Violence and Education
Flannery O’Connor, best known for her short stories, wrote two novels before her untimely death at the age of 39. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, explores many profound and difficult themes, just one of which is education.
To understand this strange, disturbing novel, we must first let go of our modern assumptions and try to see clearly the vision that this brilliant Catholic writer is offering her readers. Flannery knew, as she acknowledged in a letter, that her “modern reader will identify himself with the schoolteacher [George Rayber], but it is the old man [Mason Tarwater, the seemingly crazy backwoods prophet] who speaks for me.”
These two men are polar opposites, and much of the tension in the novel surrounds their nephew/grand-nephew’s decision about who he belongs to and who he ought to follow. Ultimately this decision is about whether he should follow God or the devil, a choice not embodied by these two men but made clear to us by the voice of a “stranger” – the devil – who tries to talk young Tarwater into the idea that he belongs to no one but himself. (Interestingly, the readers who mistakenly side with Rayber also mistake the voice of the devil in the book for the voice of light and reason).
Young Tarwater was born in the car accident that killed his mother and was orphaned when his father committed suicide as a result of this car accident. His mother’s brother, George Rayber (the “schoolteacher”) decides to raise young Tarwater, but instead Rayber’s uncle, Mason Tarwater, kidnaps the baby in order to baptize him and raise him in the woods as a prophet.
Mason Tarwater has raised his grand-nephew in an unconventional way, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t offered him an education. On the first page we read that “his [great] uncle had taught him Figures, Reading, Writing and History beginning with Adam, expelled from the Garden and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment.”
Of course, this is meant to be funny (Flannery’s writing is often hilarious), but there’s also much integrity in it. Mason recognizes that there is no separation between religious and secular history, that the plan of God has one golden thread uniting all of it. This comprehensive view of history, along with the 3Rs make up Tarwater’s learning, but his real education is the whole of his time in the woods of Powderhead, Tennessee where he has, in short, been introduced by his uncle to reality.
Fr Luigi Giussani in The Risk of Education quotes the Jesuit theologian Josef Jungmann, in defining education as “an introduction to total reality,” a phrase echoed throughout the work of Sofia Cavelleti, foundress of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS). With this definition of education in mind, what could be a better education than direct, unmediated contact with reality through sacrament and nature? Crazy old Mason Tarwater offers his nephew both.
This is contrasted to the kind of education Tarwater might have received in the city under the direction of the schoolteacher, George Rayber, in which “children his age were herded together in a room to cut out paper pumpkins under the direction of a woman.” These comments are certainly comical, but that doesn’t make them untrue. To be in school was, to young Tarwater, to be “one among many, indistinguishable from the herd.” Instead, Tarwater was guaranteed “purity of his up-bringing to preserve him from contamination” that he might be “free for the pursuit of wisdom.” In other words, the risk to young Tarwater is greater than just boredom and conformity. It’s his very soul that is at stake, as evidenced by the truant officer being thought of by old Tarwater as “the devil’s emissary.”
The other thing Tarwater tries to avoid is being “laid out in parts and numbers” by his uncle Rayber. Rayber represents the modern man who is proud that his “guts… are in [his] head”, exemplified by his hearing aid which makes him appear to the woman at the lodge “like something human trapped in a switch box.” He is impotent to act, according to old Tarwater who says “he could only get everything inside his head and grind it to nothing” and is described by old Tarwater as having “nothing” behind the look in his eyes. “He’s full of nothing.”
But what makes Rayber an interesting character is that he isn’t just dark and hopeless. When he was a boy, he too was kidnapped by his uncle, Mason Tarwater. This profoundly impacted Rayber, and the schoolteacher spends the rest of his life trying to weed out the seed that had been planted at his baptism.
He spent only four days at Powderhead but in that short time, old Tarwater introduced Rayber to reality. He “taught him what was necessary to know and baptized him. He made him understand that his true father was the Lord and not the simpleton in town[…] Since this was the first time anybody had bothered to tell these facts to the schoolteacher, he could not hear too much of them, and as he had never seen woods before or been in a boat or caught a fish or walked on roads that were not paved, they did all those things too[…] His sallow face had become bright in four days.”
When Rayber’s largely absent father comes to retrieve him from the uncle, he shouts at his child, “Back to the real world, boy” two times. But what he refers to as the real world is the crowded city of lifeless institutions and processed food. Rayber “was in despair at having to leave.” He’s had a taste of reality and he doesn’t want to go back. But he was forced to, “the light had left his eyes” and he ultimately becomes a product of his education.
He grows up angry that old Tarwater “pushed [him] out of the real world” and “infected [him] with idiot hopes”. He falsely believes that with enough study, he can understand anything, and that “what we understand, we can control.” He learns to view people in light of their utility (or lack thereof) and, most tragically, thinks that one can be his own savior. This is how he defines the real world: “expecting exactly what [one] can do for [one]self”, “where there’s no savior but yourself.” Rayber sadly believes that “the great dignity of man” is his “ability to say: I am born once and no more.” and incorrectly defines freedom is “a chance to develop into a useful man, a chance to use your talents to do what you want to do” (as opposed to old Tarwater, who knows that freedom actually comes from “knowing the Truth, in the freedom of the Lord Jesus Christ.”) As young Tarwater puts it to the truck driver toward the end of the book, “My other uncle knows everything […] but that don’t keep him from being a fool.”
It is to this foolish man with these warped ideas of freedom and reality that young Tarwater arrives, having hitched a ride into town after his great-uncle’s death. Rayber is excited to have a chance to remedy what he perceives as the “terrible injustice” that old Tarwater did to his nephew by preventing him from getting a “decent education.” Old Tarwater was well aware of the “advantages” Rayber wanted to offer his nephew and considers that he has saved young Tarwater from them. Other than Rayber, it is also the voice of the devil and of the first embodiment of the devil, Meeks who question/claim that Tarwater’s education falls short by not including machines and trying to make Tarwater doubt/question the truth he has been taught. He also sees it as a chance to “do for [Tarwater] all the things that he would do for” his own son, Bishop, “if it were any use.” Bishop, the image of Christ in the story, has special needs and therefore, in Rayber’s eyes, is of no value.
Late in the book, Rayber and Bishop revisit Powderhead, and Rayber can hardly bear the impact that being back in this place of nature and wonder, the site of his life-changing baptism, has on him. His heart beats “frenetically” and he is unable to make his “brain engage” while he is there (though he tries by “reduc[ing] the whole wood in probable board feet for an education for [young Tarwater]”). Because he is there with his child – the child he sadly considers ‘a mistake of nature’ and yet cannot help but love despite all of his best efforts– he feels what it was like to be there as a child himself, when he was introduced to the truth and reality that he tragically spent the rest of his life trying to deny. It’s not quite a conversion, but the ambiguous ending does leave hope for Rayber’s future.
As for young Tarwater, his redemption at the end of the novel is clear. But the process of getting there isn’t pretty. In order to be broken open to receive grace, young Tarwater first commits and then is the victim of very upsetting violence. As is true for every Flannery story, the violence is not gratuitous but serves a very specific purpose. In a talk Flannery gave at Hollins College in 1963, she remarked 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.”
Flannery’s insight into the considerable cost of returning to reality leads us to reflect upon how we can prevent our heads - and the heads of our children - from hardening like young Tarwater’s, in the hope that we may open ourselves to grace and, God willing, be spared the violence we see in this novel. The answer, I believe, lies in our definition of education: we introduce (and as often as needed, reorient) ourselves and our children to reality: through the reception of the sacraments, by spending time in nature and, dare I say, by reading excellent literature, like The Violent Bear It Away.