Wise Blood

Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
read: 2012

What a weird book.  I must have uttered that phrase aloud a dozen times while reading Wise Blood, and thought it to myself at least twice as often.  It's not that it's complex structurally or features bizarre phrasing or supernatural occurrences; it's the basic behavior of its characters.  Everyone in the story is odd, unlikeable, hypocritical, terrible at communicating, lost, and lonely.  There is a lot of humor in the story - I laughed out loud a few times - but it is often at the characters' expense.  The prime example is when Enoch Emery shakes hands with a gorilla and poignantly realizes that "it was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city," then immediately after discovers it's just a man in a suit, a man who tells Enoch to "go to hell."

This is the second book for the Yale class on post-World War II American novels, and it is an interesting study.  Flannery O'Connor suffuses the novel with symbolism.  Religion is the most obvious; protagonist Hazel Motes' theological struggle is the central conflict in the book, and there are symbols of Jesus, God, The Holy Spirit, the cross, etc., everywhere he looks.  Sight is another big symbol: glasses, blindness, eyes are everywhere.  Professor Hungerford argues that the novel can be read through the prism of Southern racism or sexism, and that body parts are often described as having an agency apart from the person they are connected to.  Bottom line: there's a ton of subtext and context here.

The thematic element I latched on to was the role of faith in the story.  Motes rejects his Christian upbringing, but rather than turning into a doubting agnostic, he becomes emphatically atheist.  He proselytizes his nihilism from the roof of his car outside movie theaters.  His rejection of God is characterized by an absolute and unyielding faith in nothing.  He sins and blasphemes out of a conviction that there is no sin or blasphemy.  Yet he shows faith in other things, notably his car, which he believes to be a superior automobile despite unrelenting evidence that it is a lemon.  Faith is crucial to the other characters, too: Enoch Emery has faith in own "wise blood" and is driven by his instincts to undertake endeavors he doesn't rationally understand.  Sabbath has a kind of perverse faith in sin and blasphemy.  Her father Asa is defined by his lack of faith; at his moment of testing he was found wanting.  Haze's landlady Mrs. Flood has a mundane but unshakable belief that she is being taken advantage of even when it becomes clear that is impossible.  Each character is defined and shaped by his or her faith (or lack thereof) in the unseen and unknowable, whether that takes a Christian form or some other.