Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor

As is perhaps becoming apparent, I am largely indebted for my reading choices to the blogs and comments of others. Wise Blood is no exception. Richard’s review, unfortunately no longer available, was an excellent advocate for the book (and he may at some point have suggested a shared quality with the works of Cormac McCarthy. Which would always be a strong incentive for me.)

In the dysfuntional, dislocated characters; the grim environs; religious preoccupation; even the terse (if punctuated) dialogue; I found McCarthy, and consequently liked this book very much.

Hazel Motes is returning from military service abroad to his home state of Tennessee. It becomes swiftly obvious that Jesus is an essential constituent of these people’s lives, although many of them lack sufficient understanding to question or assess that in which they profess to believe.

Hazel however, has come home changed. Despite his background (a preacher grandfather and a God-fearing upbringing), he is determined to renounce Jesus, and driven to convert others to the ‘Church without Christ.’  Hazel’s loss of faith is never explicitly explained.  It hinges on the question of redemption through blood, but in a flashback it is revealed that as a child he practiced redemptive suffering in expatiation of his own sins.  It is perhaps a fair deduction that the blood of the Great War has been seen by Hazel as mass reparation, negating any belief in a redemption freely given.

As Hazel travels homewards he is forced to assert several times that where he has come from has no bearing on his final destination, but it clearly does.  Ironically, Hazel has chosen to dress in a suit and a dark broad-brimmed hat, and is continually mistaken, which infuriates him, for a preacher. 

Arriving in the city Hazel meets Asa Hawkes; a suspiciously blind preacher of generally suspicious character, and Enoch Emery, a young man of limited understanding.  Both of these characters represent different aspects of the potential of religion.  In the former, the abuse of the faith of others for gain, in the latter, a slavish belief in, and unquestioning duty to, a capricious higher power. 

Asa Hawkes appears to be the catalyst that causes Hazel to follow the precendent of the preacher’s hat, and begin to preach the tenets of his ‘Church Without Christ.’

Sight is a recurring motif in the novel.  Preacher hats are used to cover eyes; reference is made to a variety of spectacles, none of which clarify vision; there is blindness and a throw away reference to Saul of Tarsus.

‘ “I like his eyes,” she observed. “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.” ‘

Consider also Hazel’s name: Motes. 

Matthew 7:3 – And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

As Hazel attempts to eradicate faith in Jesus from the lives of others his name seems to carry an ironic significance.

The entire book is replete with religious symbolism:

‘Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank nailed across the door frame at knee level to keep anyone from falling out. […] She was looking down into the drop too. “It used to be a fire escape there,’ she said,’but I don’t know what happened to it.” ‘

The plank and nails have a distinct significance in the context of the novel; and do they, or do they not, sound wholly inadequate to the purposes of salvation?  Wonderful symbolism, but does it reflect the message of the book or is it intended to cast light on Hazel’s mentality?

Hazel’s campaign gains impetus from his oppostion to Hawkes, but things start to go wrong when Hazel discovers the perfidy of the false preacher. Further, Hazel is dogged by Shoats, a second false preacher who attempts to usurp Hazel’s own movement. When Shoats innocently, but incorrectly, refers to the ‘Holy Church of Christ without Christ’ the paradoxical notion that Hazel needs Christ in order to renounce him is reinforced.

In the meantime Enoch is providing some of the humour of the story, which is more abundant than one might suppose. Irritated by his landlady’s painting of a ‘smug’ moose, which hangs in his lodgings, Enoch taunts it with his own painting which:

‘pictured a lady wearing a rubber tyre and it hung directly across from the moose on the opposite wall. He left it where it was, pretty certain that the moose only pretended not to see it.’

Enoch Emery’s story abruptly ends at this point. Subject to the bidding of his twisted spirituality he provides Hazel, unbidden, with a false jesus (which is ultimately hurled into the metaphorical hell of the failed fire escape.) Enoch anticipates a reward. Bizarrely, given his hatred of animals, he retreats into the semblance of a gorilla. In an earlier scene there is a reference to the eyes of the gorilla suit:

‘…a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair.’

Ultimately Enoch sees with the eyes of the beast and perhaps achieves thus what Hazel cannot.

(Enoch is also a name with biblical connotations. Having tracked down Enoch (the grandfather of Noah) it transpires that there is a Book of Enoch. Although quoted in the Bible it is thought to be falsely attributed, and not inspired by God. A fantastical religious addendum.)

As human agencies conspire against Hazel he resolves to start again elsewhere. In a final disaster, his car, which appears to run on faith alone, fails; a result of a destructive intervention of human authority.

The story ends with Hazel once again practicing redemptive suffering for his sin. Ironically, at this point his ‘church’ finally attracts a disciple, in the cheerfully agnostic character of his landlady. But which church?

My first response to this novel was to interpret it as an exploration of the inevitable corruption of a religion administered through human agency. Facile. It is not obvious to me what a reader might be reasonably expected to conclude at the end of this book. But while I was tracing the biblical references I found the following verse, which describes Saul’s modus operandi before his blinding and subsequent reincarnation as Paul:

Acts 26:11 – And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted them even unto strange cities.

[Edited for broken links: 28.2.11]