The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor

Hard to know what to read after Proust. The harsh, rock-hewn sentences of Flannery O’Connor have turned out to be an ideal contrast. Amazingly, The Violent Bear It Away doesn’t seem to be in print in a UK edition. I had to buy an American edition at £11.50, though if I could have borne to wait a day or two I could have had it for less on Amazon, but I couldn’t and didn’t.

I wonder if it is because some novels are great – in fact why we claim them as great; not just greater but somehow transcendent of the rest – that we read in them whatever it is that currently interests or exercises us. A hundred pages in and it is beginning to creep into my awareness that this is a novel about among many things freewill, which is what I’ve been reading about elsewhere these last few months. Will Tarwater act freely? Can he, or anyone? Will he fulfill the prophecy of his Great Uncle or will he choose the world as represented by the schoolteacher, his uncle? It’s more complicated than that. There are layers of choosing and not choosing. Is to follow his great uncle also to follow God, or must he wait to hear God’s words himself? Can he follow both uncles, and if he did could he said to be any freer than merely following the one over the other? What would an independently made choice look like?

On page 104  Tarwater has just found his way to his schoolmaster uncle who is deaf and is hung about with machinery to aid his hearing. Tarwater, who is 14, says of his uncle’s device: ‘Do you think in the box…or do you think in your head?’ The whole problem of consciousness summed up in the passing remark of a peculiar boy!