Studies in O'Connor: The Violent Bear it Away
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Eye Imagery and The Violent Bear it Away
During Mason’s first encounter with Bishop in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away the narrator takes special care to point out the immense gravity in the eyes of the idiot child; the old man can only see “one spectacled eye” staring at him from the crack of an open door. Eyes stand out starkly even though they never function as an imagistic singularity.
From a psychoanalyst viewpoint this method of imagistic representation, seems chronologically fitting. For O'Connor, as many have noted, the inconsequential details of the scene stick in the mind as inexplicably vivid, even though the central horror of the experience is not missing, see the work of Phyllis Greenacre. Eye imagery also surfaces in descriptions of natural entities like lakes, moons, suns, or the dreamy sky, which Tarwater sees as “dotted with fixed tranquil eyes." O’Connor’s environment becomes a projection of impulses and fears so strong that they dissolve the ego’s power, a figureative death.
The eyes, then, act as a kind of axel for the wheel of novel’s imagery. When Tarwater burns Powderhead to the ground he hallucinates a pair of eyes wreathed in flame. Eyes also reflect certain aspects of character development. Tarwater’s inability to look at Bishop in the eye, for example, indicates his unwillingness to face his destiny. The narrator describes non-human objects with imagery of the eyes to suggest the existence of a divine power in the cosmos and elsewhere, staring from above or below. In humans, however, eyes act as the body’s vessel of God and any desire to repress this presence is expressed as a physical weakness.
The usage of eye imagery to describe elemental bodies, like lakes, suns, moons, and skies, suggests the presence of an oppressive power in nature. After being dropped off at Rayber’s house, Tarwater spends a few moments sitting on the doorstep, too scarred to enter, contemplating the eye-like quality of the stars. He cannot look directly at the sky even though “he was unpleasantly aware of the stars." Nature serves both as the hand of God and as the barometer registering Divine disapproval or benediction. This could explain why Tarwater felt so uncomfortable under the immensity of the sky, why the stars “seemed to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him, as if he were alone in the presence of an immense silent eye." The sun, for example, like an omnipotent father floating in the sky, keeps an observant eye on Tarwater. The sun “watches” Tarwater. Water too becomes a physical entity that responds to Tarwater’s actions. Tempted to baptize Bishop in a fountain Tarwater stands at the edge, staring “deep into its eyes.” “I’d drown him first,” he says to the fountain—simply a reflection of his own face in the water—to which the eyes eerily reply “Drown him then."
In the same way that nature, described with eye imagery, suggests the presence of an oppressive divinity, human eyes act as mirrors, reflecting the supernatural forces already latent in a body. All the devil figures, for example, have terrifyingly bizarre eyes, whether it is the “yellow-rimmed” eyes of the ‘stranger,’ Meeks’s “soot-colored” eyes, or the neon violet eyes of the ‘friend.’ Their ocular abnormality sets them apart from the city folk whose eyes “didn’t grab you like the eyes of country people." The eyes of the old man also possess a divinity; even in death they glow “silver” and can focus sharply on something from across a room, suggesting that the eyes can live on without the body. For human characters, the acceptance of fate and the presence of God in the body cause the eyes to glimmer and glow.
Tarwater, who constantly tries to evade his fate by refusing to baptize Bishop or bury his uncle, suffers from visual blurriness, suggesting that the evasion of fate causes blindness. Tarwater physically struggles to focus his eyes in the presence of characters who have realized their destiny, like the old man. When looking at the old man Tarwater keeps “his vision located on an even level, to see no more that what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at the surface of that." Before burning Powderhead to the ground, an figurative act of rebellion against his fate, Tarwater’s eyes become “half-open” and “unseeing." Additionally, in a flashback during which he disobeys one of the old man’s commands Tarwater’s eyes are described as “open but not well focused." Any event or action integral to his destiny has some effect on his vision and when he resists the divine powers will push back. Tarwater finds it difficult, in effect, to look at his future.
While Tarwater’s evasion of fate causes blindness Rayber’s evasion of fate makes him incapable of looking at the spiritually grotesque. He becomes agitated staring into the eyes of the young evangelist, Lucette Carmody. She stares at him through a window, her “dark gaze” finds him, causing him to experience “a deep shock” that makes him “certain that the child had looked directly into his heart." In order to withstand the severity of the moment Rayber turns off his hearing aid, deafening him to the word of God, a figurative blindness. Rayber cannot bear to see or hear this sound. Even the memory of the old man’s eyes, full of God, disturbs him. In the following passage Rayber meditates the similarity between Tarwater’s gaze and the old man’s:
Something in his very look…seemed to feed on him. With Tarwater’s eyes on him, he felt subjected to a pressure that killed his energy before he had a chance to exert it. The eyes were the eyes of the crazy student farther, the personality was the old man’s, and somewhere between the two, Rayber’s own image was struggling to survive and he was not able to reach it. (115)Rayber still feels traumatized by the memory of the old man with “mad fish-colored eyes” (170), telling him that he must be “born again.” “It was the eyes that got me…” he reflects, “children may be attracted to mad eyes. A grown person could have resisted…Children are cursed with believing."
It is no accident that both Rayber and Tarwater possess similar weakness in the eyes. Like Tarwater, Rayber had been kidnapped, baptized, and even spent a brief adolescent stint as a fundamentalist. Even though Rayber tries to distance himself from his former identity as a potential prophet he has merely repressed or distorted his vocation. But this “vocation” is familial, it resides in the blood, and the only way Rayber can escape it is to constantly force it down with neurotic control:
The affliction was in the family. It lay hidden in the line of blood that touched them, flowing from some ancient source, some desert prophet or polesitter, until, its power unabated, it appeared in the old man and him and…in the boy…He had kept it from gaining control over him by what amounted to a rigid ascetic discipline…He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made. (114)The eyes reflect this “affliction.” Carmody has accepted her vocation and so her eyes take on a fiery verve. The old man has embraced his affliction, so his eyes are lit ablaze. The fact that Rayber and Tarwater’s have weak eyes does not does not necessarily indicate their lack of this affliction, but rather the repression of it.
Rayber can repress his calling, but Tarwater cannot; as a result, his eyes maintain a glint of fire, periodically bubbling to the surface, spilling over. Something lurks, subdued, behind his eyes. He tries to contain his affliction, his destiny, his vocation, but he struggles. In looking into Tarwater’s eyes Rayber sees an emptiness, but behind that he also sees something raging, on the point of explosion, trying to pierce through the surface, bright only like a pin hole can be bright, ready to burst forth. This turmoil in the eyes is Tarwater’s conflict of interests. He does not want to baptize Bishop, yet he cannot help feeling involuntarily aroused whenever Bishop approaches a body of water. When he attempts to baptize Bishop in a hotel swimming pool, for example, Rayber notices that Tarwater’s eyes “burned as if he beheld some terrible compelling vision." Rayber also notices Tarwater trying to pull back, “exerting an almost equal pressure from what attracted him.” Here, Tarwater’s physical resistance battles the divine power dormant in the eyes. Tarwater clenches his fists trying to resist the baptismal urge. His normal sight eventually fails, leaving in its wake a divine vision: “Rayber had the sense [Tarwater] was moving blindly, that where Bishop was he only saw a spot of light." Even the woman behind the hotel desk can see the God’s sinister plan unfurling in Tarwater’s gaze, as if each of his eyes were a diviner’s crystal ball:
His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing... convinced she had not seen it, she muttered, ‘Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.’ (156)Compulsion, encapsulated in the fiery gaze of the soon-to-be-prophet, overcomes Tarwater’s will to resist. The eyes then become the battle ground between Tarwater’s normal vision and Tarwater’s divine vision.
The juxtaposition of a Tarwater’s weak human vision and a strong divine vision parallels the (im)balance between his desire for autonomy and the force which compels him toward his predestined fate. “The old man had transferred his fixation to the boy,” Rayber realizes, and “there was no hope of discussing it sanely with him, for it was a compulsion." The exactitude of Tarwater’s divine vision confirms the ruthlessness of this compulsion, his eyes narrowing “so that the lake must have been reduced to the width of a knife-blade in his sight." Rayber still believes, however, that Tarwater can overcome this compulsion because—despite appearing controlled by outside forces—Tarwater can resist. He harbors an “undisguised hostility” in his body. His eyes yearn for Bishop’s baptism while his body literally “trembles” with fear, a fear of realizing a gruesome, predestined fate. Rayber must also ward off this compulsion, for he secretly desires the old man’s God sent vim and vigor. “He always felt with it a rush of longing to have the old man’s eyes—insane, fish-coloured, violent with their impossible vision of a world transfigured…[it] was like an undertow in his blood dragging him backwards to what he knew to be madness."
The narrator describes this ailment of compulsion, which apparently runs in the family, as a silence of the mind and ocular coruscation. “It was a strange waiting silence. It seemed to lie all around him like an invisible country whose borders he was always on the edge of, always in danger of crossing." The silence represents the death-like resolution that comes with ceding to God’s will. What is more, this silence becomes expressed in “the center of his eyes” as a fiery blaze. Tarwater clings to his identity as if to life; he resists baptizing Bishop as a way of eluding a figurative death. He “could have baptized [Bishop] any one of a hundred times,” the narrator reveals. However, “each time the temptation came, he would feel that the silence was about to surround him and he was going to be lost in it forever.” Rayber also senses the violent combat that rages within him, though he feels it as a compulsion to become his great-uncle. He realizes this when Tarwater gazes at him with “the eyes of the crazy student farther.” “The personality was the old man’s,” he thinks, “and somewhere between the two, Rayber’s own image was struggling to survive and he was not able to reach it." Both Rayber and Tarwater must straddle the desire for autonomy against the compulsion toward destiny.
Tarwater’s body, the manifestation of his autonomous will, is pitted against the eyes, the presence God’s control. As the body becomes lugubrious the eyes becomes powerful, and vise-versa. The brilliance of the prophet, dormant behind the eyes, comes out in Tarwater in times of physical duress. At the beginning of the novel the narrator explains how the old man would take Tarwater out into the woods, “occasionally for days,” and when Tarwater returns, weak and hungry, he would look “as if his head were still full of visions he had seen in its eyes." As his body begins to deteriorate toward the end of the novel his eyes grow fiery. Out of bodily destruction comes grace, also represented by the fact that Tarwater was born out of a wreck. Thelma J. Shinn, in her essay on the use of violence and grace in O’Connor’s fiction, explains the relationship between physical affliction and the presence of God. She argues that spiritual grotesques, like Carmody and the old man, possess physical afflictions while the secular grotesques possess spiritual afflictions. Secular grotesques “destroy the spirit in their attempts to save the body,” while the spiritual grotesques “at least sometimes are able to reach spiritual salvation through physical destruction” (Shinn 62). This inverse relationship between the body and the spirit is directly correlated to vivacity of the eyes.
For O’Connor the body cannot withstand the wrath of God. Violent acts, such as Tarwater’s rape, force characters to realize their vulnerability and that, try as they might, they cannot evade fate. For O’Connor, any idea that human life is perfectible by its own means is evil. The devil, for O’Connor, is simply man’s self-assurance and lack of humility. Before Tarwater burns Powderhead to the ground, the devil tells him: “Don’t everything you do, everything you have ever done, work itself out right or wrong before your eye?” (O’Connor 46). He says “before your eye” as if to hint “not before the Lord’s eye.” He tempts Tarwater with the prospect he has the power to fix his own situation, that it will not require the intervention of God. This section concludes with a reference to Tarwater’s prophetic blindness: once the devil incites him to set Powderhead aflame, the inebriated Tarwater becomes unable to focus his “half-open unseeing eyes." It takes an act of violence to shake Tarwater from these conceptions. Violence takes away the pretensions to power and reduces man’s body to dust, making him realize his true fragility, necessitating a complete and total submission to Christ.
Rayber never submits to the will of God, and as such he always remains a lost figure, a secular grotesque. Rayber’s final scene in the novel demonstrates the way in which his stubborn refusal to submit has turned him into an emotional cipher. Standing at his window, watching Tarwater drown Bishop in the lake, “he stood there waiting for the raging pain, the intolerable hurt that was his due, to begin, so that he could ignore it, but he continued to feel nothing. He stood light-headed at the window and it was not until he realized there would be no pain that he collapsed." Rayber’s lack of pain illustrates his severance from God; he is confined to the painless emptiness of Limbo and denied the purifying pain of Purgatory. Rayber never experienced an act violent enough to change his perception of his responsibility to God, whereas the devil’s final stand against Tarwater successfully brought him back to the holy fold. After Tarwater’s body has been completely destroyed, penetrated, and figuratively castrated, it is only then he can harbor humility and venture forth to “shout the truth.”
After he is brutally rapped Tarwater’s eyes take on new life, becoming “small and seedlike as if while he was asleep, they had been lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his head," while his body crumbles under the pressure of starvation. “His scorched eyes no longer looked hollow or as if they were meant only to guide him forward. They looked as if, touched with the coal like the lips of the prophet, they would never be used for ordinary sights again." His will to autonomy (the body) has been destroyed, and the will toward destiny (the eyes) has been set ablaze. Out of the ashes, Tarwater triumphs forward with his new eyes. Born-again, he no longer recognizes the landscape so “familiar to him since his infancy,” which appears “strange and alien." The old man’s command, “GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY,” provoke a sensation in Tarwater like “seeds opening one at a time in his blood," as if the spirit of God had lain dormant in Tarwater’s eyes, waiting to unfurl, waiting for Tarwater to submit to his inevitable future.
Eyes in the Violent Bear it Away always seem as if they are about to explode. Like the blazing sun that chases Tarwater, or the oppressive moon that blares bright red, God is everywhere and staring down. The sky too, beating, becomes a kind of oppressive, omnipotent force. Eyes, replete with the grace of the Lord, feed off the resistant body, like a parasite. Energized with grace, eyes rest always on the point of bursting, on the point of spilling over. Grace lurks behind them; God lurks behind them. Rayber chooses to repress this ocular force, chooses to ignore its power and lead a life of constant struggle, whereas Tarwater, undergoing a cleansing act of violence, realizes just how much he needs his moment of grace. For O’Connor, those who lead a life plagued by neither compulsion nor submission are not just living meaninglessly, but malignantly. Destiny, like the eyes of the prophet, are intrinsic, very much part of the body, stuck. No one in O’Connor’s fiction can escape the fury of Christ, just as no one can fully repress the divine fury of the eyes. The only way to rid the body of its predestined fate is to kill it. Likewise, to only way to rid the body of its eyes is to tear them violently from their sockets.
Faulkner and Flannery
Worked at the cannery
Writing the South into ruins
What took those batallions
of fine Union stallions
Four years took them pages to do in.