Grace Can Be Violent

Grace Can Be Violent
Jeremiah Alberg
Introduction René Girard first became known as a literary critic. All of his anthropological,
historical, and even his theological insights find their basis in his study of what he
refers to as the great novels. He learned from the authors of these novels and that
learning enabled him to see more deeply into the Christian Scriptures.
There are obviously many authors upon which Girard never had a chance to
comment and one of the ways that his work has been extended and developed has
been through others using his insights on works other than those he dealt with directly.
One of the authors that has drawn consistent attention from those who approach
literature from a Girardian perspective is the American novelist and short story writer,
Flannery O’Connor.
I can assume that readers of this book have some knowledge concerning
Girard and his thought but I am less certain about how familiar Flannery O’Connor
will be. Hence, a bit of background information seems appropriate. Flannery
O’Connor is one of the major American fiction writers of the twentieth century. She
published two novels in her lifetime, the first, WiseBlood (1952) and the second, The
Violent Bear It Away (1960), as well as one collection of short stories, A Good Man Is
Hard to Find (1955). After her death from lupus in 1964 at thirty-nine another book
of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), a book of her essays,
titled Manners and Mystery (1969), were published. All of her short stories were
gathered in a single volume, which won the National Book award for fiction in 1971.
A collection of her letters, The Habit of Being, followed. This won the National
Books Critics Circle Award in 1979. In 1988 all of these works were gathered into
1 Flannery O’Connor: The Collected Works published by the Library of America, the
most prestigious collection in American letters.
There is much that can be said about O’Connor’s fiction from a Girardian or
mimetic perspective and, in fact, a fair amount already has been written.1 It is not
difficult to see the attraction. We find in O’Connor’s fiction all the hallmarks of what
Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel labels the “great” novels, that is, those works
by authors who are trying to reveal the novelistic truth in the face of the romantic lie.
For Girard these hallmarks include a recognition of the role of mediator of desire, a
revelation of the effect of rivalry on desire, an inclusion of askesis at the service of
this desire, as well as things like the emergence of doubles and the demonic.
At the root of this common novelistic truth, Girard and O’Connor both share the
conviction that their Christian faith, far from interfering with their sensibilities,
enables them to know and experience reality in the modern world level at a deeper,
more profound level. Girard will write about Christianity in later works after Violence
and the Sacred. O’Connor’s vision emerges from and incarnates her faith. We know
this from reading her fiction and from her own testimony. In many different ways she
shows that all of her fiction is informed by her faith in the Christian mysteries of
Christ’s death and resurrection, of the human’s sin and redemption. What she has to
say about this matter in a letter from 1955 bears quoting:
I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact
and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic
peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung
describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the
Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious
Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I
2 think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible
world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church
endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are
fed. (924)
Violence and God But there does seem to be one big difference between Girard and O’Connor.
Although it is not difficult to find in O’Connor’s fiction examples of mimetic rivalry,
doubles, the demonic, scandal, and violence, it is her treatment of this last theme, the
theme of violence, that often scandalizes even the mimetic theorist reader of
O’Connor. Violence for her has a much more positive valence than one will find in
Girard. I do not mean that she in any way glamorizes or glorifies violence but it is
intimately connected for O’Connor with grace, that is, with God’s intervention in the
sinful world.
In talking about her own work she writes:
In my own stories 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, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the
world. (O’Connor 1969, 112)
In other places she is even clearer that she sees Christian grace as a two-edge sword:
it cuts and it heals. The cutting is violent. For her, “violence is a force which can be
used for good or evil, and among other things taken by it is the kingdom of heaven”
(O’Connor 1969, 113).
3 For Girard, as well as for those influenced by his work, such as the theologian
James Alison, violence is not something that can used for good or evil and it
represents the opposite of taking the kingdom of heaven. I will comment below on
ways that we might mediate or alleviate this contradiction, but first I want to explicate
it a bit more. Here is a typical text on divine violence from Things Hidden:
If we keep to the passages that relate specifically to the Father of Jesus,
we can easily see they contain nothing which would justify attributing the
least amount of violence to the deity. On the contrary, we are confronted
with a God who is foreign to all forms of violence. The most important of
these passages in the synoptic Gospels formally repudiate the conception
of a vengeful God, a conception whose traces can be found right up to the
end of the Old Testament. … The following is the basic text, in my
opinion, that shows us a God who is alien to all violence and who wishes
in consequence to see humanity abandon violence:
You have hear that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and
hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for
those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is
in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and
sends rain on the just and on the unjust (Mt. 5.43-45). (TH, 182-3)
Girard’s commentary on the parable of the murderous tenants of the vineyard (Mt.
21.40-41) serves as another example: “Jesus does not credit God with violence. He
allows his audience to come to their own conclusions and these represent not his
thoughts but their own, thoughts that take God’s violence for granted” (TH, 188). His
conclusion: “The notion of a divine violence has no place in the inspiration of the
Gospels” (TH, 189). One final statement concerns the revelation of God in Christ:
4 “The divinity of Christ is fully revealed when he is the victim of the mimetic event of
all against one, but it owes absolutely nothing to this phenomenon of violent
contagion and scapegoating. To the contrary, he subverts it” (ISSF, 131).
Alison, writing from a theological rather than an anthropological perspective
is even stronger. “The Gospel is the revelation of the monotheism that is utterly
purified of violence” (JoBW, 108). He expands this by writing:
In the light of the resurrection it gradually becomes possible to see that it
was not that God was previously violent, now blessing now cursing, …
but had now brought all that ambivalence to an end. Rather, it became
possible to see that was all human violence, with various degrees of
projection onto God. God had been from the beginning always, immutable,
love, and this love was made manifest in sending God’s Son into the
midst of violent humans, even into the midst of their persecutory
projections of God, so that they might treat him as a human victim and
thus reveal the depth of the love of God, who was prepared to be a human
victim simultaneously to show the depth of his love for humanity and to
reveal humanity as having been locked into the realm of the Father of lies.
(JoBW, 108)
These quotes are enough, I believe, to show that mimetic theory represents a
movement away from perceiving God as violent. This is a good thing and one of its
central insights that I do not wish to dilute or undo.
On the one hand, mimetic theory and its theological ramifications move us
away from the view of God as violent. On the other, the fiction of a writer who must
be considered great precisely from the perspective of mimetic theory proposes
violence as a privileged way through which God’s life comes to humans. There is a
5 relatively simple way to explain this apparent contradiction and while I do not believe
that it is sufficient, it is also not totally misguided. There is a difference in the way
that Girard and O’Connor use the word, violence. The difference may simply reflect a
change in the English language that occurred in the 1960’s, or it may reflect a more
conservative use by O’Connor. The difference comes out clearly in the text I quoted
above. O’Connor writes: “violence is a force which can be used for good or evil.” In
present day usage we would say that force is something that can be used for good or
evil but violence is forced used for evil. When Girard uses the word violence is
almost always carries with it a negative connotation. Violence is what is used against
victims and that means it is evil. I think O’Connor would agree that that is an evil use
of violent.
There is other evidence that O’Connor’s use and understanding of the word
was more scholastic than that of Girard’s. In a letter written to someone who had read
the novel in manuscript she wrote: “The violent are not natural” (1101). I think that
O’Connor is referring here not so much to the Aristotelian tradition which classifies
movements as natural (a rock falling) and violent (a rock being thrown up in the air),
according to whether or not the movement accords with the nature of the thing. St.
Thomas can also use violent in this sense. To go against one’s nature is to be violent.2
Rather, I think she is referring to St. Thomas’ teaching that the proper end of the
human being is supernatural, that is, beyond what she is capable of by her own
powers. Thus, to be violent is to struggle against settling for what we can achieve on
our own. She refers to St. Thomas’ gloss on this verse as saying “that the violent
Christ is here talking about represent those ascetics who strain against mere nature. St.
Augustine agrees” (1101).
6 O’Connor gives one other extended reflection on the title in a letter to Dr. T. R.
Spivey, dated March 16, 1960.
One thing I observe about the title is that the general reaction is to think
that it has an Old Testament flavor. Even when they read the quotation,
the fact that these are Christ’s words makes no great impression. That this
is the violence of love, of giving more than the law demands, of an
asceticism like John the Baptist’s, but in the face of which even John is
less than the least in the kingdom – all this overlooked. I am speaking of
the verse, apart from my book; in the book I fail to make the title’s
significance clear, but the title is the best thing about the book. (HoB,
382)
This makes clear that the violence that bears away the kingdom of God is the violence
of love, a love that goes beyond any merely legal demand and requires a severe kind
of ascetical practice.
I think that the effort to be clear about a kind of violence that is appropriate and
that helps claim the kingdom of God is worthwhile because otherwise we may lose a
vocabulary that is important for understanding our own spiritual experience. More
importantly, a too easy dismissal of violence as simply evil in itself and not as force
that can be used for good or evil can lead to worse forms of it. In its simplest terms, if
I can in no way allow myself to be violent toward myself (asceticism) or allow God to
be violent toward me (the inbreaking of grace), then the likelihood of my being
violent toward others increases. In effect, one tries to move too quickly to a place one
is not ready to occupy. I think that O’Connor’s own thinking moves along these lines,
although it is never clearly spelled out.
7 There is a further reason why I think we should not give up too lightly the
language of violence in speaking about our experience with God. It has to do with the
fundamental paradox in which the revelation of novelistic truth as well as all
revelation is situated. The paradox entails that it is not only possible, but necessary
that people use the same word to point completely different aspects of the truth or that
people use words with opposite meanings to point to the same truth. I will try to show
that the underlying reason for this phenomenon is the existence of two logics within
our shared reality. These logics are not simply separate or parallel, this is not
Manichaeism, rather one order is constantly breaking into the other, upending it,
enclosing it, transforming it, redeeming it. Trying to capture that reality in fiction is
fiction’s highest aim; it is also its most difficult task.
The Difficulty of Revelation To show this paradox and its underlying logics I want to use some thoughts
O’Connor had on literature. I understand that O’Connor was above all else and before
all else a writer of fiction and yet I also tend to take an indirect route to understanding
her fiction. That is, I tend to use her non-fiction writings. This is not because I
necessarily consider her to be the best commentator on her own work (although I do
not consider her a bad commentator either).3 I do, however, find it a difficult task to
write directly about her fiction for three reasons. First, almost any summary of novels
and many of her short stories cannot help but make them sound ridiculous. Second, it
is difficult to analyze her writing without giving away the really shocking moments
that she has labored to make as effective possible and which lose all this effectiveness
when removed from their narrative context. Finally, and as a consequence of these
two reasons, I find that commenting directly on her fiction actually discourages other
people from wanting to read her – the very opposite of the effect I would like to have.
So, I will take an example that O’Connor uses from Hawthorne’s life and his writing
8 to show how O’Connor sees literature as the transforming life’s experience into a
narrative that can then transform the lives of others. I will also show that Flannery
was aware of another possibility, namely, of living in and writing out of a lie such that
life is again transformed but this time into death. Finally, I will look at a short episode
from The Violent Bear It Away to see the way in which O’Connor gave form to her
own spiritual experience so that it might be read and the reader transformed.
First, however, I turn to Girard for help in deepening our understanding of
both the obstacle to the truth and the nature of the violence required to overcome that
obstacle. For, the primary obstacle to truth is, as we shall see, violence itself. To
overcome this violence violently is, at the very least, paradoxical, and may well be
contradictory. But before jumping to that conclusion, we need to take a step back and
begin by understanding the obstacles to understanding that the obstacle to the truth is
violence. The difficulty of that sentence lies not so much in its grammatical
construction as in our own resistance to this fundamental truth. If we do not begin
here, then there is a danger that we will remain in the land of misunderstanding,
thinking that we are seeing, when in fact we are blind.
The real difficulty begins not with violence, which is often obvious, but with
our own desires. To understand the way desires, spawned from violence, can prevent
us from grasping the truth of violence as a block to truth, we need to return again to
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. There Girard exposes the paradox that novelists “reveal
the truth of desire in their great novels. But this truth remains hidden even at the heart
of the revelation. The reader, who is usually convinced of his own spontaneity,
applies to the work the meanings he already applies to the world” (16). In other words
the reader believes a lie. A lie that is both rooted in and that brings forth violence.
This lie is the meaning that he applies both to the world and to the text.
9 The great novelist is aware not only of the truth but also of the lie. The
novelist is aware of the lie first in herself and therefore also in the reader. The lie can
seem innocent enough – I want what I want because I want it. My desires are mine
and arise from myself alone. But this is a deceptive view not only of oneself but also
of the world and, as Girard says, it then gets applied to the otherwise revelatory texts
in such a way that they seem to add their weight to the lie. The romantic reading of
Cervantes’ Don Quixote is one example that Girard gives.
Believing the lie about our own desire is neither innocent nor trivial. It is the
starting point of a process that leads to scapegoating and violence. It works something
like this. Someone wants something and that person believes simply that: She wants
what she wants because she wants it. It turns out, interestingly enough, that the other
also wants what she wants. Neither can seem to see that the one desires the object
precisely because the other does and vice versa. Both reach for it and frustrate the
other’s desire in so reaching. The first lie is each person’s belief in the priority of their
respective desire over the over the other. At this primitive level of wanting and
reaching for the same thing, how does one decide who gets what, or who should get
it? Each of us has equal claim. Some form of violent resolution becomes inevitable.
Our small, irresolvable conflict grows as more and more members of the
community are drawn into the violence (violence being the most mimetic
phenomenon). Here is the second and more damaging of the lies: The other is
responsible for this violence that the community is now suffering and therefore the
first person sees herself as innocent. She is innocent because she believes that her
desire was hers alone and has priority over the other’s. Therefore, her violence against
the other is also good and the other’s violence is evil. The other and his violence must
be violently expelled. This expulsion further confirms the first’s priority over the
10 other, it confirms the goodness of her violence as a transcendent force that brings
order to the community.
When violence becomes a transcendent force bringing order to the community, it hides true transcendence. Girard describes the hidden quality of revelation using these terms in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. He begins by making clear that there is a logic of violence, a way of thinking based in violence and this constitutes a transcendent violence which hides true transcendence. “To rid ourselves of this confusion, to detect transcendent love -­‐-­‐ which remains invisible beyond the transcendent violence that stands between -­‐-­‐ we have to accept the idea that human violence is a deceptive worldview and recognize how the forms of misunderstanding that arise from it operate” (TH, 217). Very much like the similarities between the romantic lie and the novelistic truth of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, the two forms of transcendence appear to be very close, almost identical. Further, these analogies between the two forms of transcendence transcend any cultural differences so that they amount to very much the same thing. This makes possible “almost instantaneous conversion” between them in spite of there being also a “radical, an abysmal opposition” (217). I want to use what Girard has to say about the divinity of Christ, not so much
to talk about the divinity of Christ as to show the impossibility of the revelation of
truth about violence by a human being. We do not have, on our own power, the
language for the revelation.
Either you are violently opposed to violence and inevitably play its game,
or you are not opposed to it, and it shuts your mouth immediately. In other
words, the regime of violence cannot possibly be brought out into the
11 open. … This unprecedented task of revealing the truth about violence
requires a man who is not obliged to violence for anything and does not
think in terms of violence -- someone who is capable of talking back to
violence while remaining entirely untouched by it.
It is impossible for such a human being to arise in a world completely
ruled by violence and the myths based on violence. In order to understand
that you cannot see and make visible the truth except by taking the place
of the victim, you must already be occupying that place; yet to take that
place, you must already be occupying that place; yet to take that place,
you must already be in possession of the truth. You cannot become aware
of the truth unless you act in opposition to the laws of violence, and you
cannot act in opposition to these laws unless you already grasp the truth.
All mankind is caught within this vicious circle. For this reason the
Gospels and the whole New Testament, together with the theologians of
the first councils, proclaim that Christ is God not because he was crucified,
but because he is God born of God from all eternity. (TH 218-9)
The texts of the Gospel have a logic. It is not simply opposed to or set against the
violence of logic, for that would be to engage not just with, but in the logic of
violence. For Girard in Things Hidden the divinity of Christ is a hypothesis that we
have to accept because it is “the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the
revelation of in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power
of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception”
(219).
O’Connor is not constrained by Girard’s anthropological perspective. She is,
rather, constrained in her novels by her art. One thing that Girard teaches us is how to
12 learn the truth from novels; how to read them so that they deliver truths that go
beyond what philosophy and the social sciences have to offer. Thus, we will look
carefully at one episode from a novel in a moment, but first I want to deepen the
context for the novel by examining what O’Connor has to say about these matters in a
nonfiction setting. As we shall see, O’Connor identifies two lines of relationship or
what I would call two logics. The first is a line from lived experience to the form of
fiction and then into the life of another, a reader, with consequences no author can
foresee or control. The other is a line from sentimentality to genocide. She does not, it
was not her vocation, spell out the relationship between these lines, but she does make
clear that they “are not so far removed” (831).
“Memoir for Mary Ann” O’Connor’s vision, whether expressed in her non-fiction essays or in her
fiction, is rooted in a belief, similar to that of Girard’s quoted above, that the Gospel
revelation contains a power of deconstructing culture. Her essays evince a high degree
of conscious control over her art and there is much that can be learned from them, but
for our purposes the most enlightening reflections concerning the role of violence are
contained in the only piece she wrote to introduce someone else’s writing.
O’Connor was a successful writer who lived in rural Georgia. She was also
very accessible, answering every letter addressed to her. Naturally, some of these
letters came from people seeking her help to break into the publishing world or
recommending to her different projects to which she might turn her authorial hand.
One such letter came from a group of nuns in Atlanta Georgia who wanted O’Connor
to write the biography of girl they had cared for and whom they considered to be a
saint. O’Connor was aware that her gifts as a writer did not extend to making a child
saint come alive. She could do much more with child demon. So she figured she had
rid herself of this task and the world of pious tale when told the sisters it would be
13 much better if they wrote it themselves and, when they were finished, that she would
edit the manuscript. She writes:
I felt that a few attempts to capture Mary Ann in writing would lead them
to think better of the project. It was doubtful that any of them had the
literary gifts of their foundress. Moreover, they were busy nurses and had
their hands full following a strenuous vocation.
The manuscript arrived the first of August. (828)
The book is about a young girl who lived from the age of three until her death at
twelve in a free cancer home in Atlanta, Georgia run by the Dominican order of
Sisters called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. Mary Ann had been born
with a tumor on the side of her face. Its removal involved the loss of one eye and the
general distortion of one side of her face. But, to quote the Sister, “after one meeting
one was never conscious of her physical defect but recognized only the brave spirit
and felt the joy of such contact” (822).
It so happens that this particular order of sisters was founded by Rose
Hawthorne, the daughter of Nathaniel. O’Connor uses this historical background to
pluck out an episode from Hawthorne’s Our Old Home for comment. In this episode a
certain fastidious gentleman, while going through a Liverpool workhouse, is followed
by a poor, dirty child who manifested a desire to be held. The fastidious gentleman
was English, shy of human contact, distasteful of dirt, and accustom to observing. He
hesitated and struggled. Hawthorne writes:
So I watched the struggle in his mind with a good deal of interest, and am
seriously of the opinion that he did a heroic act and effected more than he
dreamed of toward his final salvation when he took up the loathsome
14 child and caressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. (quoted on pp.
824-5).
Now this episode in the novel is, in fact, based on an incident in Hawthorne’s own life.
Hawthorne’s wife published his notebooks after his death and they contain an account
of the incident that differs in details but corresponds closely to the incident in the
novel.
Hawthorne’s daughter wrote that she felt that the words Hawthorne had
written about the incident in the Liverpool workhouse contained the greatest words
her father had ever written. For O’Connor, the greatness of the words is confirmed by
the fruit that they bore. There is a relationship between the words of the father and the
acts of the daughter. This is the first logic of which I spoke above.
She discovered much that he sought, and fulfilled in a practical way the
hidden desires of his life. The ice in the blood which he feared, and which
this very fear preserved him from, was turned by her into a warmth which
initiated action. If he observed, fearfully but truthfully; if he acted,
reluctantly but firmly, she charged ahead, secure in the path his
truthfulness had outlined for her. (826)
This charging ahead by Rose Hawthorne led her to Catholicism, to the founding of an
order of Sisters and to founding homes to care for those with incurable cancer. It
eventually led to a group of women caring for Mary Ann and being so impressed with
her life and liveliness that they felt compelled to write an account of it and get it
published. It ultimately resulted in the “Introduction” that Flannery O’Connor wrote.
It allowed O’Connor to reflect on the culture in which she found herself, a culture that
would ask not so much why Mary Ann had to die at such a tender age but why such a
deformed person should be born in the first place.
15 O’Connor writes:
“one of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to
discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His
goodness, you are done with Him. … Busy cutting down human
imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of the
good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment;
Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre
of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and
our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they
saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is
to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.
It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is
wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of
tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in the forced labor camps
and in the fumes of the gas chamber. (830-1)
So O’Connor is aware of another logic, the logic of violence, that begins for her with
a separation of tenderness from Christ, the source of love, and ends in the
apocalypse.4 As we already saw above, she is aware also of the first logic, “a direct
line between the incident in the Liverpool workhouse, the work of Hawthorne’s
daughter and Mary Ann – who stands not only for herself but for all the other
examples of human imperfection and grotesquerie which the Sisters of Rose
Hawthorne’s order spend their lives caring for”(831). In this quote, between the
incident in the workhouse and the work of Hawthorne’s daughter, O’Connor leaves
out the notebooks and novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. She leaves out the role that
literature plays in this line, while emphasizing it, by taking her examples from
16 literature, in the other. I do not believe this accidental. All great authors are keenly
aware of the evil of literature. Dante characterizes the book that Franscesco and Paulo
were reading and that led to their fatal kiss as “Galeotto.” Girard comments: Galleot
(or Galehalt) is the treacherous knight, Arthurs’ enemy, who sows the seeds of
passion in the hearts of Lancelot and Guinevere. It is the book itself, Francesca
maintains, that plays the role of the diabolical go-between, the pander, in her life.”5
For Cervantes it is the romances that Don Quixote read that caused his insanity. The
instances could be multiplied. Perhaps this literary connection is why O’Connor
observes that these two lines are “not so far removed” from each other. In any case
O’Connor is explicit about one thing: It is the story of Mary Ann that “will illuminate
the lines that join the most diverse lines and that hold us in Christ” (831).
But in a very real way the story of Mary Ann is not only not an O’Connor
story, it does not even provide the makings for one. She herself admits her inability to
render this goodness alive. She writes that she is only capable of dealing with wicked
children. O’Connor’s fiction we have to turn to find the other line, the line from
tenderness and pity to the gas chamber illuminated.
The Character of Rayber In her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, O’Connor has a character that
uses precisely the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God. His name is
Rayber and he is the nephew of a backwoods prophet, the uncle of the protagonist of
the novel, and father to a retarded child named Bishop. He was kidnapped by his
uncle, the prophet, at the age of seven and baptized. Thus, he began his own suffering.
His own chance at a full life was “ruined” by his uncle. Ruined because, as Rayber
explains it to his uncle: “A child can’t defend himself. Children are cursed with
believing. You pushed me out of the real world and I stayed out of it, until I didn’t
17 know which was which. You infected me with your idiot hopes, your foolish
violence… 376-7.
For O’Connor the uncle’s hopes were not idiotic and his violence may have
been foolish but only in the sense that God’s wisdom is foolishness to us. For
O’Connor the prophet’s violence is of God and from God. As we saw earlier,
O’Connor holds fast to the principle that there is always a price to be paid for being
restored to reality and that price in fiction can be represented as violence.
Through her art O’Connor makes concrete the way divine realities can be read
in two diametrically opposed ways. In effect Rayber accuses his uncle of the most
serious sin in the New Testament: scandalizing of these “little ones.” In Matthew’s
Gospel Jesus says: “But if any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little
ones who believe in me it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened
around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mt. 18.6).
O’Connor is raising the question whether telling a young person of his adoption by
God, his brotherhood with Christ, and his vocation is to scandalize the child. Rayber
certainly feels victimized. As we shall see O’Connor’s answer is not unambiguous.
The episode I analyze here has Rayber standing outside an evangelical
Protestant mission in the dead of night. He had been following his nephew after the
nephew snuck out one night and this where he ends up. Looking through a small
window that gives him a side view of the stage, the first words he hears “Suffer the
little children to come unto Him.” These words are spoken as a way of introduction
for a 12-year-old girl to prophesize. All Rayber can hear in that sentence is violent
exploitation.
18 Another child exploited. Rayber thought furiously. It was the thought a
child’s mind warped, of a child led a way from reality that always enraged
him, bring back to him his own childhood seduction. (408)
The sight of the child infuriates Rayber. His “fury encompassed the parents,
the preacher, all the idiots he could not see who were sitting in front of the child, party
to her degradation” (410-2). The yield of Rayber’s scandal at this spectacle is pity.
“His pity encompassed all exploited children – himself when he was child, Tarwater
[his nephew] exploited by the old man [his uncle, the prophet], this child exploited by
her parents, Bishop [his retarded son] exploited by the very fact that he is alive” (412).
The fury and the pity feed and balance one another. They allow Rayber to divide the
world into two – the exploiters he rages against and the exploited whom he pities.
Over against both his fury and his pity O’Connor contrasts love by having the
little girl embody the “blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye” of faith. With that eye
she sees his face in the window, she looks into his heart and she sees his pity.
Meanwhile she speaks of love; a love that knows no pity, that “cuts like the cold wind”
(413).
The world has its hopes, and these hopes are not just quite different from the
hopes of believers; they are diametrically opposed. We know what the world hopes.
The world hopes what any of us would naturally hope if our child were in danger of
being killed because some lunatic in authority, like Herod in the New Testament, was
searching for a child in order to kill him. We would hope, if worst came to worst, that
he would find the find right child, that is, not our child. The hope of the world at the
moment of the incarnation is that Herod will slay the right child. The little girl says,
“the world hoped old Herod wouldn’t waste those children but he wasted them. He
didn’t get the right one. Jesus grew up and raised the dead” (413). The world’s hope
19 was disappointed. Christian hope was not. Jesus grew up and raised the dead. The
death of the Holy Innocents took on a much larger meaning. It became a part of a
counter story against violence. What O’Connor saw with piercingly clarity is that to
hope that the Holy Innocents had been spared is to hope against salvation. It is to
grant those innocents a longer life on earth at the cost of denying them eternal life. It
is accept death as having the last word.
Rayber’s responds to the girl’s profession of faith that Jesus raised the dead
by denying it. According to him, Jesus did not raise the Holy Innocents from the dead.
All the children to whom Rayber’s pity has been extended have been left not just
bereft by Jesus but seduced in his name into a realm of non-being. Over against the
girl’s vision of Jesus’ Second Coming Rayber has “a vision of himself moving like an
avenging angel through the world, gathering up all the children that the Lord, not
Herod, had slain” (413).
With these words O’Connor crystallizes the misrecognition that lies at the
heart of Rayber’s scandal at Jesus. Rayber attributes the violence of the slaughter of
the innocents to Jesus rather than to Herod. O’Connor sees the violence as the world’s
reaction to the violent entry of grace into its midst. For O’Connor the Holy Innocents
are both saved and they contributed through their deaths to our salvation because of
their resemblance to the Christ child.
The Rayber who moves “like an avenging angel through the world,” he is in
rivalry with Jesus (413). He wants to save, he wants to gather, he wants to protect and
teach, not with Jesus and as part of his mission, but against Jesus and on his own. He
is a demonic parody of Jesus, a scandalized version of him. “Come away with me! …
I’ll save you, beautiful child!” he silently implores. But the child continues to speak
of a Word of God that burns clear. “Her eyes were large and dark and fierce.” Rayber
20 “felt that in the space between them, their spirits had broken the bonds of age and
ignorance and were mingling in some unheard of knowledge of each other. …
Suddenly she raised her arm and pointed toward his face: “I see a damned soul before
my eye! I see a dead man Jesus hasn’t raised” (414-5).
Rayber’s head drops from the window “as if it had been struck by an invisible
bolt” (415). This is a moment of grace for him but he experiences it as a moment of
violence. When he finally gets away from her shrieking voice “a silent dark relief
enclosed him like shelter after a tormenting wind” (415). The relief is dark because it
is not from God. The tormenting wind is the Holy Spirit, but Rayber refuses to
recognize it.
Novelistic Inconclusivity As I mentioned above, I have no desire to ruin the novel for anyone by giving
away its ending or its most dramatic moments. Suffice it to say that it does end with a
conversion. For Girard, “The great novelistic conclusions are banal but they are not
conventional. … Conversion in death should not seem to us the easy solution but
rather an almost miraculous descent of novelistic grace” (DDN, 309-10). This kind of
ending is, in a sense, inevitable, since “repudiation of a human mediator and
renunciation of deviated transcendency inevitably call for symbols of vertical
transcendency whether the author is Christian or not” (DDN, 310).
Though this novel does ends with the conversion of its protagonist, Rayber is
not converted. In fact, he seems to be damned. O’Connor tells us that the novel
presents a story of one character that accepts his call and another, Rayber, who
successfully fights against his own. “Rayber and Tarwater are really fighting the same
current in themselves. Rayber wins out against it and Tarwater loses; Rayber achieves
his own will and Tarwater submits to his vocation” is her laconic restatement of the
novel in a letter (1170). According to O’Connor, Rayber makes a “Satanic choice” at
21 toward the end of the novel and “his inability to feel the pain of his loss is the
immediate result” (1170).
But what interests me more here at the end is the possibility that Rayber’s
fate might still be open. O’Connor writes in a letter that his collapse after being
unable to experience the pain of loss “may indicate that he not going to be able to
sustain his choice – but that is another book maybe” (1170). I find the indications
that she had not finished her own development as an artist of the revelation of
metaphysical desire are not limited to her correspondence but are also present in
the novel itself. It is to these indications I now turn.
From her letters, O’Connor is adamant that “it is the old man (the prophet)
who speaks for me” (1108). Rayber is the rival of this old man and hence a rival to
O’Connor herself. She gives, then, an indication in the novel that the story is not
so simple as Tarwater loses (wins) and Rayber wins (loses). Tarwater’s own story
was first played out with Rayber. Like Tarwater, he was kidnapped by the prophet
but with Rayber the old man did nothing to prevent his parents from taking him
back. Rayber had four days at Powderhead, Tarwater had 14 years.
When the old man related this history to Tarwater:
There were moments when the man thought he might have helped the
nephew on to his new course himself became so heavy in the old man that
he would stop telling the story to Tarwater, stop and stare in front of him
as if he were looking into a pit which had opened up before his feet
At such times he would wander into the woods and leave Tarwater alone
in the clearing, occasionally for days, while he thrashed out his peace with
the Lord, and when he returned, bedraggled and hungry, we would look
the way the boy thought a prophet out to look. He would look as if he had
22 been wrestling a wildcat, as if his head were still full of the vision he and
seen in its eyes, wheels of light and strange beasts with giant wings of fire
and four heads turned to the points of the universe. (333-4)
The violence of love here means that the prophet has to accept the possibility that
he has, in fact, scandalized a little one and that he is dependent on the Lord for
mercy in light of that. Rayber makes his own choices and bears his own
responsibility, but the lines that connect in Christ means that not only do none of
us come to Christ on our own, none of us walk away from him on our either.
It is hopeful that Rayber’s creator indicated that her own struggle with the
stumbling block, Rayber, may not have been at an end.
1
The following is not an exhaustive list of the work done. Gary Ciuba, Desire,
Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery
O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy, (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, 2007); John Desmond “The Mystery of the Word and the Act: The
Violent Bear It Away,” in American Benedictine Review (1973) 24: 342-347 and
“Violence and the Christian Mystery: A Way to Read Flannery O’Connor in
Literature and Belief, 1995, 15: 165-181; Susan Srigley, Flannery O’Connor’s
Sacramental Art, (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
2 St. Thomas writes the following: “For force is nothing else but the infliction of some violence. According to the Philosopher that is violent “whose principle is outside it with the being which suffers the violence contributing nothing.” The throwing of the stone upward would be an example, because the stone of itself is not at all inclined to that motion. On Truth, Q. 22, Art. 5, reply. St. Thomas is quoting Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 5 (110b 23). 3 Joseph Zornado quotes Asals to good effect: “Asals writes of O'Connor's self-­‐
assessment: ‘At one pole, she can be taken as the final and definitive authority on her own writing; at the other, she can be viewed as so unaware of what she was up to as to be irrelevant if not positively misleading (4-­‐5)” in Zornado, Joseph L., "A Becoming Habit: Flannery O'Connor's Fiction of Unknowing" (1997). Faculty Publications. Paper 247. http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/facultypublications/247 The Asals quote is from Frederick Asals, Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). To be clear, Asals himself does not endorse either extreme but sees the temptation of each. 4 Girard writes in a similar vein: “Romantic liberalism is the father of destructive nihilism” (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, p. 254). 5 Rene Girard, “To Double Business Bound”: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) p. 2. 23