Sancho
09-29-2008, 01:00 AM
Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor
Copyright 1949, 1952, 1962 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Wise Blood is a short, quirky novel about desperate faith. It is also a deeply philosophical text about freedom and freewill; retribution and redemption; and about existentialism and determinism. Though technically a tragedy, it is a comic novel about false prophets, hucksters, con-men, and idols. As with all good literature, it can be read on several levels. Mostly, I think, the author intended it as a humanistic novel about inner struggle - “Later he saw Jesus move 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 where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”
Flannery O’Connor was a master of the short story. She also wrote novels, poetry, essays and criticism. She was born in Savanna, Georgia, March 25, 1925 and she died on her family’s farm, Andalusia, near Milledgeville, Georgia, August 3, 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. In 1950, at the beginning of her creative career, she was diagnosed with the rare blood decease Lupus and given 5 years to live. Fifteen painful years later, at the peak of her creativeness, she succumbed to the decease. She was a devout Roman Catholic and yet she lived most of her life in the evangelical south. Despite her illness she maintained her faith until her death. She wrote masterfully and the influence of Flannery O’Connor on American Literature cannot be overstated.
The story begins with an intense young man, Hazel Motes, on a train trip within the state of Tennessee. It is set shortly after the cessation of hostilities of World War Two and Hazel has just been released from the US Army. Hazel is the grandson of a traveling tent-revival preacher and he had intended to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps but he lost his faith while in the Army. He finds his way to Taulkinham, Tennessee and founds the existential Church without Christ which he preaches from the nose of a ‘high rat colored car.’ He decides the only way to redemption is through sin and blasphemy but then he realizes that blasphemy as a method assumes there is something to blaspheme.
Enoch Emery is a local youth who takes to Haze Motes and pursues him as would a stalker. Enoch believes that he has ‘wise blood’ and that his blood will guide him. At one point in the novel, Enoch allows his blood to determine his actions and only hopes that his blood will not decide to have him do something illegal. On one level with Enoch, I think, O’Connor is taking a jab at the protestant south and its Calvinistic philosophy of determinism. But Enoch is more than that – Enoch makes the book funny. O’Connor’s character development of Enoch Emery is fabulous. Everybody in America has an Enoch in their community. Sadly though, nowadays, Enoch is the type of fellow who shows up at school wearing a black trench coat and then mows down his classmates with an assault rifle. O’Connor’s Enoch deals with his angst in a different way and I’ll leave that to the reader.
One of the things I enjoy about reading a regional author is that I don’t have to do a lot of background work to get it, or to get at it. The idea I’d like to explore here is this: still to this day there is a meanness in the deep south. There’s an anger and even a certain violence that lies just below the thin façade of southern hospitality. Maybe it’s the climate and maybe it’s this god-awful red-clay with its fire-ants and yellow-jackets around here. But more likely it’s the echo of resentment in the new south of the old south; the 19th century aristocratic south in which there were a few rich land owners, a lot of dirt-poor sharecroppers, and many subjugated African workers. (Land barons serfs and slaves) The resentment of southern blacks towards southern whites needs no explanation. As for southern whites, there is still (!?) a resentment and indignation towards northerners over being forced back into the union in what is known here as The War of Northern Aggression. It is passed from generation to generation. Mr. Lincoln should’ve killed us all, way back then, and we wouldn’t have this problem now.
I got that sense of violence in Wise Blood and I get it in some of O’Connor’s short stories as well. I got it in stories like, A Good Man is Hard to Find (there weren’t any) and Good Country People (they weren’t). She wrote convincingly in that vein and she was in good company. Here’s a short list of southern writers who can get at the underlying violence of the south: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, John Kennedy Toole, Pat Conroy, William Price Fox, and Charles Frazier. I believe it also exists in other art forms. Johnny Cash got at it, and so did the Allman Brothers. Vicki Lawrence got directly at it in her 70s pop tune The Night the Lights went out Georgia. But for my money, Flannery O’Connor gets at it better than anyone.
My intuition tells me that southern readers pick up on it more readily than readers from other regions. In the 50s a German publisher wanted to drop some of O’Conner’s stories for being too shocking for German sensibilities. O’Conner saw the post-holocaust irony in that and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t think I was that vicious.” Contemporary critics sensed it too and called it “grotesque,” they gave Flannery O’Conner’s work, her genre, the label of “Southern Gothic.” O’Connor replied: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." (a little of her humor there) As for Southern Gothic, it’s a clever label that means absolutely nothing. If I’m remembering my world history correctly, the Goths were a loose collection of barbarian tribes who migrated south from the region in what is now northern Poland, and then later they wound up crossing the Danube and sacking Rome. It was in the early Middle Ages, wasn’t it?
Wise Blood is certainly not all violence and religiosity; it is a “laugh-out-loud” book. I read it in the middle of the night, on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Atlanta. I totally annoyed my seat-mates, who were trying to sleep, with my frequent outbursts of laughter. Here are some examples of O’Connor’s humor:
Enoch Emery, with his landlady’s umbrella, encounters a group of children queuing up to enter the matinee at the movie house: “Enoch was not very fond of children but children always seemed to like to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes began to observe him with steady interest. The umbrella had assumed an ugly position, half up and half down, and the half that was up was about to come down and spill more water under his collar. When this happened the children laughed and jumped up and down.”
Here’s a simple description of the pictures on the wall of Enoch’s boarding house room: “These were three, one belonging to his landlady (who was almost totally blind but moved about by an acute sense of smell) and two of his own. Hers was a brown portrait of a moose standing in a small lake. The look of superiority on the animal’s face was so insufferable to Enoch that, if he hadn’t been afraid of him, he would have done something about it a long time ago.”
Okay, I admire her structure and her careful choice of words. She respected her readers and that is something I appreciate in an author. She was a devout Catholic and I am a heathen yet she gently brought me into a world were I could understand the power that the “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree” has over the faithful. And she did it in a nonpolitical way – something else I really appreciate these days. She wrote a one-paragraph intro to the second edition of Wise Blood that was a lightning bolt of clarity. It’s on page one and is labeled: “Author’s Note to the Second Edition.” When I read it, I was hooked. All in all, I highly recommend this book.
On a plate of deep-fried catfish, I give it 9 out of 10 Hushpuppies with a side of grits, black eyed peas, fried okra, and corn bread…and some watermelon for desert…and maybe some peach cobbler…oh yes and a mint julep.
Copyright 1949, 1952, 1962 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Wise Blood is a short, quirky novel about desperate faith. It is also a deeply philosophical text about freedom and freewill; retribution and redemption; and about existentialism and determinism. Though technically a tragedy, it is a comic novel about false prophets, hucksters, con-men, and idols. As with all good literature, it can be read on several levels. Mostly, I think, the author intended it as a humanistic novel about inner struggle - “Later he saw Jesus move 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 where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”
Flannery O’Connor was a master of the short story. She also wrote novels, poetry, essays and criticism. She was born in Savanna, Georgia, March 25, 1925 and she died on her family’s farm, Andalusia, near Milledgeville, Georgia, August 3, 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. In 1950, at the beginning of her creative career, she was diagnosed with the rare blood decease Lupus and given 5 years to live. Fifteen painful years later, at the peak of her creativeness, she succumbed to the decease. She was a devout Roman Catholic and yet she lived most of her life in the evangelical south. Despite her illness she maintained her faith until her death. She wrote masterfully and the influence of Flannery O’Connor on American Literature cannot be overstated.
The story begins with an intense young man, Hazel Motes, on a train trip within the state of Tennessee. It is set shortly after the cessation of hostilities of World War Two and Hazel has just been released from the US Army. Hazel is the grandson of a traveling tent-revival preacher and he had intended to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps but he lost his faith while in the Army. He finds his way to Taulkinham, Tennessee and founds the existential Church without Christ which he preaches from the nose of a ‘high rat colored car.’ He decides the only way to redemption is through sin and blasphemy but then he realizes that blasphemy as a method assumes there is something to blaspheme.
Enoch Emery is a local youth who takes to Haze Motes and pursues him as would a stalker. Enoch believes that he has ‘wise blood’ and that his blood will guide him. At one point in the novel, Enoch allows his blood to determine his actions and only hopes that his blood will not decide to have him do something illegal. On one level with Enoch, I think, O’Connor is taking a jab at the protestant south and its Calvinistic philosophy of determinism. But Enoch is more than that – Enoch makes the book funny. O’Connor’s character development of Enoch Emery is fabulous. Everybody in America has an Enoch in their community. Sadly though, nowadays, Enoch is the type of fellow who shows up at school wearing a black trench coat and then mows down his classmates with an assault rifle. O’Connor’s Enoch deals with his angst in a different way and I’ll leave that to the reader.
One of the things I enjoy about reading a regional author is that I don’t have to do a lot of background work to get it, or to get at it. The idea I’d like to explore here is this: still to this day there is a meanness in the deep south. There’s an anger and even a certain violence that lies just below the thin façade of southern hospitality. Maybe it’s the climate and maybe it’s this god-awful red-clay with its fire-ants and yellow-jackets around here. But more likely it’s the echo of resentment in the new south of the old south; the 19th century aristocratic south in which there were a few rich land owners, a lot of dirt-poor sharecroppers, and many subjugated African workers. (Land barons serfs and slaves) The resentment of southern blacks towards southern whites needs no explanation. As for southern whites, there is still (!?) a resentment and indignation towards northerners over being forced back into the union in what is known here as The War of Northern Aggression. It is passed from generation to generation. Mr. Lincoln should’ve killed us all, way back then, and we wouldn’t have this problem now.
I got that sense of violence in Wise Blood and I get it in some of O’Connor’s short stories as well. I got it in stories like, A Good Man is Hard to Find (there weren’t any) and Good Country People (they weren’t). She wrote convincingly in that vein and she was in good company. Here’s a short list of southern writers who can get at the underlying violence of the south: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Erskine Caldwell, James Dickey, John Kennedy Toole, Pat Conroy, William Price Fox, and Charles Frazier. I believe it also exists in other art forms. Johnny Cash got at it, and so did the Allman Brothers. Vicki Lawrence got directly at it in her 70s pop tune The Night the Lights went out Georgia. But for my money, Flannery O’Connor gets at it better than anyone.
My intuition tells me that southern readers pick up on it more readily than readers from other regions. In the 50s a German publisher wanted to drop some of O’Conner’s stories for being too shocking for German sensibilities. O’Conner saw the post-holocaust irony in that and wrote to a friend, “I didn’t think I was that vicious.” Contemporary critics sensed it too and called it “grotesque,” they gave Flannery O’Conner’s work, her genre, the label of “Southern Gothic.” O’Connor replied: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." (a little of her humor there) As for Southern Gothic, it’s a clever label that means absolutely nothing. If I’m remembering my world history correctly, the Goths were a loose collection of barbarian tribes who migrated south from the region in what is now northern Poland, and then later they wound up crossing the Danube and sacking Rome. It was in the early Middle Ages, wasn’t it?
Wise Blood is certainly not all violence and religiosity; it is a “laugh-out-loud” book. I read it in the middle of the night, on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Atlanta. I totally annoyed my seat-mates, who were trying to sleep, with my frequent outbursts of laughter. Here are some examples of O’Connor’s humor:
Enoch Emery, with his landlady’s umbrella, encounters a group of children queuing up to enter the matinee at the movie house: “Enoch was not very fond of children but children always seemed to like to look at him. The line turned and twenty or thirty eyes began to observe him with steady interest. The umbrella had assumed an ugly position, half up and half down, and the half that was up was about to come down and spill more water under his collar. When this happened the children laughed and jumped up and down.”
Here’s a simple description of the pictures on the wall of Enoch’s boarding house room: “These were three, one belonging to his landlady (who was almost totally blind but moved about by an acute sense of smell) and two of his own. Hers was a brown portrait of a moose standing in a small lake. The look of superiority on the animal’s face was so insufferable to Enoch that, if he hadn’t been afraid of him, he would have done something about it a long time ago.”
Okay, I admire her structure and her careful choice of words. She respected her readers and that is something I appreciate in an author. She was a devout Catholic and I am a heathen yet she gently brought me into a world were I could understand the power that the “ragged figure who moves from tree to tree” has over the faithful. And she did it in a nonpolitical way – something else I really appreciate these days. She wrote a one-paragraph intro to the second edition of Wise Blood that was a lightning bolt of clarity. It’s on page one and is labeled: “Author’s Note to the Second Edition.” When I read it, I was hooked. All in all, I highly recommend this book.
On a plate of deep-fried catfish, I give it 9 out of 10 Hushpuppies with a side of grits, black eyed peas, fried okra, and corn bread…and some watermelon for desert…and maybe some peach cobbler…oh yes and a mint julep.