Both the songs by Bob Dylan and the writings by Flannery O’Connor cast the shadow of biblical stories across a landscape of modern towns and highways. Their figures meet the Lord and also the devil in the America of today…
The American or Western society wants us to be “rational.” The devil probably likes it, for a “rationality” and a passion (“violent” love) for the Lord are two completely different things. This is probably the reason why O’Connor gave a title The Violent Bear It Away (the kingdom of heaven, that is) to her novel published in 1960.
Mason Tarwater (an old Protestant prophet from the seclusion of Powderhead in Tennessee), who dies in the beginning of the novel, certainly was one of the violent people of this kind. The Catholic author says about him in her letter to a nun from 1963: “When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he’s going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but it will be real in the sight of God.” Tarwater is a man with a genuine hunger for the Lord, for the Bread of Life.
He is, hower, unhappy about his own family. His sister became a “drunken whore” living with an entirely cynical atheist by the name of Rayber. When their son George F. Rayber was seven years old, Mason Tarwater kidnapped and baptized him. Tarwater wanted to bring his nephew up as a Christian, but George’s parents got him back and the boy grew up as an atheist. He became a schoolteacher and a fanatical fighter against religion and religious morals. He found a lover for his own sister.
After death of the sister and her lover Rayber wanted to bring their son Francis up according to his own ideas. He declared that Francis was going “to be his own saviour.” Nevertheless, Tarwater rescued the boy from this kind of “salvation.” He kidnapped the boy from the city, baptised him and raised him up in Powderhead. The old prophet raised Francis to expect the Lord’s call himself and to be prepared for the day he would hear it.
The names of the figures may be symbolic. Old Tarwater is a person whose target is to bring redemption through the water of baptism. Rayber has a ray of mystical experience but he is fighting his inherited tendency to mystical love. He also tries to get his nephew back from Mason. He came with a meddlesome social worker by the name of Bernice Bishop to Powderhead to take the boy away, but the old prophet prevented it with a gun.
George Rayber married Bernice Bishop and had a son Bishop Rayber with her. And the Lord, the old Tarwater said, had preserved the boy “from being corrupted by such parents. He had preserved him in the only possible way: the child was dim-witted.”
Tarwater wanted to baptise Bishop. He said to Rayber: “That boy cries out for his baptism. Precious in the sight of the Lord even an idiot!” But the old prophet was not able to baptise the boy. Rayber declared: “He’ll never be baptisted – just as a matter of principle, nothing else. As a gesture of human dignity, he’ll never be baptized.” So Tarwater commissioned Francis to baptise Bishop at some point. Before his death, old Tarwater asked his teen-aged great-nephew to bury him as a Christian, to baptize Bishop and to expect the Lord’s call. All these things, however, a reader of The Violent Bear It Away learns only by and by. The novel starts like this:
“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 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.”
Young Tarwater got drunk instead of burying his great-uncle because of a “voice” telling him to forget about the old man. The dialogue between the voice of a stranger and the boy is a key passage of the novel:
“The way I see it, you can do one of two things. One of them, not both. Nobody can do both of two things without straining themselves. You can do one thing or you can do the opposite. Jesus or the devil, the boy said. No no no, the stranger said, there ain’t no such thing as a devil. I can tell you that from my own self-experience. I know that for a fact. It ain’t Jesus or the devil. It’s Jesus or you.”
Tarwater seems to accept this thesis. The stranger becomes his “friend.” When Francis returns from drinking, he sets Powderhead in fire. Then he leaves for the city to meet his only living relative, uncle Rayber. He may live with him for the social worker who hated Francis is already away. She hated the child Francis because of its upbringing in the faith in Jesus:
“She could not express her exact revulsion, for her feeling was not logical. It had, she said, the look of an adult, not of a child, and of an adult with immovable insane convictions… The face for her had expressed the depth of human perversity, the deadly sin of rejecting one’s own obvious good… She said she could not have lived with such a face; she would have been bound to destroy the arrogant look on it… /Nevertheless,/ she had not been able to live with Bishop’s face any better though that was no arrogance on it… By temperament and training she was ready to handle an exceptional child, but not one as exceptional as Bishop, not one bearing her own family name and the face of ‘that horrible old man.’ ”
When Francis Tarwater starts to live with Rayber and Bishop, the heritage of “that horrible old man” is present among them. There is a struggle between the dead prophet and the living atheist schoolteacher for the boy’s soul. Francis inherited from his great-uncle a hunger for the Bread of Life, but Rayber asks him to repress this hunger. Rayber himself is, however, also “divided in two – a violent and a rational self.” He is capable of pure love and experiences it in the relation with his disabled son:
“For the most part Rayber lived with him without being painfully aware of his presence but the moments would still come when, rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity. It was only a touch of the curse that lay in his blood. His normal way of looking on Bishop was as an x signifying the general hideousness of fate. He did not believe that he himself was formed in the image and likeness of God but that Bishop was he had no doubt. The little boy was part of a simple equation that required no further solution, except at the moments when with little or no warning he would feel himself overwhelmed by the horrifying love. Anything he looked at too long could bring it on. Bishop did not have to be around. 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.”
Rayber’s choise was either to bow “irrationally” to the Mystery or to live in his “rational” world of emptiness. He prefered the second alternative and repressed the first one. Rayber’s “rational” self hated his love for Bishop so much that he wanted to drown his son. At the same time, however, this “rational” self restrained him from the murder. According to an explanation in a letter written by Flannery O’Connor, “he had the idea that his love could be contained in Bishop but that if Bishop were gone, there would be nothing to contain it and he would then love everything and specifically Christ.”
Young Tarwater is also put on edge when confronted with Bishop. He is under “temptation” to baptize the child, but the „voice” of his “friend” asks him to drown Bishop instead. Both Rayber and the “friend” want to release Francis from his Christian past. Rayber devises a plan to take Tarwater back to the country in hopes that confronting that past will allow him to leave it. Under the guise of taking Francis and Bishop out to the country to a lodge to go fishing, Rayber finally confronts Tarwater and tells him that he must leave the crazy Christian upbringing that his great-uncle corrupted him with. One evening, Tarwater takes Bishop out on a boat to the middle of the lake. Rayber cannot see them on the lake but in the end he realizes what has happened: Tarwater drowned Bishop and at the same time baptized him.
Rayber “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 window and it was not until he realized there would be no pain that he collapsed.”
This is the last mention of Rayber in the novel. Flannery O’Connor was (according to her own words) seven years on The Violent Bear It Away and most of those years spent on Rayber. In spite of it (or perhaps because of it) the story of this figure seems to be unfinished. In a letter from 1962 O’Connor writes:
“The point where Tarwater is drowning Bishop is the point where he /Rayber/ has to choose. He makes the Satanic choice, and the inability to feel the pain of his loss is the immediate result. His collapse then may indicate that he is not going to be able to sustain his choice – but that is another book maybe.”
Rayber became able to live “rationally” in a world without Mystery, without divine love. He achieved his own will. This is, according to the author, “the Satanic choice.” According to Rayber himself it may have been “Jesus or me,” but in fact it was “Jesus or Satan.” When Tarwater decided either to baptise Bishop or to drown him, it was, of course, the same choise. According to Flannery O’Connor the choice is always either throw away everything and follow the Lord or enjoy oneself by doing some meanness to somebody (which, in fact, does not mean to follow one’s own good but to follow Satan). Bob Dylan’s great song Gotta Serve Somebody expresses it in this way:
You’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
When Tarwater drowns Bishop he does not understand it yet. He believes in his “freedom” and goes to Powderhead to complete the destruction of his great-uncle’s life work. He hitches a ride and says to the driver: “I had to prove I wasn’t no prophet and I’ve proved it… I proved it by drowning him. Even if I did baptize him that was only an accident… I don’t have to baptize or prophesy… I ain’t hungry for the bread of life.”
Instead of the Bread of Life, Tarwater wants only some foot and drink from the driver. This driver, however, is an actualization of his “friend” who told him to set Powderhead in fire and to drown Bishop. This time the “friend” drugges him and then rapes him in the woods. We (human beings) are like this – doing evil and suffering from it, alone with our “friend” the devil… unless we accept Jesus. We cannot be our own saviours. We’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Sometimes some horrible experience provides access to the truth. In the novel, Francis Tarwater’s rape turns to revelation. He finally makes his way back to Powderhead and discovers that his great-uncle was buried by Buford Munson (he had assumed that the body had been burned up). Two requests of the old prophet (his own Christian burial and Bishop’s baptism) have been actually realized. Now it is the time for the third one…
Francis Marion Tarwater was at last aware “of the object of his hunger, aware that it was the same as the old man’s and that nothing on earth would fill him… Night descended until there was nothing but a thin streak of red between it and the black line of earth but still he stood there. He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through the centuries… He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and engulfing him. It seemed in one instant to lift and turn him. He whirled toward the treeline. There, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. 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.”
In the end of the novel, the new prophet went to the city, “where the children of God lay sleeping.” According to the words of Flannery O’Connor written in her letter from 1963, people are depressed by this ending “because they think: poor Tarwater, his mind has been warped by that old man and he’s off to make a fool or a martyr of himself. They forget that the old man has taught him the truth and that now he’s doing what is right, however crazy… People who are depressed by it believe that it would have been better if the school teacher had civilized Tarwater and sent him to college where he could have got an engineering degree or some such.”
Even before the entire novel was published, O’Connor complained about incomprehension of her readers in a letter from 1959: “A friend of mine in a writing class at Iowa wrote me that his workshop had read and discussed the first chapter of this novel (it was in New World Writing) and the discussion revolved around who the voice was. Only one thought it was the Devil. The rest of them thought it was a voice of light, there to liberate Tarwater from the ‘horrible old man.’ ”
The Western society of our time needs to get Dylan’s and O’Connor’s message very much indeed…
Flannery O’Connor: The Violent Bear It Away. In: Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, New York: The Library of America, 1988, pp. 329–479.
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