Wise Blood

I love lifting a rock and giving light to the freaks of life. The dark and comic absurdity.

Help me Jesus.

After reading this, I feel a need to read commentaries and see the movie to better understand what I read. Flannery sure knows how to create characters you dislike.

Wise Blood is a funny, beautifully written Southern Gothic novel about the nature of faith and redemption and the extremes individuals go through to negate faith and/or accept it. The book concerns Hazel Motes, a man determined to start a church without Christ but who in the end, gives into extreme acts of what we would consider extreme Medieval Christian faith such as blinding oneself, walking on rocks and glass, etc.. Hazel, who walks around in a haze, trying to deny Christ, finds that it only draws him closer to the truth. Motes is something of a nihilist with no particular religious beliefs other than the conviction that truth consists of the denial of established religions. Ultimately, he loses even the desire to see any truth at all, and is not apt to recognize it if he did. Hazel Motes is oblivious to the “mote” in his own eyes (Matthew 7.3). The efforts of this conflicted soul to become something significant are pitiable, but hard to forget. He begins his career by purchasing an old wreck of a car, parking just outside movie theaters, standing on the car, and preaching to the crowds as they leave the theaters. He has little or no success in winning converts, but notices that another preacher, who happens to be blind, attracts more attention than he does. The other preacher’s blindness turns out to be phony, but Motes’ response to him and his comparative success has significant and severe consequences pushing Motes' closer to Christ. There’s more to the story than I have outlined here, but I would hate to ruin the reader’s “fun” in pursuing the novel to its end. In her 1962 note to the second edition of the novel, O'Connor wrote: "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's integrity lies in his trying with such vigour 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 do so." Wise Blood is a dark yet humorous book about evil, suffering, and hucksterism, and yes the nature of faith and grace. It is full of amazing symbolism which allows for repeat readings. The ending is a shocking as Motes may have accepted Christ and is trying to pay for his sins through self-harm. Motes, can't escape his fate, so it seems.

This is my first Flannery O'Connor novel and it was about as I expected. The story was certainly unusual but I knew what I was getting into and enjoyed the depth of the writing and the themes involved. I definitely didn't "get" everything. I was struck by the things that Motes was drawn to vs the things that he was running away from. Do you find truth by addition or subtraction? By running away from untruth or digging deeper into things you don't understand? Maybe those things aren't mutually exclusive. I enjoyed this as a conversion story. A few quotes that I found thought provoking: Referring to Enoch: "In his cleaning up, his mind was on the washstand from the first, but as was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was." Referring to the landlady: "she had had a hard life, without pain and without pleasure, and she thought that now she was coming to the last part of it, she deserved a friend."

I have no idea what the point of this book is but I think I liked it. It has the feel of an Old Testament story, where the characters' actions don't really make sense and there's a lingering parable-like feeling, but with a sinister O'Connor twist. It's definitely not perfect, and her craft would later be honed and perfected in her A Good Man is Hard to Find, but nonetheless an intriguing read.

(view spoiler)[ It took me about a week to get through this book, but it’s really quite short and if you can dedicate some reading time, it shouldn’t take very long to finish and get through it. It has good but simple prose- although there are some parts where I had to re-read because it makes use of Southern slang and mannerisms. Wise Blood also serves as my introduction to the Southern Gothic genre and made me want to read more. There is also apparently a film adaptation of this which I haven’t seen, but I might at some point. It also made me very uncomfortable-in a good way. If I hadn’t already known that Flannery O’Connor was a Catholic, I’d have made that assumption anyway. There’s something about this book which captures my imagination and the way it critiques religion-or perhaps just a specific subset of it. It’s odd and I found myself thinking about this days even after I finished this book. It feels like a biting critique of Protestantism and in doing so, almost borders on the absurd. Was Wise Blood meant to be a critique of Protestantism? I’ve been reading articles on the subject and I find that this is the most common interpretation of the work. Now, I’m hardly the best person to critique religion or talk about religious motifs but you can’t divorce religion from this book so I’ll have to try my best. Hazel Motes is a man haunted by Jesus. He blasphemes, he curses His name, and he has a very odd but rather extreme attachment to religion, and Jesus in particular. To say that he is ‘Christ-haunted’ is an apt description. He was a war veteran and after struggling with doubts regarding his religion his entire life and then experiencing war, he becomes an atheist. He is nihilistic and professes to believe in nothing, and yet he is continuously affected by it. From the very start, when he is mistaken for a preacher (this is common throughout the first few chapters until Hazel kind of snaps and decides to actually become a preacher), Hazel is followed by religion. Wherever he goes, he is haunted. In particular, Hazel is most haunted by the ghost of his grandfather- not a literal ghost, but the memory of him. Some of his most vivid memories involve his grandfather who was a travelling preacher and who he takes a lot after. Throughout the book, the influence of his grandfather on his life is markedly apparent. He even starts to take after him as he becomes a preacher himself- a markedly nihilistic one, yes, but a preacher nonetheless. We also meet other characters in this novel- a ‘blind’ preacher named Asa Hawks and a young man named Enoch who believes in the concept of a ‘wise blood’- a man who needs no spiritual guidance but instinctively knows what to do with his life. Asa Hawks is a preacher who pretends to have blinded himself in an act of piety. He shows a lot of the hypocrisy which Flannery O’Connor may have been criticizing in the book. At first, he annoys Hazel because he essentially claims that Hazel wants to repent and his soul yearns for Christ or something- which, to be fair isn’t exactly a wrong assumption. We see this towards the end of the novel when Hazel starts to be even more affected by religion and what he’s been doing. In the book, Hazel establishes The Church Without Christ. He becomes its preacher and preaches about nihilism and why people don’t really need Jesus. Interestingly enough, the people of the fictional city of Taulkinham don’t really take note of his blasphemy and sacrilege. He’s treated like any other preacher and one con man even earns money off its absurdity and treating it like a joke. I think it drags a little in the middle of the book especially as we start to see things in the pespective of the other characters, but it does get back on track towards the end. I also admit that I like Mrs. Flood’s point of view in the last chapter. I note Hazel’s ‘relationship’ with Sabbath Lily, Asa’s daughter. I’m not certain as to her age but she is described as a ‘young girl’ and Hazel wants to seduce her at first, until it is revealed that she wants to do the same. Their relationship honestly bothers me a lot because of the age-difference and how one-sided it is. I’m not even sure if Hazel is interested in romantic relationships or he just uses them as a means to an end. In the end though, that ‘relationship’ just kinds of fades into the background and Sabbath leaves after Hazel blinds himself in an act which completes what her father had failed to do. So many things happen in this novel that I can’t-and shouldn’t-discuss all of them. Most of the things here you really have to read for yourself- unless maybe you’re sensitive to religion in books and prefer not to. The religious themes are very prevalent and a lot of them border on the absurd. It definitely feels like a satirical take on religion, or the commercialized variant thereof. To be honest, I am starting to understand why Flannery O’Connor wrote it in this manner. Sometimes, it be easy to grow cynical about both organized religion and the ‘preachers’ described in this book. Many religious authorities are such hypocrites that it can be difficult to focus on your beliefs, on what you actually worship. As a Catholic, this is something I struggle with a lot. It becomes easy to get wrapped up in the worldly aspect of your faith that you lose sight of the more important spiritual one. In the end, Wise Blood is a very uncomfortable read. I rated it four out of five stars on Goodreads, partly because I felt like it started to drag in the middle, but the ending more than made up for it. This is the kind of book I’m not sure I’d re-read and will probably not recommend it to religious friends and family but as a satire of religion and example of the Southern Gothic genre, it’s worth reading. (hide spoiler)]