Notes on Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood’ (with spoilers)
“All comic novels that are any good must be about life and death” wrote Flannery O’Connor in her note to the second edition of her debut novel ‘Wise Blood’.
When I first read this book I was attracted to the gothic atmosphere and the ironic , distorted images of humankind. I took it to be a satire on religious extremism, having no idea at the time that the author was a devout Catholic and that for her the slogan ‘Jesus Saves’ was meant as a statement of fact.
Despite her unwavering belief in grace and salvation, O’Connor knew full well the criticisms against the faithful and the arguments for atheism. Instead of mounting a defence of the Catholic Church, she presents the anti-religious viewpoint through the voice of the absurdist central character Hazel Motes. He is a deeply troubled 18 year old who returns to a deserted home town of Eastrod after being discharged from the army. All his family are dead. He is alone, rootless and faithless.
To say that Hazel is conflicted would be an understatement. He is adamant in his rejection of the concept of sin but still behaves like a miscreant desperate for redemption. The central platform for his one-man ‘Church Without Jesus’ is summed up by lines from one sermon delivered from the hood of a battered second hand car: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” He describes himself as “a preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” But, as V.S. Pritchett observes in his introduction: “This is not an atheist’s argument, it’s a stunned man’s mad passion.”
O’Connor argued that purity is the most mysterious of the virtues. In her fiction, Hazel Motes embarks on a fruitless journey in search of a life free of guilt and shame. He desperately wants to be ‘clean’ but constantly succumbs to, or is tempted by, ‘impure’ sexual acts with a prostitute (Mrs Watts) and a sassy 15 year-old girl (Sabbath Lily Hawks) who is eager to teach Haze how to be “pure filthy”.
He crosses paths with the equally confused Enoch Emery, a zoo keeper who knows vaguely that something is missing in his life but has no idea what this thing may be. A barmaid Maude who serves Hazel and Enoch in the ‘Frosty Bottle’ bar says to Motes “I know a clean boy when I see one” and advises him to choose better company. Hazel retorts “I AM clean, adding “If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean”
Hazel Motes’ rage against what he sees as the deceitful son of Christ (“Jesus was a liar”) is that of someone desperate for a sign to prove God exists. One description of Hazel’s face is that it was “as if he had a shout closed in it.” In essence, he is not seeking an alternative to conventional Christianity but a reason to believe in the gospel teachings.
His struggle between goodness and sin is a lifetime struggle – “He knew by the time he was 12 years old that he was going to be a preacher.” As a child of 10 he sneaked into Carnival tent to witness an X-rated performance where a naked woman was “squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth.” The “unplaced guilt that was in him” after being beaten by his mother for watching this show prompts him to fill his shoes with stones and small rocks. This act of penitence is a precursor to the shocking self-punishment that leads to an ignoble early death in a roadside ditch hideously scarred and totally blind.
Despite Hazel’s regular sermons on the hood of an Essex automobile outside a cinema, he doesn’t win over any followers unlike the fake blind preacher Hawks and the opportunistic con man Hoover Shoats – alias Onnie Jay Holy – who, with his assistant Solace Layfield, sees the money making potential of Haze’s ‘Church’. While Hazel Motes makes great claims to be speaking the truth, it is the liars and frauds who prosper. “Two things I can’t stand”, Haze said, “a man that ain’t true and one that mocks what is.”
If intended as a cautionary tale, O’Connor’s surreal story is fairly crude. The symbolism of Hazel’s self-inflicted suffering is heavily Christian in the most primitive way. He blinds himself with quick lime, wraps his chest in barbed wire and fills his shoes with rocks. “You must believe in Jesus or you wouldn’t do those foolish things”, Hazel’s landlady Mrs Flood comments and she has a point. Yet although on one hand his fate has all the hallmarks of a tragedy, critic Miles Orvell perceptively notes that “Hazel Motes is in fact the hero of a comic plot of salvation.”
