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Eating the Bread of Life: Muted Violence in The Violent Bear It Away
- The University of Tennessee Press
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Eating the Bread of Life: Muted Violence in The Violent Bear It Away J. Ramsey Michaels Flannery O’Connor, in letters to Ted Spivey less than a year apart, described The Violent Bear It Away before it appeared as a novel “built around a baptism,” and after it appeared as “a very minor hymn to the Eucharist” (HB 341, 387). The first comment echoes an earlier letter to Elizabeth Bishop and has often served as a key to the interpretation of the book (CW 1092). The latter comment has received less critical attention, understandably in light of Tarwater’s calling to baptize Bishop, and the violent nature of that baptism. Bishop’s drowning by baptism (or baptism by drowning) has placed its stamp on the book’s interpretation , accenting the “violence” of which the title speaks. Baptism, to be sure, is the more “violent” sacrament, at least in its New Testament origins. The Apostle Paul wrote of being baptized into Jesus’ death, viewing it metaphorically as a kind of burial (Rom. 6:3–4). To Peter it was, if not a drowning, at least a narrow escape from drowning, in waters that evoked for him the memory of Noah’s flood (1 Pet. 3:20–21). John the Baptist foresaw a coming baptism “in Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11). Jesus himself saw a second “baptism” in his future, one that would bring fire on the earth (Luke 12:49–50), and challenged his disciples to share in it (Mark 10:38–39). The Eucharist, despite its association with Jesus’ death, has less violent connotations for O’Connor. Her controlling metaphor of “eating the bread of life” evokes the imagery of the feeding of the five thousand, not the formal institution of the Eucharist at the last supper. This is in keeping with the New Testament, where Jesus, as if anticipating the Eucharist, “takes” the loaves and fishes and “breaks” them before giving them out to the gathered crowd (Mark 6:41). Even more explicitly, the Gospel of John appends to the feeding narrative a discourse of Jesus in which he speaks of himself as “the bread of life” (John 6:35, 47), claiming, “If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever” (6:51a). O’Connor, had she chosen, could have made “eating the bread of life” into a violent image, like that of baptism, for Jesus added immediately, “and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6:51b), and continued, “Unless J. Ramsey Michaels 60 you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:53–54). Gretlund and Westarp (x–xi), citing “the widely broadcast story of prearranged cannibalism, where a man in Germany recently agreed to be killed and eaten by another man and was,” offer the comment that O’Connor “would perhaps have created a story about the Eucharist out of that material. After all, Jesus’s followers asked disgustedly, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ (John 6:52).” Significantly, that is precisely what O’Connor does not do in The Violent Bear It Away. On the contrary , her image of “eating the bread of life” is the one major nonviolent image in the book, muting to some degree the violence of the baptismal drowning of Bishop, the rape of Tarwater, and the burning of Powderhead. From the beginning, Tarwater resists his great uncle’s prophetic legacy, not because of the old man’s tumultuous visions of “wheels of light and strange beasts with giant wings of fire and four heads turned to the four points of the universe.” To these he would have been willing to say, “Here I am, Lord, ready!” What repels him are those “other times, when there was no fire in his uncle’s eye and he spoke only of the sweat and stink of the cross, of being born again to die, and of spending eternity eating the bread of life” (CW 334). The thought of “eating the bread of life” is not so much violent, in Tarwater’s eyes, as demeaning , something to be ashamed of, and yes, boring. “Had the bush flamed for Moses,” he wonders, the sun stood still for Joshua, the lions turned aside...