The Devil's Ground: THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY and THE GOSPEL OF MARK

 

The title of Flannery O'Connor's 1960 novel THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY comes from the Gospel of Matthew (11:12), but as I reread O'Connor's book recently, I was reminded more of the Gospel of Mark.

Mark differs from the other gospels in being shorter, leaner, and less expository. It has no virgin birth. Indeed, starting out, it tells us nothing at all of Jesus's early life. In Mark, Jesus simply appears among the anonymous throng of people coming from Galilee to be baptized by John the Baptist in the wilderness. Upon being baptized by the prophet, however, Jesus is immediately driven into the wilderness by the Spirit. "And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan, and was with the wild beasts." When he returns, he begins a ministry of exorcism and faith healing that he tries, repeatedly, to keep secret. While the Jesus of Mark does some teaching (though far less than in the other Gospels), he is more a man of action. And that action tends to be confronting a world of demons (including the infamous demon collective known as Legion). At the end, Christ is crucified and dies alone uttering the final words "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me." The oldest copies of Mark didn't even have a resurrection appearance. The book ended originally at Mark 16:8, with women coming to the tomb, finding it empty, and running away. The final verse reads, "Trembling and bewildered, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY is no Christ allegory, and I don't mean to imply that its story resembles the plot of Mark's Gospel. But O'Connor's second novel (like her first, WISE BLOOD) is obsessively focused on what she once called "the action of grace in ground held largely by the devil." One need only to read Mark again to see that this also happens to be the central thrust of that evangelist's narrative. 

O'Connor's novel follows Francis Marion Tarwater, a young man running away from his calling to be a prophet. The action of the novel hinges on the death of Tarwater's great-uncle, a wild-eyed fanatic who kidnapped the boy years before and raised him in a cabin the woods, preparing him to be a prophet. When the old man dies, however, the boy tries to shrug off his calling--getting drunk and burning down the old man's house--then heads into the city to see his other uncle, an atheist schoolteacher named Rayber. But Francis finds himself fighting the urge to baptize Rayber's young son Bishop, an act that itself was prophesied by the old man before his death.   

Although WISE BLOOD and THE VILOLENT BEAR IT AWAY share many characteristics--both are about young men attempting to run away from God, both are darkly comic, and both are unmistakably the work of a Catholic author filtering her vision through the lens of Southern Protestant fundamentalism--the second book more closely resembles Mark's vision of a demonic world. If WISE BLOOD is about a man tormented by God's grace, THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY is about a man tempted by Satan and his devil possessed followers. The ghostly 'stranger' who appears at Tarwater's side, whispering in his ear to forsake his calling to preach, takes a physical form in the book's penultimate chapter, when a hitchhiking Tarwater is picked up, drugged, and raped by a stranger in a lavender suit. In the dense symbolism of the novel--the stranger takes both Tarwater's prized hat and a corkscrew bottle opener given to him by the atheist schoolteacher--Tarwater is stripped of everything he has relied on and is left naked in the woods.

This last part reminded me of two of the strangest lines in Mark--indeed, two of the oddest lines in all of the Bible--verses 14:51-52. At the Garden, when Jesus is being arrested and all his disciples have abandoned him, we are told "And there followed him a certain young man having a linen cast about his naked body, and they laid hold on him. And the young man left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked." Who is this young man? Why is he the last one with Jesus, and why is he dressed only in a sheet? Why is Mark the only writer to report his existence? We're never told, but it bears repeating that Mark is a strange, cryptic book compared to the other Gospels. In this book, where secrecy is the coin of the realm, mysteries remain intact because the narrative is more about mystery than revelation.

Like the naked young man in the Garden, Tarwater flees, and he returns to the ashes of his great-uncle's burned down house. He hears a call to "GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY." Smearing himself with dirt from the old man's grave, he prepares to begin his journey "toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping."

In both O'Connor's novel and Mark's Gospel, the prose is pared down and spare, working in the service of a vision rich in dark symbolism and mystery. Neither author reveals all they know. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is this: for both Flannery O'Connor and Mark the Evangelist, the mystery is the revelation.    

      

    

Moses, Iron Man, and Jesus Walk Into A Cinema

Reading about the recent dust up between Martin Scorsese and Marvel fans, I couldn't help but think of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. It's a film that Scorsese admires and that he showcased in his documentary A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH AMERICAN FILM (1995). It's a finely crafted big budget spectacular. It's also a pretty bad film. What I mean is, no one watches THE TEN COMMANDMENTS today and thinks of it in anything other than genre terms. It's not a serious statement of religious conviction, it's not psychologically rich, and it's not a great work of cinema. Instead, it's the biggest of the biblical epics, the popular movie genre that dominated big screens in the 1950s. And biblical epics were, basically, proto-superhero movies. They have most of the qualities that we associate with superhero movies: square-jawed heroes with fantastic abilities, impressive special effects, romantic subplots, broad action and drama, and characters that fall pretty easily into the categories of good and bad. (About the only thing from the standard superhero tool kit that THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is missing is comedy, because DeMille didn't have a sense of humor.) I suspect Scorsese is probably making allowances for Moses that he won't make for Iron Man because he formed an attachment to the biblical epics as a kid. As a child, he looked past their goofiness and their shallowness because all he saw was their size and spectacle. The symbolism of the Bible writ large on the big screen fired his imagination, and that initial awe and wonder has stayed with him. The same is undoubtedly true of people who love comic book movies. Where they would watch THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and might only see stodgy cheese, they look past many of those same qualities in their beloved comic book movies because they bonded with those stories and characters as children. 

Something else that has inspired these reflections is that I rewatched Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST the other day. It's a fascinating film, and part of its fascination is that despite all of its controversy, in its heart it's kind of another cheesy biblical epic. It's dealing with deadly serious theological issues, but, I don't know, every time Harvey Keitel opens his mouth to debate Jewish law, I laugh. When the snake tempts Jesus in the desert with "Look at my breasts. Ooh Jesuuus," I laugh. And pretty much every time Peter Gabriel's very '80s score kicks in, I laugh.

Something that THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and a movie like AVENGERS: ENDGAME have in common is that they both essentially exist to do fan service. (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS was the only movie my fundamentalist grandfather liked, probably because it was designed to give him exactly the version of Moses he expected to see. Most comic book fans love ENDGAME for the same reason.) In this crucial respect, though, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is different. Scorsese made a film that appealed to a very narrow sliver of the moviegoing public. He made a biblical epic that would antagonize the kind of people who usually like biblical epics, without necessarily attracting many people who don't like biblical epics. Along with Kevin Smith's DOGMA, it belongs in a tiny subgenre we might call Subversive-Catholic fanfic cinema. These are works of supremely idiosyncratic theological obsession.

I don't know if the superhero movie could really lend itself to this kind of treatment. Something like UNBREAKABLE is certainly a rethinking of the superhero movie, but it's not working from well known pre-existing characters. And, no, JOKER doesn't count, either. JOKER is a massive testament to fan service. It gives fans of the character exactly what they want to see (to the tune of about 745 million dollars and counting). Perhaps one day when Iron Man and Joker and all the rest of their superhero/villain brethren slip into the public domain alongside Jesus and Moses, we'll see if something truly challenging could be done with them. That should be interesting.   

For now, we're stuck with the world as it is, a world dominated by superhero movies. In a way, I'm okay with that. I like many of these movies, and I suppose that whether they wear capes or togas, superheroes have pretty much always dominated movie screens. Having said that, it's also true that most great cinema addresses itself to the rest of us mere mortals, living our little lives down here below without the benefit of either infinity stones or parting seas.