Todo Tiene Su Como-Se-Llama

The Troubling Redemption of Wise Blood

Reading Flannery O'Connor's stories is exhilarating. Writing about the experience is intimidating. Wise Blood was O'Connor's first novel. It took her five years to write (and me five months to read, although it is rather short). With any luck, I'll have finished a post on it in less than five weeks. O'Connor wrote slowly and with an eye to perfection. She edited and rewrote obsessively. When Wise Blood was almost complete, she suffered her first attack of lupus. This was 10 years after the same condition had killed her father, and 13 years before it killed her.

Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes, O'Connor's original "Christ-haunted" Southern man. Haze is a veteran returning home to Georgia after serving in World War II. We meet him on the train to Taulkinham, where he is travelling after discovering his old home abandoned and his family gone. People continually mistake him for a preacher, dressed as he is in a distinctive blue suit and black hat.

This infuriates him. His grandfather was a travelling preacher and Motes has come to the conclusion that the only way to escape from Christ (who he sees as a sort of bogey man) is to escape from sin, and the only way to escape from sin is to have no soul. This is his goal. Nevertheless, he still finds himself pursued in dreams by a "ragged figure who moves from tree to tree" through the back of his mind. He still carries his Bible with him, hidden beneath all of his other belongings where he won't have to see or touch it.

Arriving in Taulkinham, Haze embarks on a rather peculiar spiritual journey. He doesn't need a job (he lives quite well off the government), so at first he wanders aimlessly. Eventually he meets Asa Hawks, a blind street preacher, and his virginal daughter, Sabbath Lily, neither of whom are what they seem to be. He also meets (and cannot rid himself of) Enoch Emory, a stupid, lonely lump of a teenage boy, abandoned by his father, who supports himself by working as a guard at the local zoo.

Enoch is a creature of impulse and an archetypal innocent. Left to his own devices, he behaves as the mood takes him. But every now and then his daddy's "wise blood" takes over, directing Enoch's actions toward some greater purpose that Enoch can seldom see the end of. He is strangely drawn to an assortment of the city's attractions, visiting many of them daily in between stops motivated by his carnal and easily distracted nature. The daily rounds might include visits to the gorilla cage at the zoo, the women who frequent the public pool, a man hawking potato peelers on a street corner, and especially a mysterious building in an isolated section of the park with the enigmatic word "MVSEVM" carved into it.

Enoch is fascinated and disturbed by this building, and especially by the weird, shrivelled figure displayed inside. The card near the figure informs him that this was once a man very much like Enoch himself before some "A-rabs" did this to him. Enoch knows this figure is somehow terribly important, and he is burdened with the need to show it to someone else. He simply doesn't know who.

Enoch latches onto Hazel Motes from the moment he meets him, seeking him out at every opportunity despite the other man's obvious attempts to avoid Enoch. He takes him to see the mummy in the museum, and convinces Haze to visit the local whorehouse with him. Haze, meanwhile, has taken to trailing Asa Hawks. He has decided to seduce Sabbath Lily, but unbeknownst to him, Hawks is encouraging Lily to seduce Haze in an effort to rid himself of her. Hawks is not really blind at all, and he is certainly not a Christian. He is a petty charlatan who ekes out a living off of his false persona.

Haze's suspicions of this, his desire to somehow compete with Hawks, and his desperate efforts to rid himself of the haunting feeling of being pursued by Jesus Christ, lead him to buy a car and set up the "Church Without Christ" where "the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way." He begins passionately preaching his new doctrine of non-salvation outside movie theaters (where he can draw the largest crowds after a show lets out).

After several weeks, the only disciple he manages to attract is Hoover Shoats (or Onnie Jay Holy, as he calls himself at first). Shoats is nothing but a common shyster who wants to manipulate Haze's message in order to turn a profit. Motes, of course, is deadly serious about his message, and turns Shoats away. But soon, Shoats has found a Hazel Motes lookalike, Solace Layfield, (who even wears blue suits and a black hat), a "false prophet." Shoats sets up shop nearby under the label "The Holy Church of Jesus Christ Without Christ," where you can believe whatever you want according to your own interpretation of the Bible.

Meanwhile, Enoch can't stop thinking about Haze's statement the his church needs "a new jesus." Eventually he sneaks into the museum, steals the mummy, and delivers it to Haze and Sabbath Lily (who has moved in after Hawks left town). Enoch then proceeds (in an intensely comical sequence) to follow a man in a gorilla suit around town as he makes appearances in front of movie theaters, shaking hands as part of a film promotion. Enoch finally slips into the back of the truck and beats up the actor in the suit on the way out of town, donning the gorilla outfit himself. He approaches a young couple in the woods, hand extended, and they flee in terror. We leave Enoch alone and dejected, head bowed, in a gorilla suit.

Haze, when he sees the "new jesus," grabs it, dashes it against a wall, and throws it violently out the window as it crumbles into dust. That night, he follows Layfield home from his preaching endeavors and runs his car off the road. He commands Layfield to take off the blue suit, but before he can finish, Haze runs him over. The next day he sets out in his car for another town. Before long, though, he is pulled over by a policeman, who instructs him to step out of his vehicle before pushing it off a cliff where it is dashed to smithereens. Hazel has no choice but to return to town.

Before long, he blinds himself with lime and spends his days walking around with rocks in his shoes and his nights trying to sleep with barbed wire wrapped around his chest. When his landlady eventually tries to marry him some months later (unable to shake the feeling that he knows something important that she doesn't), he takes off and is discovered in a ditch by the police. They return him to his home and he dies on the way. No one notices. His final words are, "I want to go on where I'm going." The novel ends as the landlady converses with his corpse as it lies on the bed, trying with all her power to discover what has been put over on her. What is it that Hazel Motes has that she doesn't?

This is an extremely difficult novel, widely misunderstood upon its initial release in 1952. Stories of redemption in the O'Connor style (see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) tend to shock and distance the audiences that should find their message most appealing, and to be misinterpreted by everyone else. Ultimately it boils down to Hazel Motes' inability to escape from God's grace. As O'Connor herself said of those who had come at the book the wrong way:

"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."

There are some definite and obvious parallels between Haze's journey of faith and the Apostle Paul's. Haze begins by actively persecuting Christ and his Church. He sets off for another town to continue his work and has an important experience before ending up blind but spiritually enlightened. The most troubling part for me was in his actions after he blinds himself: the penance. Haze still feels himself indebted to Christ and he is determined to pay that debt (as if he could). I found it difficult to pinpoint what level his spiritual renewal had reached by the time he died.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the difference between the novel and O'Connor's short stories. Most of the short stories lead their characters along in sin or stubborness until a (usually violent) event strips away the scales from their eyes and they experience an epiphany which is usually very painful for them. The story generally ends immediately thereafter, with the character bathed (either joyously or despairingly) in the light of their redemption.

The first problem with Wise Blood was my attempt to pinpoint the epiphany. Was it the murder of Solace Layfield? The destruction of the new jesus? The wrecking of the car? Any of these seem like good candidates, but in the end I think I am wrong by attempting to pick just one. Furthermore, the novel carries on much longer past the arrival at grace and redemption than a short story would (or could).

When a short story ends, it is easy to assume that the main character is a new person whose spiritual struggles are more or less over (particularly if they are dead, which they often are). In Wise Blood, Haze is still working things out right up until the moment he dies, and we no longer have the benefit even of watching from his perspective, as this entire section of the novel is told from the point of view of the landlady.

The power of O'Connor's vision of modern man's struggle against his own salvation in Wise Blood has continued to grow on me in the days since I finished it. It's no wonder people immediately realized upon the novel's release that this was something entirely new and noteworthy. Now, over 50 years later, it continues to baffle, challenge, and convict its readers . . . at least, it did this reader.

Posted by Jared at November 18, 2006 11:23 AM | TrackBack