Wise Blood

I enjoyed the writing style well enough, but the story itself doesn’t seem to be to my tastes. I’d still like to read some of O’Connor’s work so I may poke about in future and see if there’s something more in line with what I might enjoy.

Everyone in this novel talks, but no one is listening. Everyone has an agenda, but no one gets anywhere. Everyone believes in something, but no one feels secure. Underneath it all is a dark hysteria, edged with Flannery O'Connor's tongue-in-cheek humor.

I don't know if I liked this book as much as I experienced it very strongly and will think about it for a long time.

"Church of Christ!" Haze repeated. "Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption. […] I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar."

I don’t think I “get” Flannery O’Connor. I know that there is so,

so much symbolism flying straight over my head, but even at the most basic level I don’t think I really understand how to read her work. We are on two different wavelengths. Most glaringly, I don’t really see the humor and redemption in

Wise Blood: I see the brutality and the ugliness and the

meanness, on the part of both O’Connor and her characters, but I can’t quite find the lightness. (Except for the part where Haze, when pressed, tells a woman his Church Without Christ is Protestant, which is funny as hell.)

Wise Blood is kind of a weird novel. Apparently it is the result of O’Connor stitching together several short stories, and the seams show a little bit (particularly the chapters recounting Enoch’s interactions with the gorilla). But more than that, it feels overwhelmingly symbolic on every level. It’s filled with violence and transgressive behavior and characters that are over-the-top in their absurdity and unlikeability. It’s not speculative, but it doesn’t really feel “realistic,” either.

One of the strengths of the book is O’Connor’s voice. It’s not flowery or beautiful, but razor-sharp and carefully honed. There is an exactness to it. She uses language in ways I’ve never read anyone use it, in both the narrative and in the words she puts in her characters’ mouths. She writes sentences like

There was one window and another door opposite the door they had come in by.

which isn’t really anything special and isn’t even talking about anything special but it sounds like something only O’Connor could write because have you ever read an author string words together like that? And she writes dialect—

"Friends," the man said, "lemme innerduce myself.

—in a way that is perfectly easy to read while exactly communicating the sound of her characters’ speech, even to someone largely unfamiliar with the Southern accent, which I’d have thought was next to impossible. Other readers insist that she is also very funny, and while that only came through in a couple places for me, it’s undeniable that she has complete mastery of style…even though

Wise Blood was her first novel.

At the highest level,

Wise Blood is a critique of what I think would be classified as nihilism and postmodernism. We can read the novel and be horrified at the violence and corruption, which Haze enacts as deliberate acts of transgressiveness in an attempt to free himself from Jesus, but if like Haze you hold nihilism as gospel then you really can’t criticize him. “There’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he says, and we see where that gets him. Through all the brutality and insanity of

Wise Blood, O’Connor throws Christianity into vivid relief, critiquing the dangers of the move toward postmodern religion and showing how radical Christianity truly is, in a way that is shocking and profound. (Though the church itself does not escape unscathed, as jabs at prosperity preaching and false teachers abound.)

Some of the symbolism I

did pick up on. Most obviously, the recurring motif of blindness/sight would be difficult to miss, from the blind preacher Hoover Shoats, to Haze Motes’s name, to his mother’s glasses that Haze wears when he reads the Bible even though it makes his eyesight worse, to of course the ending. But even when I can identify it, I’m not altogether sure what it

means.

Case in point, the ending: here we come to the crux of my problem with the book, because

I just don’t get it. Why? What does it mean? I don’t think this is really a problem with the book itself, but a problem with me, as a reader, not having the necessary literary context to really grasp what O’Connor is trying to do here. That O’Connor comes from a short story background certainly plays a part of it (I’ve often struggled with the abruptness of American short stories and not being able to really grasp what the author is trying to say) and perhaps also O’Connor’s deep roots in Catholicism and the South

Three stars because I did like

Wise Blood: it kept me engaged, it made me think, and it is clearly much smarter than I will ever be…but I didn’t quite love it. This may be one of the best and most impactful novels I read all year, but it isn’t a favorite (observe the contradiction). I will definitely be reading more from O’Connor.

Some notable quotes from the introduction:

It is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.

Some favorite quotes:

The boy didn't need to hear it. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

He had gone to a country school where he had learned to read and write but that it was wiser not to; the Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.

Listenhere," he called, "I'm going to preach a new church--the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified. It won't cost you nothing to join my church. It's not started yet but it's going to be."

"You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else," he said, "but you ain't! I'm the one has it. Not you. Me"

It was a wet glary day. The sky was like a piece of thin polished silver with a dark sour-looking sun in one corner of it.

That morning Enoch Emery knew when he woke up that today the person he could show it to was going to come. He knew by his blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.

"I AM clean," he said again, without any expression on his face or in his voice, just looking at the woman as if he were looking at a wall. "If Jesus existed, I wouldn't be clean," he said.

The lights around the marquee were so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looked pale and insignificant.

"What church?" she asked. He said the Church Without Christ. "Protestant?" she asked suspiciously, "or something foreign?" He said "no mam, it was Protestant."

"What kind of a preacher are you?" he heard himself murmur, "not to see if you can save my soul?"

Haze had gone out in his car to think and he had decided that he would seduce Hawks's child. He thought that when the blind preacher saw his daughter ruined, he would realize that he was in earnest when he said he preached The Church Without Christ.

He felt that he should have a woman, not for the sake of the pleasure in her, but to prove that he didn't believe in sin since he practiced what was called it; but he had had enough of her.

Ten years ago at a revival he had intended to blind himself and two hundred people or more were there, waiting for him to do it. He had preached for an hour on the blindness of Paul, working himself up until he saw himself struck blind by a Divine flash of lightning and, with courage enough then, he had thrust his hands into the bucket of wet lime and streaked them down his face; but he hadn't been able to let any of it get into his eyes. He had been possessed of as many devils as were necessary to do it, but at that instant, they disappeared, and he saw himself standing there as he was. He fancied Jesus, Who had expelled them, was standing there too, beckoning to him; and he had fled out of the tent into the alley and disappeared.

"If you had been redeemed," Hazel Motes was shouting, "you would care about redemption but you don't. Look inside yourselves and see if you hadn't rather it wasn't if it was. There's no peace for the redeemed," he shouted, "and I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied!"

Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that's all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don't look like any other man so you'll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you'll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!"

"Look at me!" Hazel Motes cried, with a tare in his throat, "and you look at a peaceful man! Peaceful because my blood has set me free. Take counsel from your blood and come into the Church Without Christ and maybe somebody will bring us a new jesus and we'll all be saved by the sight of him!"

"Now I just want to give you folks a few reasons why you can trust this church," he said. "In the first place, friends, you can rely on it that it's nothing foreign connected with it.

You don't have to believe nothing you don't understand and approve of. If you don't understand it, it ain't true, and that's all there is to it. No jokers in the deck, friends." Haze leaned forward. "Blasphemy is the way to the truth," he said, "and there's no other way whether you understand it or not!" "Now, friends," Onnie Jay said, "I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this churches it's based on the Bible. Yes sir!

It's based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited. That's right," he said, "just the way Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here," he complained.

Haze stayed in his car about an hour and had a bad experience in it: he dreamed he was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the Judgment because there was no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing.

"I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there's no truth," he called. "No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, A Nutty Surprise! When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth.

The boy filled up the gas tank and checked the water and oil and tested the tires, and while he was working, Haze followed him around, telling him what it was right to believe.

He said it was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth. He said he had only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to salvation, but that you couldn't even believe in that because then you were believing in something to blaspheme. As for the Jesus who was reported to have been born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary for man's sins, Haze said, He was too foul a notion for a sane person to carry in his head, and he picked up the boy's water bucket and bammed it on the concrete pavement to emphasize what he was saying.

Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for about thirty feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub cow lying near a puddle. Over in the middle distance there was a one-room shack with a buzzard standing hunch-shouldered on the roof. The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and the cow stumbled up and galloped across the field and into the woods; the buzzard flapped off to a tree at the edge of the clearing. The car landed on its top, with the three wheels that stayed on, spinning. The motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and various odd pieces scattered this way and that.

If she had to be blind she would rather be dead. It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would be blind too. She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the first time. She recalled the phrase, "eternal death," that preachers used, but she cleared it out of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat.

I believe that what's right today is wrong tomorrow and that the time to enjoy yourself is now so long as you let others do the same.

If she was going to be blind when she was dead, who better to guide her than a blind man? Who better to lead the blind than the blind, who knew what it was like?