Wise Blood in Classics Without All the Class

Aug 19, 2015 Elisa rated it really liked it

Shelves: christian, fiction, american

One of the amazing things about this story is the fact that O’Connor wrote several individual chapters as short stories and published them as stand alone pieces as she went along. That a chapter could stand alone seemed pretty impressive to me. On the other hand, she has two main characters in this book, Hazel and Enoch, and their stories exist almost independent of each other with only a few points where their story lines intersect. And it seems to me at the end of the book that she has kind of One of the amazing things about this story is the fact that O’Connor wrote several individual chapters as short stories and published them as stand alone pieces as she went along. That a chapter could stand alone seemed pretty impressive to me. On the other hand, she has two main characters in this book, Hazel and Enoch, and their stories exist almost independent of each other with only a few points where their story lines intersect. And it seems to me at the end of the book that she has kind of just dumped Enoch while she returned to Hazel. It seemed to me that such a main character should have at least had one more mention closer to the end.

Both characters are young men, alone in the world, in a new city. Enoch is 18 and has been booted out of the home by his father and is now very proud of working at the zoo. Hazel is 20 or maybe 22, returning from his four year military service to find his home and hometown are deserted. Both men apparently lost their mothers when they were still young. They have no family and no friends. Enoch wishes to befriend Hazel, but Hazel will have none of it. Enoch doesn’t have friends because he seems to be socially handicapped. Hazel is bitter and doesn’t want them, though a number of characters endeavor to forge some kind of alliance with him.

Other characters in the novel pop up like tulips or strawberries—making a bright appearance for a day or two and then disappearing for the rest of the season. One of the most important of these is a shyster named Hoover Shoats (aka Onnie Jay Holy), who first tries to horn in on Hazel's 'preaching' gig (which is odd because Hazel was so unsuccessful), and later tries to steal his act. He has an interesting depiction of lostness. "Not even my dear old mother loved me, and it wasn't because I wasn't sweet inside, it was because I never known how to make the natural sweetness inside me show."

Another line I love comes from Enoch's story. "To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence."

Of the Flannery O’Connor works I have read, it seems to me there are three elements always present. 1) Disability or deformity, representing the twisted fallenness of humanity. 2) Frauds, representing the hypocrisy of humanity, usually Christians. 3) An overwhelming sense of the unmitigated self-centeredness of every single character. Not just self-centeredness, but downright meanness, as though the world were completely full of hatefulness and thoroughly populated by bullies. That third element is what makes it heaviest and hardest for me to get all the way through her stories.

Hazel, unlike many of the people around him, is not a fraud. He is not out to swindle people out of their money by using religion and his apparently inborn vocation of preaching. He has a deep Calvinist conviction of having been born with sin that he spends his life trying to cast off in favor of a kind of atheism, wishing to be free the ideas of sin and guilt. I guess the hope he preaches is that of being free of conscience. But he punishes himself to the end by several means of self-flagellation, both crude and cruel, revealing both a passionate self hatred and the grim reality that he is never able to quiet or to divorce himself from his conscience after all. And he demonstrates that he is quite capable of being his own judge, jury and executioner, without any divine assistance whatsoever.

Concurrent to this novel I have been reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is interesting in its parallels of the desire to divorce oneself from one's conscience, or to at least be free from its consequences. That theme also calls to mind the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, another dark tale of the desire to be free of the bonds of conscience. For Hazel, apparently, Jesus and his conscience are one and the same.

Hazel keeps proclaiming the Church Without Christ and saying that people are better if they don't know Jesus and don't consider themselves 'redeemed.' The strangest people see through Hazel. The one who seems to have him really nailed is Sabbath Hawkes, the young daughter of a fraudulent preacher. "I knew when I first seen you you were mean and evil. I seen you were mean enough to slam a baby against a wall. I seen you wouldn't never have no fun or let anybody else because you didn't want nothing but Jesus!" The amount of time and energy he spends trying to get rid of Jesus turn out to be an index of how fixated upon Him he is.

A couple of images I loved:

p. 107 It was not much of a cough—it sounded like a little yell for help at the bottom of a canyon …

p. 48 His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth."
...more

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