Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood

‘The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again.’ (Ch. 1, pp. 14-15).*

‘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…[n]o 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.’ (Ch. 10, p. 113).

I’m finding it excruciatingly difficult to put into words what I felt upon finishing Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. If anything it was a profoundly physical, gut reaction; a paralysis, mouth agape, forehead furrowed and eyes cringed in a conflicted mixture of sadness, horror and revelation aka: I loved it!

The above passages from Wise Blood represent the modernist dilemma in a nutshell and Hazel Moates it’s angry, disillusioned, at once direction-hungry and self-cripplingly aimless poster-child. This claim and the blog that follows is part me being confused about how the novel allegedly portrays a positive, reaffirming view of religion and part me taking a few liberties given that O’Connor herself asserted that the bleakness of the novel should not be confused with existentialism.

Fresh from an involuntary stint in the blood-soaked trenches of a World War (the spectre was a piece of ‘shrapnel’ embedded in modernism that victory claimed to remove but whose ‘poisoning’ presence one could still sense, here made to seem an eerily distant, indistinct, repressed figment of the collective unconscious by the lack of actual detail we are provided of his service), Haze the man unsurprisingly returns to find a world unlike that which he had left behind as an adolescent of eighteen. After Haze discovers that his family house is now nothing more than a boarded-up ‘shell’ (Ch. 1, p. 16) with its inhabitants long dead or scattered, he, like a vast majority of people during the first half of the rapidly urbanizing 20th century, inevitably finds himself forced into the city; a refugee in his own country. In Taulkinham, Haze finds himself in a new battlefield where the target is mental and spiritual rather instead of physical: an ambivalent, brashly and pervasively public realm of crowds filled with flashing neon advertisements, packed-out movie theatres trading on the ‘spectacle’ of schlock-horror flicks and flawed/degenerate, near monosyllabic inhabitants are becoming more animal-like in their characteristics and behaviour rather than more civilized or ‘modern’; a place where the ‘truths’ of religion and its duel promise of imminent damnation and salvation are comfortably peddled alongside potato peelers. Amidst this aggressive sensual saturation, Hazel yearns for ‘a private place to go’ (Ch. 2, p. 18), but in the modern age does such a place exist? Conversely, Enoch has been in the city for months and has still yet to make any friends, or meaningful, lasting interpersonal connection (i.e.: the public may be accessible to all but it does not necessarily entail a collective - alone in a crowd).

For some reason, Wise Blood reminded me a lot of the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett, particularly Waiting for Godot. Both are deceptively monotonous in pacing and the excruciating everydayness of their narrative arcs; confront the possibility that truth is relative; feature grotesque, unlikable, pitiable characters; and, most importantly, feature God as the proverbial pink elephant of the narratives (Godot will never arrive so what’s the point of waiting? Enoch finds the ‘new Jesus’ but it explodes into a cloud of dust like the bodies of the war dead). If Nietzsche’s claim that ‘God is dead’ was a prediction, then the World Wars can be considered its realisation, at least in terms of how the slaughter by technology-driven horrors of two generations of youths manipulated by leaders they never saw for causes they never fully understood could lead even the most steadfast of Christians to question their faith, even for just a second. However, implicit in the claim that God has died is one’s belief in Him in the first place and it is this fact, in my opinion, that Hazel finally comes to realise by the end of the novel and it is what prompts him to blind himself - an attempt at a final (perhaps first) autonomous act; a rejection of the gift of sight and the ability to see God’s creations; self-severance of himself from the world.

* All quotes from Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).