Wise Blood—Flannery O'Connor

The Christ-haunted South

Image from John Huston’s 1979 movie, Wise Blood

In a talk she delivered on “The Catholic Writer in the South,” Flannery O’Connor said,

Not long ago I received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will “lift up his heart.” And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I wrote her back that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

One must wonder from what sort of place could something by O’Connor actually lift anyone’s heart? Later in the same speech, she concedes,

You may say that the serious writer doesn’t have to bother about the tired reader, but he does, because they are all tired. One old lady who wants her heart lifted up wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her 250,000 times and what you get is a book club.

The episodic quality of O’Connor’s Wise Blood, published in 1952, comes from the fact that she had previously published some of the chapters separately in 1948 and 1949. In fact, she only wrote two novels, directing most of her creativity into some extremely memorable short stories such as, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and “Good Country People.”

Hazel Motes, a WWII veteran, looks to everyone else like a preacher. At first, he vehemently denies being one out of resentment at the great lie of Christianity as he sees it: our fallen state and the promise of salvation. But soon, he starts standing on street corners like any other evangelist, seeking converts to atheism. It seems that no one actually grasps what he says, though. Trying to engage a pitifully small audience outside a movie theater he singles out a boy in the group and asks him what church he belongs to. “Church of Christ,” the boy said.

“Church of Christ,” Haze repeated. “Well I preach in the Church without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

“He’s a preacher,” one of the women said. “Let’s go.”

Seeing his failure to interest the people who stop to listen, a huckster who calls himself Onnie Jay Holy horns in and witnesses to the scattered group of people how Haze, suddenly upgraded to Prophet, has changed Onnie’s life and how Haze’s church, which Onnie calls “The Holy Church of Christ without Christ,” can change theirs too.

“Now friends,” Onnie Jay said, “I want to tell you a second reason why you can absolutely trust this church—it’s based on the Bible. Yes sir! It’s based on your own personal interpitation of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited. That’s right,” he said, “Just the way Jesus would have done it. Gee, I wisht I had my gittarr here,” he complained.

When Onnie starts asking for a dollar from everyone there, Haze panics.

“Listen,” Haze shouted. “It don’t cost you any money to know the truth. You can’t know it for money.”

“You hear what the Prophet says, friends,” Onnie Jay Holy said, “a dollar is not too much to pay. No amount of money is too much to learn the truth!”

No one throughout the novel seems to hear what anyone else says. I find this quality unsettling. Most of the conversations read like two people in the same room glaring at each other while talking to other people on their phones. This disturbs me because on the one hand it makes everyone in the novel seem either imbecilic or possessed, while on the other hand it closely imitates real conversations. Of course we don’t notice the eeriness of the dialogue right away because it makes us laugh. But after a while, the apparent impossibility of real communication between the characters creates a sense of isolation and a nagging suspicion that O’Connor has simply described the human condition.

Haze’s increasingly desperate evangelism of disbelief ultimately fails because of this very inability of anyone to actually hear what anyone else says. But along the way, O’Connor delights us with many dioramas of fallen humanity. Besides Onnie the huckster, we also meet Asa, a real preacher who pretends to be blind, and his daughter, Sabbath, who says of Haze, “… that innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t.”

Most significantly, though, a somewhat addled teenager, Enoch Emery, attaches himself to Haze, believing his arrival to portend a great purpose for the first time in Enoch’s life. Enoch listens to and acts on the wisdom of his blood, without questioning that wisdom, even though it always seems to get him in trouble. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he tells Haze, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me.” His wise blood compels him to do things that strike us readers as totally whacko, and thus comic. But Enoch’s absurd compulsions only prove how close he lives to the presence of a great mystery underlying appearances. Rather than spoil all of the fun of Enoch’s quest, I’ll just say that we last see him dressed in a gorilla suit, sitting on a rock overlooking the valley and the city’s skyline.

O’Connor is a Catholic writer. I think Catholics in general tend to focus on the positive side of life: God’s grace, social justice, the virtues. But the Catholic fiction writers I’ve read seem to push all that aside to focus on the wages of sin. They leave truth and meaningfulness to the theologians and tell wonderful stories about what we see around us, aware of the silent presence of mystery. And when Flannery O’Connor looks around her, she sees an odd presence yet absence of Jesus. “I think it safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

A movie actually came out of this book, though not a very successful one by John Huston, the same director who gave us The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, and The African Queen. He, better than anyone else from that time, could have done justice to O’Connor’s comic vision of fallen man violently running from God’s grace. Nowadays, I might trust the Coen brothers to take another stab at it. But the fundamental difficulty with translating this work from a print medium into film arises from how O’Connor’s devout Catholicism produces such dark and violent tales. One may expect from a movie either an example of God’s grace or a tale of depravity, but not both. O’Connor herself expresses the dilemma in an essay, “The Church and the Fiction Writer.”

If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is. An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God.

I really enjoyed this bleak and darkly comic novel. So I think I’ll tackle O’Connor’s other novel next, The Violent Bear It Away.

Amazon links to works related to this post. Works in boldface are the editions I’m using.

Wise Blood, (FSG paperback)

The Violent Bear It Away, (FSG paperback)

Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, (published by Library of America)

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