Wise Blood was assembled from a series of short stories that Flannery O’Connor had published in Mademoiselle, The Partisan Review, and The Sewanee Review. As her writing career truly opened with this novel in 1952, Wise Blood asks a lot of you as you read it. O’Connor is actually questioning faith through a protagonist in Hazel Motes, who is a zealot non-believer.
As we have discussed before, O’Connor’s Catholic upbringing and practice could have been the only facet of her short life that supplanted her love of writing. There is O’Connor’s Southern Gothic and there is O’Connor’s love of the Grotesque. To use that moniker to immediately describe a work can be off-putting; however, events in the book are not meant to feel surreal. This a gathering of imperfect people, many of whom do not have much to believe in.
In the fictional Tennessee town of Taulkingham, Hazel Motes is confronted by a series of characters who are written to feel “too real.” So the aforementioned “grotesque” is not a Dickensian physical malady; it is the feeling that, as readers, we are receiving a funhouse mirror vision of this chapter of life. The stoic street preachers work the major arteries, seeking attention and the ability to stop passersby. Those walking the streets of this changing Southern town are made to feel a little lost in their patterns. They are ordinary (in part), while Motes and his entourage are both extraordinary and out of place.
Enoch Emery may be the most good-hearted of all O’Connor’s characters. He finds what he believes in almost by accident – yet he is an outcast ... a zookeeper who can read more from the actions of the people around him, than their words. It is Emery who stumbles into a sense of direction through his theft of a museum piece and his procurement of a gorilla suit.
If all of this sounds foreign, it is meant to be. O’Connor is not necessarily looking to unveil characters who leap from the page. Beyond the page, O’Connor wants to make the “simpleton” Enoch into a wise man. However, his intelligence is only what is inside him. Those beliefs he carries make sense only to him.
So when Enoch meets Hazel, he essentially has a disciple, per se. However, it must be noted that Hazel is knowingly trying to shake off everyone who believes. Furthermore, Hazel’s disbelief is his belief. He is still slightly welcoming and cordial, but not like the street preachers who are craving attention.
Therefore, it only makes sense (in O’Connor’s gravity-less world), that Enoch and Hazel would see right through the potato-peeler scam of the blind preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter Sabbath Lily. What then does not make sense is the antagonists moving into the same house together. O’Connor builds a high degree of tension with the characters just feet from each other. As expected, her search for truth is reflected in Hazel’s discovery that Asa is not blind.
Here, Wise Blood takes a turn toward Greek tragedy. As Hazel and Sabbath Lily pursue their attraction and bond, she shows Hazel a newspaper ad where Asa announces to the world that he will blind himself with quicklime. To the congregation seeing this act, Asa is shedding his “worldly pursuits.” To Hazel who has seen Asa still has sight, it represents the ultimate act of cowardice and the possibility of the ultimate expression of Hazel’s belief.
Belief is no longer disbelief. Suddenly, everyone sees the lack of truth as the truth. Hoover Shoats’ transition to Onnie Jay Holy leads him to start a similar church – because he figures out that real bucks come from the disenfranchised. Hazel’s message of no belief is no longer pure. Moreover, his anger can no longer be contained by the designation “righteous.”
Hazel Motes becomes the sinner he always feared. While he possibly knew that this set of needs and desires dwelled within him, its release from his earthly body and mind finally gives gravity to his (and O’Connor’s) world.
It remains unknown whether O’Connor truly wanted Motes to meet his inevitable downfall in such a brutal and Christian manner. However, she raises some fascinating questions about morality and how it keeps humans on earth in line. Even seventy-plus years later, Wise Blood offers no answers in its complex lessons. Borrowing the structure from The Gospels and Greek tragedy, the downward spiral is made obvious from the moment Hazel returns from the war to no family and no real home.
Wise Blood is O’Connor’s dream world turned upside down so she can shake the pieces into different corners. All while, her beliefs remain unshakeable.
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Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
