Book Review Article
Joyce Carol Oates, Son
of the Morning: A Novel (NY: Vanguard Press, 1978), 382 pp.
Introduction
A man attempting to escape time
and being in flesh, a man who does not wish to be, which is, for the
most part, what all earthly creatures wish for most fervently: to be. In
flesh. But for the most fanatic of religious believers, flesh is a problem.
Time is a problem as well, and the most perfervid of believers seek
timelessness and fleshlessness. Which is to be found where, other than in
Death? One view: such a believer is beloved of the Lord, in that he is willing
to renounce all earthly existence in flesh and being to embrace godliness.
Another view: a person who refuses to accept the precious gift that God has
given him—life in flesh with being in consciousness—is the worst of heretics. Is
possibly even in the camp of Satan.
We begin on the first page with a direct
address to the Deity by an unknown speaker; we begin with a man in flesh with
time on his hands—someone crying out in the wilderness to the Lord. “You have
promised that there shall be time no longer. Yet there is nothing but time in
the desolation of my soul . . . I don’t want mankind, nor do I want the
happiness of the individual without mankind. I want only You . . . There shall
be time no longer, yet we are deep in time, and of it; and it courses through
us like the secret bright unfathomable blood through our bodies, bearing us
along despite our childlike ignorance of its power . . . Save me, O God, by thy
name, and judge me by Thy strength and not by my weakness . . . I think of my
mother’s broken body and of my father’s swarthy beauty and of my own soul,
which drains away in time, minute after minute, even as I compose my desperate
prayer to You.”
All of this already—and I have not
quoted the passage in full—on the first long page of the book. This “desperate
prayer,” this business of an outcast, an apostate crying out, is to run on
throughout the almost four hundred pages of the novel. Only later do we
apprehend that this voice of lamentation belongs, in part, to the main
protagonist after his fall from grace. But that “in part” is to suggest that
one can puzzle all the way through the book and still not be sure who the
narrator is. For this novel has an extremely problematic narrative structure.
Ashton
Vickery
Book One is titled “The
Incarnation.” The story begins in 1939 with a long description—beautifully
written, horrendous in its violence—of how a young man lies in wait to shoot a
pack of feral dogs. We assume that he, Ashton Vickery, will be the main
character of the book, but this long first scene turns out to be the only one
featuring him at length. What is he like? Although his father, Dr. Thaddeus
Vickery, is a man of science and reason, his son Ashton is a man of the flesh,
who revels in the pure animal strength of his body. Self-confident, arrogant,
he sees himself as superior to other, weaker individuals in his society. He,
the alpha dog, has no need of things of the mind or emotions; nor does he take
any interest in religious matters. He is the direct antipode to Nathan Vickery,
his nephew: the character (not yet born) who soon is to become central in the
story. They have nothing in common. Ashton is all visceral flesh and body;
Nathan is—or at least aspires to be—totally fleshless, all spirit.
In his one long scene, concluding with
his gleeful slaughter of the dogs, Ashton Vickery is revealed to be a creature
nearly as feral as they are. Later it is suggested that the gang rape of
Ashton’s sister Elsa devastates his life, takes away all of his
self-confidence, turns him, eventually, to drink. He never recovers entirely
from this family tragedy. After fighting in WW II he returns home to make
nothing of his life. At age forty he is a hopeless drunk, borrowing money from
his mother and nephew Nathan. Given his early self-confidence and promise,
Ashton—a character featured only peripherally to the main action—is perhaps the
most tragic of all the Vickeries.
In a book featuring the ubiquity
of the Devil—the word is capitalized throughout—the dogs, once domestic, now
wild, are described as Satan’s minions: “They were sporty and looked like
laughter; their stained mouths appeared to be stretched wide in grins, in human
grins. They pranced about, howling at the moon like legendary beasts.” Purely
wild and savage, they consist mostly of “a certain length of guts about which
the animal skeleton and flesh moved; fanatic with desire . . . eyes, brains,
and teeth forever in the service of guts.” Seeking soul in a world seething
with the soullessness of guts is, later, to be the novel’s main theme. An
interesting point: the dogs are described as laughing. Laughter has little
place in the world of the evangelical Christian believer; from the years of
early Christianity to the present day laughter has always been suspect. True
believers are solemn, pious, reverent; Satan’s legions laugh.
The
Rape and the Far From Immaculate Conception
The episode of the feral
dogs—their lives run amuck and the violent end of those lives—foreshadows and
anticipates the scene of the gang rape of fifteen-year-old Elsa Vickery by a
pack of drunken, savage men. These too are myrmidons of the Devil, God’s fallen
angels. They are spectral characters who are never apprehended; they evanesce from
the narrative immediately and never reappear. Since the time of the action is
1939, using DNA evidence to establish the identity of a child’s father is still
far in the future. So that even if the men were caught there would be no way to
determine which of them impregnated poor Elsa. But in a novel about evangelical
Christianity, featuring Pentecostal excesses (e.g., handling poisonous snakes),
it is not farfetched to suggest that the gang rape could be a perverse parody
of the immaculate conception, and that the illegitimate child born of the rape
could be the Devil’s offspring. Nathanael William Vickery (Nathan) is born on
June 30, 1940. J.C. Oates misses by five days her chance to make a direct
connection. The spawn of Satan in the film Rosemary’s Baby is born on
June 25, the exact opposite end of the calendar from December 25. The
Antichrist. At any rate, there are hints throughout the book that Nathan
Vickery, “gift of God,” may have been sent into the world to work for the
opposite camp.
Not that anyone telling the story in
the Oates novel makes this direct connection. Musing on the rape and
conception, on the birth of a “sickly baby boy,” the true believer narrator
asserts “That this violent conception, pregnancy and birth were aspects of a
single coherence, against all odds insisting upon its being, who would dare
doubt?—for the mark of Your will was everywhere evidential.” The idea suggested
here is that the Lord’s will is behind everything that happens on earth. Even
the most violent and bestial acts are known in advance by God, tacitly approved
by God, part of His plan. “Yet it may be that the extraordinary gift of
Nathanael William was intended from the very start—even unto the first days of
the Creation . . . Before Nathanael was, You are.”
Dr.
Thaddeus Vickery
Elsa Vickery, not a particularly
bright child, but gentle, loving, must deal with being impregnated at age
fifteen by a gang of savage rapists. No girl in such a situation would be
expected to deal with it well. “In her womb the thing throbbed with life, with
the beating pulse of life. She liked to think at such times that it was hers.
But she was not deluded, having guessed at Your enmity with the world of man.”
A Deity that feels enmity and wrath toward humanity’s mundane world, so it
later turns out, is the main Deity featured in this novel. The Lord Jehovah, or
Yahweh, Jesus Christ, or Whoever, is violent and angry, having little patience
with sinful humanity.
One of the most sympathetic
characters in the book, Thaddeus Vickery, is a country doctor who has devoted
his life to helping his patients. “You let everyone take advantage of you,” his
brother Ewell tells him, meaning that the good doctor is lax about demanding
payment for his services. In speaking to himself Thaddeus asks, “Why am I here?
. . . To give aid. To do no harm. To console, to attend, and stand beside.” At
one point Dr. Vickery is presented as something akin to a gifted evangelical
preacher; he is gifted as a medical doctor, gifted at treating and healing
people. An atheist, Dr. Vickery does not believe in what he calls “a doubtful
allegiance to the soul,” since the soul is discarnate. “The truths he believed
in were those of the body, the body’s anatomy and its immutable laws.” But one
who believes in “the truths of the body” must also contend with the slimy
workings of the human insides and the decay of flesh. One must also face a
certain stubborn resistance to atheism on the part of humanity. Human beings
from time out of mind have believed, insisted on believing, and go on believing
that one’s soul detaches itself from the dead body and goes on living. That is,
essentially, what this whole novel is about.
Naturally horrified by the rape of
his daughter, Dr. Vickery is even more horrified by the conception. In the
early stages of the pregnancy he desperately searches for a way to abort the
fetus, but without success. In the U.S.A. of 1939-1940, so it seems, abortion
is even more illegal than it is fast becoming in the U.S.A. of 2024. As the evangelical
narrator tells us, addressing his words to the Deity, “All things must be
fulfilled according to Your law, and so he [Thaddeus] had no luck.” As a final
expedient, Thaddeus suggests to his wife Opal that he himself could perform the
abortion, but she finds that idea repellent. Already, even before the birth of
her grandson, she takes a stand with the forces of religion and soul against science
and the soullessness of her husband.
While Elsa is in labor the soul-denier
Thaddeus sits in his study, reading from his favorite authors. He reads
Epicurus on hedonism, on noble attempts to attain to ataraxia
(tranquility, equanimity). He reads Lucretius. There is no heaven or hell, no
gods, “no intrusion from another sphere into the lives of men . . . . no
spiritual world, only a materialist world, where soul and mind are evolved with
the body, grow with the body, ail with the body, and finally die with the
body’s death.”
Dr. Thaddeus Vickery is
practically the only voice in the novel for science and reason, the only adherent
of notions expressed by ancient scholars as in the paragraph above. These old
ideas have been repeated by scores of other scholarly sages down through the
ages, over and over, right up to our present day. They show up to some extent even
in our Judeo-Christian bible, e.g., in the Book of Ecclesiastes. But Son of
the Morning features, primarily, resistance to such ancient truths. Since
the beginning of time desperate human beings fight desperately NOT to accept
these opinions of the sages, that the world and the universe can be soulless
and godless. And, oddly enough, Thaddeus, who reads Epicurus and Lucretius
compulsively, is one more man who cannot entirely accept what they say.
Following the rape, when he learns
that Elsa is pregnant, Thaddeus the rationalist goes nearly insane trying to
explain how this happened. He experiences no tranquility or equanimity when
faced with such a horrendous situation. He sits “awaiting a visitation of some
kind that would explain the bizarre workings of what was to him, a
soulless yet not malevolent, and fundamentally knowable universe;
‘pregnancy under such circumstances, conception itself—it can’t be possible, it
can’t be.’” He thinks “what if the universe was merely a jumble of unlikely
events?” Well, wasn’t that, in essence, what the ancient sages were telling him
all along? Thaddeus the atheist needs to believe at least that the universe
makes sense. Which it does not. So, paradoxically, in seeking for the sense
behind it all, in refusing to believe in the senselessness, Thaddeus is close
to doing what believers do: looking for some benevolent force behind the
workings of the universe.
After the birth of his grandson,
Dr. Vickery regrets his earlier determination to abort the child; he comes to
love the newly born Nathanael William Vickery (Nathan). Elsa, on the other
hand, departs the Vickery household as soon as she can, wanting to have nothing
to do with her son. She plays little role in the remaining action of the novel.
At one point we are told that she has “eloped with another woman’s husband (a
sailor who now worked in a factory in Youngstown” [in Ohio, a real place? But no;
check the map of Niagara Co., where the author was born, and you’ll find a
village by that name]. Like her brother Ashton, Elsa never entirely recovers
from what happened to her at age fifteen.
Under the influence of Opal
Vickery, his religious grandmother, Nathan the child turns early to religion.
This creates a schism in the family, as Thaddeus becomes ever more determined
to resist all things religious. Contemptuous of his wife’s and grandson’s firm
belief in Christianity, he continues reading ancient philosophers. Now he takes
refuge in Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, the “disciplined reason. Knowing
that all things vanish swiftly, one accepts the universe as it is—a universe of
change, flowing about us, flooding against us, bearing us away. Only the
present moment is real. Time is but a point, reality a flux, perception
indistinct, the composition of the body subject to easy corruption, the soul a
spinning top, fortune hard to make out, fame confused. Physical things are but
a flowing stream, things of the soul dreams and vanity; life is but a struggle
and the visit to a strange land, posthumous fame but a forgetting . . .”
This passage (p. 133-34)—all
italicized and probably a paraphrase or direct citation from Marcus Aurelius—is
presented to the reader as the thoughts of Dr. Vickery, but here we have what
is obviously a different, reasoning narrator, not the evangelical believer who,
largely, controls the telling of the story. This believer narrator, living in
exile from his God, relates the tale of Nathan Vickery, while directly
addressing his “prayer” to the Deity, with whom he hopes to merge. The result
is that the head-to-head battle between scientific reason and evangelical
belief in unevenly expressed. Why? Because after the death of Thaddeus there is
no other character to replace him, no other scientific rationalist in the
novel. Halfway through the book the divinity student Japheth Sproul appears. He
is the son and grandson of biblical scholars, and he seems destined to carry on
with their scholarly work. But instead he gives up, largely, on rationality and
joins the evangelical believers who follow Nathan. He never expresses views
directly antagonistic to those of Nathan and eventually comes to a crazed
belief in Nathan’s divinity.
As for Dr. Vickery, he becomes
ever more alienated from his wife and grandson. He is “fatally proud,” refusing
to compromise his principles and meet them half way. His doom is sealed when he
decides to read the bible, for the first time in many years. In the Book of
Matthew he finds not “the Child Jesus, answering hatred with love,” not the
Christ who takes little children up on His lap, not the Christ who preaches
loving your neighbor, but “a self-righteous, intolerant, wildly egotistical,
and even megalomaniacal personality—Jesus of Nazareth . . . who brags that He
has not come to bring peace on earth, but a sword . . .”
Dr. Vickery reads the Gospels and
makes his case against Jesus Christ, in a confrontation with the gentle,
believing Nathan, who is only seven years old. In a fury the doctor pronounces
anathemas upon Christ, telling the boy, “Christ can kiss my ass.” Stricken by
this encounter with blasphemy, the child collapses in a kind of seizure, and
later we are told that Dr. Vickery “had brought the child back from the dead.
In a state of terror he had felt for the heartbeat, but there was none—he had
felt for a pulse in the wrist, in the neck, but there was none. The boy had
stopped breathing, his eyes were unfocused, a terrible clammy coldness seemed
to rise from him, a coldness of death.” This is not the only time in the novel
when Nathan Vickery lapses into something like a coma and nearly dies. What is
emphasized here is the gift of a talented doctor, who is able to revive such a
stricken patient.
Nathan, who had his first
visitation at age five, soon has another encounter with the Lamb of God, “but
this was not the gentle Christ Who had appeared at Nathan’s bedside years ago;
this was a Christ blazing with light, holding a sword aloft . . . I am a
child of the wrathful God, Christ cried in a terrible voice. I am not to
be mocked.” Nathan “tried to tell his grandfather of the danger to his
life,” but Thaddeus “stormed out of the room, he slammed doors, he hid from the
Word of God, and thereby brought about his doom.” So tells us the evangelical
narrator. In Nathan’s vision “the tip of Christ’s sword pointed toward him,
Nathan, as if he were the focal point . . . as if all that must be fulfilled
would be fulfilled through him, and none other.”
The passage in which Dr. Vickery
drops dead of a massive stroke reads as if to suggest that Christ strikes him
down in His wrath, using as his instrument the blasphemous man’s own grandson.
“The long curved bread knife in his [Nathan’s] hands caught the glare from an
overhead light, through the smudges of flour and dough, and a wire of some
sort—it must have been a near-invisible, scalding-hot wire—darted from the tip
of that knife to Thaddeus’ left eyeball. It was a wire. Thaddeus screamed as he
felt it pierce his eyeball.” Dr. Vickery is dead at age 56; his dates are given
as 1891—Dec. 21, 1947. Later, at the height of his ministry, the evangelist
Nathan will put out his left eye with a knife, as if in obedience to the
biblical maxim and, at least partially, as expiation for his participation in
murder.
So here we are, the perplexed
readers, early on in the novel, and already we are expected to believe the more
than bizarre things told to us by the evangelical narrator. We are informed in
all seriousness that Christ returns to earth to exact His vengeance, that He strikes
dead the blasphemous of the world, and that he commits murder through his
instrument, a boy of seven.
Place
Names and People Names
The time of the novel’s action is from 1939 to the mid or late seventies. The Vickery family makes its home in
Marsena, described as a village with an unpaved main street. Exactly where that
is remains hard to determine, given that all the cities and towns in their
immediate purview have fictitious names. The two highest peaks in the vicinity
are Mt. Ayr and Mt. Lambeth. Other towns and cities are Rockland, Yewville, and
Port Oriskany, the largest city around, which at one point is described as
being “on the lake.” The fictitious city of Port Oriskany shows up in other
novels by J.C. Oates, including Man Crazy, and there is an actual village
of Oriskany in Oneida County, New York. Oates was born in Niagara County, in
the town of Lockport, and later lived on the family farm in Millersport (Erie
County). Mention of the seasons, of flora and fauna in the novel lead one to
believe that we are in the Upper Midwest, possibly in Upstate New York. The Chautauqua
Mountains are mentioned. There is a Chautauqua, NY, famous for the Chautauqua
Institution, founded in 1874, which still holds educational seminars every
summer. If we presume that the author used her own birth state as the model for
the Vickeries’ state, the city of Port Oriskany could be standing in for
Buffalo on Lake Erie.
Numerous other American towns and
cities appear in the novel with their real names, so we get the strange effect
of having the main characters, and only them, living in something like a
fictitious world that is part of the U.S.A. but not quite. Why write a book
clearly set in the U.S., with its action clearly set over some thirty-five
years of the twentieth century, but then make up all the names of the cities
and towns within the purview of the central characters? I can only imagine that
this is like making a tacit assertion: this book is told realistically, as if
the people in it really lived in the U.S. in the twentieth century, but
simultaneously is it unreal; there’s really no such thing as reality, and human
life on earth is a mist blowing through a chimera.
I made a cursory check on the
internet of the names of the most famous evangelists mentioned as running their
ministries in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Most renowned of all was
Billy Graham, but he is not mentioned. Neither is Jimmy Swaggart. Of the names
that show up in the novel, Hannah Price, Aaron Miles, and Brother Joe Wallace
appear to be totally fictitious, as does one of the main characters, the
Reverend Marian Miles Beloff. The evangelist Bill Branham actually existed: William
Marrion Branham (1909-1965). Oates apparently made up the name of Beloff by
taking the surname of the fictitious Aaron Miles and the middle name of the
real William Marrion Branham. Where she got the name Beloff I cannot
determine, but I find it odd that this character has a common Russian or
Ukrainian surname.
The
Gift of God: Being Born and Remembering Being Born
June 30, 1940. The main
protagonist of the novel, Nathanael William Vickery (Nathan) enters this vale
of tears. The rhapsodical narrator, as usual addressing the Deity, describes
his birth. “In the beginning there was not the Word, nor words; only the bliss
of Your presence. He knew it as light: liquid light. So radiant that it was
black; blinding; a blackness ten times black; but light nonetheless, Your
radiance . . . The infant Nathanael saw through his closed eyelids such realms
of light!—and breathed with his tiny lungs the rich warm liquid radiance. It
was dearer than blood to him, more precious by far than any physical substance
. . . He never forgot that radiance, that bliss, and forever afterward in the
depths of his soul he sang praises to You . . .
“In this new landscape how could
he make his way? Yours was a realm of such intense light that there was no need
to see; his eyes moved in a continual ecstasy, blinded, blind. He saw nothing,
neither did he hear. Yet he knew. He knew all there was to be known.
Your Kingdom: an infinity of Being. Souls unborn, yet-to-be-born, souls
transparent and light-riddled as his own. Souls shifting and flowing through
one another, light as the seed of dandelions . . . graceful as tiny rainbow-hued
fish . . . fragile as butterflies . . . He was a witness to their agility as
they passed through one another and wound about one another, causing small
ripples of pleasure, small vibrations of pleasure, almost too intense to be
borne. He was a witness to Your love, Your perfection, which was his own.
Faceless, eyeless, he had no need to see, nor did You contemplate
him—nor did You judge him, so long as he was Your own creature. The lifebeat,
the jolting of the womb, the terrible constrictions of the womb’s wall, the
struggle of his spirit as it was fashioned into flesh: the lightning flash of
pain as the eyelids were pierced forever: the filling of the lungs, which
seemed too small to contain all that they must contain: screams and yells and
kicks and squalls and now a ruthless impatience to be born: so You breathed
mightily into him and he gasped and choked and quickened with life, and fell
headlong into an ecstasy of pain.”
We’re in the throes of almost
luridly perfervid prose. Wait. There’s more to come. “In this new landscape he
floundered, he groped; he was slippery as a fish and could not take hold.
Enormous walls of blood-warmed flesh and milk-taut sacs and his mother’s
strained, stretched dead-white belly, skin paler than his own—how could he make
his way, how could he take hold? You pulsed along his feathery, downy temples,
and stared out sightlessly from his pale eyes, and slipped hot and
near-scalding out of his body; You leaned close to him in a balloon-like mass
of flesh, You held him to Your jarring heartbeat, his beet-red heated flesh
squirming against Yours! And so it came about. And so it was. His lips and his
toothless desperate gums closed about Your nipples, but without taking hold,
and there was weeping, and sorrow, and discord, but in the end You flowed into
him, the pure river of the water of Your spirit flowed into him, and he
quickened yet again, and sprang into life.”
Beautiful writing, rhapsodies in
prose, but I suppose that a description of being born should be rhapsodical.
The most interesting thing here is how the long passage reeks in bodily flesh,
lacks all pretensions to the spiritual. Somehow it reminds the reader of the
description of the feral dogs at the beginning of the novel, the way their
whole being is wrapped in bloody, slimy guts. Being born into this world means
being born into the grim realities of flesh and blood and guts.
Here we have the description of
Nathan’s birth as told by an outside observer (who, incidentally, could not
have been there, and is making all of this up). But on the next page (57) we
are presented with the “actual details of his birth” as he himself was to
remember it. “The hurtful air: a sudden chill envelope sticking greedily to his
wet hide. The painful pricking of light against his eyes . . . The taste of
blood in his mouth. The hammering ringing pulsating noise of his own anguished
cry . . . years afterward, he was always to be ignored if he claimed, however hesitantly,
that he did remember the hour of his birth, he did remember, with
remarkable exactness, the lapping warmth of the water, the surprising cold and
hardness of the porcelain basin, the pressure of hands—strangers’ hands—the
soft caressing greedy feel of a sponge . . .”
Well, I myself don’t remember how
it was to be born, and neither does anyone I’ve ever heard of, but J.C. Oates
does a remarkable job of imagining how it could feel. Near the final pages of
the book (p. 378) there is another description of remembering being born. “I [Nathan]
vividly remember that birth, the flashes of light assaulting my teary eyes, the
salt taste of blood, the water that, lapping wildly against the white porcelain
of the basin, took on the hue, subtly, delicately, of a somewhat turgid blue
sky . . . I remember the birth as if it were only this morning.” Someone who
remembers being born. But this is only one of many magical things that the
evangelical narrator of the novel asks us, his readers, to believe.
The
First Visitation
An interesting conjecture: what if
Nathan’s grandmother Opal had died, instead of his grandfather, Dr. Vickery?
For it is she who guides the strange quiet boy toward religious belief in the
early years of his life. Previous to the arrival of the new grandson she has
never been extremely religious. But she “gets religion” after the birth of the
illegitimate child, and from that point on she comes to reject her own grown
children, in order to devote all her attention to Nathan. Of course, the
evangelical narrator would aver that things could not have worked out
differently, since all things are predestined, including the massive stroke and
death of the doctor. Both Opal and the narrator believe that “all would come
about according to Your design . . . All that had happened was meant to happen,
from the beginning of time.”
The narrator tells us of the
visitations, “the seven revelations of extraordinary magnitude . . . when God
seized him [Nathan] in the flesh: seven small crucifixions.” The first comes at
age five, the last at age thirty-four. Opal has been taking him to church with
her all along, and by the age of five Nathan has memorized many biblical
passages. But a new experience awaits him when he rides with her and a neighboring
couple up into the Chautauqua Mountains, to Mt. Lambeth. There they attend a
prayer meeting of Pentecostals, led by Brother Micah, a young man “with a
sunburned face and strangely long blond hair and fine green eyes, set rather
close together.” The people in attendance are “mountain people,” described as
“impoverished, gaunt-faced, drab.” Something about them, and about Brother
Micah, recalls the description of Elsa’s rapists earlier in the book.
On the way up the mountain Nathan,
coincidentally, recites a passage from the Gospels, when Jesus appears to his
disciples after the Crucifixion and says to them, “Go ye into the world, and
preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be
saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow
them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with
new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing,
it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall
recover . . .”
Before entering the Mt. Lambeth
Tabernacle of Jesus Christ Nathan holds back, tells his grandmother he can’t go
in there, for “God is in there; I’m afraid.” But once inside, caught up in the tumult
of Brother Micah’s preaching—as people are stamping their feet, clapping, some
of them calling out “rapid gibberish” in tongues—the boy joins the ecstasy. The
whole episode is described first from the point of view of Opal, flabbergasted
by what she views, horrified when the box of poisonous snakes is opened. Then
even more horrified when she sees a boy who is her own grandson holding a
serpent, a copperhead.
At the beginning of the next
chapter, the evangelical narrator describes what happened from Nathan’s point
of view. “And so it happened that the Spirit of the Lord descended into the
child Nathanael Vickery when he was, to all outward appearances, no more than
five years of age; and from that time onward, for nearly three decades, the
Holy Spirit did reside within him, flesh of his flesh, close as a splinter
beneath a fingernail. Nathanael’s eye glared dark with the molten heat of the
Lord, plunged deep in time as a bird diving starkly and cleanly into the sea,
leaving the surface affrighted but rippleless, undisturbed . . . . . . In a
waking trance he saw Jesus, and heard Jesus’ gentle words, and even took Jesus’
hand . . . . . . ‘The inhabitants of this world cannot touch you, neither to
bless nor to hurt,’ Jesus whispered. ‘Will you remember? For you are the same
substance as I—you are not like other men.’ . . . And so it came to pass that
Jesus knew in His heart what Nathan wished to say, and He drew closer to the
bed, saying, ‘Will you remember? Always remember? The fruitless sorrow of the
world of other people, and my blessing—?’ and the fingertips that touched
Nathan’s overheated skin were cool, marvelously cool. He was to remember them,
that particular startling pressure, all his life.”
The narrator informs us that there
had been previous visitations from Jesus Christ, prior to this one, the first
of the Big Seven. “Thus far nearly every visitation of Christ had taken place
in secrecy, sometimes in his bed, sometimes in the carriage house or in the
unused chicken coop; or back in the woods, or the irrigation ditch, where he
could talk aloud freely and not be overheard by his grandparents or other
children. Every visitation had been gentle and dreamlike and assuasive; the
person of Christ had not been overwhelming, not very physical . . .”
Nathan reacts to the first big visitation by going into a trance, a seizure, by
frightening his grandparents, “thrashing about in the bed, babbling, spittle
edging out of the corners of his mouth, his eyes rolling . . . And he had not
been bitten by the copperhead (The miracle was that no one had been bitten—no
one at all).”
Worth noting here: the Christ who
appears to him at the Mt. Lambeth church presents a much more gentle and caring
demeanor than those who will appear in further visions. For the Christ who
dominates most of Nathan’s life is the irate, wrought-up Christ who “cometh
with a sword.” It is this Christ who sees fit to murder Thaddeus Vickery two
years later. But by the time of the final two visions, late in the novel, Jesus
Christ has been demoted altogether, and the Visitor is someone altogether
different, more mighty and splendiferous and furious than “mere” Christ. Could
this be God? Or Someone Else?
Leonie
and the Temptations of Sexuality
If a boy, or a man, has a penis it
must needs rise. Such is the nature of masculine being in flesh. For over 2000
years theologians and religious believers have struggled with this
unsurmountable issue, which the Lord God Jehovah created when He decided to
incarnate his only begotten son. Nathan’s answer to the eternal conundrum of
Christ’s sexuality comes when the Reverend Beloff asserts that God “gave his
only-begotten son a body.” Nathan replies, “Not really . . . He gave Jesus the
image of a body [not a real body in flesh] so that He could appear on earth and
be seen by our eyes . . . Christ merely used a human body.” So that’s how it
ostensibly is: the only begotten son was never even truly begotten, never truly
made incarnate in the image of man. But this line of facile reasoning is easily
refuted. To follow Nathan’s “logic,” there was no Annunciation/Incarnation, the
Virgin Mary gave birth not to a child in flesh but to a virtual image, Christ
on the cross never really even suffered since his suffering flesh was not real.
The Passion and its agonies, therefore, were all make believe. The phrase “I am
not of this world” is repeated perpetually throughout the novel, and Christ the
God-Man was indeed not of this world; but He was in flesh while He was here.
Therefore, the contention that Christ was a-sexual remains problematic.
“On the eve of the boy’s twelfth
birthday,” just before puberty, Nathan has another visitation. “There was one
aspect of God, Nathan believed, that resided in him and was identical with his
soul, being of the same substance; but there was another aspect of God,
unknown, unknowable, that came upon him from without, swooping down upon him
without warning. God in this form was a rare trembling brightness that pierced
the eye and snatched away the breath. It did no good to cry for aid, or for
mercy, for this God was oblivious of human pain.” This wrathful, merciless God/
Christ presents Nathan with visions of sinners in hell; then accuses him of the
sin of pride. The passage recalls something similar in James Joyce’s Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, when a Catholic priest fulminates at length
about the terrors of hell and frightens the life out of his listeners.
To expiate his sin of pride Nathan,
who has been placed in some foul-smelling chicken coop amidst the stench of
excrement, feathers, and the fluttering wings of chickens, is forced to bite
off the head of one of the chickens. This hideous passage—one of the most
powerful in the book—goes on for eight pages. It represents all that Thaddeus
Vickery loathed about what he saw as the vengeful, vindictive, implacable, pitiless
side of Jesus Christ. “After the sacrifice of his pride” Nathan was “speechless
and only partly conscious for several weeks, but with rare powers of preaching
and healing and prophecy.” The mere sound of his voice moved many of his
listeners to ecstasy, and they appeared literally to witness a power that came
over him, “seized and possessed him.” This power “manifested itself in a
luminous glow on the boy’s face and hands.” This glow first appeared “when
Nathan was fourteen years old.”
Interesting point: at age twelve,
on the verge of puberty, Nathan’s is confronted with his pride. Nothing is said
about the issue of budding sexuality. At age fourteen he manifests a luminous
glow, but, once again, nothing is said about what would at that age be one’s
early encounter with the momentous forces of sex. The temptress Esther Leonie
Beloff, daughter of the famous evangelist Marian Miles Beloff, first hears him
preach when she is sixteen and he eleven. But the scene in which he almost
succumbs to her fleshy charms comes only when he is eighteen years old. The
narrator tells us that “he felt only a coarse, sickening desire for her and a
contempt for both of them . . . His lust for her was perverse. It frightened
him. He wondered at times if he was going insane. For it was insanity, wasn’t
it, for one of God’s creatures to desire another so violently that God Himself
was obliterated—?” Telling here, but not really showing, and even the telling
is misplaced; we need to hear something about how the great tiger of Sexuality,
one of the devil’s most powerful of accomplices in the view of Christians like
the evangelical narrator—pounced on Nathan at age twelve or thirteen. In this
book there is no pouncing. Want to read about lust? Read Tolstoy; he knows
whereof he speaks. At least in this novel, J.C. Oates never writes convincingly
about the overwhelming power of lust. The episodes featuring Leonie and Nathan
are among the weakest in the novel.
Flesh
vs. Soul
Here are Nathan’s thoughts about
carnality and spirituality—right in the midst of his being tempted by Leonie’s
carnality: “might mankind be freed of the deathliness of sin if the senses were
somehow obliterated? . . . Was it the wish of the Lord that the spirit be
reduced triumphantly to a bodiless shimmering indestructible essence that could
not be assaulted and violated by the illusory world?” Here Nathan yearns—as he
does throughout the novel—to escape the prison of carnality and join Christ/God
in the “bodiless essence” of spirituality. This is the biggest issue raised in
the book: human beings are bound to things of the flesh, rather than to things
of the spirit. “They have never listened. They have most gleefully exchanged
the glory of the imperishable God for representations of perishable man, of
bird and beast and reptile, they willingly exchange Your truth for lies,
worshipping the creature in preference to the Creator.” And this very book, as
work of art, is one of the “representations of perishable man.” The inevitable
conclusion of the flesh-haters and soul-lovers: life in flesh is an evil, so
that flesh must be somehow extirpated. But how? God incarnated human beings on
earth; they are flesh-bound. There is only one way for Nathan to merge with the
pure spirituality that he craves. By rejecting his flesh; by dying. Therefore,
the hatred of the flesh must amount, ultimately, to a love of Death.
Others in the novel find ways to
get around this paradox. Leonie’s father, the Reverend Marian Miles Beloff, is
a renowned Protestant evangelist with all the accoutrements of fame:
accountants, lawyers, big money raised by the faithful who support his
ministry. As the Gary Burbank spoof once portrayed the typical evangelist
preacher, Deuteronomy Skaggs, everything was about moolah: “Dig in them jeans
and dig out them greens.” Like Nathan, Beloff was called to his ministry at an
early age (13), but by the time he appears in the novel, in the mid 1950s, he
manifests none of the hard-core, Pentecostal-style Christianity that rules Nathan’s life. Beloff’s
Doctrine of Constant Baptism asserts that one must be rebaptized perpetually
and be “washed in the blood of the Lamb every morning of every day if possible;
so that he lived in an eternal present tense with Jesus Christ as his Saviour.”
That sounds good on the surface.
It recalls here of the eternal present tense of the Eastern Orthodox Jesus
Prayer, which is to be repeated over and over in times of trouble: “Lord Jesus
Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” Elsewhere in the novel
similar obsessively repetitive prayers are described. Early in Nathan’s life,
Opal the grandmother begins praying ecstatically, in an analogy to the Jesus
Prayer: “O God help, O God please, O God have mercy.” Late in the book Nathan
himself introduces such a prayer that in its “infantile simplicity” appeals to
his listeners: he repeats “Jesus loves me” over and over.
But “both Reverend Beloff and his
daughter, Nathan soon discovered, were lazy, vain, utterly charming people.”
Beloff’s easygoing Christianity is just the opposite of Nathan’s. None of the
fire and brimstone stuff for him, none of the wrathful “Christ with a sword”
that becomes Nathan’s favorite image of Jesus; none of this stuff about how
Christ demands that people give up even their attachment to loved ones in order
to follow Him. “‘Christianity is a religion of joy; the Gospel is uniquely
ours—why therefore must we live in terror of the future?’ Marian Miles Beloff
stressed joy, thanksgiving, the forgiveness of sins, the spontaneous giving of
gifts, the assurance of salvation.”
Furthermore, Reverend Beloff has
nothing against sexuality; in fact he indulges himself with several mistresses.
He loves a good joke and a hearty laugh. Like the most hard-core adherents of
evangelical Christianity Nathan abhors sexuality and has no truck with humor,
which he never even “gets.” “‘And what was humor, anyway?’ he asked himself.”
At age eighteen Nathan is clearly not of this world. “He had never learned to
make the small, pointless, kindly social remarks necessary in the world of
man.” Such remarks are Beloff’s specialty.
In their final encounter Nathan
scares the wits out of Beloff, when he describes how Christ forced him to
humble himself by biting off the head of a chicken. As Nathan speaks to him,
the frightened Beloff suspects for the first time that his easygoing, innocuous
Christianity is a sham. “It [Nathan’s Christianity] was the very spirit of
Jesus of Nazareth Himself: imperious and princely.” Beloff defends himself by
dismissing Nathan as his assistant and banishing him from his presence. “The
young man’s concepts were so bizarre, his vocabulary so strange, it was
impossible to know what he meant. A heretic, was he, or a fanatic of the sort
Beloff has always feared; or perhaps he was an atheist?”
A
Narrator in the Wilderness, Crying out to the Lord
Beginning of Book Two (“The
Witness”): “There is no loneliness, O Lord, like that of a man whom You have
once loved—and then abandoned.” As we learn from the earliest pages of the
novel, a man I call “the evangelical narrator” tells the story of the life of
Nathanael (Nathan), he who has been called to his ministry by God. This
narrator—so we also learn very early on—is living as an exile, an apparent
apostate banished from the presence of the Lord and bemoaning his utter
loneliness. This narrative voice—that of a true Christian believer—goes on
crying out all the way through the book. Here he is on page 196: “How long will
You keep Yourself apart from me, O Lord? how long will You hide your face from
me?”—(see beginning of Psalm 13). Earlier on in the novel (55) the voice is
described as “Like David in the wilderness of Judah,” followed by a quote from
the Psalms, including “my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in
a dry and thirsty land.”
This is a direct confirmation that
the model for this voice comes from the Psalms, where a cursory reading reveals
scads of similar cries. Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? Psalm
10: “Why standesth thou afar off, O Lord? why hidest thou thyself in times of
trouble?” Psalm 28: Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock; be not silent to me:
lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.
Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my
hands toward thy holy oracle.” In Son of the Morning the David figure,
the evoker of the Lord, calls his evocations a prayer. So that running
throughout the entire book, along with narration of the life of Nathan the
evangelist, there is this incessant, beseeching prayer to God.
For another possibility, see,
e.g., p. 142, referring to “that day nearly four years ago when You saw fit, in
Your infinite wisdom and justice, to abandon me.” Throughout the book there are
indications that the voice of the exile in the wilderness is Nathan himself.
This seems especially likely when we come to the description—late in the
book—of how Nathan suddenly fell out of favor with the Lord and gave up his
ministry. In light of this, we go back and read, say, from page 22: “Bereft of
You for the past three years, I am in dread of dying in my sins . . . I am in
dread of the draining away of my spirit. Once after you swooped upon me
suddenly, like a great hawk, and I only a child at the time [an allusion to the
third visitation, when the boy Nathan is humbled and forced to bite off the
head off a chicken], I arose baffled and stunned, and it seemed to me that the
soul was a kind of thread: how easily it might be snapped if it were Your will
. . . Now I languish in exile and my spirit is turgid and brackish as swamp
water, ebbing daily, draining away. There is an odor of rot and of stagnation:
of despair.”
So clearly the narrator here is
Nathan, but less than a page later Nathan is spoken of in the third person: “Of
Nathanael it was said by Christ that he should see heaven open, and the angels
of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. Of the child Nathanael it
was said that God had claimed him from birth and filled him at certain moments
with the power.” At various other parts of the book we have this same
disjunction. The narrator is sometimes surely Nathan himself. After all, the
seven visitations are described in great detail, and the only person who could thus
describe them is the person visited, i.e., Nathan himself. So he’s the
narrator, except when sometimes he’s not. You can read the whole novel through
twice and you’re still puzzling over exactly who is telling the story.
One thing for sure: the narration
of the novel is given, largely, into the hands of a fanatic, a man or woman with
the mindset of a Christian evangelical. “The child Nathanael dwelled with God,
and there was no time when he was not with God. So it was: before his birth and
afterwards. He knew not the terrible loneliness that I [who?] and many others,
fallen from Your regard, have known” (p.76). I provide the page numbers to
illustrate how the narrative disjunction runs throughout the book. So who is
this second narrator? The most likely candidates for this are Japheth Sproul
and another of Nathan’s disciples, Donald Beck. Given that Japheth goes berserk
and tries to kill Nathan late in the book, I’d settle most likely for Beck.
Whoever he is, this narrator expects the reader to accept numerous miracles and
highly improbable events as reality. He expects us to believe that Christ,
using the boy Nathan as his instrument, strikes down Dr. Vickery, murders him
for his blasphemy. He expects us to believe that when Japheth attacks Nathan
and strikes him on the head with a crowbar, he, in effect, kills him, but
Nathan comes back to life. He even expects us to believe that by a point late
in his ministry, when Nathan is over thirty, he has already attained to a state
of near divinity; he is an equal of Jesus Christ Himself and at times seems to
have surpassed Christ in glory.
I as secular reader, of course—one
not inclined to revel in rhapsodical Christianity—don’t really believe any of
that, but there appears no other teller of the story to listen to. Of the many
novels that J.C. Oates has published, I wonder if there is any other with such
a skewed, problematic narrative approach. At one point it seems as if the
author herself, or her representative, slides sideways into the book, sits for
a moment beside the crazy narrator whom she has put in charge: “Imagining
Nathanael Vickery is far more difficult a task than I had anticipated.” After
that sentence it appears that the evangelical narrator takes over again for a
couple of paragraphs. Then comes this: “Imagining Nathanael Vickery . . . . It
is easier to imagine William Japheth Sproul III. Who I rather like. [Who is
speaking here?] But he does not enter Nathan’s orbit until 1965, and though he
believed he was of crucial importance to Nathan’s career, I suspect in fact he
was not. (Just as poor Leonie Dietz went about giving interviews in the late
sixties, fantasizing herself as Nathan Vickery’s first and only love; blaming
the failure of their love, in retrospect, on her father. But the hypothesis of
a married Nathan Vickery, a married Saviour, was always ludicrous
and no one took the woman seriously.) . . . (It sounds as if I am angry with
Leonie. But that can’t be—for why would I be angry with Leonie?).” These
desultory and parenthetical passages (see p. 272-73), all on the theme of how
it is to imagine Nathan Vickery, read like random notes by the author in the
margins of her manuscript. In reading the book, I often wonder who edited it,
and what the editor thought about puzzling passages like this.
As the evangelical narrator is
running out of gas near the end of the book, we get a few more hints of the
author’s struggles melded with those of Nathan and the narrator: “My prayer
continues [Nathan’s prayer, the prayer of the fanatical narrator, and the
prayer of the frustrated omniscient narrator, representative of the author],
but now it is without hope. I continue but without hope . . . It must be
evident to You that I know very little, that I am as ignorant as certain of
Nathan’s disciples . . . My efforts to give substance to a wraith [my
italics, URB; to narrate the story of Nathan in this book?] cost me a great
deal of pain and yet are inadequate, and yet I must continue for I am
powerless to bring my prayer to an end . . . I am discovering, O Lord, that my
prayer is my life: my self . . . To break it off would be to break off my own
being . . . The skein of words connects me to You (or to the memory of You),
and I myself am the word made flesh, stubbornly living though my reason for
living has fled . . . The composition of this long, torturous prayer is
exhausting [my italics, URB], and yet I cannot give up. I want to know.
Were you indeed present in the form of the Holy Spirit when Nathan performed
his many cures?—his ‘miraculous’ cures? Did you instruct him in everything? Was
it Your power that healed his slashed hand, and allowed him to rise from a
hospital bed, etc.” Sometimes it appears to me that a sub-theme of the book is
the author’s desperate effort to “give substance to a wraith” and the frustrations
of the author in trying to find a way to tell this story.
Here is more of the same, this
time near the final pages of the book: “You who read this—you cannot guess at
my dread, or my self-contempt because of that dread. I am sick with
apprehension, I am a gargoyle crouched atop human shoulders, boar’s head, dog’s
head, swollen beastly lips wet with saliva. The phenomenon of language draws us
together as sisters and brothers, sisters and brothers not in Christ but in the
Word . . . you cannot guess at the meaning of the spaces between words, the
blank white emptiness of silence . . . Into which I might plunge myself yet,
for perhaps only so desperate an act would return the Lord to me.” Who is
speaking here? Surely not Nathan, or the evangelical narrator, neither of whom
would mull over “the phenomenon of language” or contemplate the meaning of
white spaces on pages. This is the agonizing omniscient narrator, the alter ego
of J.C. Oates, a narrator who, in the process of telling the story of a man
desperately seeking the Lord gets caught up in the tale and ends up a seeker
herself.
Nathan
Vickery, His Progress Toward Fleshlessness
As boy, and later man, Nathan
Vickery preaches his way through the first thirty years of “the loathsome twentieth
century.” An age that “was materialist, skeptical, blinded, atheistic; set upon
its own destruction . . . the human race was committing suicide . . . it
worshipped not Jesus Christ, but the Devil himself.” One of the central points
of the whole novel, repeated or manifested constantly, is that in this, the
twentieth century “Satan was the secret god of America.”
Nathan is born in 1940 and
“dies”—not in the flesh, but in the spirit, the only thing important to him—in
1974. For many years he insists that his is not a “healing ministry,” but
people attending his revivals are often relieved of pain and ailments. Some are
certainly healed, and the miraculous cures attract new followers. By the 1970s
he is one of the most successful and renowned evangelicals in the U.S.,
traveling constantly and attracting millions of people to his events.
Most of these years Nathan lives
with his grandmother, Opal Vickery, who was instrumental in leading him toward
the way of Christ in the first place. After his ministry is well established
she begins proclaiming that Nathan will rise up out of obscurity and “bear
witness to all the world of the Gospels and the fact that the world’s nations
were entering into the era of Great Tribulation, and that the end was close at
hand.” He himself also comes to emphasize the hopelessness of a fallen world
and the imminent coming of the End Times. At the conclusion of the novel she is
still alive, senile in a nursing home, but still glorifying her son, whom she
declares the son of God, a new messiah.
In Book Two (“The Witness”) Nathan
drops out of school at age fourteen. He has never had anything in common with
his classmates, has absolutely no interest in making friends; nor does any
subject taught in school appeal to him. But he does see the need to educate
himself. For one thing his ministry may take him all over the world, so that
foreign languages are necessary. He bemoans the loss of his educated
grandfather, the only figure in the book with genuine intellectual heft. He
“could have wept to think of the riches of his grandfather’s bookshelves.” After
the death of Thaddeus, Opal Vickery is responsible for throwing out nearly all
his possessions and burning his books. She apparently wishes to efface his
memory and destroy everything he valued in life. In the second half of the book
Opal is presented as something of a villain—the embodiment of ignorance and
religious obscurantism. Like all true believers throughout human history, she
mistrusts books, science, rationality. These are godless things, “perhaps the
Devil’s work.”
The prospect of Nathan’s
self-education is briefly proffered—then this incipient plotline is dropped;
Nathan never gets any secular education. This, however, does not humble him in
the company of educated people. He knows he has the ear of the Deity Himself,
that he is God’s chosen vessel. Why then should educated people, largely
godless, intimidate him? There is one excellent scene in which he meets with
faculty members at a university, and ends up accosting one sneering,
condescending philosophy professor; in the process he terrifies this man and
frightens all the others in attendance.
Throughout his whole life Nathan
is a foe of flesh and a proponent of spirit. Like Jesus Christ, he is “in the
world but not of it.” In 1959, at age nineteen, taking literally the famous
biblical passage—“If thine eye offend thee . . .”—he publicly puts out his left
eye with a knife, this in expiation for the lust he experienced for Leonie. In
the “calling out in the wilderness” passage directly preceding this, we find a
description of feminine carnality in all its repulsive absurdity: “The hands
clutching at me, seeking redemption. Faces swollen to the size of clouds,
staring, gaping, with ulcerous eyes. A woman’s distended belly—great drooping
bulbous lardish breasts pressing down upon the earth.” Another possibility:
although nothing is mentioned of this, the putting out of the left eye is also
in expiation for the murder the boy Nathan committed—at the instigation of
Jesus Christ Himself—initiating his grandfather’s fatal stroke by sending a
beam of something radiant on a wire into his left eye.
This outrageous act of public
self-maiming—at the conclusion of Book Two—ends up increasing Nathan’s fame and
notoriety. The Reverend Beloff, however, denounces Nathan for this act, calling
him insane, asserting that “he was willful and selfish and possibly even guided
by the Devil.” Nathan is in seclusion for nearly two years following this
event, but “came out of seclusion in the autumn of 1961.” Age twenty-one.
Japheth
Book Three (“Last Things”) begins
by introducing a new character, William Japheth Sproul III, a divinity student
and academic, scion of a long line of scholars. Twenty-seven years old, he
appears “seeking, as he told himself derisively, Tillich’s God beyond the God
of theism.” Note that word “derisively.” Neither Japheth nor his renowned
forbears is a true believer; scholars of religion traditionally tend to be
agnostics or atheists. He first comes to hear Nathan preach to Port Calmar on
Lake Oriskany (Lake Erie?), an 18-hour bus ride from Connecticut. The name
Japheth, by which he goes, is from the Book of Genesis, one of the three sons
of Noah—Shem, Ham and Japheth—saved from the Flood in the Ark. Japheth is a
true intellectual, and he could be presented as a voice of scientific reason, a
counter to the pure emotional religiosity of the true believer. But he himself
“gets religion” under the influence of Nathan, whom he comes to believe is a
second messiah. He begins working with the Seekers, Nathan’s followers, and his
organizational skills make him a valuable disciple.
Being the intellectual that he is,
Japheth has ideas. Dangerous things. In one scene he arouses the suspicions of
Donald Beck, another disciple and member of the Seekers, who, like Nathan, is
enveloped in the purity of religious belief, which is totally intuitive and emotional:
antirational. Japheth tells Beck that the younger generation is ready to give
up old cultural ideals, to turn aside from material things. At long last ideals
of the ancient Greeks, “the desirability of combat, of strife and virtue—virility—I
think we’ve come to the point in the evolution of our species where we’re ready
to—to make a leap to another—the cruelty of the Hellenistic ideal has had its
day . . .” Although Japheth voices these notions in the seventies, they sound
something like the ideals of the sixties in America, when young people were out
to extirpate nearly all values and institutions—to start all over from scratch.
The action of the novel is set to the background of events in the U.S,
beginning in the 1940s and running on into the 1970s. At times there are
allusions or direct references to this background, but often there are none. No
mention is made of the revolution of the flower children of the sixties.
Late in the book things go
sideways for Japheth. Beck tells him, “There is something poisonous in you.”
That something is reason. Beck informs the other Seekers that they must pray
for Japheth. Even worse, Japheth manifests what are apparently homosexual
feelings for Nathan and is banished from the Seekers. This leads to a scene (July,
1973) in which he attacks Nathan, smashes his skull but fails to kill him. The
crazed Japheth screams, “I killed him but he didn’t die. Because he’s the son
of God. He has replaced Christ.” The evangelical narrator informs us that when
Nathan was attacked, his soul briefly detached itself from his body and watched
the proceedings, the fallen body, from a great height. Then the soul returned
to the body. “He had not died. Yet he had not exactly continued to live.”
Another miracle: his skull was crushed but he showed no ill effects. Japheth is
committed to an insane asylum, where he is said to have committed suicide late
in the book. But he later turns up briefly again. The narrator claims to have
seen him in a church, and after Nathan’s final collapse Japheth appears briefly
at the clinic where Nathan is treated. “He was still very angry. Murderously
angry.”
Repetitive
Visitations on the Path Toward Apotheosis
As the years pass, Nathan’s
ministry, known as The Seekers, gains renown and followers. Nathan himself
transitions from boy preacher to young man preacher. The Seekers eventually
amount to a community of followers, something like a religious commune. The
organization acquires “accountants, attorneys and tax specialists.” As usual,
apparently the inevitable occurs: things have to be about money. Nathan
himself, however, refuses to concern himself with any of these ancillary
matters—they are handled largely by Japheth and another Seeker, the Reverend
Lund. Throughout his life Nathan has no truck with matters of the secular
world. The Seekers organization may be quite profitable, but this, in his view,
has nothing to do with him. Furthermore, throughout his life he relates to the human
beings around him—mired as they are in ordinary things of the flesh, romantic
love, financial matters, etc.—with indifference or even contempt. His main
focus remains on communion with a Higher Deity.
When he experiences his
visitations from the Deity that communion is direct and terrifying. Eight years
pass between the manifestation of the Lord on the eve of Good Friday,
1959—after which Nathan puts out his left eye—and the next visitation, the
fifth, in late September, 1967. This is “The Vision of the One, the Spirit of
Absolute Illumination: the Many-in-One. You.” As described by the evangelical
narrator, “One moment he was in time, aware of the time: 7:45. The next moment
time had stopped . . . You descended . . . A radiance swelling to such
intensity that Nathan’s eyeball was seared: scalding wires seemed to run up his
nostrils, into his brain [same image used for the scene of Dr. Vickery’s
murder]. The radiance grew, pulsating, until it began to burn, the very air
turned to flames, invisible and silent flames, blackening. He tried to move but
could not. The light turned suddenly dark, as if it had been forced
inside-out.” Nathan hears the wails and howls of sinners all around him, and
“he would have joined the soundless, agonized weeping had he not been too
frightened by Your wrath to turn aside from You for even a moment . . . And You
asserted Yourself then in Your infinite, writhing, coiling majesty. Your
radiance once again so heightened that it turned pitch black, and the black
then beat itself, frenzied, into light, and the light again black, by which
Nathan came to know the power of Your breath, which is the breath of the living
earth . . .”
“Whereupon Nathan Vickery learned
that You will tolerate no other gods before you, no other forms of godliness .
. . No other gods before you! No images of Your being! You are the Many-in-One,
the One-in-One, the One. Nothing before or after. Nothing except the One.” In
earlier visitations Christ has appeared to Nathan, but now it is clear that we
have transcended the figure of mere Christ, who shows up here only to be sucked
by the One Deity into oblivion—before reappearing, only to be sucked away once
more. Nathan later wants to describe this vision to Japheth, his understanding
that “Christ [was] revealed as no more significant, apparently, than Nathan
himself . . . To say finally that You are indeed a God of wrath, and the vials
of Your wrath will be poured out upon the earth as it was foretold; to say
finally that the race of men and the race of devils were intermingled, and must
be forced apart, in order that Your kingdom be restored on earth.” The Devil is
big in this novel. “Nathan Vickery and his associates sometimes spoke of rival
churches as being ‘of the Devil without knowing it.’” But a constant implication
throughout the book is that the Devil may have infiltrated the very ministry
and mind of Nathan Vickery himself.
Here's another thing that seems
obvious by the time of the Fifth Visitation: if Nathan has any use for Christ
at all by his twenties, the Christ he has use for has nothing to do with the
Christ of love that some Christians find paramount. As the narrator informs us
following the next visitation, The God of Love is of no consequence—or He “had
not yet come into existence, and what need was there for Him?” Nathan—echoing
Christ’s words in a biblical passage—cries out to the multitude as follows: “If
any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life as well, he cannot be
my disciple.” Nathan’s Christ “cometh with a sword,” to wreak havoc upon
sinners, not to bestow love on them.
The next visitation, which occurs
in 1972, when Nathan is thirty-two, confirms the diminution of Jesus Christ,
and the elevation of Nathan Vickery to a status nearly equal to that of Christ.
Nathan thrashes about for a day and a half, in the throes of the vision; and he
“saw the immense desert spaces of the earth stretching out before him; he saw
strange desert birds flying close to the cracked ground, ungainly creatures,
solitary and triumphant . . . Now You allowed him to realize the otherness
of these creatures, and of all creatures, and You gave to him dominion over
them, over all manner of life that crept about the face of the earth. There
were the great sunless darkly heaving oceans of the earth, beneath their
surfaces choked with life, and over this life, which swam and coiled about
itself and devoured and excreted itself constantly, You gave absolute dominion
to Nathanael Vickery: for he was the root, the tree, the living tower that held
together earth and heaven. The birds of the air, the creatures of the deep, and
all life that sprang out of the earth, including man, You placed under his
dominion. For he was the seed, the stem, the blossom; the gigantic tower that
heaved with life, and that no earthly power could overcome.”
Is Nathan Vickery—in the view of
the narrator—already a kind of Second Messiah? Apparently not. The Tribulation
is on the horizon, after which a new Saviour will descend and reign for a
thousand years. “Seven years it [the Tribulation] would rage, seven chaotic
years, and there would be great suffering, and weeping and gnashing of teeth,
and he must steel himself against pity: for pity for mankind would melt his
bones and he would be lost, as Jesus of Nazareth was lost. Be ye in the
world but not of it, as Jesus was of it; his worldliness cost Him his life. In
you I am come again. In You I will not fail . . . Jesus of Nazareth had
failed, but Nathan would not fail: so You allowed him to know.” So Jesus
Christ, we are given to know, became too much “of this world,” not the Man-God
but a humble human being, and His life ended in failure.
This vision presents a kind of
apotheosis of Nathan Vickery. Even before this he felt little attachment to his
fellow human beings in flesh; now he feels none. “Who were these people? Had he
known them in another lifetime? He, who had been shown the secret axis of the
earth, he who was the very axis himself, was expected to take them seriously
and to reply to their childlike questions . . . ! He laughed aloud with the
absurdity of it. He laughed, that these people should imagine he shared
a common language with them, or dwelt in his body as they in theirs, a stranger
to You.” Note that this is one of the few times in the novel that Nathan
laughs—maybe the only time? He has no sense of humor; he is humorless and
sexless. And now he is pitiless as well. When contemplating his pathetic fellow
man he laughs a laugh of arrogance and condescension. Is he not here in immediate
need of another visitation from Christ, another purging of his satanic pride? One
more complication, one more apparent contradiction in this highly contradictory
novel.
By this point in the novel, Christ
has absconded. Some new Deity rules Nathan’s world in place of Christ. Another
problem: is Nathan aware of how Christ has been demoted, un-throned in this
visitation? Does he accept the removal of Jesus Christ from the pantheon of
Christianity’s most revered figures? I am reminded here of the preacher Hazel
Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Hazel wants to found a new
church called The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ. If Nathan feels similar
sentiments, then the sermons he preaches would reflect his new views. But his
sermons and preachings remain the same, and Christ remains their central focus.
The
Seventh and Final Vision
“By September of 1973 he was
sufficiently recovered from the attempt on his life [Japheth’s attack] to begin
a massive crusade that kept him and his staff on the road for nearly twelve
months, covering some twenty-five thousand miles and eighty cities, and
bringing him into contact with several million people. In all that he did and
said he was carried out of himself, a vessel for Your wisdom, and many were the
miracles performed in Your name, and in the hundreds of thousands were the
joyous converts to Your church on earth. Cleveland, Cincinnati, Nashville,
Chattanooga, Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, Houston . . . And on and on, across the
continent, north and south across the nation, and into Mexico and Canada, a
tireless crusade-for-souls . . .” Note the real names for cities here.
“And how the multitudes thrilled,
seeing him—knowing they were to share a certain space and time with him, who
had been proclaimed as the incarnation of God Himself! . . . [but then no one
ever proclaimed him as the incarnation of God, nor did Nathan himself make that
claim; it’s only proclaimer is the mad evangelical narrator]. At the state
fairgrounds in Patagonia Springs in one of the western states—[note the
vagueness of the place and the fictitious name here when we begin speaking of
specifics]—You sent to Nathan the seventh and most violent of Your visions, and
it was here, on the eighth of August, 1974, before an estimated crowd of over a
hundred thousand people, that the ministry of Nathan Vickery came to an end.”
Most of the action of the novel
proceeds as if slightly apart from what is happening in the U.S. and abroad
during Nathan’s life, but world events hover in the background. Here we have a
climactic event occurring on the exact day that President Nixon resigned. The date
is given in terms of what happened to Nathan on that day, and there is no
mention of that momentous political event.
“To have assimilated everything
completely in himself, to have obliterated the false barriers between one form
and another!—to have experienced Your grace as the cessation of all duality,
all struggle!—thus he knew himself one with You, thus he gazed out upon the
multitudes and proclaimed Your wisdom, that none who heard should fall by the
wayside and be lost.” So it was that Nathan Vickery, “crouched before a
microphone, gazing out into the vast crowd of expectant, greedy believers . . .
saw, for the first time, for what he realized was the first time, Your face—he
saw You . . . He was in the midst of crying out that we are indeed living in
the Final Days, that the earth’s population is convulsed with sin . . . we are
in the midst of the Devil’s Kingdom, and only Christ’s Kingdom could do battle
with it!—he was in the midst of an impassioned plea, as raw and direct as any
he had ever given, when You allowed him to know that Your love for him was at
an end. Quite suddenly, after so many years—it was over . . .
“He stood there, bent, swaying,
staring out into the seething mass of life before him, life that knew him not,
even as he knew it not, the life that is You, a chaos of molecules dancing
wildly and drunkenly in the sun . . . You dropped away from Nathan and declared
Yourself in Your primary form, mocking him, a stranger to him . . . he saw only
You: shapeless, twisting and undulating and coiling and writhing and leaping .
. . A great hole. A great mouth . . . Ah, he stood at the very brink, at the
very edge!—in his frail, rather foolish being, in his utterly insubstantial human
form. In that instant, as Nathan gazed upon God, he knew that this was the
vision Christ had seen: certainly He too had seen it: they were not rival sons
but brothers, as all men are brothers. Standing on the edge of You. On the edge
of Your ravenous being . . . the hole before him was a mouth . . . the writhing
dancing molecules of flesh were being sucked into it, and ground to nothing,
and at the same time retained their illusory being . . .” Aha, so that’s what
God is: a big hole of a ravenous mouth, sucking everything in perpetually and
spitting it all back out, and then sucking it in again, etc., ad nauseum.
Big question of the whole book:
who is this Divinity that appears throughout? Surely not Jesus Christ, who in
the time of the Sixth Visitation is relegated to a secondary position. Is it
the God Jehovah of the Old Testament, often depicted, as with this divinity, as
jealous, vindictive, wrathful? But somehow Jehovah/Yahweh does not fit here
either. We’re out of the Great Monotheisms and into the Eastern religions now. Or into some Eastern variant of the religion of the One God. A major point,
stressed repeatedly throughout the novel: the Divinity is practically never
depicted as loving, comforting, caring. This is a kind of amoral God, often
cruel, easy to anger, unforgiving. Later on, in the epilogue, Nathan reflects
upon how “You led him on, how you played with him! But he recognized the joke,
the jesting spirit, behind all Your cruelty.” A few pages on from this passage
“Your playfulness” is mentioned. So we have a wrathful, ravenous, uncaring God,
who loves to play dirty tricks on his hapless human subjects, who enjoys a good
nasty joke. Something like, say, Joseph Stalin.
The
Epilogue
In the epilogue to the novel
(titled “The Sepulcher”) the banished Nathan, his ministry in shatters, rebaptizes
himself as William Vickery. “He was utterly alone. No one watched, no one
listened. No one: and Your absence was palpable, incredible.” He wanders around
the places of his childhood, bemoaning his banishment from the favor of the One
God. At this point he becomes obviously the principal “crier out in the
wilderness,” but the other narrator, the evangelical man who has been a
presence throughout, remains. As the novel progresses this rhapsodical narrator—who
quite recently has asserted the insignificance of Jesus Christ and explained
the mistakes Christ made—grows ever more crazed, lost in the grip of his
fanatical religious obscurantism.
The epilogue begins with this
strange and gratuitous statement on his part: “Thus Nathan Vickery was
extinguished, and sank into oblivion. And lies there still in his death-trance.
And passes from my consideration, belonging to You and not to me, who despaired
of him from the first and wished with all my heart that Japheth Sproul had
indeed killed him [Huh??]. Later on: “If necessary I lie to them about You. And
Nathanael. I tell them in their own neutral tones that You were a delusion and
Nathanael mad.”
Nathan has died “at the height of
his powers, like Christ” aged 34. He “was extinguished, died . . . and after
many months stirred to life again—for You did not intend that his earthly
existence should end, only that he be destroyed.” Why, by the way? Nathan’s
fall from grace is never explained. Why did the One Deity suddenly turn against
him? Only the One Deity knows. Rumors abound after the events of 1974 when his
ministry collapsed. Some say Devil worshippers poisoned him, others that the
U.S. government was responsible for his ostensible death. “Hundreds of people
claimed to see his soul fly out of his mouth, something vaporous and writhing,
near-transparent.” Ah, that elusive soul again, which scientists and
rationalists have declared extinct over and over, only to watch people revive
it, people who can swear they saw it fly out of someone’s mouth at the moment
of death.
Meanwhile, “Time that was to be no
more endures. Continues. Nor am I out of it.” The great hope of both the
rhapsodical narrator and Nathan himself is to depart from time and flesh, to
become pure spirit. Something only a mad fanatic could believe possible. One of
the Seekers mentioned earlier, Donald Beck—who possibly is the evangelical
narrator throughout—shows up one more time at the end of the novel. He “runs a
small Seekers house in Los Angeles and claims that Brother Nathan still
controls the Seekers Movement, although he is in exile, in hiding.”
Conclusion
Flannery O’Connor once described
the principal theme of her own works as “the action of grace in territory held
largely by the devil.” I don’t know how much grace is bestowed upon the
characters in Son of the Morning, but one thing is for sure: the
territory of the novel is certainly controlled in toto by Satan. The book’s
dedication page reads as follows: “For One Whose absence is palpable as any
presence—" This could refer to the Judeo-Christian God, whom Nathan
believes he is serving, but, then again, it could also refer to the Devil (word
always capitalized when used in this novel).
At one point Nathan says to
Beloff, “The Devil isn’t a person, but a presence. The Devil is a way of
seeing. Sometimes he has me entirely—my soul. And when I look out into the
world I see the world through his eyes, and it’s unclean and
contaminated and ugly and graceless and . . . and God has abandoned it . . .
and God has abandoned me. That is the Devil. He’s with me now, sitting here
with me now. He’s jeering at me. I can almost hear him. Sometimes when I preach
I can hear him, a voice running alongside my own. It’s like an echo.
It’s my own voice he has taken over and altered to suit his evil intentions.”
The Devil is such an important
character in the novel that, so it appears, the novel is even named for him. On
the title see the Book of Isaiah 14: 12. Here is Nathan (p. 254), bemoaning the
horrible state of American morals and then quoting from that passage, King
James Bible:
“Vickery went on to speak of Satan
in the churches. And of Satan in the schools. In government. Pride,
materialism, drunkenness, drugs, the sinful use of one another’s bodies, the
making of war upon defenseless people. From all the pulpits come hollow faithless
cries. American Christians! American hypocrites! Sinners! Devil-worshipers!
Their fate will be that of their secret, invisible god; they will not escape
any more than he escaped, before the start of human history . . . And in a
voice of heart-stopping beauty, fairly trembling with feeling, he spoke those
verses from Isaiah that had captivated Japheth for many years—
“How art thou fallen from heaven,
O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst
weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart,
I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I
will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of
the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Yet thou shall be brought down to
hell. . . .”
The article titled “Lucifer” on
Wikipedia explains that “In the Book of Isaiah the king of Babylon is condemned
in a prophetic vision by the prophet Isaiah and is called ‘shining one, son of
the morning.’ In modern English translations of this passage the word ‘Lucifer’
has been abandoned—instead other words are used: ‘morning star,’ ‘day star,’ or
‘shining one.’” Notwithstanding this, the biblical source for Nathan and this
novel is King James, and there seems little doubt that Lucifer in the passage
cited refers to the Devil.
I have pointed out several times
one of the big questions of the book: unbeknownst to himself, is Nathan
Vickery’s ministry sometimes also serving the purposes of the Devil? As for
Nathan’s seven visitations, is it not possible that the wrathful and vengeful
deity who appears to him could be—at least in some of them—not the
Judeo-Christian God at all, but Satan himself? We recall that the gang-rape of
Elsa leading to the conception may be interpreted as a perversion of the
Annunciation and Immaculate Conception, the incarnation of God’s “only begotten
son.” After a parodic Un-immaculate Conception Lucifer’s only begotten son is
born as a direct consequence of sexual violence, led by a kind of petty,
low-level demon, Azazel or Beelzebub, the leader of the rapists, the man in the
scarf.
During his years as an evangelical
preacher Nathan prophesied, as did many others, that the End Times were at hand.
Given the horrors of the twentieth century, those living then had no problem
believing that the world was in fatal decline, bound for The Tribulation. Then we
clicked, finally, over into a new century, even a new millennium, and people
let out a long sigh of relief: thank God that one is done. But God and
Fate, or whoever is controlling things, made short shrift of that hope. Soon it
became obvious that the new century could turn out even more hideous than the
last. Now it is forty-six years since this book was published, and we’re almost
a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. Of course, huge progress
has been made in many walks of life, but the beastliness in the human soul—or,
say, in human guts if you don’t believe in the soul—remains as hopeless as
ever.
Joyce Carol Oates certainly has
her finger on the pulse of twentieth-century America, but, unfortunately, some
of the scenes she writes could describe the way things are in America to this
very day. While convalescing after having put out his own eye, Nathan lives
with his grandmother out on a lake, where he is astonished to learn how angry
people are—mostly older people, his neighbors at the lake, with their
“energetic malice.” “The radio news was always disturbing, as were the
newspapers, but it was not quite the same as hearing anger and hatred in the
voices of people to whom you are speaking on an ordinary sunlit day, and seeing
in their faces a certain mad gleefulness aroused by hate.” Now, doesn’t that
sound familiar to us Americans who live in the year 2024?
There are implications throughout Son
of the Morning that humanity in the twentieth century was living in
apocalyptic times, but then, as our own times well illustrate, all times may be
apocalyptic times. As for the U.S.A. we are living now through the Trump Era—something
no one could have predicted—and we face the prospect of losing our whole
democratic system in the near future—becoming an autocracy. Who in 1978, when
this novel was published, could have imagined that in 2024 half the country
would aim vicious hatred at the other half, and that other half would return
the hatred in kind? Who could have imagined the state of the abyss yawning
between the left wing and the right wing politically? Who could have conceived of
the hideous notion that anyone like Trump—a man totally unfit for the
presidency, a psychopathic narcissist and fool—could be immensely popular with
millions and millions of Americans—elected President once and possibly soon to
be our disastrous leader again?
But to take the Grand Perspective,
life in flesh on earth has always been horrendous for humanity, and always will
be. The Trump Era should teach all Americans huge lessons: we are not anything
special in the world at large, as in our deluded selves we once believed
America to be. Nor is our democracy anything special (same delusion). After
years and years of attempting to shove our glorious democracy down the throats
of the entire world, we now find much of that world sneering and cocking a
snook at us. All of this in a time when most of the world scorns liberal democracy
and half of our own countrymen seem blithefully unconcerned with its imminent
demise on our sea to shining sea.
A few parting thoughts on Son
of the Morning. For one thing, I find it a hugely brave, even reckless
endeavor on the part of Joyce Carol Oates. Where did she get the gumption to
undertake such an immense project in the first place? Certainly she, an
excellent writer but no theologian, no expert on world religions would have to
undertake immense research to even begin writing such a book. What she came up
with, this novel of 400 pages, still may be read with much profit forty-six
years after its publication. For that we should be grateful to her.
It is no big surprise that
sometimes she was not quite up to the task. When she entrusted most of the
narration to this evangelical narrator, a religious fanatic who is clearly
insane, she created a mass of problems. Even more problems when she wrote
passages in which one finds it hard to separate that narrator from Nathan
himself. At several points in the novel we seem to see some omniscient narrator
behind the whole business, wallowing in the complexities she herself has
created, calling out for help to The God of All Fictions. Then again, the book
is full of contradictions—many of which I have pointed out above—but how could that
be otherwise when such serious philosophical and theological matters are under
discussion? As J.C. Oates once wrote in her journal, “Who can tolerate that
most tiresome of bourgeois values, consistency?”
