Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery OConnor - The Resurrection According to Petronius

Wise Blood is a comedy with a fierce, Old Testament soul. Flannery OConnor has no truck with such newfangled notions as psychology. Driven by forces outside their control, her characters are as one-dimensional--and mysterious--as figures on a frieze. Hazel Motes, for instance, has the temperament of a martyr, even though he spends most of the book trying to get God to go away. As a child hes convinced that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. When that doesnt work, and when he returns from Korea determined to be converted to nothing instead of evil, he still cant go anywhere without being mistaken for a preacher. (Not that the hat and shiny glare-blue suit help.) No matter what Hazel does, Jesus moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark...

Adrift after four years in the service, Hazel takes a train to the city of Taulkinham, buys himself a rat-colored car, and sets about preaching on street corners for the Church Without Christ, where the blind dont see and the lame dont walk and whats dead stays that way. Along the way he meets Enoch Emery, whos only 18 years old but already works for the city, as well the blind preacher Asa Hawks and his illegitimate daughter, Sabbath Lily. (Her letter to an advice column: Dear Mary, I am a bastard and a bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven as we all know, but I have this personality that makes boys follow me. Do you think I should neck or not?) Subsequent events involve a desiccated, centuries-old dwarf--Gonga the Giant Jungle Monarch--and Hazels nemesis, Hoover Shoats, who starts the rival Church of Christ Without Christ. If you think these events dont end happily, you might be right.

Wise Blood is a savage satire of Americas secular, commercial culture, as well as the humanism it holds so dear (Dear Sabbath, Mary Brittle writes back, Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life.) But the books ultimate purpose is Religious, with a capital R--no metaphors, no allusions, just the thing itself in all its fierce glory. When Hazel whispers Im not clean, for instance, OConnor thinks he is perfectly right. For readers unaccustomed to holding low comedy and high seriousness in their heads at the same time, all this can come as something of a shock. Who else could offer an allegory about free will, redemption, and original sin right alongside the more elemental pleasure of witnessing Enoch Emery dress up in a gorilla suit? Nobody else, thats who. And thats OK. More than one Flannery OConnor in this world might show us more truth than we could bear. --Mary Park

The Resurrection According to Petronius
Wise Blood

Early in `Wise Blood', the boy Hazel Motes goes with his father to a cheap country carnival and sneaks into the nudey tent. He's revolted and runs away. I can share his revulsion; entering Flannery O'Connor's fiction is like peeking into a sleazy freak show. If I got on a bus full of O'Connor's characters, I'd hop off at the next stop. If I found myself sharing heaven with Hazel Motes, I'd ask for a transfer. Hieronymus Bosch never painted an uglier crew of imps in his altarpieces of the Last Judgment. What's the point of all this talk about redemption? If this book portrays the reality of O'Connor's world, she was already in H*ll. If there is to be a religious exegesis of this novel, it will have to be in the language of Zoroaster, of the uneradicable strain of Gnosticism in Christianity. The J*sus that Hazel Motes seeks to `get rid of' is more the Malefactor-Creator of the Gnostic scriptures than the Redeemer of Catholicism, and if that's so, then Hazel is the True Prophet of his Church Without Christ and his self-destruction is sanctified.

Wise Blood is the sort of book that, when you've read ten pages you begin to ask `what's all this,' a question you keep asking until the last page, when you ask `what the hey was that about?' Well, dear friends, I like books that make me ask what they were about. In fact, they're the only kind I like.

With this text, we have two choices: to accept that Wise Blood is about precisely what its author thought it was about, or to assume that the author has no better claim on the meaning of her words than anyone else. Obviously the second choice - fashionable post-modernism - is more fun.

O'Connor chose sides in her one-page preface to the second edition, ten years after the first publication in 1952. She wrote: "It is a comic novel about a Christian maulgré lui." Moi, I find that word `comic' problematic. Despite scene after scene of absurdity, I swear I never laughed once while reading Wise Blood, so I assume that `comic' doesn't mean `funny'. A classical sense of `comedy' would require a happy resolution, and that's hardly what the book delivers. If `comic' means satirical, the term would fit, but to call this a "comic novel" has to be either snarky sarcasm or else a dark stain of sado-masochism in O'Connor's worldview. I'm pretty certain that O'Connor never encountered LSD or peyote -- if she had, it would explain much -- but her imagination came close to the ergot-poisoned fantasies of late Medieval witchcraft trials. I can think of one even better precendent for the sheer nastiness of Wise Blood -- The Satyricon of Petronius, the classic expression of PAGAN moral ambiguity.

Honestly, while I regard this book as a loathsome treasure, I prefer Flannery O'Connor's short stories - those I've read - from the volume "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Compression helps. Some of her best stories wring as much out of me in 15 pages as Wise Blood in 180. It's not an experience you'd want often, to ride an elevator down to H*ll with Hazel Motes, Enoch Emory, Asa Hawks, and Lily Sabbath, the grotesque cast of this Southern Gothic horror story.

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