The Violent Bear It Away

The Violent Bear It Away is by Flannery O'Connor. It is her second novel. She published 3 short story books and 2 novels. Today it amounts to 3 books with the stories collected into one volume.

I'm also reading Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch. The Gooch. She was briefly famous as a child for teaching a chicken to walk backwards.

"I ain't worried what my underhead is doing." p. 171. I guess the underhead is subconscious, or maybe the thinking mind, or the observing ego. Who knows. I google scholar-ed it and came up with nothing. Tarwater is the kind of American that says he's going to do things and not talk about it. The introvert who has some thoughts, but doesn't want society to interfere with his vision of what he thinks he knows. A Trump supporter.

I'm not a Catholic (I'm a Buddhist), but I do sort of like her exploration of the wounded atheist struggling to fight off Christianity. Makes me think of my father, who points his fingers upward at god, and makes me think that he is strongly reacting against a repudiation of god. I'm just not interested enough to repudiate. To me god is either transcendental and remote or it's an evil activist god. God made free will and therefore isn't accountable to the evil in the world just slides back to the remote transcendental god that pressed the button but doesn't do anything else.

And I've spent my summers in the bible belt with Baptist and Episcopalian grandparents. So these southern gothic stories resonate with me, flesh out something I almost want to try and say. I felt a kind of sweetness in Wise Blood, perhaps something transcendentally spiritual or all-spiritual, that I can appreciate.

I also like the craft of her sentences. I never really knew what people meant when they said they liked the writing style. I like plain and simple, but it turns out plain and simple is not that easy and writing clearly is not that easy.

Links

Free electronic versions of the book

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