flannery o'connor

People scourged by unseen passions! Christianity! Prophets! Be your own savior?


I have so many questions about her characters. The first is about how religion plays on peoples' minds. It, or Old Tarwater's version of it, was unbelievably seductive to these two little kids. The school teacher spent four measly days with him and got traumatized for life, stricken with a "love" that I don't quite understand. Frank spent a lot longer with him, but it transformed him into a lunatic heretofore unimaginable. Is it because Old Tarwater's religion told them they were special? That they came from such horrific circumstances that anything that told them there was a plan and a paradisiacal destiny was irresistible? I guess one can see the power of that religion in how it turns Frank's "I was born out of a wreck" into the appropriately gnarly birth of a prophet—he was born shortly before his parents got killed in a car accident! And the old school teacher had a mom that got drunk alone in her room and a father rarely there! Religion just sanctified their fucked upness, gave them a powerful, dangerous sense of purpose.

And freedom too, I guess. The Violent Bear It Away is kind of a nightmare version of the frontier story, of the noble savage. Instead of being a wholesome, woodsplitting auto didact Frank ends up monstrously proud and ignorant. His writing down how much he thought the school teacher's ravioli dinner in the restaurant was worth so that he could pay him back and wouldn't owe him nothing was hilarious. "Minding my bidnis" is the fierce flipside of the prophet coin. To be "beholden" is the ultimate nightmare.

Be your own savior! I think Frank's seeing the tree he forgot he set on fire and so hearing and believing he had to be a prophet after seeing the grave of Old Tarwater who he'd thought he'd burned and so believing in the supernatural rightness of that old, evil man is the saddest, saddest, saddest goddamn thing. The book switches between calling him Tarwater and the boy and I think if I tracked those changes it'd correspond to his pitifulness and how hard and inscrutable he is with his uncle. He's a boy at the end, for sure.

How's Frank like Hazel from Wise Blood? They seem like practically the same person to me. Descendants of raging preachers, young, almost totally alone, infected with a sense of purpose.

Bishop, the mentally handicapped kid, is super interesting to me. He's made a vessel for other peoples' actions, for their infinite love or cruelty. He's a lamb, so anyone with him's made a shepherd (Ah? Ahhhh?). I wonder if there's a line to be drawn between him and Enoch's stuffed homunculus in Wise Blood. They're fixations, things on which other people perform their destiny. Bishop reminded me of the demented grandpa in A Separation, who definitely functioned that way.

more soooon




"An acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth" !!