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A review by aegagrus
The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
3.5
Early in The Violent Bear it Away, I thought it was going to be a story about the ulterior motives and personal stakes lying behind ideologies (including but not exclusively religious ones). Certainly this book has a lot to say about the ways human beings use and abuse the vulnerable. But it soon became clear that this is not a story about well-defined motivations. This is a story about madness, irrationality, compulsion, mental disability -- it is difficult to find the right word(s), in part because of the immense gap between the way such phenomena were discussed in Francis Tarwater's milieu and the way they are discussed in our own.
The best I can say is this: this is a story about running away from some interior force perceived as mad or dangerous; about a child's path through resistance, dissociation, trauma, and eventually surrender. This is also a story about the intense and sinister fixation people can have towards those perceived as disabled; a fixation especially present in those who fear for their own psyche in some way. The terrifying but nuanced descriptions of both the schoolteacher Rayber's and Tarwater's feelings towards Rayber's son Bishop represent this theme at its most direct. The religious backdrop adds depth to O'Connor's themes, but I do not think it is in fact their core.
It is difficult to assess this book. Rayber's internal dialogue is sometimes difficult to believe in its mercurial intensity, but this is perhaps less a defect than a thematic element. O'Connor's trademark southern gothic style certainly infuses her writing with a rugged elegance and a palpable sense of danger, but also carries with it episodes which read as seemingly gratuitous, as well as the inescapable questions of racial tropes and racist language. The book is exceptionally well written, but not always well constructed.
At the end of the day, I suspect I will find The Violent Bear it Away as difficult to think about and talk about as I found it to read. This in itself is not a bad thing, but as a warning for those embarking upon this book it seems inescapable.
The best I can say is this: this is a story about running away from some interior force perceived as mad or dangerous; about a child's path through resistance, dissociation, trauma, and eventually surrender. This is also a story about the intense and sinister fixation people can have towards those perceived as disabled; a fixation especially present in those who fear for their own psyche in some way. The terrifying but nuanced descriptions of both the schoolteacher Rayber's and Tarwater's feelings towards Rayber's son Bishop represent this theme at its most direct. The religious backdrop adds depth to O'Connor's themes, but I do not think it is in fact their core.
It is difficult to assess this book. Rayber's internal dialogue is sometimes difficult to believe in its mercurial intensity, but this is perhaps less a defect than a thematic element. O'Connor's trademark southern gothic style certainly infuses her writing with a rugged elegance and a palpable sense of danger, but also carries with it episodes which read as seemingly gratuitous, as well as the inescapable questions of racial tropes and racist language. The book is exceptionally well written, but not always well constructed.
At the end of the day, I suspect I will find The Violent Bear it Away as difficult to think about and talk about as I found it to read. This in itself is not a bad thing, but as a warning for those embarking upon this book it seems inescapable.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Death, Mental illness, Racial slurs, Racism, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Abandonment
Moderate: Child abuse, Gun violence, Pedophilia, Rape, Fire/Fire injury, and Alcohol