Wise Blood

I’m going to base my analysis of the two books of this course in the order of which I read them, as I have begun to consider the idea that this seemingly superfluous order has influenced my enjoyment of each. So, I’ll begin with my thoughts on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

When I began reading Wise Blood, the book made me feel quite uneasy. I described the book to those who saw me reading it at first to be more or less repulsive, not in the way that it is written, but in the content it smears in the eyes and under the nose of its readers. The protagonist Hazel Motes, whose wartime experiences have left him more than a little disillusioned with the Christian morality by which he was raised, is a tremendously jaded, morbid, and waxy young man. To top off his desirability, he drives a beat-up “rat-colored” [sic] car. The number of times Haze’s “rat-colored car” is mentioned to exacerbate the sordid filthiness alluded to throughout the span of the novel gives one the feeling that the world that O’Connor creates is tantamount to walking out your door of a morning to see a potentially endearing child destroy all illusion by digging out the contents of their nose and rubbing it in their eye with relish. And yet, Hazel Motes can at times be not entirely unsympathetic. One gets the feeling in the text that Hazel might be one of the few with his eyes open, but too often they glaze over with decisions that boggle the mind, until he snuffs them out in an act of self-salvation. Fair enough – if I was a character in Wise Blood, I might consider doing the same. In short, the conglomeration of characters and their ideas and circumstances highlights the grotesque.

However, as O’Connor writes in the style of Southern Gothic, it would be amiss to suggest that the grotesque is not what she aims to create. I understand this outcome to be necessary to the purpose of the text, which is in part to show humanity’s losses in the transfiguration of society through the processes of modernity. It also comes to be an indictment of religion’ influence in a modern world, as numerous contentions can be raised regarding the effectiveness of Haze’s rebellion in using religion’s structure and foundations against itself: his preaching proves largely counterintuitive, highlighting the confusion that ensues in a society where differences have yet to be reconciled.

It is evident that the town in which all the characters of Wise Blood is set is not yet up to speed either. The town of Taulkinham, which through its various descriptions of incongruous modernity and archaic sentiment, befits a welcome sign at its borders which could read “Welcome to the electrified dustbowl, where everything else is grease”. This inability to properly get with the times is possibly hinted at cryptically in the name Taulkinham, or ‘talkin’-ham’, perhaps suggesting a Ham Radio, a bridging technology in communication that connects separate and unknown participants by getting them on the same wavelength, much like function the town of Taulkinham in the text.

As the book ends with the anticlimactic death of the protagonist, one almost feels relieved for him to be released. That said, based on the initial descriptions of all characters, even before they have begun to make their morally questionable decisions, and the ends they meet, hope is certainly lost in Wise Blood.