Key to All Mythologies

Here are the opening lines of today’s reading, which we parse in great detail: “Since we consider knowledge to be something beautiful and honored, and one sort more so than another, either on account of its precision or because it is about better and more wondrous things, on both these accounts we should with good reason rank the inquiry about the soul among the primary studies. And it seems that acquaintance with it contributes greatly toward all truth and especially toward the truth about nature, since the soul is in some way the governing source of all living things.” If a slow, careful discussion of such dense thoughts appeals to you, then give this one a listen. (You know who you are!) If not, then go about your dreary business.

The novel concludes with a shocking act of sexual violence against young Tarwater, which propels him back to his home at Powderhead, and back to the grave of old Tarwater. Here, at last, he hears the voice of God speak within him, and he accepts his destiny as prophet of the Lord. The last we see of Tarwater is as he makes his way once again toward the dark city, “where the children of God lay sleeping.”

Why was such an act required for Tarwater to accept his fate? Is this book realistic? Or more like a fable, or one of Christ’s parables? What kind of relationship to the world does this novel have? A sick, fallen place, awaiting redemption from beyond? What kind of God then is revealed at the end, who chooses the Tarwater’s to have the prophetic blood? The God of the Enlightenment, the God of the philosophers, a friendly New Testament God, the frightening God of the Desert Fathers? What kind of God could speak to us in the 20th century? What kind of divine voice could we hear?

This week we are discussing the end of part two, in which the novel confronts us, yet again, with the problem of freedom. Specifically the problem of freedom within the context of a Christian cosmology. Can anyone be said to be free and responsible for their actions, and if so where does that freedom lie? After all, we all have subconscious desires acting in us, we all have dispositions we didn’t choose, we have the limits put on us by our time and place, and we have the voices of ancestors hectoring us in our heads. Nevertheless the events of life sometimes build to crises, and how we react to those crises seems to say something essential about us as human beings. Perhaps even leads us to damnation. For the Rayber and Tarwater, their moment of crisis turns on the baptism and drowning of Rayber’s mute son Bishop. How they take part in and react to this crises forms the basis of our discussion today, as we attempt to work out what this strange, bleak, claustrophobic, very Catholic, and very Southern novel is telling us about the place of freedom in human life. And more broadly about the possibilities of sin and damnation, and of grace and redemption.

Sometimes, perhaps, it feels to us as if there is meaning in human life, as if our suffering can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are locked in an eternal struggle for our souls. Other times, it feels to us as if there is no meaning, as if nature and fate are indifferent to our suffering and nothing about it can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are childish images leftover from our ignorant ancestors.

This week we discuss the second half of part two of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, which goes straight the heart of such questions by forcing the reader to confront the problem of evil through the suffering and death of innocent children. The perspective of the narrative has switched to Rayber, as he attempts to use his carefully developed worldview of scientific rationality to raise his mute, benighted son Bishop, and to deal with his nephew Tarwater, a boy raised to be an Old Testament prophet by his great-uncle (and Rayber’s uncle), old Tarwater, a boy with a worldview intransigently at odds with Rayber’s own.

Can anything other than mysterious grace redeem suffering? Will that grace ever appear, or has the voice of God gone silent in the modern world? Can love and perfect rationality co-exist in the same heart, or is one always finally forced to choose between them?

What is the place of true silence in human life? Not merely quiet, or even deafness, but the silence which strands you alone with the inner voice, that still, small voice we so often want to ignore, overwhelm, and obliterate. What is the meaning of that voice? And why do we seem so afraid to confront it? We take up these questions on our second of five episodes discussing Flannery O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear it Away.

For this episode we read the second half of part one, which continues the story of young Francis Tarwater’s journey to meet his uncle Rayber in the city, after his great-uncle Marion Tarwater, who considered himself a prophet in the Old Testament tradition of Jonah, Daniel, and Elijah, has died. The themes of silence and speech resonate throughout this section, and along with them questions of paternity, freedom, and education. Who gets to educate the young and how? What are they teaching them and why? What are the effects of education on those whom it purports to be for? If you go to the best schools and read the best books are you in fact smarter and freer that someone who hasn’t, or are you simply a piece of information inside some great, inhuman brain? Are you a free human being, or a piano key to be played?

Francis Tarwater is a teenage boy who has been raised in near-isolation by his great uncle Mason Tarwater somewhere in deepest backwaters of the American South. The elder Tarwater has been preparing the boy to be a prophet of God, in the line of Old Testament prophets like Jonah, Daniel, and Elijah, but Tarwater reacts to his great-uncles death by first getting drunk, and second by burning down their old farmhouse, called Powderhead, with, as far as he knows, old Tarwater's body still inside, unburied, in defiance of the old man’s most consistent demand – that the boy bury him in proper, Christian fashion. After starting the fire, Tarwater flees Powderhead for the big city, there to confront his only other living relative, his uncle Rayber, an academic who has empathically rejected Old Tarwater, his beliefs, and his way of life.

Today, in the first of a four episode series, we are discussing the first half of the first section of Flannery O’Connor’s second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away. The strange and bleak landscape of the novel asks us many unpleasant. Has God withdrawn from the created World? If so, why? What kind of people are driven or called to be prophets in such a world? What does O’Connor mean by violence? Is there such a thing as sacred violence? Finally, and perhaps most unpleasant of all, Can we ever hope for grace in a world where the voice of God has become so distant and the light of the sun so dim?

After 14 books and more than 15,000 lines of poetry, we have reached the final book of Ovid’s epic, the Metamorphoses. And in the final book we encounter the philosopher Pythagoras, who has the longest and most unusual soliloquy in a poem that has been filled with them. Pythagoras’ vision of reality seems to resemble closely Ovid’s himself: a world of constant change, in which nothing, neither body, nor city, nor meaning, stays fixed for long. Yet, as we consider the words of Pythagoras, gaps between his account and Ovid’s poetry appear, making it obvious that this is not a simple philosophical summation of all that has come before, stated as simply and ponderously as possible, to make sure no reader could miss the point. What, then, is Pythagoras’ speech doing here, seeming to be a capstone to this massive, propulsive work? What kinds of explanations are possible in poetry that are not possible in philosophy? Are the poet’s aspirations for immortality essential to his writing? If so, how does Ovid hope to keep his own name alive, even beyond the end of Rome and the Roman world? And, given that we are still reading him, how did he succeed?

This book completes the story of Aeneas, as he ventures into the underworld, guided by Sybil. Returning to the human world, Sybil tells Aeneas that she is cursed to age at the normal pace, but not to die – until she eventually becomes only a disembodied voice. Early Roman history begins in book 14, with some of Rome’s founding myths, including the deification of Aeneas. Book 14 also relates the especially obscure story of Pomona, the goddess of gardens, and Vertumnus, the god of plants, and his protean, shape-shifting attempts to woo (or seduce, or rape) her. What is the role of the poet within an imperial civilization as vast as Rome? What is proper balance between Nature and Order? Is something like an empire or an emperor required to maintain that balance? What do we want to preserve of ourselves in history? Is the human voice and the written word enough to carry a culture forward through time, or does cultural transmission ultimately rest on political power, even on violence?

Book 13 features monologues from heroes like Ulysses and Ajax, from queens and nymphs like Galatea, and monsters, like Polyphemus. All in all, this book is a potent reminder that human speech has been the primary vehicle driving the action in the Metamorphoses. Polyphemus is an especially interesting case because instead of appearing as a monstrous, shadowy presence on the edge of the world, eating Greeks and bashing ships, he has his own real character, expressed through his (somewhat, possibly) charming song attempting to win the heart of Galatea. While still obviously lacking the rhetorical polish of Ulysses, there can be no doubt his speech has its own unassuming, sincere charm. All of this makes us ask about the place and power of speech in the world of Ovid. How much power does speech have to transform the world? How much power does slippery rhetoric, and even straightforward lying, have to influence our perspective? If we assume speech has significant power, which it seems that Ovid does, do the poets wield that power for good or evil? What do those terms even mean in this universe of constant, churning transformation?

On this episode we are reading Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Book 11 opens with the grisly dismemberment of Orpheus, whose severed head floats down the Hebrus River, the waters causing his mouth to still murmur his sad songs mourning the loss of his wife Eurydice, as if the earth itself were mourning for him (or with him). This book also relates the famous story of Midas and his ill-fated wish to turn all he touched to gold, and of the violent king Daedelion, transformed into an equally violent bird. The book ends with the long, tormented soliloquy of queen Alcyone, who failed to prevent her husband, king Ceyx, from sailing to Delphi, and during his voyage, as she had foreseen, he died at sea. Her story ends when, as she is wailing on the beach, mourning Ceyx’s death, his body washes ashore. She rushes to kiss his corpse, whereupon they are both transformed into seagulls… What do we owe the dead? How powerfully are the ghosts of the past alive in the present? Can a poet’s song of mourning animate or re-animate inert matter? Can any human artifice do this? Is Nature built from human memory, or is all our suffering and all our loss merely absorbed into Nature’s ever-changing flux, along with everything else?