Mark Eaton

A Subversive Gospel

Arts & Literature

“Asked to adapt Flannery O'Connor's final novel, The Violent Bear It Away, into a screenplay, Michael Bruner found that the assignment brought him closer to the beating heart of the author's fiction than he had ever felt as a literary critic. In effect rewriting The Violent Bear It Away from the inside out rather than from the outside in, Bruner came to appreciate 'her startling and sometimes pulverizing vision of things.' He felt he understood the 'theological profundity' of her fiction more fully, especially the profound care she brought to her deeply flawed, often grotesque characters. She regarded her backwoods prophets, Bruner tells us, with an 'almost primal, filial empathy as a fellow sufferer on the road to redemption.' In A Subversive Gospel, Bruner helps readers understand that O'Connor's fiction is founded upon limitations: the disease she inherited from her father, the demands of her craft, and what he calls her 'unwavering adherence to the strict delineations, even confines, of Christian dogma.' Such limitations explain, in part, why O'Connor wrote with such ferocity. Equally attuned to her penchant for tragicomedy and to her theological fluency (the Austrian theologian Friedrich von Hügel, neglected by previous scholars, looms over this account), Bruner provides a compelling reading of the redemptive quality of O'Connor's major work. As Bruner aptly describes it, 'she is performing surgery on the soul, without anesthesia.'”