Wise Blood (1952)

This was my first by O'Connor.

Story and theme aside, there is something about her style that is very addicting. I found myself speeding through this book in two days. Her prose has a no-nonsense directness that is amplified by the occasional (cunningly apt) metaphor, and by her darkly human characters - grotesque, self-serving, dishonest, indifferent, cruel, desperate.

Much is made about the author's religious views, but in O'Connor's uniquely questing artistry, what comes to the fore is not doctrine, but rather the tangled root of her beliefs, which really reflect a universal problem of seeking meaning.

Our protagonist is Haze Motes (a name which I learned references a Biblical passage regarding judgement - "do not remove the mote from your neighbor's eye without first removing your own"). This allusion to eyes is part of the central concern of the book, that of vision (and blindness). Haze's eyes are described like a sacred mystery by the young girl who is fascinated by him, eyes that "don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking." Haze is constantly looking, but rarely and reluctantly at the external world.

What he is looking for is a truth that the Church no longer provides him. A derelict veteran, he finds a calling to become a vocal anti-theist, even while his conflicts and behavior show him to have an indelibly "religious" persona in spite of his denouncements - a backwards nihilist monk, committed to his own special mission. He becomes an anti-preacher, trying to open people's eyes to the needlessness of their moral suffering, yet really projecting his own sense of being lost. He is reactive and materially indifferent. And he occupies his own world, inwardly focused on his concerns for redemption and truth. Other characters try to penetrate this world, to see what is behind those eyes, attracted to his suffering. The last quarter of the book brings the author's ideas together beautifully in a suddenly tightened knot that left me feeling a touch breathless.

Flannery O'Connor is brilliant at layering symbolism and exploring an idea from seemingly casual, tangential angles. Her depth catches you suddenly and off-guard, like suddenly realizing you've tread too far from the shore. I am looking forward very much to exploring her work more. ( )

Not my cup of tea...will try her short stories though.

p. 68 ...His face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

p. 98 ...the eyes were like two clean bullet holes.

p. 99 The little boys' faces were like pans set on either side of her face to catch the grins that overflowed from her.

p. 139 His resignation was perfect.

p. 165 "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."

p. 214 She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could...as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it. She couldn't look at anything steadily without wanting it, and what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something valuable hidden near her, something she couldn't see.

p. 229 Who better to lead the blind than the blind, who knew what it was like?

Yeah, I didn't go to college for a reason. I suspect this is a much more interesting book to people who are either Christian or Southern, but it just seemed pointlessly depressing to me. ( )

The very best part of Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor were the descriptions of sunlight and shadow. She totally projected the experience of crowded, yet lonely travel. I could taste the heavy smoke in the dining car. I found the characters painful to read about. The depressing ignorance, unrelenting poverty, and gothic darkness of the characters' lives didn't leave much opportunity for a hopeful ending. I can't say I loved reading this book, but I am intrigued enough to want to read another. ( )

Wise Blood is a novel drawn from a pastiche of several of O'Connor's own short stories from serials and other works in the 1940s. This fact stands out most plastically in the role of the Enoch Emery character, whose functionality is strictly limited to a very weak foil to the Hazel Motes character; after being set up in the novel's exposition to ostensibly play a prime role in both the novel's dramatic structure and in the personal theological and existential exploration in which O'Connor engages, the Enoch Emery figure does neither.

This is not a particular shortcoming of the novel, however– I imagine that if one had not been exposed to the works of Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, et al (and particularly such protagonists as Meursault in Camus' l'Étranger or Holden Caulfield in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye) that this quasi-existential religious probing of a novel might indeed draw intellectual first blood from the virgin mind. Hazel Motes is like any of us– engaging in a daily internal discourse in which the counterweights of what "ought" to be and what actually IS are diametrically opposed– as much a recapitulation of Hume's Is-Ought Problem as it is of any Kierkegaardian or other proto-Sartrean ideas. Hazel Motes is struggling to reconcile a world where he has been taught things should be one way, but all the senses, all tactile human experience he has collected have indicated everything to the contrary. Perhaps Wise Blood can be regarded as a study in cognitive dissonance.

Wise Blood is a good book. Flannery O'Connor has such good style. She is one of the great masters of both dialect & local color. Wise Blood is genuinely funny in several passages, which alone makes it a gem: it is a wonderful feeling to laugh out loud, in earnest, at the written word. The book is, as many have said, darkly comic. The work does amble in certain of passages involving Enoch Emery, but is otherwise a sparse, sparing, and efficient novel, worth a read to all, and in particular to those who hold in high regard the salient works of Faulkner, Camus, or Salinger. ( )