85 Wise Blood ’s biblical intertextuality, the novel’s prime anagogical manifestation, is “verticalist” in much the same way that O’Connor’s theology is verticalist; the novel invokes the Bible to insist upon personal salvation dispensed by a morally demanding God to

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whom everyone will one day be accountable. O’Connor appropriates biblical stories, figures, characters, and tropes so that her work might echo with the same urgent redemptive message she finds so prevalent in the Scriptures. Her own reading of the Bible and her intertextual appropriations mediate between her fiction and the supernatural realm it seeks to engage. O’Connor invokes the WORD into her words, investing Wise Blood with seemingly timeless and universal qualities, but her intertextual revoicings actually reflect the reading practices of a specific time and place. Wise Blood ’s intertexts reflect the white South’s obsession with individual sin and salvation. This sin/salvation fixation is encapsulated in Wise Blood ’s twin characters of unbelief and belief, Enoch Emery and Hazel Motes, respectively, whose exploits demonstrate O’Connor’s fervent belief in the necessity of spiritual rebirth. In O’Connor’s fiction, each individual must choose Christ, as does Haze, or the world, as does Enoch. As Robert Brinkmeyer has noted, a fundamentalist, evangelical theology, which is embodied in Haze’s mother and grandfather, underpins the novel.86 “Every fourth Saturday,” Hazel’s grandfather drove “into Eastrod as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell, and he was shouting before he had the car door open.”87 And the message the old man delivered was extremely simple—all listeners must surrender to the “soul-hungry” Jesus or they will face the Hell from which Jesus was so desperate to save them. There are no fine theological points or room for discussion—one must choose redemption or damnation, Jesus or the world. As they move through Taulkinham,88 Enoch and Haze are anagogically linked to the Bible in two ways: their names render moral pronouncements on life’s vacuity outside of Christ, and their actions reveal their desperate longing for some supernatural significance in their lives. Emily Archer concludes that O’Connor’s “consistent attention to meaningful, unarbitrary character naming should . . . be perceived as an anagogical signal, a clue that names can somehow ‘make contact with mystery’ ”89 (emphasis added). For example, Enoch Emery is an intertextual revoicing of two different Enochs from the early chapters of Genesis.90 The first is the son of Cain, born after his father was cursed for killing Abel.91 In his wanderings, Cain founded a city which he named after his first born son. The white South’s religiosity interprets this Enoch (Cain’s son) as a figure for sinful man. Therefore, Enoch Emery’s name links him to this first Enoch’s Old Testament story; Enoch Emery is the “son” of the Bible’s first example of willfulness and distance from God after the Fall. The familial connection between O’Connor’s character and the Old Testament Cain is further revealed when Enoch mentions his daddy’s scar to Haze. Like his intertextual biblical predecessor, Enoch Emery is a man living under a system of rituals, outside of the Grace of Christ, completely clueless about Jesus’ redemptive mission. Despite Enoch Emery’s boast that he

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knows a “whole heap about Jesus,”92 he fruitlessly seeks to fulfill his spiritual impulses through a series of rituals in the park, such as his viewing of the shrunken mummy,93 without an evangelical faith in Christian redemption. These rituals display Enoch’s religious nature, but in O’Connor’s redemption-oriented vocabulary, he is only “Christ-haunted” and never “Christcentered.” Enoch symbolizes for O’Connor the component within humanity “that demands the redemptive act,”94 yet he is unable to convert the factual knowledge of Jesus he acquired at the Rodemill Boys Bible Academy into a practicing Christian faith. For O’Connor, faith can never be just a matter of facts or biographical knowledge about the life of Jesus. Enoch Emery’s intertextual relationship with the second Enoch of Genesis is ironic. This second Old Testament Enoch was the child of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth. This Enoch was a righteous man and a Hebrew patriarch from whose descendants Noah would eventually be born. Genesis 5:24 describes this Enoch walking with God, avoiding death, and being taken directly into communion with God: “. . . and he was not; for God took him.” Unlike every other patriarch listed in the genealogy between Adam and Noah, the length of Enoch’s life is never given. In the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews revoices Enoch’s story to demonstrate the rewards of godly living: “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.”95 In an ironic retelling of this biblical story, O’Connor also “translates” her Enoch from what the white South’s theology would consider a spiritually vacuous human being into an animal, both of whom lack the ability to connect with God. All of Enoch’s innate religious desires are twisted by Taulkinham’s consumerism. For instance, O’Connor’s Enoch’s greatest goal is to be “THE young man of the future, like the ones in the insurance ads.”96 In the theological framework of the white South, the logical conclusion of Enoch’s quest to fulfill his religion of self-advancement is when he becomes an animal, assuming the form of a gorilla and being translated into an it.97 As Enoch dresses himself in the gorilla-suit, O’Connor shifts from the human pronoun “he” to the inhuman pronoun “it”: In the uncertain light, one of his lean white legs could be seen to disappear and then the other, one arm and then the other: a black heavier shaggier figure replaced his. For an instant, it had two heads, one light and one dark, but after a second, it pulled the dark back head over the other and corrected this. It busied itself with certain hidden fastenings and what appeared to be minor adjustments of its hide.98

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After worshipping the shriveled mummy, the unregenerate god of pop psychology and profit-motive theology, Enoch Emery’s deity rewards him, and “no gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one.”99 In an example of a critic replicating Wise Blood ’s verticalist theology, Richard Giannone appropriates O’Connor’s and the white South’s rhetoric of Christian salvation when he writes of this scene, “the Enoch of Genesis may have been translated to heaven . . . , but the gorilla on the rock is humanity shorn of glory.”100 But the translation of Enoch Emery from man to gorilla reveals Wise Blood ’s deferral to prevailing Southern opinions on race. The South’s racist images of blacks as sub-human beasts lurk just beneath the surface of this scene. By the end of the transformation, Enoch is a black, shaggy brute completely ruled by base or “animal” desires. In attempting to demonstrate that all humans urgently need a regenerative encounter with Christ, O’Connor creates a portrait precariously close to the white South’s stereotypical menacing black male. Enoch’s metaphorical transformation sounds suspiciously close to the core of Gavin Stevens’ speech about Joe Christmas’s “warring” white and black blood from Light in August : both men succumb to inherent weaknesses. Both Hazel and Joe Christmas wage a losing fight against their “darker” natures before completely submitting to their evil inheritances. O’Connor’s insistence that her fiction be interpreted using anagogical principles deflects attention away from possible racial considerations. For O’Connor and the evangelical white South, racial injustice is not a matter of individual piety but simply a worldly injustice to be endured. While O’Connor links Enoch Emery to the Old Testament, demonstrating the consequences of life without Jesus, Hazel Motes is intertextually linked primarily to the New Testament. His name invokes the pervasive New Testament imagery of blindness because first Haze is blind to God’s summons, and then he so completely submits to God that he blinds himself so that he will not be distracted from his newly acquired spiritual vision. Hazel Motes’ name comes from Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 7:3–5: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” In Wise Blood ’s theological framework, the young man from Eastrod is blind to God’s call because of the obfuscating “haze” of his apostasy and the log-sized “mote” of personal pride in his own eye, i.e., thinking he has not sinned and does not need salvation. Haze’s metaphorical and literal blindness evoke a large net-

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work of New Testament images all connected by the white South to proper seeing, that is, the ability to distinguish Jesus’ teachings and how one is to follow them. For instance, Christ proclaims that “the light of the body is the eye,” and if it is filled with light, “then thy whole body shall be filled with light.”101 In O’Connor’s revoicing of this New Testament trope, before his conversion when he acquired his spiritual sight and lost his physical sight, Haze was guilty of having eyes, yet having no sight.102 As spiritually exhortative as O’Connor intends their names to be, Enoch Emery and Hazel Motes most dramatically reveal O’Connor’s project of evangelical biblical intertextuality through their actions. For the reader initiated into the white South’s redemption-oriented theology, nearly everything they do points toward the futility of life without God’s grace while encouraging readers to return to or establish relationships with Christ. For example, the anagogical significance of Enoch’s pursuit of the “new jesus,” which he believes to have found in the shriveled mummy, clearly reveals O’Connor’s scorn for false idols. O’Connor uses a key word from her religious vocabulary to describe the mummy and its significance to Enoch: “It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card over it telling all about it. But there was something the card couldn’t say . . .”103 (emphasis added). What this shriveled little man cannot communicate to Enoch is some sense of the divine Mystery (as O’Connor usually designated it) of God’s redemptive involvement in and concern for individuals. O’Connor’s disdain for such frail idols is revealed in her manipulation of biblical intertexts surrounding Epoch’s veneration of the mummy and its rewards. Compelled by his vague spiritual yearnings, Epoch begins to clean his rented room for the arrival of his sacred visitor. The object receiving the most attention, since it will be the future home of his god, is a washstand which was “built in three parts and stood on bird legs six inches high. . . . The lowest part was a tabernacle-like cabinet which was meant to contain a slopjar”104 (emphasis added). He paints the inside of his tabernacle with gilt paint and places the mummy inside of what O’Connor, in all obvious allusion to the Hebrew Ark of the Covenant, calls an “ark.”105 Like a chief priest from the Old Testament, Enoch now waits for directions from his god, whose relics are to be housed in a completely secular version of the Ark of the Covenant inside the holy of holies of Epoch’s room. For O’Connor, the mummy is no more spiritually enlightening than the human excrement that used to fill the slop-jar the washstand was designed to hold. The result of Enoch’s willful pursuit of this new jesus is already apparent: he spiritually de-evolves from a human being and is translated from a person into an “it.” O’Connor once described Epoch as a “moron and chiefly a comic character.”106 O’Connor is able to laugh the laugh of the justified because of her

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firm religious faith. If readers find humor in Enoch’s exploits, there is little to laugh at in the grim spectacle of Haze working out his salvation “in fear and trembling” and numerous mortifications of the flesh. Not only does Haze blind himself in his quest for redemption, but in the last days of his life, he also wraps barbed wire around his chest and fills his shoes with pebbles and broken glass. To understand Haze’s struggle against unbelief, one must understand the Motes family’s religious legacy. Haze received some of his earliest teaching about Christ from the frightening figure of his grandfather, “a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger.”107 The grandfather spoke of a relentless, frightening, “soul-hungry” Jesus who would chase sinners “over the waters of sin,” and despite any obstacle, He “would have them in the end.”108 As O’Connor herself claimed, the only thing that Hazel retained from this frightening exposure to his grandfather’s evangelical tirades was “a sense of sin. . . . This sense of sin is the only key he has to finding a sanctuary and he begins unconsciously to search for God through sin” (emphasis added).109 This quest for redemption, regardless of where it might lead, is the common ground that forms the religious kinship with the white South’s evangelical Protestantism, which O’Connor acknowledged in her “underground affinities” with “back-woods prophets” and “shouting fundamentalists.” By the novel’s conclusion, Hazel does not seem to even be living in this world, much less showing any concern for its injustices. O’Connor dramatizes Haze’s willful rebellion and flight—both in terms of theology and geography—from his calling from God in the opening and closing scenes of chapter 7. Just as God directed Moses and the Israelite nation out of Egyptian bondage with a cloud to direct them by day, He also seeks to lead Hazel with a cloud, one reminiscent of an Old Testament patriarch: “The sky was just a little lighter blue than [Hazel’s] suit, clear and even, with only one cloud in it, a large blinding white one with curls and a beard.”110 Hazel, however, is too busy trying to seduce Sabbath Hawks (who is busy trying to seduce Hazel) to take notice of God’s attempts at spiritual guidance. By the end of the chapter, the cloud-image of an Old Testament, patriarchal figure has given way to “a bird with long thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction.”111 O’Connor’s text seems eager to bestow upon Hazel an anointing similar to Christ’s when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him in the form of a dove.112 The distances between Haze’s theology and that of the evangelical South—which reads this New Testament story as the starting point of Christ’s redemptive mission—is revealed in the simple act of Hazel driving “in the opposite direction” of this heavenly sign. Despite their nearly constant grumbling against Jehovah and the insurrections they mount against Moses, even Hurston’s recalcitrant Hebrews from Moses, Man of the Mountain are more spiritually attuned to God’s signs than Hazel.

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The clouds in the countryside are not the only signs O’Connor has placed in Hazel’s path that he fails to read, signs which become increasingly obvious to the reader attuned to her evangelical project. Haze commits the sin of pride when he repeatedly claims not to need Christ’s intervention for salvation, as he tells the waitress at the zoo’s restaurant, “I AM clean.” So, with the log-sized mote of pride in his own eye, Haze cannot read such subtle signs as the clouds. Hazel is so blind to the efforts of the “soul-hungry Jesus” that before his conversion he also fails to interpret correctly the most obvious signs the “wild ragged figure”113 of the relentless Jesus places before him. These are literally the road-side signs whose fundamentalist urgency demands that Haze abandon his sinful ways. On a trip out of the city, Haze sees a gray boulder beside the road. “White letters on the boulder said, WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER! WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP?”114 Haze spends several minutes pondering the sign’s question, one of special significance for Hazel, considering his involvement in the Church Without Christ and with Leora Watts, and for O’Connor’s apostate readership whom he represents within Wise Blood ’s narrative world. Here O’Connor reveals her affinity with the evangelical white South, the large capital letters shouting to the spiritually deaf. Haze especially studies “the two words at the bottom of the sign. They said in smaller letters, ‘Jesus Saves.’ ” Haze reacts with anger and declares, “I don’t believe in anything.”115 The Church Without Christ says that there are no longer signs from God, if there ever were any, so Haze returns to Taulkinham unaware that Christ is preparing an unmistakable message for the recalcitrant young man from Eastrod. Or, is it O’Connor preparing an unmistakable message for us as readers? O’Connor again reflects the conversion-oriented theology of the white South as she depicts three events which facilitate Hazel’s eventual confrontation with an otherworldly Jesus: Hazel destroys the dust-filled new jesus; he kills the false prophet, Solace Layfield; and the patrolman pushes his car over the embankment. In the first of these events, Enoch thinks he is rendering a great service to his deity by uniting the mummy with Hazel whom he supposes to be a great prophet of his secular god, a sort of John the Baptist whose lone voice in the wilderness of Taulkinham is preparing the way for this physical, unregenerate god. Yet what causes Hazel to reject this new jesus is what O’Connor once called his own type of “Wise Blood,”116 a blood, unlike Enoch’s, that intuitively recognizes that the shriveled mummy is not what he has been pursuing. Having never been anything more than “all man” and possessing no blood to spare for humanity’s redemption, this new jesus serves no spiritually redemptive purpose for O’Connor. Hazel recognizes this when his vision is made hyperacute by putting on his mother’s Bible-reading glasses and viewing the tableau of Sabbath cradling the shrunken mummy,

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an intertextual parody of the Catholic iconography of Madonna and Holy Child; she holds the shriveled little corpse “in the crook of her arm, . . . fitted exactly into the hollow of her shoulder.”117 Hazel responds to this blasphemous mother and child with great violence—he throws the new jesus against a wall, “and the trash inside sprayed out like dust.”118 He then throws the skin out the back door into the rain. Harold Fickett, in a passage whose rhetoric is virtually indistinguishable from O’Connor’s, or the white South’s dominant religiosity, concludes that “Haze . . . recognizes that he has indeed been presented with a new jesus—a jesus shrunken to the size to which Hazel’s unbelief would tailor him; a jesus that is a continuing sign of our mortality, that lives on in a mummified eternity only to proclaim the impossibility of resurrection.”119 O’Connor says much the same thing in a letter to “A”120 dated 23 July 1960: “That Haze rejects the mummy suggests everything. What he has been looking for with body and soul throughout the book is suddenly presented to him and he sees it has to be rejected, he sees it ain’t really what he’s been looking for.”121 Hazel’s momentary insight does not accomplish his redemption; rather, it is merely a step in clearing away the log-sized mote of personal pride that prevents him from recognizing his need for a redemptive encounter with Jesus. The second event preparing Hazel for conversion—paradoxical as it may sound—is his killing of his narrative twin, Solace Layfield. Layfield is Hazel’s textual double: when Hoover Shoats realizes that Hazel will not compromise his Church Without Christ for monetary gain, he simply hires a Hazel lookalike to help him work his scam. Hazel moves toward conversion when he strips away his double’s pious costume. [Layfield] began to run in earnest. He tore off his shirt and unbuckled his belt and ran out of the trousers. He began grabbing for his feet as if he would take off his shoes too, but before he could get at them, the Essex knocked him flat and ran over him. Haze drove about twenty feet and stopped the car and then began to back it. He backed it over the body and then stopped and got out.122

Earlier, a woman in the crowd asked Hazel if he and Shoats’s “True Prophet” were twins, and Hazel foreshadows Layfield’s impending murder when he replies, “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down, and kill you.”123 This comment does not so much reveal Hazel’s murderous tendencies as it does his realization, at least on what O’Connor considered his intuitive or “blood” level, that he must rid his own self of its disbelieving elements. Put another way, within the anagogical interpretive mode favored by Wise Blood and the Southern white church, Hazel’s violence is interpreted

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not so much a murder of Layfield as it is a violent exorcism of his own sinful elements that obstruct his view of the redeeming Christ. Anagogy displaces the moral concerns regarding violence in the here and now. In the terms of O’Connor’s universe, Hazel functions as Layfield’s instrument of grace because, as the consumptive false prophet lies beneath the Essex, he confesses his sinful nature before Jesus and dies asking for His forgiveness: “ ‘Jesus hep me,’ the man wheezed.”124 The final step of Hazel’s preparation for conversion is when the patrolman destroys Hazel’s car. Though Haze claims that not even a lightning bolt could stop his Essex, he does not reckon on the mysterious patrolman who polices the outer limits of Haze’s apostasy and prohibits him from getting too far in his attempts to outrun God. This point is reinforced by another road sign that Hazel deliberately tries not to read—“Jesus Died for YOU”125— just moments before the policeman pulls him over. The officer pushes his car over an embankment, destroying his vehicle and his ability to run from God. “Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space. His knees bent under him and he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging over.”126 Hazel has now completed his third preparatory experience necessary for receiving Jesus’ mysterious redemptive grace. This scene secures the intertextual bond between Hazel and Paul: both men violently experience God’s grace as they travel isolated country roads to preach their individual messages against the Gospel. Immediately following his encounter with the patrolman, Haze rushes back to the city to blind himself with the mixture of quicklime and water. The blindness of Saul and Hazel is the bridge between their old selves and their new ones. Saul’s blindness, the scales covering his eyes, is God’s chastening tool. After his rebirth as the apostle Paul, he continually suffered from a “thorn in the flesh” which kept him humble before God. Hazel likewise disciplines his flesh with the metal thorns of three strands of barbed wire wrapped around his chest.127 These harsh measures do eventually convert him into a beam of redemptive light at the novel’s conclusion. In fact, O’Connor has Haze finally recognize the truth behind Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18:9 (a particularly favorite passage of the evangelical white South) that it is better “to enter into life with one eye [or, in Hazel’s case, with no eyes] rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.” Hazel’s self-mutilation allows O’Connor to emphasize two crucial components of the white South’s redemption-oriented theology: first, Hazel’s blindness eliminates the distractions which have so long kept him from surrendering to Jesus’ pursuit; secondly, he gains a more intense spiritual vision

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allowing him to see what he is now running toward and not from. As Mrs. Flood notices after Hazel rubs quicklime and water into his face, his eyes reveal a “peculiar pushing look, as if [he] were going forward after something [he] could just distinguish in the distance.”128 While Hazel’s means of salvation are extremely Catholic (i.e. through his penitential acts), the evangelical call that leads to his conversion is highly Protestant. An important distinction should be made between Saul/Paul and Hazel, however. While both men bicker with Christianity, their motives could not be farther apart. Theologian Martin Hengel observes that Saul/Paul persecuted the early Christian community “in the firm conviction that in so doing he was acting according to God’s law and will, in zeal for this law.”129 The newly founded cult of Jesus was highly critical of the Mosaic law, leading to the eventual stoning of one of the church’s most influential leaders, Stephen (Acts 7:55–60). Saul held the cloaks of the men who stoned Stephen, and seemingly spurred on by this action, he began to persecute the early church in Jerusalem and surrounding areas, imprisoning believers (Acts 8). Haze, on the contrary, denigrates Christianity not because he sees himself as fulfilling God’s law but because he wants to deny that there even is a God. Once Hazel has blinded himself, he begins his journey “backwards to Bethlehem,”130 drawing toward a spiritual union with Christ as he approaches death. Hazel’s journey has truly come full circle now with his end fully recognizable in his beginning. Wise Blood opens and closes with the memento mori images of death in life that Hazel’s surrender to Christ fully embodies within the white South’s salvation oriented theology. O’Connor describes the “plain and insistent”131 outline of a skull under Hazel’s skin on the novel’s first page, and on its last, the same memento mori fuses with the description of Hazel’s eyes, his hyperacute organ of spiritual sight: “The outline of a skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.”132 Hazel’s self-blinding, which bestows upon him a theological “tunnel-vision,” and his other penitential acts lead to a union with Jesus as he becomes the “pin point of light” that Mrs. Flood had detected in his sightless eyes. It is this dark tunnel that leads him back to Bethlehem and his soul-saving encounter with Christ. Wise Blood is O’Connor’s evangelical project, and Hazel’s blindness is her metaphor for the occlusion of humanity’s spiritual sight. But the text of Wise Blood itself might be said to possess a blind spot; O’Connor is so intent upon demonstrating the machinations of Christian grace that the Southern white church’s verticalist tendencies are replicated in Wise Blood. The extent of O’Connor’s identification with the white Protestant South’s hierarchy of heavenly concerns over earthly ones is suggested by her refusal to meet James Baldwin in Georgia in the spring of 1959. To use O’Connor’s own words, it

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“just wouldn’t do” for a white woman (regardless of the fact that O’Connor never considered herself a real Southern “lady”) to meet with a black writer of the stature and reputation of James Baldwin to discuss art. She explained her reasons for not meeting with Baldwin in a letter to Maryat Lee: “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair.” O’Connor concluded by saying that one “might as well expect a mule to fly” as for her to see Baldwin within the state borders of Georgia.133 Even in short stories, such as “The Artificial Nigger” and “Revelation,” where her focus seems to be explicitly upon Southern race relations, O’Connor’s stories demonstrate an emphasis upon her white main characters’ “moments of grace,” and Southern blacks are just the impetus of her white characters’ “salvation,” as in the case of Mrs. Turpin. In a recent attempt to deal with the question of race in O’Connor’s short fiction, one of her most theologically sympathetic critics, Ralph Wood, examines her correspondence with Maryat Lee and concludes that “Flannery O’Connor often sounds like an unabashed racist in her privately expressed opinions.”134 However, he goes on to differentiate between what she wrote in her letters and the purer expressions of her fiction. Wood finds that her fiction offers “the way of the Cross” as the only viable solution to “race hatred.”135 This seems to me to be a strange dichotomy that allows Wood, like O’Connor and much of the rest of her audience, to deflect social concerns with theological ones. As he says, in a statement that sounds as much like O’Connor as anything she wrote herself, “the liberal estimate of human nature is mistaken in the most fundamental way. It ignores the enduring reality of Original Sin, especially in its power to infect the racially righteous no less than the racially sinful.”136 In essence, Wood, in the classic rhetorical gesture of O’Connor’s partisan critics, once again replicates the white South’s response to racial inequality: why concern ourselves with racial inequality in the here-and-now when everything will be remedied in the hereafter? To paraphrase Paul in the New Testament, O’Connor might have been forced to live in the world, but she zealously refuses to be of the world, especially the South’s racial struggles, which Wise Blood (and most of its critics) so studiously avoids.

No t e s 49. Flannery O’Connor, “Fiction Writer and His Country,” 32. 50. Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, 108. 51. O’Connor, “Fiction Writer and His Country,” 33–34. 52. Louise Y. Gossett, “Flannery O’Connor,” 490. 53. Laura B. Kennelly, “Exhortation in Wise Blood: Rhetorical Theory as an Approach to Flannery O’Connor,” 166.

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54. Michael Kreyling, introduction to New Essays on Wise Blood, 2. 55. Ibid, 3. 56. Martha Stephens, The Question of Flannery O’Connor, 10. 57. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 169. 58. Ibid, 174. 59. Flannery O’Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” 162. 60. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, 58. 61. Matthew 11:12. 62. Thomas Schaub, American Fiction in the Cold War, 123. 63. Ibid, 125. 64. Ibid, 124. 65. Kreyling, introduction to New Essays on Wise Blood, 7. 66. Samuel Porter Jones (1846–1906) was one of America’s most popular evangelical preachers in the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. He swore at his father’s deathbed to forsake alcohol and his profligate lifestyle, accepted Christianity shortly afterward and preached his first sermon within a week after his conversion (Henry Warner Bowden, “Samuel Porter Jones,” 367). 67. O’Connor, “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” 201–202. 68. Ibid, 203. 69. Ibid, 209. 70. Louis D. Rubin, “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt,” 50. 71. Quoted in Kenneth K. Bailey, Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century, 104. 72. Rubin, “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt,” 74. 73. Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” 207. 74. Flannery O’Connor, “Southern Fiction,” 44. 75. Rubin, “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt,” 69. See Robert Brinkmeyer’s The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor for another insightful discussion of the common spiritual concerns O’Connor shared with her Protestant neighbors. 76. O’Connor, “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” 202. 77. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 350. 78. Samuel S. Hill, Southern Churches in Crisis, 92. 79. Samuel S. Hill, “The South’s Two Cultures,” 41. 80. O’Connor, “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” 209. 81. Hill, “The South’s Two Cultures,” 36. 82. O’Connor, “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” 202. 83. Carl Ficken, God’s Story and Modern Literature, ix–x. 84. Edgar T. Thompson, “God and the Southern Plantation System,” 61. 85. Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” 72. 86. Brinkmeyer, The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor, 105. 87. Ibid, 10. 88. Several critics have discussed the symbolic function of Taulkinham in relation to some of the more decadent cities of the Bible. See Thomas Lorch, “Flannery O’Connor: Christian Allegorist,” for a reading of Wise Blood which examines O’Connor’s debt to Christian allegorists, such as Bunyan, and which reads Taulkinham as a contemporary version of Vanity Fair; Horton Davies, “Anagogical Signals in O’Connor’s Fiction,” for a catalogue of recurring religious symbols in the depiction of Wise Blood ’s apostate Southern city; and Sallie McFague, “The Parabolic in Faulkner, O’Connor, and Percy,” in which she finds that, like the Gospel parables

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of Christ, O’Connor’s fiction is rooted in the everyday world while revealing a supernatural reality. See also Marshall Bruce Gentry’s Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque, particularly 123–24, for an insightful discussion of the absent and/or twisted theologies of Taulkinham’s citizens.   89. Emily Archer, “ ‘Stalking Joy’: Flannery O’Connor’s Accurate Naming,” 22.   90. James L. Green, “Enoch Emery and His Biblical Namesakes in Wise Blood,” 418.   91. Genesis 4:17.   92. Wise Blood, 26.   93. Harold Fickett also argues that Enoch’s religious desires are revealed through the rituals he constantly performs and even goes so far as to liken them to a type of liturgy (Harold Fickett, Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace, 42–43).   94. O’Connor, “Southern Fiction,” 48.   95. Hebrews 11:5.   96. Wise Blood, 98. See Jon Lance Bacon’s essay, “A Fondness for Supermarkets: Wise Blood and Consumer Culture,” and his book-length study, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture, for investigations of Wise Blood as critique of rampant American consumerism.   97. See William Allen’s “The Cage of Matter: The World as Zoo in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood ” for a discussion of Enoch’s “translation” into the gorilla. Allen sees this change as prefigured in Enoch’s fascination with the zoo animals and as a reward for the religious offices performed at the zoo.   98. Wise Blood, 101.   99. Ibid, 102. 100. Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, 25. 101. Matthew 6:23. 102. Mark 8:18. 103. Wise Blood, 41. 104. Ibid, 67. 105. Ibid, 89. 106. Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” 116. 107. Wise Blood, 9. 108. Ibid, 10. 109. Quoted in Fickett, Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace, 39. In this passage, Fickett is quoting from an unpublished letter of O’Connor’s written as a summary of Wise Blood for potential publishers. She wrote this letter before Wise Blood was accepted for publication by Robert Giroux, who would eventually publish all of her work, and after John Selby had released her from a contract given to her based upon the merit of her early stories and her M.F.A. thesis. 110. Wise Blood, 60. 111. Ibid, 65. 112. Matthew 3:16; Mark 1:10; Luke 3:22; John 1:32. 113. Wise Blood, 10. 114. Ibid, 38. 115. Ibid, 39. 116. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 350. 117. Wise Blood, 94–95. 118. Ibid, 96. 119. Fickett, Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace, 43.

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120. “A” is the designation given by Sally Fitzgerald in her editing of O’Connor’s correspondence to a woman who first wrote to O’Connor in 1955. “A” wished to remain anonymous in O’Connor’s collected letters. She and O’Connor wrote to each other from 1955 until O’Connor’s death in 1964. 121. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 404. 122. Wise Blood, 105. 123. Ibid, 85. 124. Ibid, 105. This scene from Wise Blood is particularly reminiscent of several O’Connor short stories where murder and mayhem serve as the agents of God’s grace, bringing the victims to some saving knowledge of Christ. The Misfit, from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is probably the best known and most often studied example of this tendency in O’Connor’s work. 125. Ibid, 106. 126. Ibid, 108. 127. Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, 13. 128. Wise Blood, 110–11. 129. Martin Hengel, The Pre-Christian Paul, 65. 130. Wise Blood, 113. 131. Ibid, 3. 132. Ibid, 120. 133. O’Connor, The Habit of Being, 320. 134. Ralph C. Wood, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?: Flannery O’Connor on Race,” 92. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid, 100.

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Headon, David. “ ‘Beginning To See Things Really’: The Politics of Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora in Florida. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, editors. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. Hebel, Udo J. “Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion.” Intertextuality. Heinrich F. Plett, editor. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hengel, Martin. The Pre-Christian Paul. Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1991. Hill, Samuel S. The South and the North in American Religion. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.     . Southern Churches in Crisis. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1967.     . “The South’s Two Cultures.” Religion and the Solid South. Samuel S. Hill, editor. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972.     . “Survey of Southern Religious History.” Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study. Samuel S. Hill, editor. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983. Holman, C. Hugh. “The Unity of Faulkner’s Light in August.” The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South. Athens: University of Georgia Press: 1972. The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorized King James Version. Meridian: New York, 1974. Hunt, John W. William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965. Hurd, Myles Raymond. “Between Blackness and Bitonality: Wright’s ‘Long Black Song.’ ” CLA Journal 35/1 (September 1991): 42–56. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” Voices From the Harlem Renaissance. Nathan Huggins, editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.     . Dust Tracks on a Road. New York: Harper, 1991.     . “The First One.” Ebony and Topaz: A Collectaena. Charles S. Johnson, editor. Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971.     . “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Third Edition. Volume 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.     . Moses, Man of the Mountain. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.     . Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.     . The Sanctified Church. Berkeley: Turtle Island Press, 1983.     . Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.     . “Stories of Conflict.” Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. John M. Reilly, editor. New York: Burt Franklin & Company, 1978. Jackson, Blyden. “Some Negroes in the Land of Goshen.” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 19 (December 1953): 103–107. Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself. Jean Fagan Yellin, editor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. JanMohamed, Abdul. “Rehistoricizing Wright: The Psychopolitical Function of Death in Uncle Tom’s Children.” Richard Wright. Harold Bloom, editor. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Jenny, Laurent. “The Strategy of Form.” French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Tzvetan Todorov, editor. R. Carter, translator. London: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Jordan, June. “Notes Toward a Black Balancing of Love and Hatred.” Civil Wars. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

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Kennelly, Laura B. “Exhortation in Wise Blood: Rhetorical Theory as an Approach to Flannery O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives. Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Klehr, Harvey. The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Kreyling, Michael. Introduction to New Essays on Wise Blood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Larson, Thomas. “A Political Vision of Afro-American Culture: Richard Wright’s ‘Bright and Morning Star.’ ” Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988. Leonard, Bill J. “A Theology for Racism: Southern Fundamentalists and the Civil Rights Movement.” Southern Landscapes. Tony Badger, Walter Edgar, and Jan Nordby Gretlund, editors. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1996. Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Lincoln, C. Eric. “Black Religion and the Black Church.” Black Experience in Religion. C. Eric Lincoln, editor. New York: Anchor Press, 1974.     . “The Development of Black Religion in America.” African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Gayraud Wilmore, editor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Long, Charles H. “Interpretations of Black Religion in America.” Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986. Lorch, Thomas. “Flannery O’Connor: Christian Allegorist.” Critique 10 (1986): 69–80. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.     . “Wright Writing Reading: Narrative Strategies in Uncle Tom’s Children.” Journal of the Short Story in English 11 (Autumn 1988): 49–74. Marable, Manning. “Religion and Black Protest Thought in African-American History.” African American Religious Studies. An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Gayraud Wilmore, editor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. May, John R. The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O’Connor. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. McClain, William B. “Free Style and a Closer Relationship to Life.” Black Experience in Religion. C. Eric Lincoln, editor. New York: Anchor Press, 1974. McFague, Sallie. “The Parabolic in Faulkner, O’Connor, and Percy.” Religion and Literature 15 (Spring 1983): 49–66. McKnight, Edgar V. The Bible and the Reader: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985. Mencke, John G. Mulattoes and Race Mixture. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1979. Mitchell, Carlton. “Seventh-Day Adventists.” Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. Samuel S. Hill, editor. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984. Mitchell, Henry. “Two Streams of Tradition.” Black Experience in Religion. C. Eric Lincoln, editor. New York: Anchor Press, 1974. Montgomery, William T. Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Morgan, Robert and John Barton. Biblical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Morgan, Thaïs. “The Space of Intertextuality.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, editors. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Harvard University Press, 1992. Nadel, Alan. “Translating the Past: Literary Allusions as Covert Criticism.” The Georgia Review 36 (Fall 1982): 639–51. Newman, Mark. “Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945–1980.” Southern Landscapes. Tony Badger, Walter Edgar, and Jan Nordby Gretlund, editors. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1996. O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1971.     . Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Rosemary M. Magee, editor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.     . The Habit of Being. Sally Fitzgerald, editor. New York: Vintage, 1980.     . “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1969.     . “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1969.     . “The Gothic in Southern Fiction.” Mystery and Manners. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1994.     . “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1969.     . “Novelist and Believer.” Mystery and Manners. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1994.     . “On Her Own Work.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1969.     . “Southern Fiction.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, editors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1969.     . Wise Blood. Three by Flannery O’Connor. New York: Signet, 1983. Orr, Leonard. “Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semiotics.” College English 48/8 (December 1986): 811–23. Peterson, Thomas Virgil. Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South. Metuchen NJ: American Theological Library Association, 1978. Plant, Deborah G. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Rath, Sura P. and Mary Neff Shaw. Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press, 1983. Rubin, Louis D. “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt.” The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis Lawson, editors. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966. Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Sheffey, Ruthe T. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: A Fictionalized Manifesto of the Imperatives of Black Leadership.” CLA Journal 29 (December 1985): 206–220.

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Smith, H. Shelton. In His Image, But . . . : Racism in Southern Religion, 1780–1910. Durham: Duke University Press, 1972. Smith, Theophus H. Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Spillers, Hortense J. “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon.” The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance. Dominick LaCapra, editor. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Stephens, Martha. The Question of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Sullivan, Nell M. “Persons in Pieces: Race and Aphanisis in Light in August.” Mississippi Quarterly 49/3 (1996): 497–518. Sundquist, Eric J. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.     . “Faulkner, Race, and the Forms of American Fiction.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1986. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie, editors. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Thompson, Edgar T. “God and the Southern Plantation System.” Religion and the Solid South. Samuel S. Hill, editor. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972. Touchstone, Blake. “Planters and Slave Religion in the South.” Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Trotman, James C. “Our Myths and Wright’s Realities.” Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. James C. Trotman, editor. Garland Publishing: New York, 1988. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord:. Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Vandersee, Charles. “American Parapedagogy for 2000 and Beyond: Intertextual, International, Industrial Strength.” American Literary History 6/3 (Fall 1994): 409–433. Walker, Alice. “Dedication—On Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design: A Tradition by Now.” I Love Myself When I Am Laughing. Alice Walker, editor. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. Washington, Joseph R., Jr. “The Peculiar Peril and Promise of Black Folk Religion.” Varieties of Southern Evangelicalism. David E. Harrell, editor. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1981.     . “Folk Religion and Negro Congregations: The Fifth Religion.” African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Gayraud Wilmore, editor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1984. Watts, Leon W. “Caucuses and Caucasians.” Black Experience in Religion. C. Eric Lincoln, editor. New York: Anchor Press, 1974. Weathersby, H. L. “Sutpen’s Garden.” The Georgia Review 21 (1967): 354–69. Weinstein, Philip. Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. West, Cornel. “Religion and the Left.” Churches in Struggle: Liberation Theologies and Social Change in North America. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986. Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York: MacMillan, 1980.     . A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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R ichard G iannone

The Prophet and the Word in the Desert

Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

F

—1 Samuel 3:9

Do not be always wanting everything to turn out as you think it should, but rather as God pleases, then you will be undisturbed and thankful in your prayer. —Nilus, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

rom 1938 to the summer of 1952, visitors to the backwoods of Tennessee would have seen a man devoting the last fourteen of his eighty four years to raising his grandnephew from infancy to adolescence. Getting to the site would take some doing. To reach it, one turns at the junction of Highway 56 onto a dirt road running ten miles. The route then becomes a twisting, lovely passage. The wide, unpaved road goes through thick growths of trees before narrowing into a rutted wagon path that crosses a field rising to a crest. The view is healing to the eye. Through a forked birch at this promontory, the visitor can see one-quarter mile down to a clearing with an unpainted, two-story shack settled between two chimneys. The homesite is Powderhead. Its inhabitants are Mason Tarwater, the great-uncle, and Francis Marion Tarwater, his grandnephew. These backcountry figures,

From Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist, pp. 144–69. © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

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comprising a male world of two, are the heroes of O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960). It would do well to pause at the journey’s end to see how these woodsmen live and to look closely at the locale in which they make their day. Patient, discerning eyes will find much to take in. Here is a snapshot of master and disciple epitomizing an ancient way of life that defines the ascetic sensibility shaping all the stories that O’Connor tells. The old man and the young boy are offspring of a family bloodline that George Rayber, the third male relative, describes as “flowing from some ancient source, some desert prophet or polesitter” (CW 402). For the Christian, that genealogy finds its fullest expression in fourth-century Egypt, in the life of a solitary, young peasant-landowner named Anthony. One day, he heard these words of Jesus read in church: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor . . . then come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). Jesus’ charge spoke directly to Anthony; he sold all his property and went to live with an old man who had devoted his life to solitary prayer. In time, Anthony withdrew from the feet of his teacher into the desert, where his struggle to follow Jesus transformed the lonely waste into a paradise. Alone, the hermit developed a practice of fighting demons and controlling his body to find peace with God. If Anthony sought anonymity, he found fame. His daily discipline appeared to others as spectacular physical and spiritual feats that attracted widespread attention and many recruits. The man’s fame multiplied through Athanasius’s influential celebration entitled The Life of Anthony, which appeared about ten years after the renowned Egyptian’s death in 356 a.d. The Life of Anthony combines in this one man the prestige of the pagan wise man and the honor of the Christian holy man with the biblical “man of God.” The man of desert solitude became a spiritual exemplar for all ages. George Rayber cites the models of the unbridled Hebrew prophet and Simeon Stylites, the legendary mid-fifth-century Syrian saint who stood atop a sixty-foot pillar in the desert, to explain the religious call besetting his family as an “affliction” (CW 402). For Rayber, a man of reason, living out God’s word before others is an invitation “he knew to be madness;” for him, prophecy and chosen alienation from society are “irrational and abnormal” (CW 401) demands that he personally fights against through ridicule and even attempted murder. In scorning the desert call, Rayber is not alone. For some, Simeon’s standing on a pillar was an extravagant instance of the morbid phenomenon of asceticism. Others, however, found the solitary figure seeking freedom up in the open air a holy man to be admired and emulated (Lives of Simeon Stylites 15–23). For Simeon’s followers, his pillar (where he spent twenty-eight years) was not a place of punishment but an altar. From his lofty perch, the renouncer moved heavenward by means of taking into

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himself the suffering and cruelty of the world around him. More than an icon, Simeon’s body gave witness in flesh—not metaphor—to sickness, hunger, and pain. Rayber is aware of the harsh extravagance of ascetic life but not of its contradiction. The schoolteacher’s one-sided judgment is instructive about desert spirituality and its expression in The Violent Bear It Away. Whereas Rayber remarks the physical outrage of Simeon on the pillar, he misses how in withdrawing for spiritual reasons the saint changed people’s lives—not only through miracles but also in simple acts of kindness and justice. By devoting oneself to God, as will be shown, the hermit is called to serve all in need. O’Connor’s heroes in The Violent Bear It Away are modern variations drawn from the ancient profiles of desert life. Elder (abba) and younger Tarwater, described most simply, are solitaries. . . . [T]he Greek word for solitary is monachos, which yields our word monk, a forbidding word for O’Connor’s good country people and an alien status in every culture. Deliberately separated from society, they are hermits, which comes from eremos, meaning desert. In Hebrew and Christian reflection, desert and wilderness are interchangeable conditions in sacred history; and at different times in The Violent Bear It Away, Powderhead resembles both desert and wilderness. Monk, hermit, desert, and wilderness are charged words in the spiritual vocabulary. To appreciate life in Powderhead, one would need to intensify matters by paying even more attention than in the previous chapters to the loaded term ascesis, which in The Violent Bear It Away involves a training and practice whose essence seeks to imbibe the spirit of Scripture. That vital principle embraces the prophetic call of the Hebrew prophets and the renewed embodiment of that vocation in the life of Jesus. This continuum has its basis in spiritual discipline; the practice commended in Powderhead is that of the desert. O’Connor’s recluses are authentic ascetics. They lead a disciplined life of prayer, study, and subsistence farming as rigorous as the regimens maintained in many organized cloisters or charterhouses. Asceticism is a universal phenomenon, and not necessarily religious or even salutary (as becomes clear when one turns to the life of George Rayber). Christian ascetics embrace the rigors of bodily and spiritual training in solitary starkness to draw close to God. The Hebrew prophets and Jesus, who were themselves models for the desert mothers and fathers, guide Mason Tarwater and reign in Powderhead. As in biblical time and during late antiquity, the search in Tennessee involves not speculative knowledge but the religious experience from which ascetic practice is born. The fruits of this experience are fulfilled in the nitty-gritty of daily life. The ruling culture beyond the secluded Tarwater world has little sympathy for old Mason’s ways in the woods. Mason need not concern himself with the hostility, however, for controversy has always surrounded the ascetic

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life. In Edward Gibbon’s famous analysis, Christianity’s alteration of the ferocious Roman temper and civic structure led Gibbon to a stern attack on the indolence of those ascetics who disturbed the accepted way of Christian life by retreating to the nearby Egyptian and Syrian deserts. The Reformation, of course, saw this solitary kind of monasticism as disparaging the body and regarded its denials as unscriptural. The latter charge holds partial truth because Jesus was not a solitary, except on crucial occasions, but a man of public involvement. Such reservations about ascetic solitude would not bring Mason Tarwater out of the woods. Mason, O’Connor’s prophet for our time, is not at all inclined to give up his antisocial life in favor of public acceptance. Far from being persuasive, advice from the heathen culture that Mason abjures only reassures him of the value of flight. Indeed, the old man celebrates his status as stranger in an estranging world. He is incomprehensibility in human form. Besides his enigmatic ways, there is his unfathomable goal of intimacy with God through service as a prophet; and that relation is an extreme Christian mystery holding truths beyond Mason’s own understanding. He does know that to reach God he must pull away from society, and his place on the edge of the settled land marks a more daring displacement than geographical remoteness. Mason’s fearless striking out into the unknown of divine union lands him on the limits of his body, spirit, and personality. There, beyond society and self, old Tarwater seeks to recover the connection with God that O’Connor believes is the fundamental bond for each person. This chapter explores the primary impulses and cultural significance of asceticism and the trials of solitude in The Violent Bear It Away. The discussion first sketches the historical context giving rise and meaning to religious withdrawal in the novel and then takes up the biblical and patristic sources generating the novel’s ascetic action. That action involves Tarwater’s combating his demons and traces his flight and return home. As O’Connor concludes the hero’s weeklong struggle with a rite honoring his self-donation, so this chapter ends by showing how, through the poetics of solitude, the novel O’Connor called “a very minor hymn to the Eucharist” (HB 387) comes together like a liturgical song. * * * O’Connor precisely brackets the climactic events of The Violent Bear It Away within one week and sets its essential antecedent action between 1938 and 1952, a period corresponding to the formative years of the modern world that she judged “terrible” (HB 90). Briefly to historicize the novel is to glimpse a world where the engagements register both the terrors driving a person to find refuge from society and the political urgencies calling to the solitary for help. During the fourteen years that Mason lives as a solitary—fighting

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his inner demons and dedicating himself to raising his grandnephew to be a prophet—the powerful nations committed themselves to turning the planet into a charnel house. In November 1938, the year Francis Marion Tarwater was born, Kristallnacht inaugurated through mob violence the systematic oppression of German Jews; then there was the wearing of the yellow stars, followed by deportations and finally the camps. The moral distance between Hitler’s Germany and O’Connor’s Powderhead is telling. The people who are hated in the mighty European power are honored in the primitive Tennessee woods. In Powderhead, Israel’s prophets hold the healing answer to the terrible wounds evidenced in the ravages of World War II. Through their keen awareness of evil and misery, these ancient bearers of God’s word articulate the ways through which to overcome oppression and break spiritual chains. Israel’s prophets are heroes of the word; but, even more through their exemplary alienation from the sinful life, they are heroes of being. The Violent Bear It Away reaches all the way back to Moses, Ezekiel, Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus to show how asceticism and prophecy join forces to combat the demons spreading their crepe wings over the modern world. The vaunted scientific progress of the twentieth century spawned a technology of death. Ovens, crematories, gas chambers, and artillery wiped out over fifty million people during World War II with businesslike productivity that occasioned patriotic celebration. On the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration, 6 August 1945, the United States displayed its expertise by employing atomic fission on humans, thereby changing the shape of fear while altering the earth’s future. Disintegration continued after peace treaties were signed. Millions more were exiled and became “displaced persons” (an impassive epithet that O’Connor recharged, as seen earlier, with theological power). Then there was the Korean War (1950–53), which raged while Mason was teaching Tarwater the history of the world from Adam’s eviction from Eden to “the Day of Judgment” (CW 331). Even within the shielding Tennessee pines, there persisted the anguish of racism and the prophet’s own violence and iron self-will in disobedience to the command of God, whom he vows to honor. These were some of the social forces darkening the period in which the Tarwater chronicle unfolds. Acutely alive to the moral climate in which she lived, O’Connor summed up the state of things with more than usual precision: “Right now,” O’Connor wrote on 6 September 1955, “the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul” (HB 100). Whereas the clinician Walker Percy diagnosed the institutionalizing of death as the thanatos syndrome, and the cultural observer Don DeLillo later saw the proliferating technologies swell into a cult of death, the ascetic O’Connor defined the malady as an inner extinguishment. For the hermit novelist, the vortex of

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political and psychological turmoil is the inborn center of the person, of the spirit. Terror, impotence, and egotism seep into the inner world to distort the characters’ perception of themselves and creation. Divided within, they are uprooted from their native ground and alienated from God. During these bloodthirsty years, O’Connor witnessed humanity’s stark capacity to destroy its own species and habitat, and she described that willful malice in the warring human relations of her narratives. The “dark night” that O’Connor observed not only eclipsed decency but disabled the soul’s discernment of evil, blurring the line between mad fantasy and sane recognition of evil. But the ruins of society are, for O’Connor, as the shards of the Roman Empire were for the desert-fathers and mothers, stuff for the kingdom. The ancient hermits believed, Thomas Merton explains, that they could “pull the whole world to safety after them” (Wisdom, “Introduction” 23). In her own seclusion, O’Connor developed a similar concern for her age. The effect of her eremitic withdrawal was different than Merton’s political militancy but equally vast. In advance of and alongside Vatican II (1962–65), she conducted a one-woman aggiornamento that brought her readers and church into vital confrontation with the modern world, which in a sense became her hermitage. O’Connor’s good country people would be shocked to learn that they had any connection with a primitive way of life centered on self-denial. Ascetic life belongs to the unreformed past that these advanced people of gumption, whose guidance comes from their own private will, have outgrown. The pangs of flesh, however, make known the infirmities of desire as O’Connor’s characters stare into a drainage ditch, a pool of vomitus, puddles of blood, a raped body, and sweeping tides of darkness. Willful they are, but renouncers they become, amazed and blessed by having their cherished personal wishes violated and brought into alignment with God. They all end up where there is no company, where nobody can follow. Long before illness sent O’Connor to this forlorn place, a desert father reassured humankind that “humility is the land where God wants us to go and offer sacrifice” (Merton, Wisdom 83 [53]). This strange land of surrender is Powderhead. The Violent Bear It Away sets out to draw more firmly that vanishing boundary between a world hostile to life and a sphere of true human order fostering dignity and holiness. Powderhead marks off that border. Its red hills contain a deep withinness. Here is an “empty place” “where there’s nothing” (CW 352), a “ ‘lonesome place’ ” (CW 357) that has the force of a character. The woods are a wilderness with the desert’s stark isolation that drives its inhabitants to their spiritual roots. Daily life is a struggle to maintain footing on the hard ground of being. The truths of Powderhead are known to old Mason, for they run deep in his nature and teaching. With death in sight—and mind-

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ful that his young charge might turn to George Rayber, who disavowed his prophetic call—Mason admonishes young Tarwater: “ ‘And when I’m gone, you’ll be better off in these woods by yourself with just as much light as the sun wants to let in than you’ll be in the city with him [Rayber]’ ” (CW 344). The red soil, fed by the sun, reveals the plan and promise of God as taking all time to complete. Mason sees himself as a child of the promise—the prophet and heir obliged to train Tarwater as his successor to speak God’s word before others. Before confronting society’s apostasy, Tarwater must admit to and fight against evil in himself: his demons. Mason’s training is rigorous because the battle for Tarwater will be daunting. This hidden warfare demands a life of self-denial and discipline (ascesis) to resist the enemy. Mason is a seasoned veteran of this unseen war against inner evil, and he knows that the struggle is excruciating and fought with meager human resources against superior opponents. To begin with, there is always the human inclination to take the easy way by following one’s own will rather than the hard commandment of God. And so, over the years, Mason wanders into the remotest parts of the woods to thrash out his willfulness with the Lord. Alone, he endures blistering assaults that culminate in a consuming interior fire, leaping in a wildcat’s fury, to claw away any resistance to God. There are other powerful demons in Mason to rend. His faults include wanton violence, a misguided apocalypticism, and a share in Rayber’s following a different moral course than he had hoped for. Even the teacher needs correction. The battle is a ferocious taming of Mason’s tigerish will, and the agony continues until he “couldn’t stand the Lord one instant longer” (CW 358); and then he got drunk. The wounds Mason suffers in wrestling with God are acute. Exhaustion plunges Mason deeply into his heart so as to know its waywardness, its capacity for evil, and its self-deception. He grasps these modulations from within the shattered condition he shares with all humankind. Such depth of passion consists of participation in God’s love and freedom and is made known by the wooden cross that Mason wants over his grave. To recognize the extent of Mason’s sinfulness and the intensity of his inner warfare is to marvel at the outcome of his struggle. Mason achieved the almost impossible task of being a holy man in evil times. He stood guard over sacred texts in the face of public reproach. His is a life well lived. Those around him could feel the old man’s profundity of spirit. “ ‘He was deep in this life,’ ” Buford Munson eulogizes at the beginning of the novel, “ ‘he was deep in Jesus’ misery’ ” (CW 360). With Jesus, Mason fights against Satan. By opening himself to the full range of experience to endure the painful fight against his personal evil, Mason holds all of humanity in the healing presence of Jesus’ passion and obedience to God’s will. The outcome of his solitary

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warfare and the goal of his teaching are one and the same: freedom. “ ‘I saved you to be free, your own self!’ ” (CW 339) Mason reminds Tarwater. Being one’s true self, as Mason’s immersion in Jesus’ misery exemplifies, frees one to love, to see Jesus in the suffering of others, and fearlessly to proclaim God’s word before others to liberate them from the captivity of sin. As Mason goes deeper into Jesus’ life, he translates over time the Gospel into the many various circumstances of life. In this sacramental way, Tarwater, his disciple, comprehends the search for God through living principles in everyday activities. The route to this recognition for young Tarwater runs across his pubertal body, through the wilderness of his tormenting choices, and into the solitude of his cracked heart. The front line of Tarwater’s decisive battle is his will, just as it was for the ancient solitaries. For O’Connor, freedom of the human will involves, as seen in Wise Blood, “many wills conflicting in one man” (CW 1265). O’Connor’s emphasis on the will in its multiplicity reiterates a crucial desert issue. In their quest for holiness, the ancient ascetics were preoccupied with contending desires, and it was precisely the private will that blocked their search. Only by taming the personal will can one move toward God (Sayings, Poemen 54 [174]). Out of the struggle to overcome the impediments of the self-will, the desert-dwellers perceived a connection between human passions and the devil; and that patristic understanding of demons inhabiting our disordered emotions opens a direct way into O’Connor’s controversial reintroduction of Satan into the postmodern, postsuperstitious world of The Violent Bear It Away. A better position from which to understand the demonology in The Violent Bear It Away can be achieved if one pauses briefly to consider the view of evil forces held by the desert mothers and fathers. With the rest of the ancient world, the hermits believed in supernatural beings, both helpful (angels, or messengers) and harmful (satans, or adversaries). The ammas and abbas persistently probed from various directions the operation of these powerful beings. Dorotheos of Gaza, in his Discourses, puts his inquiry with the prosaic brilliance characteristic of the desert-dwellers. He asks his brothers: “Why is the devil called not only ‘enemy,’ but also ‘adversary’?” Dorotheos’s answer goes to the heart of the inextinguishable spiritual energy of the satanic: “He is called ‘enemy’ because he is a hater of men, one who hates what is good, a traitor; an ‘adversary,’ because he always puts obstacles in the way of good” (2 [95]). Such clear-eyed perceptions provided the groundwork on which the solitaries built their knowledge of their opponents. Demons (from the Greek daimones), the hermits came to realize, were deceitful agents waging war against the true God and Jesus. Demons had a power over humans, who must vie, in Saint Paul’s words, “against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). The desert

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solitaries mortified their wills and bodies to develop the self-mastery needed to combat the hosts of wickedness assaulting them. That same ascetic control is the discipline that young Tarwater must cultivate to overcome the identical evil agents attacking him. Satan targets the boy precisely because he is raised to serve God. Indeed, the demons swarming both the modern and the ancient worlds hold a special animosity for anyone with spiritual longings. The moment Anthony takes up the life of prayer, the devil hurls thoughts of sexual pleasure before him to turn Anthony’s attention from God. Whether defeated or successful, the devil never lets up. No sooner does Anthony recover from horrible whippings by a demonic multitude than the throng of “beasts and reptiles” attacks him (Athanasius 9 [38]). Never far away and always dusting the human mind with dissuasions, the evil spirits rush to check any inclination toward God. The demons’ intention is to ingratiate their presence into human consciousness by any means. The demons attacking the desert ascetics reassert their malice in The Violent Bear It Away. With updated garb and southern vernacular (easy maneuvers for spirits), the demons pursue their fixed goals against Tarwater: they hate him and put obstacles before any good that his great-uncle had taught him to seek. Insinuation is a mere preliminary to the domination they seek over him. It is a measure of how intimately desert spirituality runs in O’Connor’s sensibility that she intuitively dramatizes Tarwater’s trial as being caught in the swift downward tide of the satanic “thought-flow” charted by the ancient solitaries. The metaphor of thought-flow comes from the Greek logismos, an important word in patristic texts that means thought or idea. In ascetic-monastic usage, logismos most frequently occurs in the plural, logismoi, and is invariably allied to demons to mean evil or passionate thoughts. “Evil thoughts,” says Poemen, “are suggested by the demons” (Sayings, Poemen 21 [170]). The word logismoi recurs in The Life of Anthony and in Origen (Bacht 956–58). Evagrius, a learned Greek among unlettered Egyptian hermits, intending to teach the cunning of demons, in the Praktikos enumerates eight logismoi (the seven deadly sins plus acedia) through which the evil spirits harmfully influence humans. As demons are the source of evil, the logismoi describe for Evagrius the means and effects of stirring up the human senses (6–14 [16–20]). The logismos usually begins by appealing to the human mind through physical gratification and then imbues the mind as an idea that tempts the person to commit evil. If the person yields to the thought, the temptation gathers a propulsive momentum of its own, and the demon penetrates from the conscious mind into the heart. The heart’s obscure passages are the estuary of the demonic flow. Here the evil stream swirls and thickens to occlude the heart so that its responsiveness to others and its yearning for

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God are stopped. When this blockage occurs, Peter Brown writes in The Body and Society, the person becomes lost “to the powers of numbness that still lurked in the hidden reaches of the universe” (167). The logismoi register their invasion of the heart in eerie ways. The fantasies and obsessions commonly associated with demonic possession take hold. More sinister than these histrionic displays is the unseen deadening inertia of the spirit at the very center of emotional life. The heart loses its fluidity of freedom in favor of becoming a bound accomplice to the demon burrowed into the heart, twisting its rightful attention from God into self-interest. At this final stage, the evil flow, by clogging the heart, seizes the person’s will, and the victim’s will becomes the demon’s. The attempt of the evil logismoi to control Tarwater makes up the essential drama of The Violent Bear It Away, and Abba Poemen’s description of the demonic flow anticipates the young hero’s psychological struggle and early defeats at the hands of the devil. The boy’s initial and repeated submission to sin, O’Connor emphasizes, has to do with the conquests of his private will, and she stresses that Tarwater’s will becomes the demon whose savage commands he fulfills. Because the final goal of conquering the victim’s heart is always the same, the devil wastes no time in getting started. The demon begins by instigating Tarwater’s disobedience of Mason’s burial orders. Then, for several days, the demon incites rebellion against the boy’s prophetic vocation. To that end, the demonic flow steadily pours self-interest into Tarwater’s heart until it dams up the boy’s capacity to feel anything other than proud independence. At this point, the demon gets Tarwater to drown in cold blood the very child that Mason ordered Tarwater to save by baptizing him. O’Connor’s dramatic pattern not only replicates the movement of diabolical machinations in desert literature; she intensifies Tarwater’s spiritual trial with his demons by placing him in two deserts: the external wilderness of Powderhead and the inner barrenness of desolation. What makes this interior desert so painful for Tarwater is that, unlike the elders and Mason, the boy does not seek it. In fact, he flees from hardship, restraint, and solitude; but the discipline of his two unsought deserts is crucial to his moral calling. To grasp the full importance of Tarwater’s grappling with evil in two deserts, one must add a biblical perspective of the young hero’s spiritual pursuit to that of the ancient hermits’ psychology of evil. O’Connor compares the ascetic training of her two protagonists in Powderhead to the experience of Elijah and Elisha (CW 356); and in so doing, O’Connor draws on the link in Christian reflection between the Old Testament prophets and the desert fathers and mothers. In their humility before the Bible, the desert elders believed that Elijah and the prophets invented the desert life and that they, the fourth-century followers of their forebears’ word, lived out the

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Scriptures. As the hermits reflected on sacred history, desert solitude was in their consciousness the basic experience of prophetic life. Desert trials bring Elijah to feel the unfailing care of the Lord, who attends Elijah’s “journey to the wilderness” with food and drink all the way to Horeb (1 Kings 19:15). There on the mountain where Moses saw God, God reveals himself to Elijah (1 Kings 19:1–10). The desert that imposes hardship is for Moses and Elijah the ground of contact with God. Elijah, above all, exemplifies the paradoxes uniting the prophetic vocation, desert spirituality, and O’Connor’s religious sensibility. As Elijah comforted the distressed, he also made the comfortable into the uncomfortable. Gentleness and denunciation were indicative of Elijah’s deep trust and reliance on the only God; and this is the very singleness of heart that the desert solitaries sought and that O’Connor’s solitaries, against their will, must learn. To show the making of a new prophet for our time, The Violent Bear It Away incorporates the wisdom of fourth-century elders with the scriptural precedent on which prophecy rests. * * * The very first scene of The Violent Bear It Away links the prophetic vocation with the desert call. The old prophet Mason Tarwater has just died, and his death marks Tarwater’s entrance into this interlocking ascetic adventure. Mason leaves young Tarwater with two momentous obligations, each requiring the boy to act as an agent of bringing new life through death: first he must bury the old prophet; then he must baptize Bishop, his cousin, Rayber’s son. Both ministries are onerous. Digging a grave in sand and solid brick for “two hundred pounds of dead mountain” (CW 343) taxes the teenager’s physical strength, and baptizing little Bishop goes against the young hero’s personal desire to follow his own plan for his life. This conflict immerses the future prophet in a trial of wills. Such warring of multiple wills in one person is the first and unceasing struggle of the desert and the essential drama of The Violent Bear It Away. The interior battle against selfwill is the first phase of the young boy’s spiritual training. Combat begins in mourning, which is a solitude not shared with his uncle-protector or any other person. The summons to solitude is to prepare Tarwater for the important work in his future. As solitude initiates the novice into the trials of the desert, the situation simultaneously incites the ancient adversary into aggressively taking up his opposition to anyone called to carry out the plan of his sempiternal opponent, God. When the boy is alone, the devil makes his move; and the logismos stirs. Always cozy near death’s shiver, the demon flutters from within Mason’s bodily death rattle across the breakfast table to Tarwater. The communication is subtle yet tangible. The satanic brushing is just light enough

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to be tolerated but so unfamiliar as to make Tarwater experience a “sullen embarrassment as if he were in the presence of a new personality” (CW 336). The bereft boy does come into contact with a force that he had never before felt so intimately. The spookiness registers a revealing sensation. The arrival of this alien psyche causes a physical discomfort that warns of the numbness and morose pain to come from the subsequent demonic provocations. The emphasis on the physical nature of Tarwater’s encounter derives from O’Connor’s belief that moral knowledge comes “through the senses” (MM 67), which accords with the patristic concept of the logismos as penetrating the body. The first part of this instruction takes the form of an insensibility that the devil deliberately instills in his victim and that Tarwater welcomes as an excuse for not digging Mason’s grave. Deceit occasions Tarwater’s schooling. The devil pretends to offer comfort and aid but actually aims to control the boy so that he will reduce Mason’s corpse to ashes rather than burying it. The demon first nestles inside Tarwater’s head as a “loud and strange and disagreeable” voice (CW 337) promising the orphaned boy companionship. Among the devil’s toadies buzzing about, three cohorts spearhead the attack on the boy’s body. The nasty voice, by disparaging the dead, speaks to the boy’s inclination to defy Mason’s orders. Demon rum joins the fray to inebriate the boy. Drunkenness is Tarwater’s mourning, his version of wearing black. Although Tarwater embraces the stupor as pleasing to his will, O’Connor shows the slothful pleasure to be the result of a disgusting infiltration. The stump liquor he has been drinking feels like a “burning arm” that “slid down Tarwater’s throat as if the devil were already reaching inside him to finger his soul” (CW 358). The demonic invasion of Tarwater’s body captures perfectly the patristic-monastic understanding of logismos. John Cassian, the fifth-century interpreter of eremitic spirituality, maps out the flow and the malice generating it: “A train of thoughts comes into being from the devil when these undermine us with the attractiveness of sin and when the devil gets to us with his hidden snares, when with the subtlest of skills he deceitfully presents evil as good and on our behalf transforms himself into an angel of light” (Conferences I, 19 [53]). Sure enough, O’Connor’s stranger comes as a sly, appealing messenger. With Tarwater, the devil presents himself as an avuncular surrogate who will undertake responsibility for the bereaved nephew’s education and spiritual welfare. This self-appointed sponsor then waxes like a wise counselor purporting to reveal truths about the boy’s choices in the outside world that Mason kept hidden from his charge. One bit of inside information that the devil offers his petted friend concerns the visitant himself: “No no no, the stranger said, there ain’t no such thing as a devil” (CW 354). Disappearance is the illusion behind all demonic illusions. Vanishing tightens Satan’s

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control on his victim. It turns Tarwater into the dummy for the demon’s ventriloquism and, more ominously, into Satan’s proxy in his war against God. The battle is no longer against evil: “It’s Jesus or you” (CW 354). Tarwater chooses himself. He torches Powderhead under the soused belief that he is cremating Mason and flees to his uncle, George Rayber, in the city. The next leg of Tarwater’s spiritual wandering begins with the hope of finding a refuge for his pride, perhaps in the form of praise from Rayber for defying Mason. Like Elijah, the ancient desert-dwellers, and Saint Francis of Assisi, Tarwater takes nothing material for his journey. Unlike his predecessors, however, the Tennessee boy in his poverty relies not on God but on himself. The result is the greater poverty of egotism, a magnet for the demonic preceptors of adolescence ready to coddle him with delusions of adequacy. As the boy roams through a series of deserts and adjacent wildernesses of his mind, demons materialize, serving as the wind beneath Tarwater’s wings of escape. These velocities assume various guises but share the common ruse of befriending Tarwater for what is least admirable in him. The logismoi carry Tarwater into the mainstream of American life. Moving in the urban currents, he can live and breathe a culture that exalts the private will over everything else. The selfishness, optimism, materialism, and humanism of Tarwater’s tempters form the negative image of the dark night that O’Connor saw enshrouding our age. T. Fawcett Meeks, a salesman of copper parts, drives the boy in darkness to the city and promotes its vices. “ ‘And now,’ ” he gloats, “ ‘you’re coming to town to run to doom with the rest of us, huh?’ ” (CW 381). Meeks’s rules for prestige in “the big world” (CW 364) are familiar. Time is money; people are money; love makes money; money is god. Wealth in the Sayings and Lives of the desert is frequently linked to sadness and aggression, and Meeks exemplifies the connection. As possessions are the sources of Meeks’s gratification, so they generate his violence and define his sexual gratification. Everyone this grim huckster encounters becomes the object of emotional assault as he breaks down their humanness into sales figures. The desert ascetics, who struggled with material attachments, came to an understanding of clinging to things that exposes the demon in Meeks and the suffering he brings on himself. A vignette from the Sayings also warns of the psychological harm to the person who values goods over people and effectively disregards support from God. The story even has a comic touch that O’Connor would savor. The saying tells of an old man who helped some thieves when they were stealing. “When they had taken away what was inside his cell, Abba Euprepius saw that they had left his stick and he was sorry. So he took it and ran after them to give it to them” (Sayings, Euprepius 2 [62]). For those seeking God, like the old abba, mercy outweighs justice because

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robbery is a test of the ascetic’s reliance on God for sustenance. From that dependency emerges another truth in this saying, one that lies at the heart of O’Connor’s treatment of poverty and her psychology of renunciation: As sadness marks possession, joy is the patrimony of those who become poor for God. Such profound faith frees one from care. From this detachment and inner freedom flows compassion toward others. Meeks, the flagrant antithesis of this freedom from care, rushes around the South in the anxiety of spirit that the ascetics and Mason struggled to avoid. The salesman’s bitterness manifests the demonic effect that avarice wreaks on his soul. Attachment to material gain enslaves Meeks to the point at which he has cut off feeling for others. “ ‘And that’s the way it ought to be in this world,’ ” he brags, “ ‘nobody owing nobody nothing’ ” (CW 362). During Meeks’s protracted self-aggrandizing, Tarwater is too attached to his own willful disobedience of Mason to be engaged with the demonic salesman. If Tarwater’s attachment to his personal will is at this moment a protection against Meeks’s indoctrination, Tarwater’s will is also the warning of the spiritual disaster awaiting the truant boy. The danger of serving one’s private desires is idolatry of one’s self. Ascetic spirituality sees self-will as the impulse that replaces God with the self as the source of life and meaning; and for that reason the will, for the hermits, presents the greatest danger in solitary life. For the desert teachers, self-will is hell; and hell is what Tarwater experiences in the city as anger and pride impel him deeper into his personal desires and further from God. There is no mistaking the boy’s infernal descent into himself. Upon entering the city, the atmosphere imposes resistance, emits peril, and inflicts reprimand. Terror clutches at Tarwater the instant he bangs on Rayber’s door. The place dares to defy his bidding, seeming “immune to his fury.” Tarwater feels “a trap” (CW 385). The ambush is laid by Tarwater’s own disordered passions. The logismoi swell his head and distort his perceptions. People, places, events, and God come into his view as challenges to or validations of his will. Hallucinations and bodily depletions, the punishing effects that the desert ascetics felt from unchecked pride, punctuate the urban phase of Tarwater’s spiritual vagrancy—a phase his uncle George Rayber accurately calls “five days of madness” (CW 455). Tarwater’s excursion in the city reveals the interior deformities of solitude that leave him a prisoner of his egotism. The worst of these torments comes from Tarwater’s closing himself in the hell of the heart that resolutely refuses to love and is sealed by the iron walls of the will to defy Mason’s orders and assert his autonomy from God. During Tarwater’s stay with Rayber, every experience dilates to the boy’s inner disorder. The three characters Tarwater encounters torment him merely by their presence. Lucette Carmody unnerves Tarwater by her apostolic zeal, which reminds him of Mason and the call to prophecy. The crippled girl

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evangelist lives by the singleness of heart and vision that recognizes the material world, the human person Jesus, and his rising from the dead as outpourings of the Logos. “ ‘Jesus is the Word of God and Jesus is love’ ” (CW 412), Lucette cries out at her revival service. She shouts: “ ‘Are you deaf to the Lord’s Word?’ ” (CW 415). Later, Tarwater says in a convulsive murmur to Rayber that he came to the service “ ‘only . . . to spit on it’ ” (CW 416); but at the prayer meeting, the narrator goes beneath Tarwater’s vocal contempt to show that Lucette has struck dread in his heart by reminding him of things he thought he sent up in smoke in Powderhead. When he goes to bed that night, “the boy’s white face” is “drained but expectant” (CW 416), exhausted by the logismos and provoked by Lucette’s reminder that God’s Word, the Logos, becomes flesh to speak to him through the direct and visible presence in the person of Jesus. For Lucette, each person’s response to the demands of love expresses an attitude toward Jesus, the enfleshed Logos, that defines one’s relation to God. O’Connor gauges her characters’ relations to God through their responses to little Bishop. Bishop is joy and love—qualities of the Logos—love unguarded and a capacity for pleasure bound only by the reaction of others to his spiritual freshness. The two most important persons around Bishop impose on the child’s joy constraints out of their own fear and severity. Because the child has Down’s syndrome, his father rejects him as an ugly burden created by a brutish deity. Because Mason orders Tarwater to baptize Bishop, Tarwater scorns the boy as a menace to Tarwater’s freedom. Simply for being himself, Bishop becomes the declared enemy in Tarwater’s battle to defeat Mason and reject his prophetic vocation. At the park where Bishop is delightfully splashing in the water fountain, we see the painful effects of these demonic misrepresentations of the child’s innocence. To prevent the possibility that Tarwater might spitefully christen Bishop, Rayber yanks his son from the water. Bishop, cruelly snatched and wounded, howls and then settles into “crying quietly” with “his face red and hideously distorted” (CW 422) by the fiends who have dragged the innocent boy into the hellish dark of their sinister wills. Thanks to the competing logismoi, pain unites Rayber and Tarwater where love could not; for as Bishop sobs, father and cousin remain unmoved by anguish and deaf to the Logos. Tarwater’s five delusional days culminate in the disaster that the desert solitaries saw as the goal of the baiting demons: “A time is coming when men will go mad,” says the knowing Anthony, “and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us’ ” (Sayings, Anthony the Great 25 [6]). The demonic logismoi, now tunneled into Tarwater’s heart, single out the person, Bishop, who is not like us: “It’s only one dimwit you have to drown” (CW 462). The crazed attack comes the

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day after the park excursion, as night sets in at the Cherokee Lodge, where Rayber takes Tarwater and Bishop for an overnight outing. Tarwater lowers Bishop into the boat, takes him to the opposite bank of the lake, and drowns him. The murder is the sheerest butchery. There is another demonic horror at work in the scene. Rayber observes the killing from his room in the lodge, and he feels nothing as Tarwater drowns Bishop. Writing from an intimate grasp of desert spirituality, O’Connor shows what the inner person becomes when the logismos saturates one’s being and possesses one’s heart. During his son’s horrible slaying, Rayber “remained absolutely still, wooden, expressionless, as the machine [his hearing aid] picked up the sounds of some fierce sustained struggle in the distance” (CW 456). Rayber can no longer hear the sound or word at any pitch; he is deaf, as Lucette says, to the Lord’s word. The distant din is Bishop’s death roar; the cry of suffering is the voice of God. The excruciating bellow blares out one last time, “rising out of its own momentum as if it were escaping finally, after centuries of waiting, into silence” (CW 456). The background of silence marks the enormous changes in the inner world of all three characters. For Rayber, this silence is the chill demonic aftershock of deafness to the Logos. Trained in Mason’s stern self control, Rayber over the years uses his “rigid ascetic discipline” (CW 402) to keep God from controlling him. The silence surrounding Rayber at Bishop’s slaughter indicates that he is spiritually dead while physically alive. The silence waiting to embrace Bishop is a different stillness; this quiet opens to fuller life. Bishop’s silence, which inheres in his physical condition and is broken only by crying, embodies the desert ideals of silence as the source of humility and tenderness. The child lives alone and in the poverty of total dependence on God for his dignity. Without making a choice, Bishop is the humble prayer alive that the desert mothers and fathers valued in silence. Humility made the inarticulate child proof against Rayber and freed him from the self-absorption that separates the human person from God. God never leaves the child; God is present at the sparkling fountain and God is with Bishop at the blackened lake. In the dark water, the rescuing flow of the divine spirit softens the child’s death. Baptized by his killer, Bishop is buried in mystery, enshrouded in silence. In Bishop, the Logos reveals itself and acts. The significance of silence in Tarwater’s case is far more complex and central than in the case of the other two characters. It involves a dialectic with speech that rises from some of the subtlest insights that the ancient hermits gained in solitude. Silence attends the young killer’s crossing into the deepest zones of the still desert world of warring tribulation, the inner combat that profoundly expresses the faith that O’Connor’s art brings to life. For the desert elders, silence entails more than not speaking. It encompasses a positive

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receptivity to language at the inmost center, the heart of personal integration of human faculties. Silence is a habit of being; it links the inner life with action, which is to say that silence is a prerequisite for linguistic integrity. “Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart,” says Abba Poemen (Sayings, Poemen 164 [189]). Again, Abba Moses reminds us: “If a man’s deeds are not in harmony with his prayer, he labors in vain” (Sayings, Moses 4 [141]). For the ascetic and prophetic life to have the truthfulness it seeks, words must be tested by experience. “When words and life correspond to one another they are together the whole of philosophy” (Sayings, Isidore of Pelusia 1 [98]); and then silence reaches fruition. It is a smooth transition from the Sayings of the ancient hermits to the sayings of the modern hermit novelist. “Conviction without experience makes for harshness” (HB 97), says Amma Flannery. Silence can bring about the union of experience with expression that signals prophetic integrity and desert holiness. Holiness in words is, of course, O’Connor’s true subject. In working out the training of her prophet-elect, she brings Tarwater back to the silent source of his integrity and spiritual vitality. His future work depends on this return, because silence nourishes and supports the message he must deliver in its full revelatory force. Silence will teach his heart to guard that which his tongue teaches (Sayings, Poemen 188 [193]). Part 3 (chapters 10–12) of The Violent Bear It Away concentrates on Tarwater’s tongue to enact the drama of silence, in which he confronts his torturing consciousness. In this inner war, the powers of good and evil, life affirming and life denying, Logos and logismos, pull in opposite directions to get the boy to speak or be silent according to their aims. Never talkative to begin with, Tarwater wants to be stone silent after leaving the lake to hold back admitting that he uttered the christening words in the act of drowning Bishop. Tarwater’s silence is more than an attempt to suppress the guilt caused by his murdering Bishop. Tarwater has been taught by Mason that the tongue expresses the depths of the heart and that words effect and reveal invisible powers. Tarwater fears that hidden world. Words in the prophetic and patristic economy bear a unique relation to the sanctifying sacrament of rebirth through the death of sin, the baptism Tarwater was ordered to perform on Bishop and unknowingly accomplished. O’Connor’s treatment of Bishop’s drowning carries the special understanding that the early Christians found in the Word becoming flesh to give life. They developed an extensive theology of the Logos that described (with magnificence in Origen) the mystical communion of the Logos with the baptized. And so the baptizing words blazoned forth by the Logos itself, uttered over and against Tarwater’s demonic will at the lake, consummate Bishop’s life in death, the death of sin accomplished by the enfleshed Word.

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Although Tarwater tries to rationalize his voicing the baptismal words while drowning Bishop as “ ‘an accident’ ” that “ ‘don’t mean nothing’ ” (CW 458), the words plague him because they were pulled from his tongue against his will and do mean something to him. The most powerful force, the Logos itself, has claims on Tarwater’s tongue and lips. He feels yet another tug at his tongue from the slumberous trucker who picks him up and wants nothing but meaningless words from him. Like the other demons assaulting Tarwater, this operator with a serpentine nose tries to reduce his victim to a machine, a device sputtering gibberish. When Tarwater opens his mouth to speak words, “none came” out of it (CW 457). Tarwater is tongue-tied, gripped by secret forces—Logos and logismos—fighting for his voice, the instrument of the prophet’s mind and heart. As the Word overcomes all words, a silence affixes other silences. A mute vision of the murder scene burns its unexpungeable details into Tarwater’s memory as he rides the truck “in silence.” In Tarwater’s mute recollection, Bishop’s “light silent eyes” stare pleadingly at Tarwater, who is yielding to the “violet-colored” eyes of the devil (CW 461) who is engineering his human cargo to the “silent” lake bank (CW 462). The sudden cry of the baptismal words shatters the dream and hurls Tarwater out of the silent rig and into the soundless dark. Back on the road, he plans to return to Powderhead, where he can be silent about the murder and can be his own man spared from “the torture of prophecy” (CW 465) and live by his own will. The very silence that he seeks to deny his sinful disobedience, however, will teach him “the blessings of obedience” (Early Fathers, Dorotheus 3 [153]). In silence and solitude, Tarwater’s will begins to bend away from himself and toward others and God. As with the desert searchers, Tarwater, who is now wandering in the wilderness of sin and loneliness, receives through his body the lesson for his soul. Throughout the novel, his body registers particular needs that his proud mind and egotistical will deny; on his return to Powderhead, these bleak and insistent physical urgencies begin to sink in. He hungers. He thirsts. He sees Bishop in a black child. He smells the demon near him. He hears the stinging denunciations of the unmistakably angelic woman who nabs him for shaming the dead and scorning “ ‘the Resurrection and the Life’ ” (CW 468). This messenger of truth leaves the boy speechless except for an unstated obscenity that his controlling logismos spits out. Need and anxiety drain Tarwater’s musculature of its pubertal sap to the degree that “his skin seemed to have shrunk on the frame of his bones from dryness” (CW 468). Ascesis has taken hold of his body, which bears the desert’s aridity; and an unsparing mortification ensues. Along the highway, his demonic friend rematerializes in a fancy car. Dressed to kill, the devil drugs Tarwater with liquor and rapes him in the “silent” woods (CW 471). An hour later, not a coherent word but a “loud dry

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cry” (CW 472) tears from the boy’s mouth. Having gotten the use he wants of Tarwater for the moment, the demon discards him. O’Connor’s presentation of rape draws less on the modern understanding of rape as a political crime (with its attendant sympathy for the victim) and more on the timeless spiritual effects of this notorious weapon of degradation. The hour-long rape in the silent woods off the dirt road, the site where O’Connor’s devils feel most free to indulge their malice and will, brings out into the open the extent to which the logismos spiritually penetrates the boy. Rape consummates Tarwater’s self-plundering, which has taken the form of his assenting concourse with the logismos of his will. Under his demonic partner’s brute sexual force, Tarwater experiences the loss of control that his fierce will imposed on Bishop and the loss of freedom brought about by his demons. Those who fill themselves on personal desire, says Gregory of Nyssa, in The Life of Moses, become “empty and a vacant container” under Satan’s tyrannical power (61 [68]). Gregory explains the hollowing of O’Connor’s young killer in preparation for prophecy. As the satisfactions of Tarwater’s private will take their toll, Tarwater’s violated and desiccated body begins to bear the primal themes of the desert. The desert fathers and mothers had a cure for the loss of control Tarwater experiences in rape and with language. “If you cannot contain yourself,” says Abba Matoes, “flee into solitude” (Sayings, Matoes 13 [145]). Solitude enforces a positive self-emptying (kenosis) that brings the hero to the “beginning” (HB 359) of his vocation and the novel to a close. The drama ends with the renegade back in Powderhead. In the last chapter, Tarwater does not say one word. Buford Munson speaks four brief sentences to inform the prodigal boy that he, Buford, buried Mason while Tarwater was drunk; and Buford’s truthful words demolish Tarwater’s residual self-confidence and shut him up for good. Also, the velvet voice of the logismos sighs its final importunings; but the fresh ache from being raped teaches the boy that loneliness is preferable to his attacker’s conjugal alliance. Tarwater, for the first time, discerns his demon as his “adversary” and torches the nearby tree to get rid of the wraith. This “roaring blaze” (CW 475) declares the boy’s war on evil. Declaration of war, however, requires weaponry to fight the adversary. In the unseen combat of the spirit, humility alone overcomes the devil (Sayings, Anthony the Great 2 [2]; Theodora 6 [84]). The efficacy of demonic power depends on the human victim’s prideful assumption of adequacy in meeting the demon. Humility, by contrast, defeats the otherwise indomitable enemy by acknowledging weakness so that the Almighty can intervene. Thinking the same thoughts as the desert elders, and feeling as they do, O’Connor intuitively reimagines so closely a vignette in The Lives of the Desert Fathers that the fourthcentury Egyptian text serves to introduce and elucidate Tarwater’s final action.

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John of Lycopolis tells of a young man who had sinned gravely and repented mightily. “At God’s bidding this youth was struck by compunction for his many sins. He made straight for the cemetery, where he bitterly lamented his former life, throwing himself down on his face and not daring to make a sound, or to pronounce the name of God.” The youth renounced his life with groans “from the depths of his heart” (Lives, John of Lycopolis 37 [57–58]). Like the young man in the ancient Lives, O’Connor’s youth, also not daring to make a sound, mourns his sins at a burial place. Death is the final experience of the human body and the first lesson of inner growth for ascetics. “A man who keeps death before his eyes,” says an elder, “will at all times overcome his cowardice” (Merton, Wisdom 138 [76]). By keeping “death in mind,” Tarwater will “not forget the eternal judgement” (Sayings, Evagrius 4 [64]), as the hermits and Mason before him did not. Evagrius’s saying expresses the wisdom issuing from the encounter with death that concludes so many of O’Connor’s narratives. In every instance, O’Connor’s protagonist finds meaning and joy in grief. Tarwater’s facing death is the founding experience of his relationship with God. As the desert blossoms with divine promise (Hosea 2:14–15), so the wild field around Powderhead yields a vision of Mason among the multitude miraculously being fed the loaves and fishes at an eternal meal. In both Mark 8:1 and Matthew 15:33, the feeding occurs in the desert. The slope on which the crowd sits in the novel links the revelation of God to Tarwater with the divine disclosure on Mount Sinai to Moses. As God was with the Israelites at every step in the wilderness (Exodus 15:26), so the Logos has been an abiding presence with Tarwater on his stumbling desert passage. When the banquet dream seizes Tarwater at the end, he sees that his journey stands at and under the charismatic authority of Mason, whose ascetic solitude informs his instruction. Central to that teaching is Mason’s belief that the world was made for the dead—which the novel’s ending dramatically corroborates. In this confirmation, a dynamic need imbues the old man’s envisioned body. His bulk is leaning forward on the ground, looking up with hunger to the single basket of the messianic banquet. What Mason yearns for is satisfied by the very nourishment that leaves his desire unsatisfied, in the way that Dante in the Paradiso moves and grows deeper in love through the yearning that carries him to love itself. Stunned by the revelation, Tarwater remains in Powderhead from dusk to midnight to take in the ambient gift of the great feast before his eyes. Understanding again comes through his body, especially his mouth. Tarwater’s hunger is “so great” (CW 478) that he takes on his dead uncle’s ache for food as his own. Tarwater’s struggle presses beyond his privileged gaze of the festive meal. The lesson in his exodus through the desert is a venture of integrating

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into practical life the stern training and wisdom he received right there in Powderhead. O’Connor marks this concurrence through the respiratory act essential to life and meditation. Tarwater’s breath (in Latin, spiritus) goes “out to meet” (CW 478) the fire that he knows tested Daniel and transported Moses. This fire is the purifying element in the divine word that Tarwater expects to hear. Like the youth in the Lives, the boy throws himself on the ground to receive the word. His gesture of love insolubly binds asceticism with prophecy as he physically lays down his life for others ( John 15:13; Sayings, Poemen 116 [184]). In the scorched face and prostrate body of the living nephew, we see honor for his great-uncle and the other dead. Tarwater’s low point of self-abnegation prepares for the high point of the novel. Tarwater rises from the ground, sees the ruinous fire he started, and stoops to smear his forehead with dirt from the grave. He who loved the excellence of his self-will now confesses his persistent destructive will as the inner enemy that he must fight. His admission of personal sin is a first effect of grace in Tarwater, and the dirt above his brow forms the seal of the experiences preceding it. It is not Mason’s body but Tarwater’s ego that lies in ashes. The boy learns what the desert solitaries taught and what modern preceptors deny: his own being is the subject and source of his pains. Whipped, bereft, raped, scorned, and broken of self-will, the boy makes room for God in his soul, a sacred space that expands through self-scrutiny. Exposure to his sinfulness and hunger for the bread in the baskets teach Tarwater that salvation lies in the bread of life and in loving others. For all its introspection, the solitary life is a life for others. “Our life and our death is with our neighbour,” says Anthony (Sayings, Anthony the Great 9 [3]). Readers who find this eschatological evocation too exuberant have only to glance at patristic writings to see how naturally the course of Tarwater’s renunciation sweeps him up into the hope of regaining paradise. The desert mothers and fathers saw their practice in solitude as a way to recover the innocence of Adam and Eve and then to earn the glory purchased by the new Adam (Burton-Christie 231–33). The ending of The Violent Bear It Away revives for late twentieth-century readers the motive pervading the ancient Sayings and Lives. The desert ascesis of dying to oneself aims for a rebirth of love of others in God. The hard Tennessee earth on which Tarwater prostrates himself is the severe training ground of that inclusive love. The war ahead of him will be fought by drawing from the austere practice of love and humility developed in the grace-filled backwoods. * * * It is precisely O’Connor’s understanding of ascetic life as the basis for a universal communion that brings her to say in a letter to T. R. Spivey of

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9 April 1960 that The Violent Bear It Away “is a very minor hymn to the Eucharist” (HB 387). The reference to the Eucharist may strike some readers as a devotional aside that can be passed over in favor of looking into more conspicuous issues raised by the novel. Others may find O’Connor’s crossing from art to worship to be abrupt and baffling. But those who are attuned to the spiritual currents in O’Connor’s fiction are in a position to appreciate her linking artistic practice with sacramental action. To follow this transformation is to approach anew the heart of O’Connor’s poetics of solitude. Seeing how The Violent Bear It Away becomes a song of praise to God is the goal of the final portion of this chapter. First, a word is in order about the word Eucharist. In the original Greek sense, Eucharist means to give thanks for “goodly gifts.” By extension, the word has also come to be associated with the Last Supper (Luke 12:19–20), during which Jesus gave his body and blood to be taken in the form of bread and wine. Jesus’ offering at the table anticipated his supreme gifts of suffering and dying. As the sacrifice is for all, all are invited to the table to share in the meal. Each subsequent liturgical celebration of this oblation, then, brings the past sacrifice alive in the present. The eucharistic action accomplishes a new sacrifice of the single historical sacrifice, for which the recipient gives thanks. Gratitude, like Jesus’ original self-donation, has a collective and communal dimension. As the gift freely given is for all, so the grateful response for the divine offering is universal. The public aspect of solitude and ascesis has been part of Tarwater’s destiny from the beginning. If his self-consecration at the end is only for himself, it would lead to spiritual pride or a merely symbolic moment that O’Connor would dismiss, effectively condemning it, as she did when Mary McCarthy condescendingly allowed that the Eucharist was “a pretty good” symbol (HB 125). A disincarnate faith offends O’Connor. But to express her belief, O’Connor sacramentalizes Tarwater’s graveside genuflection by making it the pivot of a twofold liturgical action that has been quietly built into the entire novel. Up to the ending, the events emphasize the writings of the prophets as amplifying God’s call to Tarwater to be spokesman of the divine word. In Protestant and Catholic worship, this movement would constitute the Liturgy of the Word. Tarwater’s submission to the prophetic call, however, enacts a shift. In a nonverbal way, he acknowledges that he is unworthy to receive the Lord; but if the Lord only says the word, he, the broken sinner, will be healed and prepared for God. The transition is from the Liturgy of the Word to the Liturgy of the Bread (or Eucharist), from preparation to reception. There is also a theological transition in this movement. Surrender previously moved Tarwater’s conflict toward reconciliation with God—that is, the

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Father. Now the turn is toward Jesus, the divine word enfleshed, and toward communion with the Son. Far from being symbolic, the liturgy that ensues is disturbingly incarnational. Jesus enters Tarwater’s blood. God not only says the word but does the word once again. The words of command silently rise from the dirt into the boy’s veins. He is a word of His. “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY” (CW 478). A trio of embracing prepositional phrases, each introduced with the of of God’s belonging, unites through forgiveness Tarwater and all the people of God as members in the body of Jesus. Although the movement from word to Eucharist follows the order of worship that O’Connor experienced in her church, her artistic rendering is more radical in its intense corporeality and theological poignancy than the rite she knew. O’Connor takes the words that might appear symbolic and puts them back on the track to living things themselves. Words become organisms, seeds breaking into Tarwater’s blood to make flesh, seeds for new life. In the parable of the sower, Jesus says that the “seed is the word of God” (Luke 8:11). In The Violent Bear It Away, Jesus’ words are made flesh. What appears to be an object, the seed, hides a story with an unfolding future. The redeeming death that flowed from the incarnation of the Word now abides reincarnated in Tarwater. In the masses that O’Connor attended, the rites celebrating these events, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Bread, were separate; but she joins them into a primordial sacrament. The combined rite brings Tarwater backward and forward in time. By setting Tarwater’s reception of the blood within the dream of the paradisal repast, O’Connor restores the most ancient association of the Liturgy of the Eucharist with Jesus’ resurrection. The future arises from that event. The Eucharist is not merely a private exchange between Tarwater and Jesus; for the dream depicts a crowd, and the commanding words speak of the multitude. As Jesus’ suffering and dying were for all, so Tarwater’s prophetic life must be for all “the children of God” (CW 479), for people he does not know. O’Connor wants to get into Tarwater’s skin the words that unite all in a seamless identification with the divine. Rooted in the dirt of the backwoods, this union comes about in silence, including the silence in which readers bring the text to life, for the true heart of The Violent Bear It Away is not heard but felt. The silence of solitude composes an interior attitude of attentive listening, of interior receptivity to the interior God, who would keep aside all that might interfere with the Spirit’s voice. The “great asceticism,” says Amma Syncletica, is “to control oneself in illness and to sing hymns of thanksgiving to God” (Sayings, Syncletica 8 [232]). O’Connor did both. She made of her stricken body and her forced withdrawal from the world the condition of her extraordinary art. Gratitude

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was the bedrock of her response to life, as it was for the elders. “I work from such a basis of poverty,” O’Connor wrote, “that everything I do is a miracle to me” (HB 127). That “everything” drew sustenance from the Eucharist that O’Connor deemed “the center of existence for me” (HB 125). In the marvel that is The Violent Bear It Away, she offers, to reiterate her words, “a very minor hymn to the Eucharist” (HB 387). Although it may be slight next to the handiwork of creation against which O’Connor measured her effort, The Violent Bear It Away has become astonishing and urgent for our spiritually starved age. The book is a song to the Eucharist in its original meaning as the thanks of one who has received great gifts. In gratitude for what O’Connor has received, she in turn passes on the story of prophets, who have been on the endangered species list for some time, who receive the word in the desert of our time. Through the depiction of Tarwater’s evil, she raises the question our century must ask: How can someone who has done something so horrible make something of his life? Through her prophet-elect’s wrenching spiritual upheaval, accomplished by means of fire and loss, she explores inner zones of thought and feeling that our era needs to face out for its moral survival. This modern yet ancient story of a bloody, renunciative adventure through the arid wastes and across the human body forces us to realize how rarely the warring life of the soul is probed in contemporary literature. At the moment, power more than inner truth preoccupies us. To countervail this bias, O’Connor invites us through Tarwater’s inner struggle to recognize the value and insights of solitude and spiritual combat. O’Connor reminds the age that even the most willful and murderous among us are forever at the mercies of inner eddies of submission, self-denial, and desire for transcendence. The mysterious connection between our body and our soul is not one that many writers even try to consider at great depth, for to contemplate its spiritual textures would be to refute postmodernism’s treasured claim, as one of Don DeLillo’s characters in White Noise tells the hero, that “ ‘you are the sum total of your data’ ” (141) or that we are products of culture, playthings of chemical processes (as Rayber holds), whose destinies are set by political and evolutionary powers. In open warfare against all this, O’Connor recalls in her hymn to the body the experiment of the desert fathers and mothers to affirm that our bodies are capable of transformation and that we are free to define ourselves and to bend the fixed self-will to align our identity with God. The Violent Bear It Away is the story of the ancient Egyptian desert set in the American South. The subject matter is shaped by the new meaning derived from modern anguish. To bear her goodly gifts, O’Connor chooses a hero who at fourteen has already participated in the lethal violence of our time. Like many before him in sacred history, the Tennessean will be a holy

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terror in distributing the news that pulsates in his blood. His ruthless manner and remedy are necessary to cut through the impassivity that the contemporary prophet faces. The good news lies in Tarwater’s stern character. He learns with Abba Alonius that “in the world there is only myself and God” (Sayings, Alonius 1 [35]); and by reaching the deep knowledge of himself in communion with the absolute, Tarwater embraces all others and all of physical creation. Flannery O’Connor has become a habit of knowing for the late twentieth century. Her writing is a vade mecum in how to live in desolate times, a handbook for constant use drawn from the words and examples of the primitive monastics she admired. And the hermit novelist of Milledgeville is a match for the great teachers of the ancient desert. As the primitive solitaries are the spirit-bearers of the divine word in obscure and unspectacular practice, O’Connor is the modern writer of daily love and self-donation exercised within the context of ordinary human weakness and brutality. Her letters stand alongside The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in their wisdom, and her fiction rivals the remarkable stories in The Lives of the Desert Fathers in their edification. In personal correspondence, fiction, and lectures, she writes with tremendous freedom; yet her basically joyous and mystical outlook unfolds through an intellectual approach that could be severe. That stringency derives from the probity with which O’Connor faced out the great cost of love in the modern century, an era that she penetrated beneath the exterior surface of appearances to the fundamental secret of inmost life. From her remote perch in Baldwin County, O’Connor saw an America that no other writer has got right. Now we cannot see it without seeing O’Connor. From our basis of poverty in the desert, we can only be grateful for the miracle of O’Connor’s correcting our vision by her perception of divine love revealing that we, greatly loved, are participants in the lasting drama crystallizing around the word uttered and acted in the desert.

R alph C . W ood

Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O’Connor’s Vision of the World to Come

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f Christianity be not altogether thoroughgoing eschatology, there remains in it no relationship whatever with Christ.” This peremptory claim by Karl Barth would seem to guarantee sure dismissal in our time. Ours is an anti-eschatological age. The word “eschatology” itself seems to posit an unhealthy dualism between this present suffering world and a putative ideal world. Christians who still believe in heaven often envision it sentimentally as the place where all good people go, where we ourselves will be united with our friends and families, where we shall enjoy personal bliss bye and bye. Such is the hope of many conservative Christians who regard salvation almost entirely as an affair of “getting us to Heaven.” They ignore John Wesley’s wise counter-conviction that the chief purpose of the Christian life is to get heaven into us—and thus to get the hell out, as certain wags have suggested. From the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, there arose a new and optimistic eschatology that became the hope of many liberal Christians. They believed that the kingdom of God was progressively being realized on earth. They held the fond hope that wars would soon cease, that hunger and disease would be conquered, that homelessness and poverty would be overcome, that the kingdom of heaven would indeed occur on earth, under the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man—specifically in the neighborhood of Boston, the real locus of the liberal outlook.

From Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, pp. 251–65. © 2004 by Wm. B. Eerdmans.

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Even if it now seems a hopelessly naïve and old-fashioned vision, such liberal Christianity still thrives among a small band of believers who populate the old-line Protestant churches. They devote themselves to correct causes in the conviction that, if the kingdom doesn’t occur here and now, it will never occur at all. Conservative and liberal eschatologies are equally sub-biblical. They justify the critique of Marx and Nietzsche that Christianity is a slave religion of the weak, an opiate for those who cannot face the unrequited injustices of human existence and the utter finality of death. Whether by casting their eyes to the sky in post-worldly hope, or by grinding away at their bootless attempts to correct all social ills, both conservatives and liberals seem equally opaque to the bright hope of Christian faith and the dark pathos of our time. The calamities of our disastrous age seem to vindicate the great nineteenthcentury nay-sayers. An ominous, end-of-the-world atmosphere pervades human life in our late age. The planet seems burdened with ecological damages that it cannot much longer bear. Disease and starvation ravage entire continents. Nationalism, tribalism, and terrorism seem to know no limits, producing a suicidal warfare that has compunction against neither biological nor nuclear weapons. Whether Christian or pagan, most of us have become secularists in the literal sense: we believe that the saeculum—this present age—will be succeeded by no others. It matters little whether it ends with a bang or a whimper.1 The early Christians had neither the postmillennial hopefulness of conservatives nor the premillennial laboriousness of liberals. Facing a world altogether as bleak as ours, they were prepared to answer both the overeager enthusiasts and the world-weary cynics of their own age. They had a thorough-going eschatological faith. They believed that the world had already ended and that Christ would return in order to complete the new age that his life, death, and bodily resurrection had inaugurated. Rather than canceling the importance of earthly life, their eschatological faith drastically enhanced it, as Karl Löwith explains: Nothing in the New Testament warrants a conception of the new events that constituted early Christianity as the beginning of a new epoch of secular developments within a continuous process. For the early Christians the history of this world had rather come to an end, and Jesus himself was seen by them not as a world-historical link in the chain of historical happenings but as the unique redeemer. What really begins with the appearance of Jesus Christ is not a new epoch of secular history, called “Christian,” but the beginning of an end. The Christian times are Christian only insofar as they

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are the last time. Because the Kingdom of God, moreover, is not to be realized in a continuous process of historical development, the eschatological history of salvation also cannot impart a new and progressive meaning to the history of the world, which is [already] fulfilled by having reached its term. The “meaning” of the history of this world is fulfilled against itself because the story of salvation, as embodied in Jesus Christ, redeems and dismantles, as it were, the hopeless history of the world.2

Flannery O’Connor’s eschatological vision serves both to redeem and dismantle the hopelessness of our time. Far from debasing human existence, her belief in the Life beyond life gives a sharp urgency to ordinary experience. Her fiction summons people of all kinds and conditions to an eschatological life here and now. Her characters learn either wondrously to live out their salvation, or else miserably to fall away into damnation. This drastic either–or does not mean that the alternatives are equal. The first and last word spoken by Christians to the world, whether in art or in the church, must be Yes rather than No: “Do I make my plans like a worldly man,” asks Paul, “ready to say Yes and No at once? As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been Yes and No. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we preached among you, Silvanus and Timothy and I, was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why we utter the Amen through him, to the glory of God” (2 Cor. 1:17b–20, RSV). To declare any other gospel is to betray the word itself, turning glad tidings into baleful and admonitory news. Most of O’Connor’s stories end, therefore, in a glad moment of grace, as the gift of salvation comes to her protagonists amidst a blinding blaze of revelation, at once disclosing the horror of sin but also overcoming the horror with hope. If it is only at the point of death, most of her characters acknowledge the redeeming paradox announced by Mason Tarwater: “Even the mercy of the Lord burns.” The Perdition That Feels No Pain While the preponderance of Scripture is devoted to the proclamation of a kingdom that is at once already present and yet to be manifest, there is no denying that both the first and second comings of Christ bring judgment. The threat of holy wrath bears down on the world with a fearful urgency. Hans Urs von Balthasar explains: “Love itself, as the utmost gift, is also the utmost demand.”3 The seventeenth-century Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor offered a similar admonition: “[God] threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.”4 The mystic Marie des Vallées speaks even more darkly: “God[’s] love is more terrible, and better understands how to make us suffer, than his

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justice. . . . I love his divine justice and find it wonderful, mild and pleasing, but [divine] love is relentless and frightful in a cruel way.”5 This strange saying points to Christ’s agony on the cross: the hellish torment of his seeing, from the viewpoint of absolute Love, the entire human race turning away and crucifying it. The plain biblical fact of God’s judgment cannot be denied. Admonitions about the sheep and the goats, the right hand and the left hand, the everlasting lake of fire, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth are far too prominent, in both Scripture and Christian tradition, to be dismissed by recourse to a spongy universalism.6 Though Karl Barth is sometimes accused of being a universalist, he adamantly insists on the Last Assize: “That which is not of God’s grace and right cannot [finally] exist,” Barth warns. “Infinitely much human as well as Christian ‘greatness’ perhaps plunges there [at the Last Judgment] into the outermost darkness.”7 There is a frightening possibility that the last divine word could be a final negation uttered in answer to our final impenitence. There is no doubt about our own capacity to end in rebellion. In one of her most famous pronouncements, O’Connor confessed that “man [is] so free that with his last breath he can say No” (MM, 182). Persistent rejection of God’s grace ends in “the pain of absolute loss,” as Roman Catholics succinctly define the meaning of hell. This rejection and loss have consequences here and now, not only in the life to come. Adrienne von Speyr describes what happens to the person who silences the divine summons by putting God off, as if the Lord of the cosmos could be made permanently to wait. The negligent creature becomes a frightening figure, says von Speyr, “a permanently marked man.” He is and remains recognizable. He has pushed aside the experience of his life. In the future he remains embittered, dissatisfied, sarcastic, fault-finding, and he never grows tired of exposing his reasons, just concealing a sense of “knowing better” and trying to prove the impossibility of discipleship. But he is marked in advance; his words are superfluous.8

George Rayber is this marked man. Like Ivan Karamazov, he is not an atheist so much as an anti-theist. He believes that, if there is a God at all, he is surely a monster. Rayber is as determined as Karamazov is to deny and refute this evil deity, this gnostic demiurge. This school psychologist has become a secular monk, ascetically denying himself the world’s pleasures, lest they soften his stiff will not to believe: “He slept in a narrow iron bed, worked sitting in a straight-backed chair, ate frugally, spoke little, and cultivated the dullest of friends” (CW, 402). The single chink in Rayber’s secularist armor is

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his unaccountable love for his retarded son, Bishop. Precisely in his “uselessness,” his innocence, his obliviousness to insult and scorn, this mindless child stirs an “irrational” love in Rayber. Bishop is a sign of the sheer gratuity of all created things, the stark and utter unnecessity of every living creature, the knee-bending astonishment that there is something rather than nothing at all. Even so convinced an atheist as George Eliot could not help but observe, in Middlemarch, that “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” Rayber is an atheist whose mystical sense of the world as a total gift makes him fear that his “horrifying love” for Bishop, if left uncontrolled, might become all-encompassing, taking in the whole cosmos: Anything [Rayber] looked at too long could bring it on. . . . It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk. 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. 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 [people] in cases where nothing else had worked. . . . 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. And it only began with Bishop. It began with Bishop and then like an avalanche covered everything his reason hated. (CW, 401)

Like few other rationalists, Rayber understands the real meaning of divine love. Precisely because Bishop’s “uselessness” makes him incapable of any reciprocal exchange, any return of the love that he might receive, Rayber sees the boy as an unbidden gift. Just as God has freely loved his utterly unlovable people, asking not even their gratitude, much less their repayment in kind, so does the divine gratuity make every living thing infinitely valuable. All things are precious, Rayber understands, not chiefly for what they might become, but simply for what they are. Like Ivan Karamazov, with his inexplicable love for the sticky little leaves in spring even as he chooses to turn back

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his ticket to life, Rayber the nihilist has a mystical desire to love everything absolutely and without qualification. Yet spiritual love can become sentimental and self-indulgent; authentic love is always costly, at once “imperious and all-demanding.” If Rayber expressed his unstinting love for the feeble-minded Bishop, he would appear foolish before the hard gaze of the utilitarian world. A culture of efficiency and productivity honors only those lives that “contribute to society.” To avoid the “madness” of such useless love, and to maintain perfect mastery over his desires, Rayber is determined to steer a narrow course between equally perilous chasms: the “idiocy” of loving Bishop and giving gratitude to God, and the “emptiness” of not loving his son and thus descending into the void. Rayber is too honest to seek any middle way between the absolute alternatives. He knows that, in ultimate matters, there are only two options: transcendent faith and utter nothingness. When the time comes to make the bitter choice between the two abysses, he vows to maintain his integrity by electing nothingness rather than love of God and child. Rayber has already sought, on at least one occasion, to choose the void. He attempted to drown Bishop in the ocean, only to suffer a last-minute failure of nerve that led him to have the unconscious child revived. The schoolteacher doesn’t miss his second opportunity. Even though it does not come by Rayber’s hand, he is clearly complicit in the drowning of Bishop. Despite having heard Francis Tarwater’s repeated claim that, unlike his weak-willed kinsman, he himself can act, Rayber allows the boy to take Bishop boating. This is a virtual invitation to murder. When Rayber first hears the drowning Bishop bellow out his protest, he is initially stricken with horror. But the hard rationalist gradually regains self-control, steeling himself against grief. So thoroughly has Rayber succeeded in silencing the repeated call of the ultimate Voice that he hears its final echo—in Bishop’s dying scream—as if it were a remote occurrence happening to someone else. With chilling candor, O’Connor’s narrator sets forth the pain of absolute loss, the damnation of being unable to love: The machine [his hearing aid] made the sounds [of Bishop’s cry] seem to come from inside him as if something in him were tearing itself free. He clenched his teeth. The muscles in his face contracted and revealed lines of pain beneath harder than bone. He set his jaw. No cry must escape him. The one thing he knew, the one thing he was certain of was that no cry must escape him. . . . He stood there trying to remember something else before he moved away. It came to him finally as something so distant and vague in his mind that it might have already happened, a long

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time ago. It was that tomorrow they would drag the pond for Bishop. He stood waiting for the raging pain, the intolerable hurt that was his due, to begin, so that he could ignore it, but he continued to feel nothing. He stood light-headed at the [motel] window and it was not until he realized there would be no pain that he collapsed. (CW, 456)

Because Rayber has allowed the final summons of Bishop’s love to go unanswered, that love has torn itself free from the man’s heart. Our final assessment of Rayber depends on our reading of his collapse after he hears Bishop’s drowning scream. It may be regarded as his final descent into permanent perdition, his uncoerced election of nothingness, his entry into the unrecognized hell that he has repeatedly vowed he would choose over “idiot” love when the time at last came. To dwell in absolute spiritual vacuity, as Rayber does, is the precise meaning of damnation as Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima describes it: the hell of being unable to love. Yet a more positive reading of Rayber’s fate is also possible. That Rayber is not able to rejoice at Bishop’s death—glad at last to be rid of his useless son—may augur a more hopeful future for the school psychologist. It may demonstrate the final defeat of his cold-hearted atheism. Like Mrs. McIntyre after her collapse in “The Displaced Person,” the deaf and disabled Rayber may have crumpled into the beginning of his salvation.9 Even so, it is clear that we have witnessed a man’s damnation, at least in this present life, as O’Connor reveals hell to be an existential reality, not some far-off state of timeless punishment. To define either salvation or damnation entirely in post-temporal terms, O’Connor teaches, is to miss the real import of Christian eschatology. The end has already come, the Kingdom is in our midst, and we are already dwelling in various states of paradise or perdition. The new life is now present because the world’s reconciliation has already taken place in Jesus Christ; or else the old death, which has been brought to its term, is passing ever more rapidly away into nothingness, seeking to sweep souls such as Rayber along with it. The Paradise Whose Silence Is Broken Only by Shouting the Truth To confess with the Apostles’ Creed that Jesus Christ “is coming to judge the quick and the dead” is to expect nothing other than the Apocalypse. The word itself, which means to “uncover” or “reveal,” makes clear that this event will not constitute some entirely unheard-of thing, but rather the final disclosure and universal manifestation of the kingdom of God that is already in our midst. Just seven years before his death, perhaps thinking of

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his own coming encounter with the living Lord, Karl Barth described to a friend what he took to be the essence of eschatology: “Eternal” life is not another, second life beyond our present one, but the reverse side of this life, as God sees it, which is hidden from us here and now. It is this life in relationship to what God has done in Jesus Christ for the whole world and thus also for us. So we wait and hope—in respect of our death—to be made manifest with him ( Jesus Christ who is raised from the dead), in the glory of judgment, and also of the grace of God. That will be the new thing: that the veil which now lies over the whole world and thus over our life (tears, death, sorrow, crying, grief ) will be taken away, and God’s counsel (already accomplished in Jesus Christ) will stand before our eyes, the object of our deepest shame, but also of our joyful thanks and praise.10

O’Connor’s confessed affinity for Karl Barth would surely have extended to Hans Urs von Balthasar had his work been translated into English before her death in 1964. Von Balthasar makes clear his conviction that hell is a state and not a place, and thus a present as well as a future reality. He cites St. Augustine’s commentary on Genesis: “There is, then, definitely a real hell, but I take it to affect the imagination, not the body.”11 Von Balthasar also shows that, as with Rayber’s collapse into total insensibility, evil always turns inward and consumes itself, making it incapable of real community or friendship. Since personhood entails a positive engagement with other persons, damnation produces what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger calls a terrible kind of unpersonhood, “a decomposition and denigration of being a person.”12 Yet the self-destructive powers of evil are never the main focus of Christian witness. For while the church has specified many saints, it has never declared anyone definitively damned. Dante places Judas in the lowest pit of Hell, but von Balthasar regards Jesus’ betrayer as a figure who stands near rather than far from us; he is “the representative example for something of which all sinners are also guilty.”13 The real issue, von Balthasar argues, is not Judas’s final state but our own present hope. How can we live truthfully and redemptively if we are assured that a great deal—perhaps most—of God’s good creation will be irretrievably lost, that the preponderance of human effort and culture will be swallowed up in the swirling abyss? Considering our utter failure to meet the demands of divine love, would not the ultimate abuse and denial of God’s love lie precisely in hoping for ourselves what we refuse to hope for all others? Could we ever assume the final abandonment of any other person besides ourselves? Would not this assumption that even

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one other person might dwell forever beyond the pale of divine mercy also cut the cord of our own unreserved love for him? Would not such a conclusion sever the demand that, as Jürgen Verweyen puts it, we “have a patience that absolutely never gives up but is prepared to wait infinitely long for the other”?14 These are the questions that two eschatological scenes in O’Connor’s fiction serve to answer. The first occurs when young Tarwater, having drowned Bishop and having himself been sodomized by the devil’s agent, angrily purges the satanic presence by setting the woods afire. He heads home for Powderhead, expecting to meet the awful judgment that he deserves for having incinerated—so he believes—his great-uncle. The farmhouse does lie in ashes, but the corn crop has been freshly laid by. To his immense astonishment and even greater gratitude, Tarwater finds a newly mounded grave with a crude cross planted at its head. Buford, a black farm worker, has dragged the huge prophet from the burning house and given him the reverent burial the old man had requested. This utterly unbidden and unmerited gift of grace, an act of sheer transcendent mercy that spares the boy a lifetime of overwhelming guilt, at last frees Tarwater to become the prophet that he is meant to be. The flaming woods that he has set on fire no longer betoken the heat of his anger but the ardor of God’s summons: “He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY” (CW, 478). That prophets repent in sackcloth and ashes, abasing themselves in abject humility, does not make them immune to being killed by the very people whom they are sent to save. In a letter commenting on Francis Marion Tarwater’s postfictional fate, O’Connor observed that “the children of God . . . will dispatch him pretty quick” (HB, 342). Even if the young evangelist dies in order to realize his mission, his death will not invalidate his calling. He has seen what ultimately counts: that the cross is not a knife driven into the heart of the world to rend its life, but the tree, as O’Connor confessed, whose roots encircle all the dead and whose branches embrace all the living. In the end, Tarwater’s vision reaches even to paradise, for he is given a glimpse of Old Mason feeding eagerly among the great throng of the redeemed, as the multiplied loaf is passed among them. The boy knows that this hunger for the Bread of Life is also his, that it belongs not to him alone but to every living soul, and that no one can rest, as St. Augustine said, until the craving is satisfied:

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He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. (CW, 478)

That O’Connor can envision the realm of the blessed dead as being inhabited by “violent” men who are strangers on the earth reveals her abiding fear that ours is an age of the mediocre and the flaccid, of the pusillanimous and the falsely satisfied. It also displays her conviction that paradise is not a static condition. This is a central Christian conception, from the Book of Revelation through Dante and modern theologians such as Barth and von Balthasar, both of whom eschew the term “eternity” because it evokes an absence of movement and energy in the divine life and thus misconstrues our own participation in it. They are all agreed with Gregory of Nyssa’s contention that “eternal bliss means a dynamic, never-ending movement toward the center in God; never-ending because God’s essence can never be fully reached.”15 This “dynamic, never-ending movement toward God” lies at the center of the vision granted to Ruby Turpin at the end of “Revelation,” O’Connor’s most winsome story. Mrs. Turpin is a complex character, at once frighteningly complacent about her own life and yet engagingly open to the truth. Convinced that Jesus has given her everything—a faithful husband, Claud, a prosperous sanitary hog farm, and a prominent standing in society—Ruby thanks Christ at night for all her blessings, naming them one by one. In fact, she falls asleep by imagining the kind of person Jesus could have made her into—a Negro, for example—if he had not created her to be the excellent person that she is. Since most of the “colored people” she knows are “trashy,” Mrs. Turpin remains assured that Christ “would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black” (CW, 636). Such musings, though racist, seem more amusing than vicious, until Ruby remembers that there are genteel whites who have lost their possessions, even as there are prosperous black doctors who own expensive homes and cars and cattle. These counterindicators upset Ruby Turpin’s ranking of the good and the bad. That she has a hierarchical imagination is not itself evil, but that her hierarchy is humanly constructed rather than divinely revealed makes it potentially fascist: “Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven” (CW, 636). Ruby Turpin lives in the shadow of the Holocaust, and she obscurely senses

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her link to it, even if she cannot articulate her feelings in historical terms. The Hitlerian horror was undergirded by the assumption that, in the absence of transcendent moral order, human life becomes as disposable as vermin. The Jews violated Hitler’s hierarchy, just as well-off blacks disrupt Ruby’s conviction that the social order must be arranged according to her own norms. And since the world refuses to conform to her vision of it, she dreams of having everything dissolved in the flaming chaos of the death camps. Mrs. Turpin meets her avenging angel of judgment in the person of an acne-faced Wellesley student, who confronts her in a medical waiting room. Mary Grace is not an echo of either the Virgin Mary or any of the Marys who are central to Jesus’ ministry. She is a secular bearer of the grace that O’Connor described as having to wound before it can heal.16 Outraged at Ruby’s litany of thankfulness for all the good things Jesus has given her, Mary Grace flings a huge psychology textbook at the self-congratulating Turpin, striking her over the eye. The demon of wrath then shoves Ruby roughly to the floor, pounces astride her, and screams out a memorable imprecation: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog” (CW, 646). Because she is a Christ-haunted Southerner, Mrs. Turpin is unable to dismiss this vicious attack as the work of a mere madwoman. Just as the Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” recognizes The Misfit as someone she has known from the foundation of time, so does Ruby instantly discern that she has been sent a dread message from her Lord. At first she tries to deny the truthfulness of the judgment that has befallen her by extolling her own good works: “It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.” Then she becomes snide and sarcastic about God’s having directed his ire not at “rednecks” or “niggers,” as she would have called them, but at a “neat, clean respectable woman” such as herself. Hence her fury at a deity who shows himself to be no respecter of persons but sends his condemnation on a decent white lady. She reminds God that, unlike those who deserve divine reproach, she does not lie down in the middle of the street and stop traffic like black civil rights demonstrators, or “dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over [her] face” like white trash. She concludes her Job-like complaint by confessing, with unrecognized verbal irony, “I could be nasty” (CW, 652). Even if Christ has totally overturned her hierarchy, putting the first last and making the wise foolish, Ruby Turpin determines to maintain the proper social distinctions: “Call me a warthog from hell. Put that bottom rail on the top. There’ll still be a top and a bottom.” When none of Ruby’s self-justifications proves satisfying, she grows ever more desperate, defying God with more Job-like taunts: “Who do you think you are?” (CW, 653). But unlike Job, who acquires a certain dignity in contending with God, Mrs. Tur-

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pin becomes increasingly childish and futile in her rage. Her last query comes rebounding back to her in the form of an echo, as if God were asking Ruby who she considers herself to be. As almost always in O’Connor’s work, the answer occurs through silence. This talky woman who has raged against God receives no divine lecture but an eschatological vision. With the sky darkening toward sunset, Ruby stares down at an old sow who feeds her suckling piglets in utter disregard for her own welfare. This scene of unstanched giving and vibrant receiving enables Ruby to gaze “through the very heart of mystery.” She seems, in fact, to be “absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge” (CW, 653). Then she lifts up her eyes to the heavens, where the disappearing sun has left only a long purple streak in the sky. There, with her hands raised in a priestly gesture, she beholds a purgatorial vision that redeems even as it judges: She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. (CW, 653–54)

This momentary eschatological disclosure concerns not only Ruby’s future life in a paradise but also her present life in a small Southern town. In one of her angriest queries, Ruby Turpin had asked God, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” (CW, 652). Here in an apocalyptic vision she finds her answer. Both the question and the reply are central to the Christian faith: How can one be the reborn child of God while remaining a miserable offender? Luther struck at the core of the matter when he declared that Christians are simul justus et peccator. We are simultaneously justified by Christ’s life and death and resurrection, said Luther, while remaining dreadful sinners who must work out our salvation in fear and trembling. Far from sanctioning the status quo by means of what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—a reliance on Christ’s forgiveness as the unguent for a complacent life—eschatological faith enables true transformation.

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Ruby Turpin’s hopeless world must be both dismantled and redeemed. Everything is thus turned upside down in her final eschatological vision, for she is made to see things as God sees them. Now she must learn, however painfully, to live in the revolutionary new age that God is inaugurating by way of the redemption already wrought in Christ, even as it awaits its final fulfillment beyond time. She has seen that the divine mercy is like the refiner’s fire, cleansing rather than consuming her spurious goodness. Her pride of place and position is being purged by this incandescent sight of all the world’s “inferior” folk entering the kingdom ahead of her. O’Connor does not suggest that society’s outsiders are intrinsically noble. But like the New Testament “publicans and sinners” who are so welcoming to Jesus, the emarginated are not inclined toward Ruby’s self-justifying righteousness, if only because they have so little cause to think highly of themselves. Mrs. Turpin also discovers that, while her small virtues of “good order and common sense and respectable behavior” are necessary to social existence, they are not the keys of the Kingdom. And when such minuscule virtues lead to moral arrogance and spiritual presumption, as they have in her case, they become more pernicious than the common vices. O’Connor never ends her stories with easy victories, since neither good art nor authentic faith is ever less than arduous and exacting. Ruby Turpin is still far from salvation. Her false goodness will not be easily cleansed. Even in receiving her divine vision, she retains her tone of arch condescension: she and Claud “always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” Yet neither will she be able to forget what she has glimpsed. The good news that she is included in the heavenly procession, not because of her gleaming good works but by God’s burning mercy alone, promises to put constraints on her presumption. That she and Claud are at the rear of the train is meant as a positive spur to a new kind of excellence and joyfulness, as she is called to conform her sinful life to the gracious life of the triune God. Mrs. Turpin receives a hint of what such a redeemed life is meant to be as she trudges home in the darkness, for she does not hear wails of damnation but songs of jubilation: “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing into the starry field and shouting hallelujah” (CW, 654). * * * Flannery O’Connor’s South was Christ-haunted, as she repeatedly emphasized, though not Christ-centered. But to be haunted by the ragged figure of the Nazarene who swings from limb to limb in the great tree of Southern cultural and religious life is to be given a gift of immense proportion. Walker Percy offers thanks for this gift at the end of his apocalyptic novel of

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1971, Love in the Ruins. Percy’s protagonist-antagonist, Dr. Thomas More, seeks to unite both the Christians and secularists, the liberals and conservatives, the blacks and whites of his region to serve the common good. More’s organization wittily parodies the anti-Catholic society that rose to prominence in the 1950s and that was called “Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State” (POAU). It’s far too late for Protestants and Catholics to be set against each other, More suggests, when church and culture are both in a state of collapse. Dr. More slyly calls his group “Southerners and Others United to Preserve the Union in Repayment of an Old Debt to the Yankees Who Saved It Once Before and Are Destroying It Now” (SOUP).17 The Yankee gospel of progress and enlightenment that once saved the nation from ruin, insisting that no human being can ever be regarded as mere chattel and that peoples of all creeds and colors are due basic fairness and justice, has largely cut itself off from Christian confession and tradition. There is no longer a Southern problem or a Northern problem or even a California problem. Severed from the biblical story and the institutions it once sustained, the Divided States of America will founder and sink into the abyss that eventually will engulf all nations and cultures.18 Yet hope remains, the eschatological hope that Ruby Turpin encountered, the hope that God’s burning mercy hurries terribly and wonderfully near. Flannery O’Connor’s work both enlivens and extends this hope because it was inspired by a terribly and wonderfully Christ-haunted region.

No t e s 1. Otto Weber makes the shrewd observation that our desperate thisworldliness has caused suicide and capital punishment to exchange places on the scale of dread and horror. Our medieval ancestors regarded suicide as the unforgivable sin, since it presumed upon the prerogative that belongs to God alone; on the other hand, they considered capital punishment wholly acceptable, because God could correct in the next life whatever miscarriages of justice might occur on earth. But with the collapse of eschatological faith, suicide has become a virtual right and capital punishment a dubious penalty. 2. Karl Löwith, “History and Christianity,” in Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 283. 3. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”?, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 41. 4. Quoted in C. S. Lewis, “Preface” to George MacDonald: An Anthology (New York: Macmillan, 1978), p. xxxi. 5. Quoted in von Balthasar, Dare We Hope, p. 108, n. 20. 6. It is best to treat such heavy matters with a little levity. Martin Luther opined that the real question is not whether we are sheep or goats, but whether God is herbivorous or carnivorous. If it’s the latter, no one shall go undevoured. There

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was a Scots Presbyterian minister who was asked how the bare-gummed will be able eternally to gnash their teeth. The dour Scot is said to have replied: “Teeth will be provided.”   7. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), pp. 135–36.   8. Adrienne von Speyr, They Followed His Call, trans. Erasmo LeivaMerikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), p. 31.   9. O’Connor hedges on Rayber’s ultimate state. On the one hand, she says that he “wins” his battle against the grace of God and thus damns himself (HB, 488); on the other hand, she holds out the extratextual hope that Rayber’s collapse, like Mrs. McIntyre’s at the end of “The Displaced Person,” may signal “that he is not going to be able to sustain his choice” (HB, 484). 10. Quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), p. 488. 11. Quoted in von Balthasar, Dare We Hope, p. 127. 12. Quoted in ibid., p. 145. 13. Ibid., p. 187. He adds, somewhat ominously, that “[t]he certainty that a number of men, especially unbelievers, must end in hell we can leave to Islam” (p. 213). 14. Quoted in ibid., pp. 78–79. 15. Ibid., p. 245. 16. O’Connor often observed that all of her major characters were versions of herself, and we will recall that her full name was Mary Flannery O’Connor. 17. Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), p. 401. 18. When Love in the Ruins won the National Book Award in 1971, Walker Percy was asked what if any “message” his apocalyptic novel enshrines. Percy’s answer made ironically clear that our plight is not a regional epidemic but a national pandemic: “If my novel has any message, it is probably this: Don’t give up, New York, California, Chicago, Philadelphia. Louisiana is with you. Georgia is on your side.”

M ichael D unne

Flannery O’Connor: “Funny Because It Is Terrible”

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n a highly influential essay entitled “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” (1962), O’Connor’s friend and fellow novelist John Hawkes connects the young, Roman Catholic southerner’s work to the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nathanael West. . . . Hawkes is clearly onto something. There can be no doubt that Flannery O’Connor’s work resembles Hawthorne’s and West’s and, furthermore, that she deserves a place among the American Calvinist humorists. Perhaps this is why O’Connor writes in a letter to “A.” (September 24, 1955), “In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny” (957). We may begin our examination by noting that O’Connor’s fiction carries clear religious intonations. As Frederick J. Hoffman has written, “Her major subjects are the struggle for redemption, the search for Jesus, and the meaning of ‘prophecy’; all of these in an intensely evangelical Protestant South . . .” (33). Specific examples bear out Hoffman’s claim. In O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood (1952), for example, her principal character, Hazel Motes, says to Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock in the book’s first chapter, “I reckon you think you been redeemed” (6).1 Later in the novel, Motes goes on to meet Asa Hawks, a false prophet, and Onnie Jay Holy, a religious hustler, before blinding himself in a desperate act of religious atonement. Since From Calvinist Humor in American Literature, pp. 162–83, 203–04. © 2007 by Louisiana State University Press.

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these are not the materials that occupied most significant American writers in the early 1950s—who were famously uninterested in prophets, preachers, and modes of atonement2—O’Connor’s religious subject matter is all the more noticeable. In fact, O’Connor wrote in a letter to Carl Hartman (March 2, 1954) that Wise Blood was “written by some one who believes that there was a fall, has been a Redemption, and will be a judgment” (919)—distinctly Christian, if not exclusively Calvinistic, sentiments. The same may be said of O’Connor’s other novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), which presents a fanatic elderly preacher, Mason Tarwater, who teaches his greatnephew, Francis Marion Tarwater, “history beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment” (331); the old man’s challenge to this great-nephew to baptize his idiot cousin, Bishop; and the great-nephew’s conflict between his onerous religious destiny and the insistently secular vision of his uncle, George Rayber, Bishop’s father. Although they are decidedly twisted, these folk are not obsessed Delta planters or nasty beauty shop patrons, as they might be in the fiction of other southern writers such as William Faulkner or Eudora Welty;3 they are actors in the grand, enduring Christian drama of salvation and damnation.4 O’Connor’s shorter fiction makes the same point, as Louis D. Rubin maintains in an essay aptly entitled “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt”: “Both her novels and most of her short stories are directly concerned with religion” (51). Consequently, in O’Connor’s most popular story, “Good Country People,” Joy/Hulga, the philosopher, announces, “I don’t even believe in God,” and Manly Pointer, the Bible salesman, responds, “That’s very unusual for a girl” (277–78). Pointer also says, later on, “I hope you don’t think . . . that I believe in that crap. I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!” (283). Clearly, this is not the usual ground for modern American fiction. Nor is it usual to create a character like Obadiah Elihue Parker, in “Parker’s Back,” who thinks that he will impress his wife by getting a tattoo of Jesus on his back, or one like Ruby (Mrs. Claud) Turpin, who yells at God in “Revelation,” “If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” (652). Even O’Connor’s titles reveal her involvement with Christian ideas: “Revelation”; “Judgement Day”; “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”; The Violent Bear It Away, from the Gospel of Matthew; “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” from the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. As C. Hugh Holman has accurately observed, “Flannery O’Connor’s restless souls belong to people primitive in mind and Protestant in religion, who with all their difference, share a common, deep, and personal awareness of the awful and awesome presence and

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power of God in the world” (86). Here is plausible material for Calvinist treatment. And yet, even though O’Connor resembles other Calvinistically inclined thinkers and writers, there is the palpable stumbling block of her Roman Catholicism to stand in the way of her absorption into the fold of Calvinist American humorists. As O’Connor wrote in a letter to John Lynch (November 6, 1955), “I feel that if I were not a Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything” (966). Admittedly, there are doctrinal affiliations separating O’Connor from William Bradford and Michael Wigglesworth. However, we might ponder how this Catholic way of seeing suggests to O’Connor that she abandon Joy/Hulga in a hayloft at the end of “Good Country People” without her glasses, her wooden leg, and her delusion of superiority. How is this Catholic raison d’écrire responsible for the Misfit’s murder of the whole family in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” of Bevel’s drowning in “The River,” of Mrs. May’s fatal goring in “Greenleaf ”? We might ask whether these developments reveal even a Christian view of experience, much less the orthodox Roman Catholic commitment that O’Connor frequently professed.5 The answer may be that O’Connor is having too much nasty fun in these stories to need any theological explanations of what she is up to. That is to say, as Josephine Hendin plausibly maintains, “O’Connor’s assertions of Christian orthodoxy do not accurately describe her art” (16). When all is said and done, then, O’Connor’s affiliation with the Catholic Church may be considered more of a private matter than as an informing source for her fiction. In the judgment of Martha Stephens, moreover, “O’Connor’s Christian faith was as grim and literalistic, as joyless and loveless a faith, at least as we confront it in her fiction, as we have ever seen in American letters—even, perhaps, in American theology” (41). Temporarily putting aside Stephens’s terms faith and literalistic, we can glimpse in her analysis the resemblance of O’Connor’s work not so much to that of other twentieth-century Catholic novelists but rather to her harsh nineteenth-century southern predecessors, the humorists of the Old Southwest. Miles Orvell is only one of many critics to draw such connections, in his Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor (54–56), where he derives O’Connor’s technique from that of her predecessors and comments on her connections to William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell. Louis Rubin agrees, in “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt,” claiming that what “makes Flannery O’Connor’s fiction so gripping and memorable lies in the insight into religious experience afforded her by her double heritage as both Catholic and Southerner” (70–71). In other words, O’Connor reaches back as much to the Old Southwest tradition of cruel, violent humor as to the text of the Bible, whether it be the Protestant

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King James version or the Catholic Douay-Rheims translation. O’Connor claims to repudiate this literary tradition in her Georgetown University lecture, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” when she says dismissively, “In nineteenth century American writing there was a good deal of grotesque literature which came from the frontier and was supposed to be funny—such as Sut Lovingood ” (860). In spite of her apparent scorn for these writers, O’Connor clearly derives authorial pleasure from the suffering of her fictional characters, as do the creators of the “grotesque literature which came from the frontier and was supposed to be funny.”6 In illustration, we might consider the passage in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s “The Horse Swap,” from his Georgia Scenes (1835), in which the removal of a saddle blanket from the back of a horse named Bullet “disclosed a sore on Bullet’s back-bone, that seemed to have defied all medical skill. It measured six full inches in length, and four in breadth; and had as many features as Bullet had motions.” The heart of Longstreet’s genteel narrator “sickened at the sight; and [he] felt that the brute who had been riding him in that situation, deserved the halter” (30). The local Georgians, however, laugh heartily. Furthermore, this laughter is not directed at the horse’s physical misery but at the foolishness of Peter Ketch, who has apparently been seduced into trading for such a defective animal. Significantly, there is nothing warm and inclusive about this laughter: “The laugh became loud and general at the old man’s expense, and rustic witticisms were liberally bestowed upon him and his late purchase” (30). When it is discovered that Kit, the horse that Ketch gave in trade, is both deaf and blind, the crowd’s laughter is turned on Kit’s new owner, Yellow Blossom. Even though these characters are not directly laughing at a horse’s misery, they are laughing at another human being’s embarrassment and misfortune. That Yellow Blossom has been shown to be an arrogant braggart complicates the joke somewhat, but it does not totally eliminate the joke’s cruelty or its delight in another’s (richly deserved) misfortune. Longstreet is surely a Calvinist humorist in this respect and thus one of O’Connor’s potential literary ancestors. Consider merely this passage from “Good Country People”: “Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report” (264).7 Cruel Calvinist humor is equally evident in the episode from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), in which a drunken Jim Blaine tells about Becky Martin’s daughter, Maria. Maria “married a missionary and died in grace,” Blaine says, and he recounts that she was et up by the savages. They et him, too, poor feller—biled him. It warn’t the custom so they say, but they explained to friends of his’n

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that went down there to bring away his things, that they’d tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of ’em—and so it annoyed his relations to find out that the man’s life was fooled away just out of a dern’d experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there ain’t anything ever reely lost; everything that people can’t understand and don’t see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake. Providence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys. That there missionary’s substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu’ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don’t tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain’t no such thing as an accident. (Complete Short Stories 79–80)

Surely this episode is funnier in most ways than the horse trade depicted by Longstreet, and surely Twain’s satire of the widely held theological belief in special providences contributes to this humor.8 Just as surely, we cannot ignore the fact that the cruel fates of bodily infirmity and cannibalism stand as the basis of the principal joke. We might also recall William Bradford’s delight occasioned by the plight of the plague-stricken Indians. In this respect, O’Connor can be seen to belong to this grotesque Old Southwestern tradition as much, or more so, than to the tradition of Catholic, or even of Christian, fiction writers. We may all say amen to this possibility, recognizing the terrible physical and mental distortions of her characters even while howling at how funny she makes the whole thing. That is to say, we may recognize Flannery O’Connor as a true Calvinist humorist, either because of or despite her religious dispositions. In keeping with John Hawkes’s insight about the commonality in the authors, we might go on to note that the plot of Wise Blood patently demonstrates O’Connor’s debt to Nathanael West and his personally inflected Calvinism. Like Miss Lonelyhearts, Hazel Motes has a Christ complex, but unlike Miss Lonelyhearts, Motes conceives of his mission in inverted terms. Instead of offering salvation, Motes typically preaches that “nobody with a good car needs to be justified” (64). Motes’s church is the apparently unorthodox Church without Christ. And yet, his concerns are hardly secular or worldly. As I have already said, he preaches his unorthodox beliefs—from the hood of his rat-gray Essex. Characteristically, Motes reveals his actual immersion in the spiritual world that he claims to reject by saying, “If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me” (29). Like West’s hero, Motes pursues spiritual goals in a secular world, best represented, perhaps, by Motes’s landlady who thinks, “She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars” (119). Also like Miss

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Lonelyhearts, who is accidentally killed by Peter Doyle, the man he is trying to save, Hazel Motes comes to a tragicomic end. After learning that Asa Hawks did not actually blind himself with lime to prove his faith, Motes does blind himself with lime; he falls into the clutches of Mrs. Flood, the grasping landlady; and he ends up being beaten to death by some cops who are supposedly bringing him home to Mrs. Flood. O’Connor differs from West, however, in implying that Motes finally attains salvation in spite of his doctrinal dissent. As she describes Motes in her introductory note to the second edition of Wise Blood, he is “a Christian malgré lui.”9 In spite of this supplementary judgment of her hero’s “integrity” (2), black, vicious, Calvinist humor is omnipresent in the book. Mrs. Flood, for example, concludes after Motes has adopted a regimen of bodily mortifications: “It’s like one of them gory stories, it’s something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats. . . . There’s no reason for it. People have quit doing it” (127). In Mrs. Flood’s view, the penitential Motes “might as well be one of them monks . . . he might as well be in a monkery” (123). Some satire is directed at Mrs. Flood’s secularism in these passages, of course, but O’Connor’s language is in comic excess of what is required to make her thematic point. The terms walling up cats and monkery are just too good for mere satire. They are as certain signs of Calvinist humor as Hawthorne’s sentence in “The Minister’s Black Veil”: “One imitative little imp covered his face with an old black handkerchief, thereby so affrighting his playmates that the panic seized himself, and he well-nigh lost his wits by his own waggery” (377).10 Even though she often bears weighty thematic responsibilities, Mrs. Flood is just as often a happy occasion for Calvinist humor. Thus, while we encounter the symbolic judgment “The landlady stared for a long time, seeing nothing at all” (126), we also relish her response to Motes’s initial declaration that he is a preacher by vocation: “ ‘Protestant?’ she asked suspiciously, ‘or something foreign?’ ” (60). The joke is probably disposable in terms of the novel’s overall thematic intentions, but O’Connor likes it too much to pass up the opportunity. And, Mrs. Flood is not the only comic temptation that O’Connor gives in to in this novel. Onnie Jay Holy, for example, says about the Church without Christ: “In the first place, friends, you can rely on it that it’s nothing foreign connected with it. You don’t have to believe nothing you don’t understand and approve of. If you don’t understand it, it ain’t true, and that’s all there is to it. No jokers in the deck, friends” (86). Holy also claims that “[t]his church is up-to-date! When you’re in this church you can know there’s nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don’t know, all the cards are on the table, friends, and that’s a fack!” (87). While these jokes obviously have something to do with Christianity—or at

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least with religion—they are assuredly jokes even so. And, as Marilyn Arnold reluctantly notes, “Probably most of us were attracted to Flannery O’Connor for her comic spirit” (244). No wonder! in light of passages such as the one in which Sabbath Lily Hawks tells Motes about the time she wrote to advice columnist Mary Brittle: “Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not? I shall not enter the kingdom of heaven anyway so I don’t see what difference it makes.” Mary replied, “Dear Sabbath, Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living if you put it in the proper perspective and do not let it warp you. Read some books on Ethical Culture.” A number of the Calvinist humorists considered in this book might have created this exchange of letters. Only O’Connor would conclude with Sabbath Lily’s response: “Dear Mary, What I really want to know is should I go the whole hog or not? That’s my real problem. I’m adjusted okay to the modern world” (67). Since “the modern world”—or what Mary Brittle calls “Life”—is the environment in which Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards see people deluding themselves that they will avoid hell—“No, I never intended to come here: I had laid out matters otherwise in my mind. . . .”—we can laugh a deep Calvinist laugh at both Sabbath Lily and Mary Brittle. I suspect that O’Connor then wants us to ask ourselves whether our own views are any more responsible. At the same time that she rings these serious thematic chimes, O’Connor can’t keep from noting, as a descendant of the Old Southwest humorists, that Sabbath Lily was “scratching his ankle with the toe of her sneaker, and smiling” while saying all of this. This is the cruel streak that leads O’Connor to say about Manley Pointer in “Good Country People,” “He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking” (277). Apparently, a writer does not need abused horses or cannibals to create cruel Calvinist humor. O’Connor also expresses her Calvinist criticism through larger elements of Wise Blood. Enoch Emery experiences the impersonal coldness of an indifferent city until he is desperate for any touch of true Christian charity. In his desperation, Enoch hopes that shaking hands with what he takes to be a movie-star gorilla will bring him some semblance of the love he is missing. After Enoch tumbles out a confused account of his pathetic loneliness, we read: “The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair, ‘You go to hell,’ a surly voice inside the ape-suit said, low

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and distinctly, and the hand was jerked away” (102). The episode is simultaneously shocking, sad, and comic. It is also thematically appropriate in light of O’Connor’s overall theological commitment to the idea that human life is only a probationary period. Thematic seriousness aside, we must conclude that Wise Blood is definitely funny—in a Calvinist way. The same may be said of O’Connor’s first collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). The title story reflects O’Connor’s quasi-religious humor when the homicidal maniac called the Misfit says that Jesus should not have raised the dead: “Jesus thown everything off balance” (151). Then he completes his massacre of a vacationing family by shooting the grandmother three times, perhaps in fulfillment of his recognition that “[s]he would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (153). In a remote theological sense, the grandmother may just have had it coming, as we can see in speeches of this sort: “In my time . . . children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” (139). Racism like this surely trumps social propriety, as most true moralists would see. In another, nonthematic sense, the grandmother is simply funny because she exemplifies a type so effectively, as when she says, “I believe I have injured an organ” (145), or thinks, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (138). This grandmother does end up dead, and probably no one realizes that she is a lady, but June Star ends up dead, too, although she gets to deliver one of the story’s funniest lines when she says on the first page that the grandmother “wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (137). Later, when Red Sammy’s wife praises June Star’s tap dancing by asking whether she would like to stay with them and live in the café, June Star says, “I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!” (141). Another victim of the Misfit is June Star’s brother, John Wesley, who says hilariously, “Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground, . . . and Georgia is a lousy state too” (139). Probably some thematic intention is fulfilled by the children’s rudeness but, from the perspective of Calvinist humor, the speeches can stand firmly on their own comic nastiness. After all, bad kids are always funny—when they are someone else’s. O’Connor may thus be seen to echo the Misfit’s sentiment, “No pleasure but meanness” (352). “The River” is a pretty serious story in every sense of the word since it aggressively attacks modern secularism and concludes with the drowning death of a little boy named Harry Ashfield, who pretends to be named Bevel after a fundamentalist preacher. Despite this weightiness, the story also contains a comic exchange involving Bevel’s babysitter, Mrs. Connin, and a watercolor belonging to Bevel’s seriously hung-over parents. First, Mrs. Connin says, “I

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wouldn’t have paid for that. . . . I would have drew it myself ” (354). Later, she concludes, “I wouldn’t have drew it” (355). Some humor is directed at Bevel’s parents’ artiness and some at Mrs. Connin’s lack of sophistication in this episode, but—as in other cases mentioned already—much of the humor derives simply from O’Connor’s phrasing. We can detect the same stylistic technique in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” when the narrator observes about a summer graduation in Georgia, “The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them” (259). Similar joking occurs at some points in “The Displaced Person.” As the title perhaps suggests, O’Connor can say about this story, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things” (270), like her character Manly Pointer. This is her friend Robert Fitzgerald’s point when he says about “The Displaced Person,” “In most O’Connor stories we are aware of the Roman or universal Church mainly by its absence. Here it is present from the start” (388). Fitzgerald is perceptive in this judgment. Mr. Guizac is the story’s title character, and other characters’ lack of Christian charity toward him is the narrative’s chief thematic burden. Like the innocent Bevel, Mr. Guizac ends up dead at the conclusion of the story. Even so, there are a few comic highlights. Mrs. Shortley, Mr. Guizac’s employer, is made as uncomfortable by the Polish language as Mrs. Connin is by the Ashfields’ water color: “She saw the Polish words, dirty and all-knowing and unreformed, flinging mud on the clean English words until everything was equally dirty” (300). Another example of this incidental comic technique appears when we read: “Mr. Shortley said he had never cared for foreigners since he had been in the first world’s war and seen what they were like” (318). “The Displaced Person” has several more integral Calvinist jokes, however, including: “Christ in the conversation embarrassed her [Mrs. Shortley] the way sex had her mother” (317) and “She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it” (294). Here O’Connor combines Calvinist subject matter with Calvinist jokes to create a deeper form of Calvinist humor. Other stories in this collection occasionally touch on this religious territory also. In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” O’Connor has the young female in the story reflect prayerfully, “Lord, Lord, thank You that I’m not in the Church of God, thank You Lord, thank You” (205). In “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Cope “began to tell the child [her daughter] how much they had to be thankful for, for she said they might have had to live in a development themselves or they might have been Negroes or they might have been in iron lungs or they might have been Europeans ridden in boxcars like cattle . . .” (247). Such thoughts, such speeches, attest to how far from perfection most of us are. We have already seen John T. McNeill’s warning in his introduction to Calvin’s

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Institutes: “Since all of us have faults and suffer from ‘the mists of ignorance,’ we should not renounce communion with others on slight grounds” (lxi). As these passages attest, O’Connor would agree with McNeill’s premise but, significantly, her stories often make this point comically. This is one strain of Calvinist humor, even when her Calvinist vision does not encompass the whole story. O’Connor operates within the full-body Calvinist arena in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” however. In this story, Tom T. Shiflet tells Mrs. Lucynell Crater, “[T]he monks of old slept in their coffins!” and she replies, “They wasn’t as advanced as we are” (176). After Shiflet begins to take advantage of Mrs. Crater—as she hoped to take advantage of him—the narrator observes, “He had an expression of serious modesty on his face as if he had just raised the dead” (178). When O’Connor can combine what Shiflet calls “a moral intelligence” (176) with really funny dialogue in this way, she scales the heights of Calvinist humor. Two other stories in her first collection particularly illustrate this point. O’Connor writes in a letter to “A.” (September 6, 1955), “I suppose The Artificial Nigger is my favorite” (953), and it is easy to see why. The story resonates with quasi-theological remarks. In this story about a trip to Atlanta, Nelson, the young boy, “connected the sewer passages with the entrance to hell and understood for the first time how the world was put together in its lower parts” (220). Mr. Head, Nelson’s grandfather, reflects O’Connor’s familiar Christian emphases even more directly, as when we read that “his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair” (231) and that “[t]he speed of God’s justice was only what he expected for himself, but he could not stand to think that his sins would be visited upon Nelson and that even now, he was leading the boy to his doom” (227). In such passages, though, O’Connor’s thematic intentions seem almost to overwhelm her aesthetic conscience. Sarah J. Fodor admits that this story “stands out in her oeuvre because it directly states religious meaning” (222). Such suspicions about the story are surely correct. In fact, O’Connor wrote to Ben Griffith (May 4, 1955) “[I]n those last two paragraphs [of “The Artificial Nigger”] I have practically gone from the Garden of Eden to the Gates of Paradise” (931). That this is no formula for any sort of humor should be obvious. On the other hand, O’Connor also writes this about Mr. Head’s plan for Nelson: “Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in the city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life” (211–12). O’Connor also writes about Nelson that “the boy’s look was ancient, as if he knew everything already and would be pleased to forget it” (212). We can hear Tom T. Shiflet in these passages and even the grandmother from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Also, in what is probably the best joke in the story, Nelson replies to

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Mr. Head’s boast that Nelson has never seen him lost, “It’s nowhere around here to get lost at” (211). Once again, it’s the phrasing that makes the joke, even more than O’Connor’s acerbic insight into human nature. This jaundiced view controls O’Connor’s approach to all of the characters in “Good Country People.” In one of her most successful comic sentences, O’Connor writes that “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack” (264). The delicate Calvinist balance between recognizing ourselves in others and feeling superior to them determines our reading of this sentence. Less problematic are O’Connor’s jokes concerning Mrs. Hopewell’s feelings about her daughter Joy/Hulga’s Ph.D. degree in philosophy: “Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel it would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It certainly had not brought her out any . . .” (267); “You could not say, ‘My daughter is a philosopher.’ That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans” (268). This perspective also underlies the brilliant passage in which O’Connor describes Mrs. Hopewell’s response to one of Joy/Hulga’s philosophy books: “These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish” (269). O’Connor’s language is, again, brilliantly comic. But, of course, Mrs. Hopewell is not the only Calvinistically comic figure in the story, as is evident in her exchange with her tenant, Mrs. Freeman: “ ‘Everybody is different,’ Mrs. Hopewell said. ‘Yes, most people is,’ Mrs. Freeman said. ‘It takes all kinds to make the world.’ ‘I always said it did myself ’ ” (265). In this way, the two characters are brilliantly encapsulated. We are thus unsurprised by Mrs. Freeman’s account of her daughter Glynese’s date with her chiropractor boyfriend, Harvey Hill. According to Mrs. Freeman, Harvey Hill told Glynese, “You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show you” how to get rid of a pesky sty. And she naively continues: “So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning . . . she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty” (273). Speeches of this sort are hilarious enough to make us temporarily forget O’Connor’s most comically damning indictment of this character: “Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable” (267). One is inescapably reminded of Sally Fitzgerald’s opinion, in her introduction to Three by Flannery O’Connor, that “the fiction, although more often than not dreadful in the surface resolution of her stories, was also extremely funny” (xviii). The “surface resolution” of this story concerns Joy/Hulga and Manly Pointer rather than Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Hopewell, and so it is appropriate

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that O’Connor also devotes “extremely funny” attention to both of them. At one point, for example, she summarizes this exchange between Mrs. Freeman and Joy/Hulga: “Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36 Plymouth” (274). On a more serious note, O’Connor writes, “[T]he large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the left of her [Mrs. Hopewell], her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who has achieved blindness by an act of the will and means to keep it” (264–65). This description is on the more serious side because of the theological implications of Joy/Hulga’s disposition. As she says later on to Manly Pointer, “I’m one of those people who see through to nothing” (280). But not all of her remarks are so symbolically significant. When Mrs. Hopewell remarks that “a smile never hurt anyone,” Joy/Hulga shouts in outrage: “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” (268).11 What fun! Manly Pointer is sometimes brimming with symbolic significance also, as when he tells Joy/Hulga, “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” (283). But, he can still say to Mrs. Hopewell, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor. I see that is the one lack you got!” (270), and he can say, in answer to Joy/Hulga’s confession that she is highly educated, “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” (280). That is to say “Good Country People” is most probably filled with fear, loathing, and other “dreadful” things, as Sally Fitzgerald observes, but as she also observes, it is also, like most of O’Connor’s fiction, “extremely funny.” The Violent Bear It Away is less funny in almost every way—as most critical commentary attests. Martha Stephens maintains that the novel “attempt[s] to convey, in more realistic and persuasive terms, the anguish and beauty of true religious experience” (98). This hardly promises belly laughs, Calvinist or otherwise, perhaps because such ponderous intentions rule out such a reaction. This is Miles Orvell’s view. While conceding that “[t]he novel was indeed long in the making,” Orvell concludes that “it is not entirely successful . . . because there was in fact too much reason in making it” (125). This thematic motivation appears in Gilbert H. Muller’s proposal that the novel characteristically probes “such moral and theological problems as the nature of good and evil, the origin of sin, the reality of temptation, and the burden of free will . . .” (61). Such critical insights hardly tempt one to echo Bobby Lee’s exclamation in “Good Country People”: “Some fun!” (153). Even so, as Muller also maintains, O’Connor’s approach to all of these weighty theological concepts is by means of “grotesque action” (61), as was the approach of the Old Southwest humorists. One of the injunctions that Mason Tarwater lays

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on his great-nephew, for example, is to bury him in Christian fashion after his death. Since old Tarwater has grown rotund over the years, this task may prove too much of a challenge for the boy, as we see when Tarwater tries out his destined coffin. We read that the old man “had climbed into it where it stood on the back porch, and had lain there for some time, nothing showing but his stomach which rose over the top like over-leavened bread” (337). Description of this sort recalls Sut Lovingood’s description of the title character in George Washington Harris’s “Parson Bullen’s Lizards”: “He weighed ni onto three hundred, hed a black stripe down his back, like ontu a ole bridil rein, an’ his belly wer ’bout the size an’ color over a beef paunch, an hit a-swingin out frum side to side; he leaned back frum hit, like a littil feller a-totin a big drum, at a muster . . .” (211). By accepting the grotesque body in this way, O’Connor obviously resembles her literary ancestors. But, most of the book is not written like this. Admittedly, O’Connor sometimes plays with the rural eccentricities that give such pith to her other fiction, as when she presents, in indirect discourse, young Tarwater’s thinking, “The old man had always impressed on him his good fortune in not being sent to school” (339). It should also be funny that, after seeing his Uncle Rayber’s hearing aid, young Tarwater wonders whether “his head ran by electricity” (386), but somehow it isn’t. O’Connor is so committed to rendering in this novel “the anguish and beauty of true religious experience,” the “nature of good and evil, the origin of sin, the reality of temptation, and the burden of free will” identified by the critics that she forgets to be funny. In this book, O’Connor’s characters may be as fallen as any in American literature, but there is nothing especially comic about their condition. The demonic voice that often dogs young Tarwater’s tracks is a potential source of Calvinist humor, as in this passage: “Shaw, you know yourself that it give him great satisfaction to admit she [Mason Tarwater’s sister] was a whore, the stranger said. He was always admitting somebody was an ass or a whore. That’s all a prophet is good for—to admit somebody else is an ass or a whore” (355). The characterization entails the kind of hyperbole popular with writers as diverse as Melville and West. Since the voice offering this judgment is identified as definitely demonic, however, we can hardly relish old Tarwater’s failings in the way that we can relish those of the Confidence Man’s victims or Miss Lonelyhearts’s correspondents. F. H. Buckley defines such ethical dilemmas about being free to laugh: “Our mutual laughter seals a pact by which we participate in a community with similar tastes and aspirations” (187). In most cases, the choices of community offered by O’Connor in The Violent Bear It Away are too narrow to afford us opportunities for laughter.

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Rayber, for instance, sounds like he was invented at a meeting of the Nashville Agrarians to stand as an epitome of all that is wrong with modern secular life. As Louis Rubin explains, in his very sympathetic introduction to I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, “[The] headlong race for mastery over nature called Progress by some and Industrialism by others, stifled the aesthetic impulse, rendered impotent the religious impulse, and converted man’s days into a frantic and frenzied drive for the often tawdry conveniences of modernism” (xxx). This sounds like Rayber’s biography writ large, as does Ralph C. Wood’s characterization of O’Connor’s general disposition in these matters: “While others were noisily trumpeting the American Way of Life, O’Connor joined . . . in resisting all attempts to baptize individualist self-sufficiency and materialist well-being in the name of a sentimental religiosity” (76–77). Rayber’s role as epitome of all that is wrong with this secular view is evident when he declares: “The great dignity of man . . . is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it. It’s enough to be a man.” When O’Connor adds, “There was a light ring in his voice. He watched the boy closely to see if he had struck a chord” (437), we are likely to respond, “Please! Let us go! We promise not to be secular humanists!” Who is likely to choose to follow Rayber’s path anyway, since he thinks about his love for his idiot son, Bishop, “He had kept it from gaining control over him by what amounted to a rigid ascetic discipline. . . . [H]e only knew that it was the way his life had to be lived if it were going to have any dignity at all” (402)? O’Connor writes in a letter to Cecil Dawkins (May 19, 1957), “[T]he people I write about certainly don’t disgust me entirely though I see them from a standard of judgment from which they fall short” (1033). Her depiction of Rayber in this novel would seem to call this statement into question because her “standard of judgment” so patently determines her inverse fictional depiction. The ideal southern society, according to Rubin’s introduction, is “one in which men could live as individuals and not as automatons, aware of their finiteness and their dependence upon God and nature, devoted to the enhancement of the moral life in its aesthetic and spiritual dimensions, possessed of a sense of the deep inscrutability of the natural world” (xxxi). Once again, we can glimpse Rayber standing somewhere back in the corner where he has been exiled for failing to live up to the Christian ideal. Surely there is some other way to represent non-Christian modes of life, a way that would leave room for humor as well as condemnation. Returning to the short story form in her posthumously published collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, O’Connor again seems to regain her sense of Calvinist humor. In the title story, for example, the central male character, Julian, “standing with his hands behind him, appeared

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pinned to the door frame, waiting like Saint Sebastian for the arrows to begin piercing him” (485). Julian’s mistaken sense of himself is captured brilliantly and comically in the allusion to Saint Sebastian. Of course, we do not share Julian’s views in this story, especially when he believes that some sort of justice entitles him to think about his suffering mother, “Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson” (496). At the same time, neither do we see him as epitomizing all that is wrong with the world today as O’Connor encourages us to see George Rayber. In the same way, we can laugh at the other mother–son relationship in “The Enduring Chill” when the mother hopes that her supposedly literary son, Asbury, has been spending all these years writing a blockbuster novel like Gone with the Wind: “Mrs. Fox hoped it wasn’t going to be just a poem” (553). We feel that we know Mrs. Fox and Asbury—and probably that we know Julian and his mother—but nobody knows Rayber, and nobody would want to. We just might want to spend some time with Thomas’s mother in “The Comforts of Home” because she thinks that the promiscuous Star Drake, nee Sarah Ham, is a “nimpermaniac” (574). Malapropisms are always good for a laugh to those who know the correct word. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is, as many have observed, a displaced version of The Violent Bear It Away, an unsurprising development since—as we have seen—O’Connor worked on her second novel for many years. Sheppard, this story’s version of Rayber, shares many of Rayber’s shortcomings. He thinks, for example, that “heaven and hell were for the mediocre, and he [his son, Norton] was that if he was anything” (613). Sheppard’s repudiation of his son clearly puts him in the same leaky boat with Rayber, but his assumption that “heaven and hell were for the mediocre,” while doctrinally reprehensible, is at least funny. Even so, Rufus Johnson, this story’s version of young Tarwater, is justified in saying to Norton: “God, kid, . . . how do you stand it? . . . He thinks he’s Jesus Christ” (609). Overall, there is more opportunity for humor in O’Connor’s shorter version of this moral exemplum, but the nature of the material confines the humor to small effects here and there, as when Rufus Johnson says about his grandfather, “He’s gone with a remnant to the hills” (607). In this exaggerated commonplace, Rufus Johnson’s grandfather seems, like the elder Tarwater, to rise above the narrative surrounding him to provide us with an occasional wry laugh. Several other stories in Everything That Rises contain both great oneliners and probing satire, in the manner of A Good Man Is Hard to Find rather than of The Violent Bear It Away. In “Greenleaf,” Mrs. May offers us a terrific one-liner when she recalls that “Wesley, the younger child had had rheumatic fever when he was seven” and concludes that “this was what had caused him to be an intellectual” (504). This is a merely amusing eccentricity, but

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Mrs. May is, at the same time, one of those awful, self-righteous people that O’Connor loves to hate. Typically, the narrator says about her, “She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true” (506). Experienced readers can anticipate from this passage that something bad is going to happen to Mrs. May, but they can also anticipate some good laughs along the way to this tragic development. Mrs. May ends up gored to death by a bull, but O’Connor allows us to laugh frequently before this happens. One source of humor is Mrs. May’s genteel disapproval of the extreme form of worship practiced by Mrs. Greenleaf, who clips stories about suffering out of the paper, buries the clippings in a hole, and then prays over them. When Mrs. May sees one of these orgies of religious feeling taking place in her own woods, she imagines saying to Mrs. Greenleaf: “Jesus . . . would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from [the ground] this instant and go wash your children’s clothes” (507). Her feelings about Mrs. Greenleaf ’s husband are similarly mean and similarly funny: “ ‘I thank Gawd for everthang,’ Mr. Greenleaf had drawled. You might as well, she had thought in the fierce silence that followed; you’ve never done anything for yourself ” (514). People shouldn’t talk this way about other people, we think, but then we think that Mrs. May is not entirely mistaken. And, perhaps, we remember that O’Connor is the one who made Mrs. May talk this way in the first place and made Mrs. Greenleaf roll around on the ground. As a result, we can only respond ambivalently to Mrs. May’s summary judgment of herself: “Before any kind of judgement seat, she would be able to say: I’ve worked, I have not wallowed. At this very instant while she was recalling a lifetime of work, Mr. Greenleaf was loitering in the woods and Mrs. Greenleaf was probably flat on the ground, asleep over her holeful of clippings” (522). Mrs. May is admittedly a monster of uncharitable judgments, but she seems to take on literary ancestry by echoing Henry James’s character Mrs. Costello in Daisy Miller. When Mrs. Costello’s nephew, Frederick Winterbourne, says that Daisy is merely an innocent American girl, Mrs. Costello responds, “She goes on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar” (48). James is probably just making a joke about social snobbery here. O’Connor makes a similar joke, but she also works on her Calvinist condemnation of Mrs. May when she has this woman say about the Greenleafs that “[t]hey lived like the lilies of the field, off the fat that she struggled to put into the land” (509). In a certain sense, O’Connor is playing for even higher thematic stakes than Henry James. No matter how we decide thematically, however, while deciding we must laugh a deep Calvinist laugh at what O’Connor says.

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In “Parker’s Back,” Obadiah Elihue Parker starts out sounding like another Mrs. May, as when he ominously thinks about religion, “I ain’t got no use for that. A man can’t save his self from whatever it is he don’t deserve none of my sympathy” (669). Since O’Connor spreads her jokes more evenly over this story, however, other characters also become targets of her Calvinist humor. Thus we read about Parker’s wife, “Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous” (663). Surely this is one of O’Connor’s grandest gestures of Calvinist humor. If Parker tends toward atheism, in other words, Sarah Ruth succumbs to religious extremity. Mrs. Greenleaf might have climbed into the same boat if O’Connor’s intentions had been different in that story, but her desire to expose Mrs. May’s religious shortcomings leaves no room for equal-opportunity abuse. Things are different in “Parker’s Back,” and so we can read Parker’s rumination on his wife: “In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffing up sin. She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint her face, and God knew some paint would have improved it . . .” (655). As is often the case in O’Connor’s stories, there is no one entirely in the clear, and this is one great attraction of “Parker’s Back.” This evenhanded criticism enables comments like the following: “Parker did nothing much when he was at home but listen to what the judgement seat of God would be like for him if he didn’t change his ways” (664). “Serious things” are, as Manly Pointer says, probably the only things really worth talking about, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a few Calvinist laughs while you’re at it. “Revelation” is a perfect illustration of this principle. In this story, Ruby Turpin shouts out to God at one point, “Who do you think you are?” (653). Even the creator and sustainer of the universe would have a lot of nerve asserting any sort of familiarity with Ruby Turpin—much less superiority— and that goes double for Mary Grace. After all, as Mrs. Turpin patiently explains to God, “It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church” (652). Like Mrs. May, Mrs. Turpin feels that she has met and passed any test that supernatural forces might put before her. Then, why don’t things work out the way she thinks they should? Why does Mary Grace get to hit Mrs. Turpin square in the forehead with a social studies textbook and shout at her, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog” (646)? If things worked out the way they should—the way Mrs. Turpin thinks they should—then none of this would happen. But O’Connor is committed to keeping Mrs. Turpin from having what she thinks she deserves. Mrs. Turpin’s low ranking on O’Connor’s supernatural scale is epitomized in the passage in which she tries to contemplate being in any way different from how she already is. “If Jesus had said to her before he made her, ‘There’s only two places

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available for you. You can either be a nigger or white trash,’ ” Mrs. Turpin is sure that she would have responded, “Please, Jesus, please . . . just let me wait until there’s another place available” so that she would not have to come to earth as anyone other than Ruby Turpin. Most likely, Jesus would have told her, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” Given this divine either/or, Mrs. Turpin is sure that she would have “wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded” for some other option. In the end, though, she would have said to her savior, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one” (636). The imaginary encounter is outrageous but it is perfectly consistent with her character and with the premises by which Ruby Turpin lives her life. As W. A. Sessions writes, “Ruby Turpin defines the negative aspect of her Calvinist world—a society seen in levels of election” (209). Clearly, O’Connor is saying, Mrs. Turpin is too selfrighteous to be admirable from a religious point of view. From a secular point of view, however, there is much to recommend her, at least as the subject of Calvinist humor. Since—unlike O’Connor—most of us do not get to decide who deserves heaven or hell,12 we can appreciate both the author’s jokes and those we might tell ourselves. Both kinds of jokes are captured in an exchange of dialogue that takes place before Mary Grace assaults Mrs. Turpin. A woman identified by Mrs. Turpin as “white trash” says about a clock displayed in the doctor’s waiting room, “You can get you one with green stamps. . . . Save you up enough, you can get most anything. I got me some joo’ry.” Mrs. Turpin thinks in response, “Ought to have got you a wash rag and some soap” (637). We are probably reminded of the way Mrs. May thinks about the Greenleafs, and we probably laugh all over again at evidence of the same cruel disposition. Mrs. May might say to God, as Ruby Turpin does, “If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then . . . You could have made me trash. Or a nigger . . .” (652). O’Connor’s term for Mrs. Turpin’s tone in this encounter with the divine is railed. Of course, the stories tell us, we should disapprove of all this, but there is probably a part of most of us that laughs at what Mrs. Turpin says, as we might laugh at what Sut Lovingood or the Big Bear of Arkansas says. The fact that O’Connor’s subject matter involves religion doesn’t change this fact. There is no doubt that O’Connor differs in her positive affirmation of Christianity from the other twentieth-century American writers I have been discussing. In fact, it is this affirmation that attracts the lion’s share of critical attention devoted to her work. In a series of essays collected under the title Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery (1997), Richard Giannone writes in summary: “Her writing is a vade mecum in how to live in desolate times, a handbook for constant use drawn from the words and example of the primitive monastics she admired” (187). One can hardly imagine praise

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of this sort lavished on Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner. None of these writers would be likely to attract this judgment by Ralph C. Wood in the same collection: “I contend that O’Connor’s Catholic faith—both as she practiced it in her life and as she made it the motive-force in her fiction—was set against the vaporized faith of a 1950s consensus religion” (82). And yet, as we have seen, O’Connor’s fiction is more than the sum of its religious parts. In the same collection, Marilyn Arnold finds herself forced to admit, “Probably most of us were attracted to Flannery O’Connor for her comic spirit” (244). Arnold and other critics collected in Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery and elsewhere believe that they have gone beyond this surface attraction to reach some deeper truth. From the point of view of Calvinist humor, however, Flannery O’Connor’s “comic spirit” is reason enough to admire her work.

No t e s 1. Although all of O’Connor’s work is readily available in various inexpensive editions, the Library of America volume collects nearly everything in one place, and so I have used this edition—except for two cases, noted below—when referring to O’Connor’s works. 2. In a letter to “A.” (July 5, 1958), which appears in The Habit of Being, O’Connor writes, “The setting in which most modern fiction takes place is exactly a setting in which nothing is so little felt to be true as the reality of a faith in Christ” (290). For a good sampling of American literary opinion during these times, see The Bit between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965 by Edmund Wilson. 3. See Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Welty’s “Petrified Man” (1941). 4. John Calvin writes in his Institutes of the Christian Religion: “But they do not realize that true religion ought to be conformed to God’s will as to a universal rule; that God ever remains like himself, and is not a specter or phantasm to be transformed according to anyone’s whim!” (49). 5. For a sampling of these professions, see O’Connor’s letters to Carl Hartman (March 2, 1954): “Wise Blood is about a Protestant saint, written from the point of view of a Catholic” (919) and to Thomas Mabry (March 1, 1955): “I am a Catholic (not because it’s advantageous to my writing but because I was born and brought up one) and at some point in my life I realized that not only was I a Catholic but that this was all I was, that I was a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist but like someone else would be an atheist” (930). 6. Milton Rickels discovered in conversation with Flannery O’Connor that she had read the work of George Washington Harris (141, n. 13). 7. In The Enduring Legacy of Old Southwest Humor, Ed Piacentino maintains that “O’Connor was particularly adept at using the grotesque humorously . . .” (20). 8. See Calvin’s argumentative premise in the Institutes; “Therefore we must prove God so attends to the regulation of individual events, and they all so proceed from his set plan, that nothing takes place by chance” (203). 9. Reprinted in Three by Flannery O’Connor 2.

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10. In addition to John Hawkes’s contention regarding the connection to Hawthorne and West, see O’Connor’s characteristic remark in a letter to Ben Griffith (March 3, 1954): “[M]y opinion of Hawthorne is that he was a very great writer indeed” (924). 11. To get at O’Connor’s grim joke, it may be helpful to consult this information from George M. Marsden’s biography of Jonathan Edwards: “Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715), [was] a French Augustinian Catholic philosopher and theologian who held that things are really God’s ideas and that the unity of the soul with God is the Proper source of knowledge” (73). 12. As a sign of the religious censoriousness that O’Connor practiced in her fiction and that she continues to elicit from her critics, let us consider this very confident pronouncement by Marilyn Arnold: “Thus Ruby Turpin, Hulga, the grandmother in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,’ Mrs. May, Mrs. Shortley, and a host of others are to be considered redeemable. Tom Shiflet and Mr. Shortley, however, are not, and Rayber and Julian are questionable” (257).

J ohn D . S y kes J r .

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he anagogical meaning for which O’Connor strove in her work from Wise Blood onward has a distinctive shape. Although the content of this vision cannot be narrowly specified—she often referred to her goal as Mystery—a definite pattern can be discerned in her handling of religious theme. Despite variations, nuances, and subtle shifts, the theological message of her work remained stable, or so I shall argue. And a good place to begin is with one of the meanings of the term anagogical itself, which is “having to do with the afterlife.” Instructively, Dante in his letter to Can Grande della Scala illustrates the anagogical with this interpretation of Psalm 113:1–2: “[W]hat is signified to us is the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory.”1 O’Connor’s poetics is based not only on the metaphysical principle of the analogy of being, according to which there is no division between the sensible and the intelligible, 2 but also on the more directly theological conviction that the true meaning of life is to be found on the other side of death. This is not to say that O’Connor’s fiction is otherworldly or life-denying. Rather, for her the fulfillment of this life is to be found in what lies beyond it. Indeed, it is the fullness of life beyond the natural that gives substance to nature itself. Participation in the life of God is what gives nature its reality, and for human creatures, this participation becomes complete only after death, From Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation, pp. 39–69. © 2007 by the curators of the University of Missouri.

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through the power of the Resurrection. Thus death itself has a kind of Christian ambivalence. In one sense it is the enemy to be conquered, and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection makes death’s defeat certain. However, in another sense, death is positive, for when embraced as the means of selfdenial it reminds us of our finitude and points us to infinite being in God. Death in O’Connor is not an escape from nature, but rather a gateway into a deeper level of being, one that transcends the body without denigrating it. In fact, as we shall see, the body is necessary to the process of redemption, both because it is inherent to our creaturely natures and because Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection took bodily form. The church, she writes a friend, places tremendous emphasis on the body, with Christians looking forward to the resurrection of a glorified body like that of Christ, in which “flesh and spirit are united in peace.” This glorification is a completion of creation; indeed,” [t]he resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature” (HB 100). The human body is the site at which our salvation must be worked out, so to speak. O’Connor makes this claim directly in relation to Mary Ann, a little girl whose face was grotesquely distorted by the cancer that eventually took her life. At the urging of the nuns who took the girl in, O’Connor wrote an introduction to their memoir of Mary Ann. Of this child, O’Connor says, “She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Pere Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘passive diminishments’ ” (CW 828). This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, it metaphorically asserts that the girl’s distorted face was the “material” from which her death in Christ was “fashioned.” The body provides the stuff from which her sanctified self is made. Second, in the manner of the memento mori tradition, O’Connor claims that preparation for death is the purpose of life, but in exact opposition to the spirit of the Faulknerian assertion that “the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.”3 For O’Connor this preparation is a “creative” action. Third, the girl’s suffering is included amongst “this world’s goods” from which the sanctified self is fashioned. Perhaps this last point is most difficult of all for contemporary readers, for it smacks of sadism and a kind of sanitizing of evil. The violence done to Mary Ann’s face by cancer is an example of the kind of violence that O’Connor seems to extol in her use of the grotesque. Cruciform Counterviolence: Wise Blood and “Parker’s Back” Violence is a concept important to O’Connor’s understanding of the anagogical, as she herself indicates by the title of her second novel, The Violent

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Bear It Away, taken from the Douay-Rheims translation of Matthew 11:12. As she explains to Betty Hester in a letter, “[M]ore than ever now it seems that the kingdom of heaven has to be taken by violence, or not at all. You have to push as hard as the age pushes you” (HB 229). Thus she suggests that violence, like suffering, death, and the grotesque, has a divine purpose. This assertion also goes against the modern grain, which may countenance violence in the form of war and even revel in it for its entertainment value on stage and screen, but condemns it from a moral point of view. For O’Connor, the violence of sin requires a divine counterviolence that receives violence and turns it against itself in the interest of peace. Again, her starting point is the cross, where Christ is, in John Milbank’s phrase, “sovereign victim,” inviting yet overcoming violence. As we shall see, violence in the stories falls into two categories where divine agency is concerned, revelatory and redemptive. Missing is punitive violence, God’s striking down of sinners to repay them for their sins. From the standpoint of human agency, active violence is always motivated by sin, with the exception of ascetic self-violence, which is revelatory. Passive violence, on the other hand, violence endured, is nearly always redemptive. As one might expect in the case of an overtly Christian writer whose work has accumulated a small mountain of commentary, the nature of O’Connor’s message has been much debated. Early readers of a secular cast of mind tended to dismiss her work as freakish and misguided; more recent and more sophisticated critics of a similar bent have wanted to get behind or beyond theological readings to more interesting issues, assuming that since they still find her fascinating there must be more to her than Christian orthodoxy. Within the camp of those who engage O’Connor theologically, some have found her to be a champion of the faith, while others, beginning with her contemporary and fellow writer John Hawkes, have believed her to be secretly and perhaps unintentionally in league with the devil she takes so seriously. Even O’Connor critics of the stature of Frederick Asals and Robert Brinkmeyer, who are appreciative of O’Connor’s stated aims, find the need to divide her work. Asals argues that Wise Blood is unwittingly Manichean, whereas the later stories achieve a unity of matter and spirit more in line with O’Connor’s public statements; Brinkmeyer, while defending Wise Blood on this score, divides O’Connor’s narrators into “fundamentalist” and “Catholic.” One of the chief reasons for such divisions, which extend to feminist readings as well, is the large place that violence plays in O’Connor’s work— particularly violent death. Not content to display the psychological misfits and physical deformities that constitute the face of the grotesque, she insists on manifold forms of death and dismemberment. Not only do these acts

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often have no apparent redemptive outcome, but they seem to be part of a strategy of negation—one that denies the very goodness of life. Hazel Motes blinds himself, young Bevel drowns himself, the grandmother is shot for talking too much, Mrs. May is gratuitously gored by a bull: in none of these cases is there any benefit to the sufferer on this side of death, beyond a brief flash of insight. To make matters worse, the narrators in these stories indicate their approval, as though these terrible events are good rather than evil. Indeed, one of the bracing first principles of O’Connor’s work is that suffering is good, not evil, as long as that suffering is identified with the redemptive suffering of Christ. The violence in O’Connor is cruciform. She is perhaps more aware than any other twentieth-century American writer of the meaning of the cross: without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. Our present suffering offers the opportunity for the human being to participate with Christ in the salvation of the world. One of the ways O’Connor’s work is sacramental is that in it, violence becomes the occasion for the sinner to join Christ, through his or her own body. We might say that a death such as the grandmother’s is a kind of Eucharist in reverse. In Eucharist, the bread and wine become Christ’s body and blood in a mysterious spiritual transformation that conveys grace to the recipient. In a death like the grandmother’s, her violated body becomes the means whereby she is mysteriously united with Christ’s grace as she repeats his suffering. Christ’s suffering produces grace; our suffering opens us to that grace. The mystery of violence is the startling recognition that by violence we are saved—not by committing it, but by receiving it. Perhaps the most startling of O’Connor’s fictional assertions is that violence can be sacramental—a means by which God’s grace takes saving shape in the natural world. Closely related to the notion of violence is that of the grotesque, the category to which O’Connor frequently refers in her lectures, and which is specifically addressed in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” (MM 36–50). O’Connor adopted the term in response to critics, since early in her career she was placed with Erskine Caldwell in what she called “The School of Southern Degeneracy.” Characteristically, she accepted the derogatory label, but turned it to her own defiant purposes. “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological” (MM 44). Although O’Connor acknowledged her debts to Poe and the southwestern humorists, here she calls attention to an issue deeper than literary history. A sense of the grotesque in human nature depends upon a prior sense of what is normative—and for her, what has been distorted is the image of God. And

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since sin mars us all, all of us are “freaks”—the anonymous organization man in the grey-flannel suit not excepted. For O’Connor, then, the grotesque is a literary response to original sin. Distorted characters show the twist in human nature that most readers ignore, and conversely, they reveal those urges toward the good that are camouflaged from the secularized eye. O’Connor acknowledges that her kind of fiction does require a departure from realism. The subject matter of her fiction—its characters, its themes, and its action—is set against the social norm. In this way, she is doing violence to realism, and without directly acknowledging it, departing the path of Flaubert and James that Caroline Gordon had striven to keep her on.4 She names Hawthorne as her inspiration in this essay on the grotesque, and names his style “the modern romance tradition,” clearly intending to put herself in his company. Romance, as she explains, abandons everyday reality to explore mystery that is equally real, if less apparent. The prophet, she famously announces, is a realist of distances. What is most important here for our present purpose is O’Connor’s literary violence. She acknowledges that her method is one that requires distortion in service of truth. Secondarily, she names a new category previously missing from the list of her literary models—the romance. O’Connor seems to have sensed that her Thomist aesthetic, while compatible with New Critical principles, was not a perfect fit. The tradition of fiction carried out by Flaubert, Chekhov, James, and Joyce produced stories that achieved epiphanies— sudden moments of individual insight issuing in a temporary synthesis. But O’Connor came to see that she aspired to revelations more comprehensive and permanent. Or, to use terms better suited to the anagogical, O’Connor aspired to rend the veil between the temporal and the eternal. O’Connor then might be said to be on the attack on two fronts. First, she exhibits a certain fierceness toward her characters, giving moral and intellectual judgments ascendancy over feeling. In “Some Aspects of the Grotesque” she disparages as sentimentalism the kind of compassion that readers expect authors to show their wayward characters, defining sentimentality as “loving someone more than God does.” And second, she is out to assault the reader’s sense of propriety and normalcy. O’Connor’s occasional prose is peppered with warnings to her readers: “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” (MM 34). Most of these warnings are directed at readers who misunderstand her because they do not share her theological framework. But in fact, O’Connor intends readerly violence to all her readers, believers and unbelievers alike, not excluding herself. For, ultimately, she hopes to precipitate an act of reading that is itself a kind of imitatio Christi, or more accurately, an imitatio crucis. Of her own writing experience she says,

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I have discovered that what is needed [to make a story “work”] is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace. This is not a piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories; it is a discovery that I get out of them. . . . I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way you discover your subject; but it is an added blow. (MM 118)

As readers of O’Connor know, the “unexpected action” is often violent, and here she names herself one of the readers who is surprised by it. And, tellingly, she calls the discovery of her indifferent audience an additional “blow,” as though the subject of the story itself—the action of grace—is the first blow. This description of both reading and the action of grace in violent terms coincides with O’Connor’s statements on violence itself. “With the serious writer,” she observes, “violence is never an end in itself.” However, “Violence is a force that can be used for good or evil, and among other things taken by it is the kingdom of heaven. But regardless of what can be taken by it, the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him” (MM 113–14). Clearly for O’Connor violence has its uses, and here she directs attention to the fact that when faced with death, one may be required to abandon the trivial in favor of the essential. But the role of violence in O’Connor’s stories has theological roots that run much deeper than Samuel Johnson’s witty remark that “the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind.” Violence is here connected to eschatology, for the threat of death immediately places one in the context of last things, vaulting us into the realm of the anagogical. And no fewer than twelve of the twenty-one stories O’Connor published in book form (two novels and two short-story collections) include a death as the central or climactic event. But the deepest root, invisible on the surface of her remark, is the cross, for in O’Connor’s world, it is only through the extension of Christ’s suffering to us that we become fit for eternity. Three interlocking theological ideas provide the framework for O’Connor’s distinctive use of violence. First is the role of the body in salvation. Second is the value of human suffering. And third is her understanding of evil as privation of good. These notions correspond respectively to the Christian doctrines of Incarnation, Atonement, and Creation, all of which are

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necessary to make sense of stories that are otherwise not only mysterious, in O’Connor’s sense, but malicious. Although it is artificial to select illustrative stories from a remarkably unified body of work, the goals of clarity and depth will be served by looking closely at Wise Blood and “Parker’s Back” in connection with the body, for these first and last stories provide a helpful alpha and omega to O’Connor’s pervasive concern with death. Critical discussion of Wise Blood must begin with Frederick Asals’s astute assessment, which has justly drawn widespread response and rebuttal. The theological charge Asals makes against the novel has directly to do with the body: despite O’Connor’s own intentions and later work, this first book is Manichean, for through it “runs the strong current of the imagery of repulsion, a repulsion at the physical deeper than anything required by the novel’s motif of reverse evolution or the satire of a secularized society.” Of the body more specifically, Asals observes, “The ‘blood’ of the book’s ironic title is no source of wisdom but the very substance that immures the self in the horror of the physical, a deadly cage and a coffin. In Wise Blood the self is buried alive in matter.” Even given the more orthodox, medieval echoes of Hazel Motes’s monklike actions in the book’s denouement, Asals insists that O’Connor’s protagonist thereby completes a Gnostic assault on creation: “Haze is beyond even a modern ‘monkery.’ The violent asceticism of his end is a thoroughgoing rejection not only of a secularized age but of life taken in through the senses at all—life in a world of matter. The grisly comic victory of Hazel Motes is exactly to escape from the world, to mortify his body, to seek out death. By the end of Wise Blood the chasm between inner and outer, spirit and matter, is absurdly and terrifyingly absolute.”5 Despite the eloquence of this argument, and its grounding in elements indisputably to be found in the novel, Robert Brinkmeyer’s counterpoint places us on a more revealing track. Haze’s asceticism is ultimately not Manichean, but Yahwistic, an assault rooted in an Old Testament sense that everything standing between the self and God is an obstacle to be burned away. In Christian terms, this Old Testament theme allows O’Connor to balance her Manichean tendency with a more sacramental one: The world-ridding, body-wounding (and celebrating) motion typical of O’Connor’s fiction suggests that what Asals identifies as her ascetic imagination is both Manichean (world-destroying) and sacramental (celebrating the confluence of body and spirit) at the same time. . . . That O’Connor’s imagination repeatedly moves to rid the claims of the world of any significance also points to the profoundly Hebraic cast of her vision. . . . [T]he Yahwist vision . . . so devalues nature and culture before the looming, other-worldly

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presence of Yahweh that in a sense the world, the middle-ground between the individual and Yahweh, all but disappears.6

The key “sacramental” consideration introduced by Brinkmeyer is the fact that bodily mortification, of the kind practiced by Haze, accepts—indeed requires—the body as the site of intersection between God and self. As Elaine Scarry observes concerning one form of mortification, “The self-flagellation of the religious ascetic . . . is not (as is often asserted) an act of denying the body, eliminating its claims from attention, but a way of so emphasizing the body that the contents of the world are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unworldly, contentless force.”7 One may with justice say that such a practice is world-denying, but not that it denies the body or that it demonstrates a principled animosity to matter. And in the case of specifically Christian asceticism, the body’s pain is a way of identifying with the crucified Christ, just as the transcendent self to which the ascetic aspires coincides with his original self—the one made in the image of God. These two parameters of Christian asceticism, both of which are premised on the goodness of God’s creation, are suggested by Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s description of how St. Anthony’s pursuit of spiritual perfection differed from that of his pagan contemporaries: “In place of the selfsufficient self formed on the model of the work of art, Christianity proposed an identification of the self with a text of transcendence, an experience that shattered all self-sufficiency and opened up the self both to other selves who had made this identification, and to idealization and closure. In the theology of conversion the self can be synchronized with a transcendent origin; it is invited to accede to the design that is already intrinsic to it. . . . Through conversion, one is called simultaneously to imitation and to an original condition.”8 In Haze’s case, the “text of transcendence” is not the hearing of a passage of scripture, such as the reading of Matthew 19:21 produced for Anthony, but rather an act of violence, which forces him back to the biblical blueprint laid upon him in his childhood by his preacher grandfather. But in both cases, the body becomes the means to spirit, the necessary point of access to that divine grace paradigmatically joined to nature in the person of Christ. In fact, one might say that Haze turns to the body when the overly spiritualized—in theological terms one could say docetized—form of the Word fails. We must remember that Haze becomes a “monk” convert only after he has failed as a preacher. True, his “gospel” is an anti-Gospel, and thus he himself is the agent of blasphemy, but when he sees the error of his ways, it is not to a corrected preaching that he gives himself, but to mortification of the flesh. The implication is that the path to his salvation lies in silent action. It

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is as though language itself has failed him, or at least that it has taken him as far toward God as it is able to go. Haze’s body—the thing he has in common with all of humanity and thus the universal locus of testimony—becomes the page upon which to write the signs of his repentance, the instrument with which to perform an imitation of Christ. Asals flatly asserts that “Hazel Motes receives no revelation.”9 In a strict sense, this is true. Haze knows nothing he can say—or at least nothing he is willing to trust to words. But this is not to say that he lacks insight, to use the dominant metaphor of the book. His actions indicate that he has found a new route to God, at once more immediate and more mystical. As even a casual reader of Wise Blood will recall, Haze’s life at Mrs. Flood’s boardinghouse after he blinds himself is monklike, a point that the landlady herself makes. And we might advantageously remember that O’Connor wrote this book during a resurgence of monastic life. Robert Giroux—the editor who published Thomas Merton and who was to become O’Connor’s editor—gave her a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain well before she finished Wise Blood.10 Even careful readers may miss how thoroughly Haze carries out the pattern of the eremitic fathers. He shows indifference to the pleasures of eating and drinking. He is free of the lure of money, throwing away whatever is left from his pension check at the end of the month. He refuses the blandishments of both his young former lover and the lonely widow, Mrs. Flood, whose advances finally drive him away. In these ways he practices poverty and chastity after his fashion. Mortification of the flesh is his specialty. He walks endless miles on gravel and broken glass; he sleeps with barbed wire wrapped around his chest. All of these are the actions of saints, extreme and (as Mrs. Flood announces) outdated though they seem. Those few words that Haze does speak confirm, however laconically, that he is seeking to die to the old self, the “fleshly” self, in order to prepare himself to meet God. In one brief conversation with his landlady, he asserts his mistrust of speech and his own sense of sin. Having failed in other temptations, Mrs. Flood suggests that Haze indulge in his former craft of preaching; if he got a guide dog he could draw a big crowd—people will always go to see a dog, she says. But Haze refuses, saying he doesn’t have time. The more urgent business he is about is suggested by his earlier remark to Mrs. Flood, “If you believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t be so good.” This dictum is not as it appears to her, a condemnation of belief. Instead, it is evidence of Haze’s recognition that those who truly believe in Jesus are forced to acknowledge their own sinfulness, and that his youthful attempt to avoid Jesus by avoiding evil has failed. As Richard Giannone observes, “The disparity between the spiritual ideal of entrusting oneself to God and His gracious guidance and the inept human groping toward the apotheosis of self depicts more than the

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twisting of reality that we have come to call the grotesque in O’Connor’s art. This contrast conveys the theology underlying her first novel.”11 Now Haze’s task is repentance. He later tells Mrs. Flood that he walks on rocks “to pay.” He sleeps in barbed wire because “I’m not clean.” And in this last exchange, he indicates that his reasons are not Manichean. To the landlady’s objection that his actions are unnatural, he issues a flat contradiction: “It’s natural.” What he seems to mean is that the journey to God corresponds with man’s higher nature, which does not ignore the created self but seeks to redeem it by radically reshaping it. It is this journey to God that he surely means when in his last words he tells the young cops who are about to kill him, “I want to go on where I’m going.” One might be inclined to hear this statement as a death wish, yet it is important to recognize that Haze does not kill himself. The Christian ascetic mortifies—“makes dead”—his flesh, but he does so as a means, not an end.12 The body remains necessary to him until such time as God releases him from it to await resurrection. In Haze’s case, the body maintains its significance even after death, when his corpse, returned by the oblivious policemen to Mrs. Flood, lies stretched out reverently before her on her bed, a silent sign pointing down a path she cannot take, but to which she is nonetheless lured when she stares into his dead eyes. Haze, with his victim’s death, completes his imitatio Christi, an imitation carried out in his body, and we might add, in silence. It is his body itself upon which he “writes” his repentance and which “speaks” his witness to Christ. And yet, an obscurity hovers over Wise Blood. In part, the murkiness is due to O’Connor’s decision to switch to Mrs. Flood’s point of view in the final chapter, which forces us to deduce the meaning of actions Haze does not explain. Further, the patterns of denigrating imagery for both humanity and landscape that Asals describes do make it difficult for the reader to affirm the goodness of creation; Sarah Gordon may well be correct in maintaining that The Wasteland exerted a strong influence on this early work. But finally, it seems to me that O’Connor is unable to break through what we might call an allegorical difficulty. Christian monks do not make sense in the context of the post–World War II, Bible Belt setting of O’Connor’s novel. Clearly she wants Haze to be understood in terms that neither he nor any of the other characters can supply. She seems to want Haze to “discover” Roman Catholic belief and practice without ever encountering it. Since such a discovery is highly implausible, she is forced to the level of external description to imply an interpretation of his actions he could not himself provide. Haze, we might say, is an “allegorical” monk, comprehensible only to readers who can place him in a different framework than the one he is in. And within the strict conventions of realistic fiction she has adopted, the range of clues she is permitted to leave for the reader is limited.

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The obscurity of Wise Blood is illuminated in significant ways by “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor’s final story. As Paul Elie remarks, the later stories are more stylized, more consciously in the manner of Hawthorne’s romances, or in the terms of Scholastic hermeneutics, more openly allegorical. And in “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor has hit upon an image of allegorical significance that draws out the implications of Wise Blood, completing that novel’s reflections on the body. The image, of course, is that of the icon tattoo that Parker has applied to his back, rendering him a living embodiment of Christ’s face. By means of the tattoo O’Connor opens a pathway for the reader to the Christian doctrine that undergirds the world-denying asceticism of Hazel Motes—the Incarnation. The part of the body that this story calls attention to—despite the title— is the face, for beauty is perhaps more important in this meditation on the image of God than in any other O’Connor story. There is conceptual interplay not only between divine and human, natural and supernatural, but also between the grotesque and the beautiful. The story opens with Parker sullenly watching his wife, gazing at her face and concluding that she is “plain, plain.” He can’t understand why he married her and is ashamed of himself for not being able to leave her. She is both ugly and pregnant, two bodily features that repel him, yet he is held by her, “as if she had him conjured.” In abstract terms, Parker’s puzzle at the beginning of the story is why he is fascinated by the grotesque. This puzzle is further complicated for him by his wife’s hatred of tattoos. While from one point of view tattoos represent a kind of mutilation, distorting the natural appearance of human flesh, they produced in Parker the first thrill of wonder. When he saw the tattooed man at a fair he was awed, as though he had witnessed a magical transformation. And he set about transforming himself in the same way. But from the time he begins to court her, Sarah Ruth finds his tattoos contemptible: “Vanity of vanities,” she says. Yet from the fact that she marries him, we can infer that she is attracted to him despite the tattoos. From both sides of the marriage, then, we find a pattern of action that goes against inclination, but no agreement about where bodily beauty is to be found. O. E. Parker is determined to compel such an agreement—to procure a tattoo that will elicit from this wife the wonder he has felt. Sarah Ruth, for her part, seems entirely oblivious to beauty. In the course of the story, Parker’s puzzle is solved, at least for the reader, by the merging of the grotesque that repels yet fascinates him with the beauty he finds in tattoos. And the theological basis of this identification is the Incarnation. The most striking feature of Sarah Ruth’s face is her “icepick eyes.” They are so designated in the first paragraph, and it is exactly this feature that Parker longs for during the one night he is away from her, waiting for the

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new tattoo to be completed. Her eyes remind him of the ones in the icon that the artist has yet to apply to his back, eyes that penetrate, rendering him “as transparent as the wing of a fly” (CW 669). The icon’s eyes are like his wife’s, only more so, we might say. Compared to the eyes he has seen in the tattooist’s book, hers are “soft and dilatory” (CW 669). What the two pairs of eyes have in common is the ability to see through him—to peer into his very core. Although Parker himself does not recognize it, what drew him to the icon originally was this similarity, for as becomes apparent in the story’s final episode, he has a deep desire to be known. The similarity between wife and Christ is not coincidental—indeed, in the terms the story sets up, Sarah Ruth’s power might be said to derive from the source the icon represents. She is a type of Christ in this regard, and the eyes establish the connection between the beauty Parker finds in the tattoos and the grotesque power of Sarah Ruth’s visage and personality. They represent the continuing presence of Christ in the world—the God within each of us illuminated and confirmed by the Word made flesh. Thus the true power of the grotesque is the hidden life of Christ, redeeming the world despite the distortions of sin. Even in the visually repulsive, this seed of redemption is present, for the image of God, though obscured, is never erased. Parker’s desire for tattoos is revealed as proceeding from an intimation of this same fact of human nature. Having once seen tattoos that turned an ordinary man into a thing of wonder, he, too, would be so transformed. His unarticulated wish is for the tattoos to grant him a kind of supernatural luminosity—to give him “color.” This desire leads him to have the face of Christ permanently joined to his skin, making him the re-embodiment of Christ in a very direct way. Driven to the icon by his wife’s hard-edged and iconoclastic biblicism and by the unexpected religious vision that he experienced after the tractor crash, he is pressed finally toward the spiritual transformation he unwittingly desired. But as O’Connor repeatedly indicates, there is no imitation of Christ without suffering. Getting the tattoo is a crucial symbolic gesture for Parker to make, but it is incomplete. Thus is Parker, like Haze, soon beaten, but with the difference that he is made to suffer for Christ’s sake, at least symbolically, and again symbolically, Christ suffers with him. In the final scene, Sarah Ruth—Christlike in her ability to see through Parker’s self-deception—turns persecutor in her iconoclasm. Having wrung from him his true name, she strikes him repeatedly once she sees the new tattoo and hears his claim that this is “God.” And it is the tattoo itself that bears the brunt of her wrath, so that large welts form “on the face of the tattooed Christ” (CW 674). The story leaves Parker, now chastised and truly named, leaning against a tree, “crying like a baby.” His condition signals repentance and rebirth, and this change is directly tied to Christ’s suffering, which Parker

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is made bodily to share; the welts on Christ’s face are also welts on his back, a direct reminder of Jesus’s scourging and of the fact that by his stripes we are healed. The process of Parker’s redemption thus includes his body. In fact, we might say that it is the vehicle of his spiritual renewal, for it literally takes on Christ in the form of the tattoo, and it allows him to join in Christ’s pain. Two notions are necessary to make this connection work; one is allegory and the other is participation. Clearly, O’Connor is inviting the reader to find the Christological parallels I have described. Parker’s story makes sense when it is placed in the pattern of Christ’s passion. It is the Christ story that gives Parker’s story its meaning, even as it also takes the reader to the anagogical level of Parker’s participation in the life of God. The idea of participation itself is also crucial, for O’Connor suggests that the reality of Parker’s salvation lies beyond words and beyond human cognition. More specifically, she suggests that Parker does not understand what has happened to him, and that his redemption does not require what our jurisprudence would call informed consent. His salvation is able to go forward without his comprehension because his participation in Christ is more than symbolic. Thus, his suffering not only resembles that of Christ, it becomes Christ’s suffering by way of his tentative but genuine cooperation with the gift of grace that draws him to the icon. Parker willingly takes the needed initial step, even if his understanding never catches up. And this identification of his own suffering with Christ’s agony is in turn made possible by the Incarnation, registered in the story through the enfleshed icon. God’s union with creation in the Incarnation reasserts the unity of Being that had been assaulted by sin. Because of that connection, our participation with God across time is made possible, and Christ’s action can become our own. I have paired allegory with participation to make the point that, for O’Connor, what happens to Parker is not merely allusive or illustrative. What makes her stories mysterious is her conviction that the process of redemption can take place beyond a character’s comprehension. Parker, for example, means more in the total context of the story than he does in his own world because he is a type. And further, his salvation can be accomplished without his recognition through a sacramental participation in Christ. Such a background is necessary to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that Parker undergoes no “conversion” or other manifestation of the moment of grace that O’Connor seems to have intended. At the end, we observe him from the outside as we did Haze, and we are shown only brokenness. Within the terms of his own psychology, Parker seems only to desire to please his wife and to gain some relief from her insistent demands. He gives no indication of consciously identifying his suffering with that of Christ, or indeed of answering to God in any direct way at all. It is only in his attempt to do the bidding

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of those “all-demanding eyes” in the icon, foreshadowed by the eyes of his wife, that he can be said to have chosen Christ at all. It is not, therefore, the bare assent of his will that marks him as a recipient of grace, though this is necessary, but the mystery in which he participates, primarily through his body. One is tempted to say that he is saved and doesn’t know it. Parker is at once a sacramental sign for the reader and a central player in a great drama of which he is but dimly aware. He becomes a kind of icon himself, a window by which the reader may glimpse divine reality as it interpenetrates the earthly, redeeming and restoring it. So important is the body and the enactment of divine drama that the spoken word in this story is at most a propaedeutic. When Parker at last fixes on the Byzantine Christ, “there was absolute silence” (CW 667). The sight of the icon brings silence—even in the poolroom in which Parker takes refuge. When Parker examines his tattooed back in the mirror, the eyes look at him, “enclosed in silence” (CW 670). Parker hopes that when Sarah Ruth sees the tattoo, she will be “struck speechless,” but this hope proves vain. Sarah Ruth possesses not only icepick eyes, but a “sharp tongue,” which she uses to bring him to judgment. Not only does she use her words to force him into confessing his true name (which she does through the door, unseen), but her final word is a condemnation of him as an idolator and of the icon as idolatrous. She seems incapable of seeing the divine, incarnated power apparent to her husband, even if he has beheld it only in a mirror. Her word has prepared him, but not herself, and within the dynamic of the story the purpose of speech is to bring words to an end, leaving only vision and contemplation. At the end of the story, she has “hardened” her eyes, while Obadiah Elihue has opened his to weep. And these tears of a broken man have much in common with the quicklime that Haze uses to blind himself, for in both stories it is the bodily refocusing of vision that leads toward redemption. From Suffering to Redemption: “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Displaced Person” The link between suffering and redemption, while present in Wise Blood and “Parker’s Back,” is more plainly laid out in two other stories, “The Artificial Nigger” and “The Displaced Person.” In the first story, we find perhaps the clearest example of vicarious suffering in all of O’Connor’s work, the shared suffering by which Christ makes atonement for sin. In the second story, we find in Mr. Guizac the closest thing to a Christ figure to be found in O’Connor’s fiction, although, surprisingly, this character does not represent one engaged in an imitatio Christi. “The Artificial Nigger” confronts us both with the pride that is for O’Connor the universal source of human rebellion and with the racism that

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is the South’s more particular sin. The complementary if conflicting presumptuousness of grandfather and grandson are shown to be the root of racist attitudes toward the black people Nelson encounters for the first time on his day trip to Atlanta. For readers unfamiliar with O’Connor’s penchant for irony, even the narrator seems complicitous in supporting Mr. Head’s high opinion of himself at the beginning, using the moon to enhance his nobility and crediting him with the observation that “only with years does a man enter into that calm understanding of life that makes him a suitable guide for the young” (CW 210). He is compared to Vergil and the angel Raphael. Nelson, for his part, wins the first battle in their daily competition by arising before his grandfather, upstaging the old man and handing Mr. Head his initial reversal during a day of reversals. Mr. Head has two goals for the adventure: to show Nelson that the big city is not for him and to prove his own moral superiority—both goals meant to make the boy want to remain at home to care for the old man in his dotage. Nelson in turn wants to demonstrate that he does belong in the city, and he means to assert his independence of his grandfather. The struggle between them quickly moves to the arena of race when Mr. Head offers his first reason why Nelson won’t like the city: “It’ll be full of niggers,” he warns, adding, “You ain’t ever seen a nigger” (CW 212). Black people are here presented as negative, and Nelson’s ignorance of them is evidence of his callowness. These associations continue when he sees a black person on the train and fails to identify him as “a nigger,” instead calling the stranger simply “a man.” When this “mistake” provokes public ridicule from his grandfather, Nelson turns his resentment on the black man:”He felt that the Negro had deliberately walked down the aisle in order to make a fool of him and he hated him with a fierce raw hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them” (CW 216). The salient point here is that the white boy has turned the black man into a scapegoat, projecting onto him guilt for his own mistake. Throughout the story, blacks represent both a kind of power (usually, a kind of worldly knowledge) and a kind of moral taint. The black waiter in the dining car prevents the bumpkins from touring the kitchen, telling them, “Passengers are not allowed in the kitchen.” But Mr. Head shoots back that the cockroaches would run the passengers out, implying that the waiter is hiding filth. In the same scene Mr. Head tells Nelson, “They rope them off,” suggesting that segregation is a quarantine to protect white passengers from contamination. This pattern continues when the pair gets lost in a “colored” part of town. Mr. Head resolutely refuses to ask a black person for directions. The more sensible but desperate boy finally approaches a black woman standing in a doorway, to whom he feels strangely attracted. After teasing him briefly, she supplies the needed information, but Mr. Head has to drag Nelson away, for he has nearly fallen in a trance, “as if he were

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reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel” (CW 223). Nelson is drawn to what he fears, sensing something in this powerful but despised Other that he needs. Having admitted his insufficiency and turned to a black person for help, Nelson suffers the ridicule of his grandfather, who must suffer a much greater blow to his moral standing before being confronted with his own powerful symbol of the other. Mr. Head denies his grandson in a betrayal that is forgiven only after Mr. Head has cried out that he is lost, accepted the help of another stranger, and finds himself standing, with Nelson, before a piece of lawn statuary. The “artificial nigger” itself is a dilapidated ornament, resembling both Nelson and Mr. Head yet clearly intended to represent a black man. “He was meant to look happy,” but the statue’s deterioration has given him “a wild look of misery instead” (CW 229). This figure of humiliation, which seems now to include them in its signification as well as the blacks they have both feared and despised, brings the two together: “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat” (CW 230). Clearly the figure refers not only to them and the black people they have feared, but to Christ as the ultimate source of reconciliation. And the key element they have in common is misery. Suffering unites sinners both with the unjustly maligned black race and also with the rejected savior. When Mr. Head arrives at home, he is given credit for understanding that mercy grows out of “agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.” Further, he sees that agony “was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him” (CW 230). Four assertions about suffering seem to be implicit in these passages. First, triumphant suffering is undeserved—the suffering of a scapegoat. What distinguishes the misery of the two white characters from that of the black person and Christ is that it is caused by their own sin. Mr. Head and Nelson are both “defeated”; the other who is victorious could be either Christ himself or the black race collectively, and victimization is the trait they share. Second, suffering is necessary to provide conviction of sin; Mr. Head’s “agony” leads him to recognize simultaneously his sinful condition—and God’s mercy in removing it. Third, this suffering is not merely consciousness-raising. It is the crucial point of connection, or more specifically of participation; with the suffering of Christ that provides the triumph over sin. And fourth, suffering can be shared, so to speak: the suffering of another—specifically, the righteous suffering of the black race and of Christ—can be redemptive for oneself. Each of these claims is radical in its own way, but perhaps most counterintuitive and potentially offensive is the last. Vicarious suffering seems an

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oxymoron. Pain is perhaps the most personal and incommunicable of human experiences. One can be sympathetic to the pain of another, but to say one suffers “for” another can only be wildly metaphorical, except in the sense of one standing in the place of another who is about to have pain inflicted upon him. But clearly, it is not this strict “substitutionary” sense that O’Connor has in mind. Blacks may be said to suffer from the sins of whites, but not for human sin in any direct way, as though God were punishing them for the crimes of others. No, the key here once again is the notion of participation. Innocent suffering, serving as an imitation of Christ, provides the Incarnational basis in current human life for our participation in the ongoing drama of salvation. Those who suffer the undeserved consequences of human sin share with Christ the divine mission of taking into themselves and so negating the brokenness that afflicts God’s good creation. Like Christ, southern blacks are oppressed by corporate sin, of which they are innocent victims. And like Christ, they have not responded in kind to their enemies, interrupting the cycle of sin evident between Nelson and his grandfather. Insofar as their suffering is the price of challenging this deadly cycle, blacks may be said to suffer for their white brothers and sisters, making present in another form the atoning action of Jesus. The pattern of sin exhibited by the two rural whites reveals why this suffering is necessary. As Ralph Wood points out in The Christ-Haunted South, Mr. Head and Nelson, in their constant and often comic battle of wills, actually carry out the ancient and universal attempt to supplant God. Their will to power, by a turn Nietzsche and Dostoevsky would have appreciated, informs even their morality, with Nelson clinging to Mr. Head’s betrayal as a means to keep the upper hand on his grandfather. Without the insertion of a kind of love neither has known, the cycle of domination and revenge will know no end. The love that accepts defeat without retaliating, and that does so for the sake of the offender, is the only kind that will do, and it is this love that is symbolized by the dilapidated statue. But one additional issue must be addressed before we leave “The Artificial Nigger”: power. On the face of it, the analogy between Christ and the black person would seem to break down here. The cross leads to the Resurrection, when God’s power over sin and death is exercised and the “victory” O’Connor alludes to is accomplished. Yet at the time O’Connor writes (1954), blacks have very little political power in the South, the fight against Jim Crow having barely begun. This powerlessness is troubling on a number of levels. Since they lack the power to refuse suffering, blacks cannot be said to choose it, as Christ does. Likewise, it is difficult to say that black people suffer willingly for the sins of the white man. These are serious difficulties, as is the fact that Mr. Head retains his racist attitude after his moment of

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grace. But on a more directly theological level, no human victim possesses God’s power to negate sin. Christ not only accepts the consequences of sin, he defeats it, as no other scapegoat could do. He is the sovereign victim, uniquely able to conquer through his sacrificial death. Thus there is inequality within the analogy. The black person might more accurately be said to be a type of Christ, and the “artificial nigger” a type of the crucifix, for only by this referent does either figure gain its full significance. Interestingly, power is exactly the symbolic resonance blacks have in the story that they lack in the historical reality of the setting. In their three encounters with black people before they stand before the statue, Nelson and Mr. Head register power of some sort. The well-dressed “coffee colored” man on the train is clearly more prosperous than they; the waiter forbids them entrance to the kitchen; the woman in the doorway holds a great eroticmaternal fascination for Nelson, as well as knowing how to direct them back to the train station. Thus is the statue shocking in part because of the contrast, for it dramatizes the black person’s humiliation. Theologically the contrast allows O’Connor to suggest Christ’s self-emptying sacrifice that enables the “action of mercy” Mr. Head feels in the penultimate paragraph. In this humiliation, signaled by but exceeding that of the black person, there is a hidden power that forgives as it burns and consumes the pride that stands behind all sin. * * * Although in “The Artificial Nigger” we find in the black person a type of Christ, and particularly of his suffering on behalf of humankind in order to break the power of sin, a nearer example of a Christ figure is to be found in “The Displaced Person.” Mr. Guizac, the displaced person of the title, is more deliberately and directly linked to Christ than any other figure in O’Connor’s fiction, and for our purposes the crucial analogue is the manner of his death. However, from the outset we must note that O’Connor is not seeking to portray a fictionalized, updated Christ, in the manner of Dostoevsky’s idiot or Faulkner’s corporal. As I argue elsewhere, for reasons such as those advanced by Hans Frei in The Identity of Jesus Christ, O’Connor scrupulously avoided direct depictions of Christ.13 Even so, while the distinction between the Polish immigrant and the Jewish peasant is consistently maintained, the analogue is also carefully established. Perhaps rather than call Mr. Guizac a Christ figure, it would be better to term him yet another type of Christ. Although such typology is prepared for throughout, the clearest identification occurs near the end of the story, when Mrs. McIntyre, the owner of the farm where the refugees have found a seeming refuge, interrupts the

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priest who is trying to work religious instruction into the conversation: “As far as I’m concerned, Christ was just another D.P.” (CW 320). Rather than establishing this Displaced Person’s Christlike disposition, what the story draws out is the similarity in external circumstances. Mr. Guizac is “extra”; he doesn’t “fit in”; he is the stranger who, while doing good to others, is ultimately despised and rejected. And most tellingly, he is made to suffer a cruel death through the guilty collusion of those who resent him. In fact, at the allegorical level one might treat this story as a recapitulation of a Gospel Passion narrative, but told from the point of view of the crowds. Mrs. McIntyre is initially an enthusiastic champion of her new tenant, declaring, “That man is my salvation!” (CW 294). By way of contrast, Mrs. Shortley, with her more pharisaical disposition, is suspicious of the Polish family from the beginning, hinting that Mr. Guizac is an agent of the devil. Both women, along with the men who work the farm, judge the D.P. from the standpoint of narrow self-interest. Mrs. Shortley, however, is particularly adept at supplying a religious justification for her hatred of the labor competition. She prophesies against the Guizacs, who represent a religion that “hasn’t had the nonsense reformed out of it.” Significantly, the “vision” that she receives supporting her view is full of bodies: “The children of wicked nations will be butchered. . . . Legs where arms should be, foot to face, ear in the palm of hand. Who will remain whole?” (CW 301). This prophecy bespeaks both her nightmare visions of newsreel footage from the Nazi concentration camps of World War II and, ironically, the manner of her own imminent death, but she intends it as a denunciation of the havoc she believes the Guizacs to be wreaking all around her. Bodily violence and dismemberment will prove to be the anagogical key to the story as well, but before that culmination, Mrs. Shortley’s condemnation of the Guizacs comes generally to be shared. Mr. Shortley and the two black tenants see the economic threat; Mrs. McIntyre reverses her position once she discovers that Mr. Guizac has unwittingly violated the South’s deepest taboo: he has recruited Sulk, the young black man, to marry his white niece, and so rescue her from another refugee camp in Europe. Mrs. McIntyre concludes that the Guizacs must go. Interestingly, this rejection, too, has to do with the body—specifically with joining together bodies that are supposed to remain separate. Mrs. McIntyre turns on Mr. Guizac not out of strict economic interest, but to preserve the social order. The “temple” this man threatens to destroy is the very social order that structures Mrs. McIntyre’s world. If left unchecked, he will unwittingly dismember the body politic, and Mrs. McIntyre knows she must stop him. Although there is no trial scene as such, Mrs. McIntyre does have a confrontation with Mr. Guizac, and later she presents her full case to the same priest who first brought the Guizac family to her farm, feeling afterward that

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she “has triumphed over him.” Yet, like Pilate, she cannot quite bring herself to pronounce doom on the accused. The aggrieved Mr. Shortley, agitating to take back his old job from Mr. Guizac, can only “wait on the hand of God to strike.” Mr. Guizac is indeed struck down, but only with the help of all the principals. The Polish man’s death is a kind of crucifixion, in the sense that he is innocent of wrongdoing yet undergoes a public execution of sorts, dying an excruciating and lingering death. Mr. Guizac is undoubtedly a scapegoat for sins that the four conspirators will not acknowledge. This is most clearly the case with Mr. Shortley, who nonsensically maintains that since the Polish man wears spectacles resembling those worn by the German soldier who threw a grenade at Mr. Shortley in the war, Mr. Guizac, too, is the enemy. In this comical non sequitur, Mr. Shortley neatly ties his hatred to defense of the social order. According to him, the refugee is an outsider who threatens “our way of life,” and thus is no different from those armed aggressors who, in fact, displaced Mr. Guizac to begin with. The role of the body in this entire drama is so prominent that it leads us to the story’s anagogical meaning. The “passion” of Mr. Guizac completes the prophecy spoken by Mrs. Shortley. Mr. Guizac has indeed provoked the social devastation the vision forecast, and Mrs. Shortley’s own death is the emblem of it, as she during her fatal stroke grabs the limbs of other family members who are jammed into their car. But it is the disruption of the body politic that is the true prophetic referent of the vision. The real reason for this disruption, therefore, is the universal rejection of the one body that is broken. That is, failure to confront their own sin has led the members of this little community to repeat that primal rejection of Incarnated grace that led to Christ’s crucifixion. At the same time, this tragic reenactment also provides a renewed outpouring of grace, making possible both repentance and forgiveness. Despite the fact that the “community” is scattered, as indeed this murderous clique deserves to be, Mrs. McIntyre is driven by guilt to physical extremity—or, more theologically put, to conviction of sin. This change, though negative in its effects on her health, is spiritually hopeful, for it shows she has accepted the truth about herself. And finally, Mrs. McIntyre appears to be on the threshold of joining the Church, which is literally the last word of the story. Beholding Mr. Guizac’s broken body has led her to the body of Christ, the one true and eternal human community. As if to confirm this pattern of imagery O’Connor has previously had the priest administer the Eucharistic wafer—the sacramental broken body— to the dying man while Mrs. McIntyre watches. On that occasion, she was the outsider while family and priest bent over the dying man, forming an unbroken circle. Now she is invited into the circle of those who bow to the

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sacramentally broken body of Christ, united through him to the communion of saints. And perhaps, as Jill Peláez Baumgaertner thinks, the denouement of the story shows Mrs. McIntyre partaking of sacramental nourishment: “The final emblem of the story shows the priest arriving with his bag of breadcrumbs for the peacocks, feeding them, and then sitting by Mrs. McIntyre’s bedside, expounding doctrines of the Church, feeding her bit by bit, week after week—breaking the bread of life. This is sacrament, the outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual truth” (CW 97–98).14 Evil as the Privation of Good: The Violent Bear It Away In “The Displaced Person” as in “The Artificial Nigger,” we find O’Connor turning her theological attention from the penitent to the source of his or her hope in the work of Christ. As human suffering is identified with and lifted up into the divine nature, it becomes redemptive, even though the characters in the stories are sometimes only dimly aware of this providential operation. In all of O’Connor’s work, sin is never far in the background, constantly asserting itself in the rebellious unbelief that produces betrayal and even murder from those who count themselves “good country people.” But in O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, the nature of evil comes in for extraordinary treatment. And what we find there is a working out of the Augustinian claim that evil is the privation of good. Both the boy prophet who fulfills his mission despite himself and the uncle who tries to stop him are drawn back to a good they cannot live without, and which they desperately require even as they resist it tooth and nail. Far from being the metaphysical dualist that the Manichean charge makes her out to be, O’Connor is a powerful proponent of evil’s utter dependence upon good. The very nihilists who regularly animate her fiction are typically fierce in exact proportion to their fear of what they reject. And, as we shall see in more detail, the devil himself, when he appears, has a parasitic existence, feeding on what he attempts to corrupt. Indeed, the accusation sometimes made against O’Connor that she is of the devil’s party unawares springs in part from the way in which even the most twisted characters in her fiction remain susceptible to grace. Just as suffering, which both modern and postmodern temperaments take to be indisputably evil, is in O’Connor’s work a means to redemption, so is evil itself presented as a deficiency to be supplied rather than a thing in its own right. Rather than reveling in evil or confusing it with good, as she appears to some readers to do, O’Connor actually denigrates evil by showing how it is constantly taken up into the good. In the strictest sense, evil does not exist; it is the “impossible possibility,” as Karl Barth termed it. And in this regard, O’Connor is in accord with ancient Christian sources, which John Milbank summarizes in this way: “evil for the

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Christian tradition was radically without cause—indeed it was not even selfcaused, but was rather the (impossible) refusal of cause.”15 For all her exposure of sin, O’Connor is opposed to what postmodern theorists, reflecting upon the Holocaust and other twentieth-century atrocities, have called “radical evil”—an evil with its own foothold in being, so that “annihilation [is] pursued perversely for its own sake, as an alternative end in itself.”16 To O’Connor’s mind, not even the horror of the gas “showers” is enough to thwart the goodness of creation or the sovereignty of God. Evil is not the result either of a faulty universe or even, when properly understood, of human freedom. It is the nothing paradoxically held in place by God’s “No.” Thus in O’Connor’s work, the emphasis falls not upon evil as a sort of opposite and equal number to good, but on sin understood as offense against God and thus as a defection from the good. In O’Connor as in Augustine, the basis of sin is precisely a turning away from true freedom into false freedom. True freedom lies in the power to envision the good and move toward it. False freedom is the self-governing autonomy that serves as the modern, Enlightenment-inspired model of moral man. Closely allied to the conviction that evil is privation of good, therefore, is the unpopular corollary that the human will in its fallen state is neither pure, neutral, nor autonomous. Instead, it is weakened and easily distracted, lacking the vision and capacity to pursue its deepest desire, which is not for itself, but for God. Within the Augustinian Catholicism that O’Connor represents, the problem with the will is not that it has become corrupted, as the Reformers tended to say, but that it has been rendered feckless. We suffer not from excess of bad will, but from the deficiency of a diminished will. What grace supplies in order to rescue us is renewed desire—a supernaturally invigorated longing that frees the will. In the course of The Violent Bear It Away, we encounter a prophet whose will is freed despite his stout resistance to the operation of grace. What may seem a compulsion is, when viewed within O’Connor’s theological framework, a liberation from the false would-be autonomy that leads him temporarily to embrace an evil that is nothing. By contrast, he is measured against the great uncle who prepared him for his call and the uncle who successfully evaded his own. In the process, the measure of evil is also taken through the demonic presences young Francis Marion Tarwater encounters. A dialectic concerning freedom is set up in the novel almost from the beginning. Upon the death of old Mason Tarwater, the fourteen-year-old nephew is faced with his first adult decision: whether to obey the injunction of his great uncle to bury him or to defy the dead man and strike out on his own. According to common usage, this decision could be expressed as one lying between obedience and freedom. But O’Connor quickly problematizes

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the question of freedom. In his memories of the man who raised him, the boy recalls old Tarwater insisting, “I saved you to be free, your own self !” (CW 339). He says this by way of discouraging the boy from seeking out his only other living blood relative, a secularized uncle who has repudiated the great uncle’s teaching. Old Tarwater asserts that the free-thinking schoolteacher is actually bent on bringing others into a kind of mental bondage. For a brief time, the old man had accepted his nephew’s offer of charity, only to discover that the nephew’s real purpose was to scrutinize his relative in order to write up a case study of him for publication. His chagrin is registered in this recollection: “The old man had not known when he went there to live that every living thing that passed through the nephew’s eyes into his head was turned by his brain into a book or paper or chart” (CW 341). Old Tarwater is determined that the boy will not endure a similar reduction, and that is the principal reason he kidnapped the boy and brought him deep into the woods. But not only is the boy to be free from pseudoscientific dehumanizing, he is also to be free for God. The boy “was trained by a prophet for prophecy”; “he was left free for the pursuit of wisdom” (CW 340). Old Tarwater gives his freedom speech a decidedly theological conclusion: “You were born into bondage and baptized into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ” (CW 342). The other side of the argument over freedom is put forward by the nephew Rayber, who tells young Tarwater, “You don’t know what freedom is” (CW 400). He sets out to redefine the term, offering to free his nephew from the very baptism that he himself has cast off. Rayber says he can free the boy from stultifying belief in a life beyond this life and thus a mindless obedience to the dictates of a dead father figure. But what Rayber is freeing the boy for remains much more vague. He can appeal only to the “dignity of man.” He summarizes, “The great dignity of man is his ability to say: I am born once and no more. What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it. It’s enough to be a man” (CW 437). But this freedom is largely empty of content. It amounts to a kind of brave self-sufficiency in which there is no higher good than the assertion of one’s autonomy. Freedom for Rayber is its own end. The danger of this libertarian notion of freedom is well illustrated in Rayber’s struggle against the irrational love he feels for his mentally retarded son, Bishop. This love is exactly the “desire” Milbank identifies as the supernatural gift of grace that redirects the sinner to God. To Rayber, this love is “irrational,” a sign of “madness” precisely because it goes against the grain of his cherished notion of autonomy. He fears that “[i]f, 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

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praise” (CW 401). Only by a constant effort of the will does Rayber keep himself from this “insanity.” The pull is strong, not only because it strikes him as though from an outside force, but also because it brings him joy. In addition, Rayber finds himself receiving a second unwanted gift that Augustine believes was lost in the Fall: vision of the good. This irrational love begins with Bishop, but it does not end with him: “Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. . . . It could be a stick or a stone, the line of a shadow, the absurd old man’s walk of a starling crossing the sidewalk” (CW 401). Likewise, he longs to be seen with the same kind of vision, wishing to be looked on by his deceased uncle’s eyes “with their impossible vision of a world transfigured” (CW 401). Since he is determined to maintain the control that this love would deny him, Rayber walks “a very narrow line between madness and emptiness” (CW 401). And although ideally he will maintain his balance and retain his “freedom” above these two alternatives, if forced to one side, he is determined to choose emptiness, and thereby avoid surrender to anything beyond himself. For O’Connor, the choice of emptiness amounts to embracing nihilism, and nihilism is thus the logical consequence of libertarian freedom bent on defending its autonomous kingdom at any cost. In Rayber’s case, this scenario is acted out in his decision to drown his “useless” son, who has already been abandoned by his mother. The boy clearly has no prospect of becoming a fully developed, rational, autonomous human being himself, and thus according to the creed Rayber attempts to live by, Bishop is not human at all. Though Rayber never uses the word, Bishop is a candidate for euthanasia. It follows that, with Bishop removed from his life, Rayber could hope to be free of the irrational love that tempts him. The emptiness of Rayber’s notion of freedom issues in the ultimate act of negation: murder. But when it comes to the deed itself, Rayber lacks the courage of his Raskolnikovean conviction. With the boy on the verge of death, Rayber has “a moment of complete terror in which he envisioned his life without the child” (CW 419). Bystanders on the beach help him effect a rescue, but within the terms of Rayber’s philosophy, the murder of Bishop remains the deed undone. Young Tarwater’s dialectic of freedom is less cerebral and more active. Warned by the instruction of the old prophet, the teenager remains wary of Rayber’s attempt to convert him to a new way of thinking. Deeper than any theoretical difference is young Tarwater’s desire to be free of any personal control. He wants to defy the dead great uncle simply to show that he is his own man. He likewise bristles at Rayber’s attempts to shepherd him, emphatically rejecting the school psychologist’s offer to be a “father” to him now that the old man is dead. And so the struggle within young Tarwater is not so much between the opposing views of old Tarwater and Rayber as it is between self-

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sufficiency and submission. The main opposition to the remembered voice of old Tarwater is that of a “stranger” who soon becomes the boy’s “friend,” the demonic tempter who seeks to nurture the seeds of rebellion. Virtually the first thing the stranger leads young Tarwater to say is “Now I can do anything I want to” (CW 345) since the old man is dead. But this freedom, the freedom in which, as Ivan Karamazov might say, “everything is permitted,” proves to be as dangerously empty as the freedom Rayber pursues, and it is indeed Rayber who pushes young Tarwater to decisive extremity. When young Tarwater arrives at Rayber’s door, he has already failed in one of the two commands given to him by the old prophet: with encouragement from his smooth-talking “friend,” he has left Powderhead without burying old Tarwater. But the second commission still hangs over him. Mason Tarwater charged Francis Marion Tarwater with the prophet’s job of baptizing Bishop. Although he is determined to flout this demand as well, young Tarwater strongly feels the force of it. On the other hand, Rayber exerts psychological coercion to break young Tarwater’s will and bring him around to his own way of thinking. His most effective tactic is to isolate Tarwater in a boat on a lake, and to use fishing as a pretext to hammer away at the boy, who seemingly can’t escape. “Every day you remind me more of the old man,” he tells him. “You’re just like him. You have his future before you” (CW 439). Since young Tarwater is resolved to avoid the control of both wouldbe fathers, Rayber’s sentence strikes a nerve, but Tarwater finds a means to escape: he jumps overboard and swims for shore, answering accusation with action. What Rayber takes as a sign of his near success is actually the spur to Tarwater’s own solution. During the meal following this crisis, Rayber tries to drive his point home by bringing Tarwater into the realm of “choice”— the kind of freedom that serves as his ersatz religion: “I want you to make the choice and not simply be driven by a compulsion you don’t understand. What we understand, we can control” (CW 450). But young Tarwater, who does indeed yearn for complete autonomy, has his own notion about how to achieve it. Of his compulsion to follow the old man’s bidding, the younger Tarwater says, “I can pull it up by the roots, once and for all. I can do something. I ain’t like you. All you can do is think what you would have done if you had done it. Not me. I can do it. I can act” (CW 451). And act he does, but in a way that curves back on himself, in just the way that Augustine demonstrated sin to operate. Tarwater lures Bishop into a boat, and, with Rayber’s undiscerning permission, rows him to the other side of the lake. We learn later that out of Rayber’s sight, Tarwater performs a double act. He drowns the boy, but as he holds him under the suffocating waters he also speaks the words of baptism. In this way, he carries out the fate of both earthly “fathers,” intentionally completing the murder that Rayber

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attempted, and unintentionally completing the work of the fanatical old man. This ultimate act of “freedom” is at once radical and self-defeating. Tarwater has indeed struck a blow at the ties that bind him to anything except the dictates of his own sweet will. By killing his cousin, he slashes the bonds of blood, of animal affection, and of natural law. At the same time, he proves that his will is not sufficient to wrench him loose from the grip of God. The words of blessing come out of his mouth against his own defiant will, announcing new life even as his hands destroy the old. It is Tarwater’s failure to carry out the full resolution of his will that in the end makes possible his future redemption, just as it is Rayber’s failure, and his desire for “intolerable pain” when he hears Bishop’s dying cries, that provide the only hopeful signs for his future. For the will, torn from its orientation to God and thus from the good, is no longer fully free. Its true freedom paradoxically appears as compulsion—the divine grace of desire for God. And it is this desire, present in him as a literal hunger, that leads Tarwater back to his great uncle’s grave, to hear and accept a new commission that will mark his having taken up the mantle of prophecy from the dead man. So we find in O’Connor that the will itself is an example of evil as the privation of good. Diverted from its natural goal, weakened in its desire for God, and diminished in its vision of the good, it becomes liable to an ultimately nihilistic worship of its own autonomy. Even more direct, however, is the portrayal of evil in the form of the devil, who appears in several guises. The unseen “stranger” who later becomes “friend” sometimes speaks with Tarwater’s own voice, representing a kind of satanic anti-conscience. He begins his tempting work by denying his own existence, saying to the boy, “No no no, there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own selfexperience. . . . It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you” (CW 354). What this revealing passage discloses, in addition to the plug for false autonomy, is a strategy of negation. The devil insists that he does not exist, and in a certain sense this is true. Although O’Connor is straightforward in her assertion that the devil is real, this reality is of course derivative. And in his very purpose of destroying the good work of creation, he is bent on nothingness. So while he does negatively exist and thus is lying to Tarwater, in a deeper sense he is bent upon nothingness, as the “No no no” hints. This negativity is played out in two additional episodes. Later, in the city park, where young Tarwater feels the compulsion to baptize Bishop when he slips Rayber’s grip to play in a fountain, Tarwater’s friend reverses religious language to dissuade him: “You have to take hold and put temptation behind you. If you baptize once, you’ll be doing it the rest of your life. . . . Save yourself while the hour of salvation is at hand” (CW 433). The idea of drowning Bishop itself is presented to Tarwater as a perversion of baptism. Then, in

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his final scathing encounter with the demonic, this time in the form of the man in the lavender shirt who offers him a lift, Tarwater suffers the bitter consequences of perversion. Drugged by spiked liquor that he declares to be “better than the Bread of Life!” (CW 471), Tarwater becomes the victim of a homosexual rape. Certainly for O’Connor, as for Dante, homosexual intercourse is itself unnatural, a turning of the right desire for bodily and procreative concourse with one’s sexual other into a sterile union with one’s own kind, in this case, an unconscious and thus corpselike boy. The man’s act is thus necrophiliac as well as sodomitical and pedophiliac. But the greater wrong here is Tarwater’s violation: he is literally used against his will in the most intimate of ways. Having spiritually seduced Tarwater into murder, in this final encounter he seduces him sexually, concluding the meeting with what we might call date rape. Having initially gained Tarwater’s cooperation, he incapacitates his will entirely, rendering him a volitionless object of pleasure. When the stranger leaves, his skin has “acquired a faint pink tint as if he had refreshed himself on blood” (CW 472), a final parasitic image implying that, like a vampire, the devil sustains his own life only by preying upon the life of others. It is hardly coincidental that in her most direct depiction of personified evil O’Connor should progress from disembodied to embodied form. The devil begins as a voice, but he ends as a yellow-haired man wearing a lavender shirt and a thin black suit. Evil exists as the privation of good, but its particular nothingness takes both spiritual and physical shape, for it is a distortion of creation. And for O’Connor, all of earthly creation is affected by evil. Just as Tarwater’s rebelliousness issues in a violent act of his own hands, so does his seduction into evil culminate with his own physical violation. And on the other side of his humiliation, it is the fire that purges the woods, the earth of his great uncle’s grave, and the hunger within him that serve as points of connection between him and the God he will now serve. He throws himself to the ground and presses his face into the dirt of the grave where the old prophet’s corpse lies. Only then does he hear the words of command that commission him and cause him to rise to a new life. The message comes not audibly but palpably: “The words were as silent as seeds opening one at a time in his blood” (CW 478). As we have seen in other representative works, in her portrayals of redemption as well as of evil, O’Connor displays the body as the site on which the drama of salvation is played out.

No t e s 1. Quoted in David Richter, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 121. 2. John F. Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History, 9.

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  3. Addie Bundren makes this assertion in William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, 167.   4. Elie, The Life You Save, 312.   5. Asals, Flannery O’Connor, 50, 52, 56.   6. Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., “ ‘Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart!’: Wise Blood, Wounding, and Sacramental Aesthetics,” 84.   7. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 34.   8. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, 42.   9. Asals, Flannery O’Connor, 53. 10. Elie, The Life You Save, 175. 11. Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, 8. 12. Harpham, Ascetic Imperative, 59. 13. John D. Sykes, Jr., “Christian Apologetic Uses of the Grotesque in John Irving and Flannery O’Connor.” 14. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring, 97–98. 15. John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, 17. 16. Ibid., 1.

Chronology

1925

Mary Flannery O’Connor born to Edward F. and Regina O’Connor on March 25 in Savannah, Georgia.

1938

Family moves to Milledgeville, Georgia.

1941

Father dies of lupus.

1945

Graduates from Georgia State College for Women.

1945–48

Attends Writer’s Workshop at State University of Iowa. Receives M.F.A. in 1947. “The Geranium” published in 1946 in Accent.

1949

Lives in New York City. Chapters from Wise Blood published in Partisan Review. Moves in with Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in Connecticut.

1950

Suffers first attack of lupus in December.

1951

Returns to Milledgeville.

1952

Wise Blood is published.

1953

Earns Kenyon Fellowship.

1954

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” awarded second prize in the O. Henry Awards for short stories.

1955

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is published. “A Circle in the Fire” wins second prize in the O. Henry Awards. O’Connor starts to use crutches.

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Chronology

1957

“Greenleaf ” wins first prize in O. Henry Awards. Receives National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.

1958

Travels to Lourdes and Rome, accompanied by her mother. Audience with the Pope.

1959

Receives grant from Ford Foundation.

1960

The Violent Bear It Away is published.

1963

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” awarded first prize in O. Henry Awards.

1964

Dies on August 3 in Milledgeville Hopsital. “Revelation” wins first prize in O. Henry Awards.

1965

Everything That Rises Must Converge is published.

1969

Mystery and Manners, an edited selection of prose taken from lectures and essays, is published.

1971

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor wins the National Book Award.

1979

The Habit of Being, an edited selection of letters, is published.

Contributors

HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. Philip M. Weinstein is a professor at Swarthmore College. His many books include Faulkner’s Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns, What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, and, most recently, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction. Suzanne Morrow Paulson has taught at Minot State University. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction and William Trevor: A Study of the Short Fiction.

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Contributors

Laurence Enjolras is an associate professor in the French department at the College of the Holy Cross, specializing in twentieth and twentyfirst century literature. In addition to his book on Flannery O’Connor, he has written other titles in French. Joyce Carol Oates is a professor at Princeton University. She has written on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce. She has published many novels and novellas and many volumes of short stories, as well as volumes of poetry and of plays. Timothy P. Caron is a professor at California State University, Long Beach. He is a contributor to Blackwell’s A Companion to William Faulkner. Richard Giannone is a professor at Fordham University. Among his books is Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. He also has written numerous articles on O’Connor and others. Ralph C. Wood is a professor of theology and literature at Baylor University. He is the author of, among other titles, The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists and The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Michael Dunne is professor emeritus of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the author of several books, including Hawthorne’s Narrative Strategies and Intertextual Encounters in American Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. John D. Sykes Jr. is a professor of English at Wingate University. His titles include The Romance of Innocence and The Myth of History: Faulkner’s Religious Critique of Southern Culture.

Bibliography

Beaven, Simon W. Terrible Swift Sword: The Action of Grace in Three Stories by Flannery O’Connor. Stanford, Calif.: Humanities Honors Program, Stanford University, 1992. Bolton, Betsy. “Placing Violence, Embodying Grace: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Displaced Person.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 87–104.

Burns, Margie. “A Good Rose Is Hard to Find: Southern Gothic as Signs of Social Dislocation in Faulkner and O’Connor.” In Image and Ideology in Modern/ Postmodern Discourse, edited by David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan, pp. 105–123. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Ciuba, Gary M. Desire, Violence & Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Ciuba, Gary. “ ‘Like a Boulder Blocking Your Path’: Scandal and Skandalon in Flannery O’Connor.” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 26–27 (1998–2000): 1–23.

Crocker, Michael W., and Robert C. Evans, “Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning’ and O’Connor’s ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.’ ” College Language Association Journal 36, no. 4 (June 1993): 371–83.

Currie, Sheldon. “A Good Grandmother Is Hard to Find: Story as Exemplum.” The Antigonish Review 81–82 (Spring–Summer 1990): 143–56. Daretta, John Lawrence. Before the Sun Has Set: Retribution in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.

Desmond, John F. “Violence and the Christian Mystery: A Way to Read Flannery O’Connor.” In Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery, edited by John J. Murphy, Linda Hunter Adams, Richard H. Cracroft, and Susan Elizabeth

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Bibliography Howe, pp. 129–47. Provo, Utah: Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature, Brigham Young University, 1997.

Desmond, John F. “Violence and the Christian Mystery: A Way to Read Flannery O’Connor.” Literature and Belief 15 (1995): 163–81.

Di Renzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Dunne, Michael. Calvinist Humor in American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Edmondson, Henry T., III. Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2002.

Emerick, Ronald. “Hawthorne and O’Connor: A Literary Kinship (1989).” In The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Eberhard Alsen, pp. 127–36. New York, N.Y.: Garland, 2000.

    . “Wise Blood: O’Connor’s Romance of Alienation.” Literature and Belief 12 (1992): 27–38.

Fitzgerald, Sally. “Flannery O’Connor.” In The History of Southern Women’s Literature, edited by Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, pp. 404–12. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.     . “Flannery O’Connor: Patterns of Friendship, Patterns of Love.” Georgia Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 407–25.

    . “McMullen’s Choice: A Recent Appraisal of Flannery O’Connor.” Religion and the Arts 2, no. 4 (1998): 519–29.

    . “The Invisible Father.” Christianity and Literature 47, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 5–18.

Gatta, John. “The Scarlet Letter as Pre-Text for Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People.’ ” In Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition, edited by John L. Idol Jr. and Melinda M. Ponder, pp. 271–77. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “How Sacred Is the Violence in ‘A View of the Woods’?” On the Subject of the ‘Feminist Business’: Re-Reading Flannery O’Connor, edited by Teresa Caruso, pp. 64–73. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 2004.

Gordon, Sarah. Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Gretlund, Jan Nordby, and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Hardy, Donald E. The Body in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction: Computational Technique and Linguistic Voice. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

    . Narrating Knowledge in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Jackson, Robert. “Region, Idolatry, and Catholic Irony: Flannery O’Connor’s Modest Literary Vision.” Logos 5, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 13–40.

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Lake, Christina Bieber. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2005.

McDermott, John V. Flannery O’Connor and Edward Lewis Wallant: Two of a Kind. Lanham: University Press of America, 2005. McInerny, Ralph. Some Catholic Writers. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007.

McMullen, Joanne Halleran, and Jon Parrish Peede, eds. Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2007. Montgomery, Marion. Hillbilly Thomist: Flannery O’Connor, St. Thomas, and the Limits of Art. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2006.

Nisly, L. Lamar. Impossible to Say: Representing Religious Mystery in Fiction by Malamud, Percy, Ozick, and O’Connor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

O’Gorman, Farrell. Peculiar Crossroads: Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Paffenroth, Kim. The Heart Set Free: Sin and Redemption in the Gospels, Augustine, Dante, and Flannery O’Connor. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Palmer, Louis H., III. “Southern Gothic and Appalachian Gothic: A Comparative Look at Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy.” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 3 (1991): 166–76.

Parrish, Tim. “The Killer Wears the Halo: Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, and the American Religion.” In Sacred Violence, I: Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works, edited by Wade Hall, pp. 35–50. El Paso: Texas Western 2002.

Prown, Katherine Hemple. Revising Flannery O’Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Robillard, Douglas, Jr. The Critical Response to Flannery O’Connor. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.

Seel, Cynthia. Ritual Performance in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001.

Sikora, Malgorzata. “Discovering the Grotesque in the South.” In Approaches to Fiction, edited by Leszek S. Kolek, pp. 185–95. Lublin: Folium, 1996.

Smith, Peter A. “Flannery O’Connor’s Subtle Parodies of Protestantism in Kentucky.” Philological Review 17, nos. 1–2 (March 2002): 34–39.

Srigley, Susan. Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Walters, Mark. “Violence and Comedy in the Works of Flannery O’Connor.” In New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, edited by Regina Barreca, pp. 185–92. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992.

Acknowledgments

Philip M. Weinstein, “‘Coming unalone’: Gesture and Gestation in Faulkner and O’Connor.” From Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. © 1993 by A. Francke Verlag Tübingen and Basel. Reprinted by permission. Suzanne Morrow Paulson, “Apocalypse of Self, Resurrection of the Double: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away.” From Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw. © 1996 by the University of Georgia Press. Laurence Enjolras, “Intellectuals and Would-Be Artists.” From Flannery O’Connor’s Characters. © 1998 by University Press of America. Joyce Carol Oates, “The Action of Mercy.” From Kenyon Review 20, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 157–60. © 1998 by Kenyon Review. Timothy P. Caron, “‘Backwards to Bethlehem’: Evangelicalism in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.” From Struggles Over the Word: Race and Religion in O’Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. © 2000 by Mercer University Press. Richard Giannone, “The Prophet and the Word in the Desert.” From Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist. © 2000 by Richard Giannone and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Permission granted by the author.

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Acknowledgments

Ralph C. Wood, “Climbing into the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O’Connor’s Vision of the World to Come.” From Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. © 2004 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, all rights reserved. Michael Dunne, “Flannery O’Connor: ‘Funny Because It Is Terrible.’” From Calvinist Humor in American Literature. © 2007 by Louisiana State University Press. John D. Sykes Jr., “O’Connor and the Body: Incarnation, Redemptive Suffering, and Evil.” Reprinted from Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and the Aesthetic of Revelation. © 2007 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. Reprinted by permission of the University of Missouri Press.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the original essay. Those interested in locating the original source will find the information cited above.

Index “A,” 19, 69, 137 Absalom (Faulkner), 12 allegory, 149, 151 Alonius, Abba, 101 ambivalence, 24 American Fiction in the Cold War (Schaub), 53 anagogical mode/vision, 56, 63–64, 144 annihilation, 16 Apocalypse/apocalypticism, 21–34, 83, 109, 114, 117 apotheosis of self, 147 Archer, Emily, 57 Ark of the Covenant, 60 Arnold, Marilyn, 125, 137, 138 art, 31, 49 would-be artists, 35–42 Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor, The (Brinkmeyer), 51 “Artificial Nigger, The,” 19, 43– 44, 45, 46, 66, 128, 152–156, 159 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 2, 4–5, 9–10, 16 Asals, Frederick, 141, 145, 148 Asbury (character), 38–40 ascesis, 79, 94 asceticism, 79–80, 81, 82, 85, 86–87, 89, 90, 96, 97–98, 99, 141, 145, 146, 149

atheism/atheists, 36, 42, 107 audience, 144 Bacon, Jon Lance, 54, 68 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 11, 17–18 Baldwin, James, 65–66 Balliff, Algene, 25 baptism, 23, 28, 30, 50, 52 “Barber, The,” 34 Barth, Karl, 103, 106, 110, 112, 159 Baumgaertner, Jill Peláez, 159 Benton, Thomas Hart, 45 Bevel (character), 142 Bible, 32, 49–50, 52, 54, 56. See also Scriptures book of Matthew, 2–3, 59, 64, 96, 141 New Testament, 53, 58, 59, 60, 104, 112, 115, 120 Old Testament, 13, 45, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 81, 110, 145 Second Coming/Day of Judgment, 120 translations of, 3, 121–122, 141 verses from, 49, 96, 139 Bible Belt, 54, 148 biblical intertext, 49, 54, 56 biography education, 17 full name, 117 Hawthorne descendent, 3

177

178

Index

Bishop (character), 26, 30, 95, 107, 120, 132, 161, 162 baptism/drowning of, 4, 23, 27, 87, 91–92, 93, 94, 108, 109, 111, 164 Down’s syndrome of, 91, 107 blacks, 53, 59, 152–156 Blake, William, 5 Bleikasten, André, 9, 11, 14, 18, 52 Bloom, Harold, 1–8 Body and Society, The (Brown), 86 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 114 Bradford, William, 121, 123 Bread of Life, 111. See also Christ Brinkmeyer, Robert, 51, 57, 141, 145–146 Brooks, Cleanth, 46 Brown, Peter, 86 Buckley, F.H., 131 Buford Munson (character), 1, 31, 83, 95, 111 Caldwell, Erskine, 121, 142 Calhoun (character), 40–41 Calvin, John, 137 Calvinist humorists, 119–138 Campbell, Joseph, 22 Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 5 Caron, Timothy P., 49–76 Cassian, John, 88 “Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” (lecture), 55, 122 Catholic orthodoxy/Catholicism, 2, 8, 17, 22, 121, 137, 160 anti-Catholic society, 54, 116 iconography, 63 See also Eucharist/communion; Roman Catholicism characterization, hyperbole and, 131 Chekhov, Anton, 143 Christ, 2, 32, 80, 91, 104–105, 126 communion/Eucharist and, 45, 98–100 crucifixion of, 158, 161 incarnation/resurrection of, 140

redemption and, 49, 56, 61, 109 in sacramental vision, 6–7 “soul-hungry” Jesus, 57, 61 suffering of, 99, 142, 144, 150, 152 surrendering/rebirth to, 50, 65 symbolism, 6, 156 tattooed image of, 149, 150–151 See also cruciform counterviolence Christ complex, 123 Christ-haunted South, 8, 113, 115–116 Christ-Haunted South, The (Wood), 155 Christian asceticism, 79–80, 148 Christian orthodoxy, 44, 49, 120, 121, 141 Christianity, 42, 49, 50, 65, 80, 114, 132 commitment to, 52, 53, 136 heaven and, 103 jokes and, 124–125 as slave religion of weak, 104 theological ideas and, 144–145 Word becoming flesh, 93, 99, 150 Church, the, 16, 19, 121. See also Roman Catholicism “Circle in the Fire,” 14, 45, 127 class status, 13, 14, 16, 54 Claud (character), 7, 114, 115 cold war, 51, 53 comedy, 14, 43 “Comforts of Home, The,” 15, 133 “coming unalone,” 9–20 compassion, 32 Conrad, Joseph, 45 conversion-orientated theology, 55, 62 Cool Million, A (West), 4 correspondence, 53 Crews, Frederick, 19 crucifixion, 158, 161 cruciform counterviolence, 140–152 Daisy Miller (James), 134 damnation, 57, 105, 120. See also hell

Index

Dante Alighieri, 110, 112, 139, 165 Paradiso, 96 Dawkins, Cecil, 18, 19 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 120, 140 de la Tour, Georges, 45 death, 18, 96, 140, 141 psychological death, 21, 28 rebirth “earmarked” by, 29 symbolical death, 41–42 technology of, World War II, 81 DeLillo, Don, 81 White Noise, 100 demonology, 84–85, 88, 91–92, 131. See also logismos/logismoi des Vallées, Marie, 105–106 devil, the, 2, 8, 25, 32, 95, 141, 144, 164 Discourses (Dortheos of Gaza), 84 disintegration, 15 “Displaced Person, The,” 109, 117, 127, 156–159 Divided Self, The (Laing), 23 Divinity, 6, 42, 101, 106, 107, 151–152 Dortheos of Gaza, 84 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 17–18, 109, 156 Roskolnikovean conviction, 162 Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, The (Rank), 22 “doubling” tradition, 21–34 “another” voice, madness and, 31 devil-double, 31 “double-by-duplication,” 29, 33 procreative double, 23, 26 seelenspiegel, 25 Dubliners (Joyce), 45 Dunne, Michael, 119–138 Edwards, John, 125, 138 egotism, 22, 89, 90 Eliot, George Middlemarch, 107 Eliot, T.S., 3, 4, 5 “Enduring Chill, The,” 38–40, 45, 133 Enjolras, Laurence, 35–42

179

Enoch Emery (character), 57–58, 59–60, 68, 125 eremitic withdrawal, 82 Erikson, Erik, 2 eschatology, 97, 103–105, 110, 114, 116, 144 eternity, 112 Eucharist/communion, 45, 80, 98– 100, 142, 158 Evangelicalism, 49–76 Everything That Rises Must Converge, 4, 5, 15, 19, 120 posthumous publication of, 132–133 protagonist of, 37 evil, 82, 85, 110, 131, 140, 160 as privation of good, 144, 159–165 See also demonology Faulkner, William, 3, 5, 8, 9–20, 22, 49, 50, 53, 54, 120, 121, 137, 140, 156 As I Lay Dying, 2 Sanctuary, 4, 46 feminism/feminist readings, 51, 141 Ficken, Carl, 56 Fickett, Harold, 51, 63, 68 “Fiction Writer and His Country, The,” 43 Fitzgerald, Robert, 4, 17, 127 Fitzgerald, Sally, 2, 69, 129, 130 Flannery, Amma, 93 “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt” (Rubin), 120, 121 Flannery O’Connor and the Christian Mystery, 136, 137 Flannery O’Connor and the Cold War Culture (Bacon), 54 Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, 51 Flaubert, Gustave, 143 Fodor, Sarah J., 128 Francis Marion Tarwater (character), 1, 8, 23–32, 30, 77, 89, 95, 108, 111, 120, 131, 160, 162–164 baptism/drowning by, 23, 86, 92, 94, 163, 166

180 homosexual rape of, 4, 94–95, 111, 165 Huck Finn comparison, 2, 4, 8 mental illness of, 2, 31, 90, 91 freaks, 8, 13, 142–143 free will/freedom, 84, 131, 160–164 Frei, Hans, 156 Freudian theory, 21–22, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34 George Rayber (character), 4, 21, 27, 78–79, 83, 89, 90, 92, 107, 108, 109, 117, 120, 131, 132, 133, 161–164 Georgetown University lecture, 122 Georgia, 65, 126, 127 Atlanta, 19, 44, 128, 153 Georgia Scenes (Longstreet), 122 “gesture” and “gestation,” 9–20 Giannone, Richard, 59, 77–101, 136, 147–148 Gibbon, Edward, 80 Girard, René, 4 Giroux, Robert, 68, 147 Gnostics/Gnostic texts, 5, 7, 8, 145 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 12 God, 42, 44, 96, 106, 107, 111, 142 Kingdom of, 103, 105 God’s Story and Modern Literature (Ficken), 56 “Good Country People,” 13–14, 36– 37, 120, 121, 122, 125, 129, 130 Good Man Is Hard to Find, A, 3, 15, 43, 69, 126, 128, 133, 138 grandmother in, 3, 113 the Misfit in, 113, 121 passage from, 3–4 Gordon, Caroline, 17, 18, 143 Gordon, Sarah, 148 Gossett, Louise, 50 grace, 44, 106, 111, 114, 117, 144, 158 “Greenleaf,” 121, 133–134 Gregory of Nyssa, 95, 112 Griffith, Ben, 128, 138

Index

grotesque, the, 5, 8, 137, 140, 141, 148, 149 normative and, 142–143 shrunken mummy, 14, 58, 60, 62–63 Guerard, Albert J., 45 guilt, 18, 27, 38 Habit of Being, The, 4, 137 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 146 Harris, George Washington, 131, 137 Harry Ashfield (character), 52 Hartman, Carl, 120, 137 Hawks, John, 55, 123, 138, 141 “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil,” 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 119, 124, 138, 143 Hazel (Haze) Motes (character), 14, 50, 51, 53, 57, 119, 146–148 blindness, metaphorical/physical, 59–60 Christ complex of, 123–124 “darker” nature/evil inheritance, 59 rebellion/flight of, 61 self-mutilation/asceticism, 64–65, 142, 145, 152 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 45 heathen culture, 80 Hebrew Ark of the Covenant, 60 hell, 57, 106, 110, 114, 125. See also damnation Hendin, Josephine, 41, 121 Hengel, Martin, 65 hermeneutical principle, 56 hermit novelist, 81–82, 101 Hero with a Thousand Faces, A (Campbell), 22 Hester, Betty, 141 Hill, Samuel S., 55 Hitler, Adolf, 81, 113 Hoffman, Frederick J., 119 holiness in words, 93 Holman, C. Hugh, 120

Index

Holocaust/Hitler, 16, 112–113, 157, 160 Holy Ghost/Spirit, 45, 61 homosexuality, 25, 33–34 homosexual rape, 4, 94–95, 111, 165 latent homosexuality, 29 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 44 “Horse Swap, The” (Longstreet), 122, 123 Hulga. See Joy-Hulga Hopewell human nature, 42 humility, 92, 95 humor, 119–138, 137 Humphries, Jefferson, 5 Hurston, Zora Neale, 50, 54 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 53, 61 identity, 10, 11, 28, 29, 38 Identity of Jesus Christ (Frei), 156 idolatry, 152 Iliad (Homer), 4 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, 132 illegitimacy, 11 imagery, 31, 44, 46, 59, 145 imitatio Christi, 148, 152 Incarnation, 149, 151, 155 Incarnational Catholicism, 17 incest, 25 intellectuals, 35–42, 53 intersubjectivity, 10 Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor (Miles), 121 irony, 32, 35, 42 Irwin, John T., 22 isolation, 38, 41 Ivan Karmozov (character), 106, 107–108, 163 James, Henry, 18, 143 Daisy Miller, 134 Jesus Christ. See Christ Jim Crow, 53, 155

181

John the Baptist, 2, 53, 62 Johnson, Samuel, 144 Jones, Samuel Porter, 55, 67 Joyce, James, 45, 143 Joy-Hulga Hopewell (character), 16, 36–37, 120, 121, 129–130 Judaism, 13 “Judgment Day,” 120 Julian (character), 37–38, 132–133 June Star (character), 126 Kennelly, Laura B., 51 Kenyon Review, The, 43 Kreyling, Michael, 51, 54 Kristallnacht, 81 Kristeva, Julia, 11, 18 Lacan, Jacques, 10, 17, 25, 51 Laing, R.D., 23, 28 “Lame Shall Enter First, The,” 133 language/style, 5, 15–16, 31, 50, 79, 85, 93, 127 “Late Encounter with the Enemy,” 127 Lee, Maryat, 66 liberalism, 38, 39, 53, 104 Life of Anthony, The (Athanasius), 78, 85 Life of Moses, The (Gregory of Nyssa), 95 “Life You Save May Be Your Own, The,” 128 Light in August (Faulkner), 53, 59 Liturgy, 98–99 Lives of the Desert Fathers, The, 89, 95–96, 97, 101 logismos/logismoi, 85–86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 Logos, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96 Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 122, 123 love, 101, 106, 107, 108–109 Love in the Ruins (Percy), 116, 117 Lovingood, Sut, 122, 131, 136

182 Lowell, Robert, 17 Löwith, Karl, 104–105, 116 Lucette Carmody (character), 24, 90–91, 92 Luther, Martin, 114, 116 Lynch, John, 121 Lytle, Andrew, 17 madness, 26, 27, 31 Manichaeism, 4, 141, 145, 148, 159 Manley Pointer (character), 36–37, 120, 125, 127, 129–130, 135 martrydom, 35 Mary Ann (character), 140 Mary Fortune Pitts (character), 5–7 Mary Grace (character), 135, 136 Mason Tarwater (character), 21, 23– 24, 28, 29, 77, 79–80, 83–84, 86, 95, 96, 105, 111, 120, 130–131, 160–161 McNeill, John T., 127–128 Melville, Herman, 131 memento mori, 65, 140 Memphis Commercial Appeal Merton, Thomas, 82, 147 Middlemarch (Eliot), 107 Milbank, John, 141, 159–160, 161 “Minister’s Black Veil, The” (Hawthorne), 124 miscegenation, 11, 12, 17 Misfit, the (character), 3–4, 113, 121, 126 misogyny, 25 Miss Lonelyhearts (character), 123– 124, 131 Miss Lonelyhearts (West), 2, 4–5 modernism, 16, 19, 132 monasticism, 80, 85 moral climate/moralists, 81, 126 Moreland, Richard, 16, 19 mortality, 28 Mosaic law, 65 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston), 53, 61 Mr. Fortune (character), 5–7

Index

Mr. Guizac (character), 152, 156– 158 Mr. Head (character), 43–44, 45–46, 153–154, 156 Mr. Shortley (character), 157, 158 Mrs. Flood (character), 147, 148 Mrs. Greenleaf (character), 15, 134 Mrs. Hopewell (character), 13–14, 122, 129, 130 Mrs. May (character), 15, 133–134, 135, 136, 142 Mrs. McIntyre (character), 156–159 Mrs. Turpin (character), 7, 66, 112– 114, 115, 135–136 Muller, Gilbert H., 130 Mystery and Manners, 4, 33, 46, 55 narcissism, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29 Nelson (character), 43–44, 45, 46, 153–154, 156 New Critics, 17, 19, 46, 143 New Essays on Wise Blood (Kreyling), 51 “nigger” as term, 47, 113, 136, 153. See also “Artificial Nigger, The” nihilist/nihilism, 108, 159, 162, 164 “Novelist and Believer,” 32 Oates, Joyce Carol, 43–47 Obadiah Elihue Parker (character), 120, 152 Oedipal tragedy, 10, 18, 22, 33 Orvell, Miles, 130 Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor, 121 Paradiso (Dante), 96 parental abuse, 31 “Parker’s Back,” 5, 13, 120, 135, 145–152 cruciform counterviolence and, 140, 149–152 icon tattoo, 149, 150–151 “Parson Bullen’s Lizards” (Harris), 131

Index

“Partridge Festival, The,” 32, 40 pathos, 38 patriarchal norms/father figure, 11, 27 patristic texts, 85 Paulson, Suzanne Morrow, 21–34 Percy, Walker, 81 Love in the Ruins, 115–116, 117 perdition, 105–109 perversion, 164–165 phantasmagoria, 8 piety, 50, 59 Poe, Edgar Allan, 142 Poemen, Abba, 86 Popper, Karl, 2 Porter, Carolyn, 19 postmodernism, 100 poverty, 89, 90, 100, 101, 103 “problems of assent,” 51 prophecy, 3, 24, 25, 77–101, 81, 164 protagonists, characterization of, 41–42 Protestantism, 50, 53, 54, 56, 61, 98 Proust, Marcel, 5 psychological determinism, 31 punished mothers theme, 15 racial injustice, 59, 66 racism, 38, 40, 47, 53–54, 56, 59, 66, 126, 152–153, 155 Rank, Otto, 22 Rath, Sura P., 51 rationalists, 107, 108 Ratzinger, Joseph (Cardinal), 110 realism, 3, 49, 143 “realist of distances,” 45 rebelliousness, 165 reconciliation, 98, 154 redemption, 44, 50, 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 141, 142, 150, 165 “rednecks,” 113 Reformation, the, 80 regeneration, spiritual, 23, 50 Reivers, The (Faulkner), 12 religious censoriousness, 138 renunciation, psychology of, 90

183

repentance, 148 Requiem (Faulkner), 12 resurrection, 21, 24, 94, 148 Revelation, 7, 66, 112–115, 120, 135 rhetoric gestures. See “gesture” and “gestation” Riesman, David, 2 “River, The,” 52, 121, 126–127 Roman Catholicism, 44, 49, 106, 121, 148 deviations from normative, 4 Vatican II, 82 See also Catholic orthodoxy/ Catholicism romance, literary models and, 143 Roughing It (Twain), 122–123 Rubin, Louis D., 54–55, 67, 132 “Flannery O’Connor and the Bible Belt,” 120, 121 Ruby Turpin (character), 112–115, 120, 135, 136 Rufus Johnson (character), 133 rural eccentricities, 131 Sabbath Lily Hawks (character), 14, 61, 125 sacramental participation/sign, 99, 151–152. See also Eucharist/ communion sacramental vision, 6–7 sadism, 37, 140 Saint Francis of Assisi, 89 Saint Paul, 84 salvation/salvation theology, 44, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 62, 65, 97, 105, 120, 142, 144, 146, 165 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 4, 46 Sarah Ruth (character), 135, 149– 150, 152 Satan, 54, 83, 84, 88–89 Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The, 77, 89, 93, 95, 96, 99, 101 scapegoat, 153, 154, 156 Scarry, Elaine, 146 Schaub, Thomas, 53

184

Index

Scholem, Gershom, 5 “School of Southern Degeneracy, The,” 142 Scriptures, 56, 57. See also Bible Secret Sharer (Conrad), 45 secularists/secularism, 3, 104, 124 self-advancement, religion of, 58 self-aggrandizing, 90 self-consecration, 98 self-denial, 82, 83, 100, 140. See also asceticism self-emptying (kenosis), 95 self-righteousness, 42, 115 self-will, 84, 90, 97, 100 semiotics, 11 sentimentalism, 37, 38, 143 Seven Storey Mountain, The (Merton), 147 sex/sexuality, 18, 25, 85. See also homosexuality silence, 92–93, 94, 152 sin, 18, 57, 62, 131, 135, 143 original sin, 66 punitive violence and, 141 racism as, 152–153 Singleton (character), 32, 40–41 Solace Layfield (character), 50 solitude/solitariness, 28, 80–81, 87, 92, 95, 97, 98 “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” 8, 142, 143 soul, condition of, 56 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 12 southern society/religion, 53, 55–56, 132 spirituality, 3. See also asceticism eremitic spirituality, 88 spiritual vocabulary, 79 Spivey, T.R., 97 Saint Anthony, 146 Saint Augustine, 110, 111, 160, 163 Stephens, Martha, 32, 51, 52, 121, 130 subjectivity, 15, 17, 18 suffering, 38, 142, 144 vicarious suffering, 152, 154–155

supernatural, the, 54, 55 Sykes, John D., Jr., 139–166 symbolism, 10, 17, 19, 41–42, 44, 67, 156 Syncletica, Amma, 99 T. Fawcett Meeks (character), 89, 90 Tarwater family (characters), 3. See also Francis Marion Tarwater; Mason Tarwater Tate, Allen, 17 tattoos, 13, 149–150, 152 Taylor, Jeremy, 105 “Temple of the Holy Ghost, A,” 12, 45, 120, 127 Tennessee, 77, 97, 126 thanatos syndrome, 81 theology, 31, 144–145. See also Roman Catholicism Thomist aesthetic, 143 Three by Flannery O’Connor, 129 Tom T. Shif let (character), 128, 138 transcendence, 11, 16, 17, 100, 146 transformation, 114 Turner, Denys, 15 Twain, Mark Roughing It, 122–123 Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright), 53 Vatican II, 82 “verticalist,” 55, 56 Verweyen, Jürgen, 111 victimization, 154 “View of the Woods, A,” 5–6 violation, by God or Satan, 15 violence, 16, 50, 140, 141, 144. See also cruciform counterviolence Violent Bear It Away, The, 4, 21–34, 52, 77–101, 120, 130, 131, 133, 140–141 demonology in, 84–85 evil as privation of good in, 159–165

Index

passages from, 1, 107, 108–109 Powderhead in, 30, 77, 79, 81, 82, 86, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96–97, 111, 163 vision/visionary writer, 3, 6–7, 44, 56, 59, 64–65, 143, 145–146 von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 105, 110, 112, 116 von Speyr, Adrienne, 106 W.A. Sessions, 136 Warren, Robert Penn, 46 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 5, 148 Weber, Otto, 116 Weil, Simon, 4 Weinstein, Philip M., 9–20 Welty, Eudora, 120 Wesley, John, 103 West, Nathanael, 3, 5, 119, 123, 124, 131, 137, 138 A Cool Million, 4 Miss Lonelyhearts, 2

185

White Noise (DeLillo), 100 white southern Protestants, 56 white South’s theology, 55, 58, 62 “white trash,” 14, 15, 136 Wigglesworth, Michael, 121 willfulness/waywardness, 83 Wise Blood, 4, 14, 33, 49–76, 119–120, 123, 124, 125–126 biblical intertextuality, 56–57 cruciform counterviolence and, 140–149 passage from, 58, 63 Taulkinham in, 57, 58, 62, 67 theological framework of, 59 Wood, Ralph C., 66, 103–117, 132, 137, 155 World War II, 81, 157 Wright, Richard, 53, 54 writing style, 19, 32. See also language/style Yahwist vision, 145–146