Baron Wormser: Salvation

On Flannery O’Connor, Donald Trump, and American Violence

   Reading day-in day-out about Donald Trump’s malicious decrees, I have been put in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s stories such as “A View of the Woods” with its vision of backwoods progress in the form of “a supermarket store across the road” and “a gas station, a motel, a drive-in picture-show within easy distance,” but also of her novel The Violent Bear It Away with its depiction of a deep-rooted struggle in the American psyche between the forces of prophesy and reason. I think this is because I am witnessing a particularly American violence, one that is focused as it removes this and that governmental job, grant, and program in the name of efficiency or mere vindictiveness yet one that wishes in its bleak heart of hearts that it knew no bounds, that some cleansing apocalypse cannot come soon enough and that it is the business of those now in charge to hasten that time. For anyone who looks back at the nation’s origins this theocratic yet commercial yet separatist yet individualist energy, this clamor born of fear and want, comes as no surprise. The pot has always been bubbling with an unhealthy heat. One dislocation or another brought each so called “settler” to these shores. That inner dislocation defines an American as well as anything. 

   The epigraph to the novel is from Matthew 11:12 and reads: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” We are to understand that the violence was both a violent love of Christ and John but also a violent pressing upon them when they preached, a sort of greed to get salvation, a clamor. The epigraph is set in Biblical time but we have the word “now” to keep us on our spiritual toes and transport us to somewhere in the South in what were for O’Connor more or less recent times. For beyond the struggle in the novel between Rayber, the school teacher who is the voice of “information” and spokesman for “intelligence,” and Tarwater, the raw youth who is trying to figure out his prophetic destiny, we are immersed in a world in which the Old Testament is alive if not well. We are in a world in which spiritual fate is palpable and immediate, where decisions must be made one way or another. In another post-WWII society, this situation might be called “existential” but that word would not fit the United States that O’Connor writes about. The Lord’s word is afoot, whether people take it up or reject it. 

   The Violent Bear It Away speaks to a number of burning issues and, indeed, the burning is literal since Tarwater, as he seeks to free himself, sets fire to a house and some woods. The chief issue, however, is salvation or as Tarwater’s great-uncle puts it: “You were born into bondage and baptized into freedom, into the Death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Even Tarwater’s opponent, his uncle Rayber, is concerned with Tarwater’s “salvation,” though it is not Jesus but a “college education” that he envisions. Tarwater has not gone to school and wants no part of it. The deep aversion Tarwater’s great-uncle took to Rayber is based on an article the teacher wrote about the great-uncle, a crime rooted in the evil of explanation: “His [the great-uncle’s] fixation of being called by the Lord had its origins in insecurity.” Such words for the great-uncle represented “a dry and seedless fruit, incapable of even rotting, dead from the beginning.” And this is the core of the American matter as O’Connor presents it: Are you alive inside or are you dead? As to violence, it tells us we are human, which often turns out to be a matter of regret since rage is like oxygen in O’Connor. Put bluntly, bad things happen. The novel and the story I have referenced both feature the murders of children. 

   Tarwater is waiting to grasp what his religious calling is. The uncle dismisses such a notion and is glad to be a productive member of society, in his case a teacher who is keen on testing. Yet, as the present moment shows, a person can be a member of society, a politician, for instance, and still receive a calling that entails salvation. For the underlying feeling is that life as we know it, the getting up and going to bed, the shopping and shitting, the walking here and driving there, the sky above and the ground beneath is never quite enough for us and that certain forms of human activity, such as politics, particularly of a democratic stripe, are so rooted in confusion that they never come clear and that only a saving messianic force can make things right—whatever “right” may mean. This emphasis on salvation is exciting since each soul is the seat of a drama of final proportions yet situated in a body that wears a hat and likes to go fishing. When salvation touches politics, it is doubly exciting. All the dirtiness that has been imputed to the liberal and secular can be vanquished. Maybe forever. 

   The United States, as a Protestant yet ever-nascent, ever-shifting society, has been especially given to the imprint of salvation and Donald Trump’s statement that “He who saves his Country does not violate any law” comes as no surprise. (Since salvation speaks to eternity while a nation exists in historical time, an inherent contradiction looms, though one that would not bother Trump or many of his followers.) As an ultimatum, salvation cancels all contingencies. It is, as O’Connor’s epigraph indicates, a violence that speaks to a terrible hunger. It makes sense in her novel that Tarwater has no appetite and that when he does eat he throws it up. Like the nation he finds himself in, he is starving for sustenance. All he knows is what he does not want, beginning with the teacher’s approach to life, the heady “information” that Tarwater finds deadening and that accompanies an education. O’Connor admitted that she had trouble with the teacher character because she had little sympathy for his viewpoint. His is the well-meaning voice of accommodating reason. He wants life to be much neater than it will ever be while he is terrified within, not the least for the “horrifying love” that he bears to the “dim-witted child” of his own, a child he tries, at one point, to drown. 

   For the three major characters in her novel, Tarwater, Rayber, and the great-uncle, life needs fixing, be it through education or salvation. Whether this stems from an inherent American restlessness based on the pursuit of happiness and the concomitant banishment of contentment or from the commercial impetus that always wants more or from the “progress” that Fortune, the protagonist of “A View of the Woods” is taken with, is a hard one to call. If one looks at Trump, one sees someone who needs to impose himself at any cost yet who identifies with the nation to the point that he considers himself the nation’s savior. Why the nation needs a savior is a good question but, again, a certain discontent seems built into the temper of the United States, all that striving that is a pin in everyone’s otherwise complacent ass. Salvation, as is all too clear, has nothing to do with justice. It has to do in Trump’s case with the notion that he is self-anointed and with his discontents, beginning with people who don’t agree with him. In his discontent, he is near to prophecy just as Tarwater is near to prophecy. It is in the American air and it is hard to oppose because in a society that prefers competition to cooperation it dwarfs mere fellow feeling. This discontent thrives, as Trump has shown, on denunciation, and this is another crux of what O’Connor is tilting at, how each human assertion shrinks life irrevocably. The majesty of the Lord along with the gifts of humility and awe are elsewhere. All is focused on human doings. No mystery need apply. 

   O’Connor’s novel crackles with metaphysical wit and repartee. Tarwater has a shrewd, sullen answer for every remark that Rayber, his would-be instructor, makes. He will not be destroyed by the forces of socialization. If he destroys himself that is his “bidnis,” as O’Connor puts it. The question remains as to who was there to begin with? Again, we can dispense with existentialism and simply ask what for many dislocated Americans has been the key question: Do I exist? Materialism is reassuring but salvation offers a personal confirmation: your fate is real. Ask Donald Trump as he throws out the unclean. He is not, to quote O’Connor, “a fanatical country preacher,” but in his American, know-nothing way he is kin. He has no compunctions and that is what terrifies in so much of O’Connor’s writing, all those people with so few compunctions and so many festering predilections. She touched a true nerve there. It is staring us in the face but it is not really news. The ultimate irreligious entertainment-based aggrieved dictatorial honcho was waiting to happen. Now he has. The violent are bearing it away. 

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser