Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, orig. 1952)        (read summer 2009)

Hazel Motes, just out of the army, can read and write and still has the black Bible and his mother’s eyeglasses from his home in Eastrod, Tennessee. He grandfather was a preacher and by the time he was 12 years old Hazel was sure he was going to be a preacher too. “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 the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.” (p. 16)

Then he got in the army and was told by some friends that he didn’t have any soul. “He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them.” This made it possible for Hazel to believe he was still uncorrupted – he was “converted to nothing instead of to evil.” (p. 18)

Haze has various adventures, all challenging his nonbelief. He takes a train to Taulkinham, where he knows no one, and finds an address for “Mrs. Leora Watts” who has “The friendliest bed in town” written on the wall in a restroom. The taxi driver who takes him to her house thinks he’s a preacher, which he denies vehemently, and then he says to Mrs. Watts, before getting into her house, that he’s not a preacher.

The next day he’s wandering around downtown and stops to listen to a man hawking a potato peeler, which he buys, not for himself, but for a girl with a blind preacher who was handing out tracts. He takes a tract from the girl but tears it into confetti. Then when she and her blind preacher father leave the crowd, Haze starts after them, intending to give her the potato peeler. He’s accompanied by Enoch Emery, an 18-year-old who is desperate for companionship. Hazel finally gets rid of him, but not before Enoch tells him about his experiences with a “Welfare woman” who took him from his daddy and “didn’t do nothing but pray.” She finally sent him to Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy, but he escaped after four weeks.

When Haze and Enoch catch up with the blind preacher and his daughter, they are waiting outside an auditorium to hand out tracts. The blind preacher says to Hazel, “Repent! Go to the head of the stairs and renounce your sins and distribute these tracts to the people!” Hazel says, “I’m as clean as you are,” but when the blind man says “Fornication and blasphemy and what else?” Haze replied, “They ain’t nothing but words ... If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me. ... I don’t believe in sin ....” (p. 49)

But a couple of pages later Hazel is accosting the people coming out of the auditorium, not to give them tracts, but to warn them against Jesus:

“Sweet Jesus Christ Crucified,” he said, “I want to tell you people something. Maybe you think you’re not clean because you don’t believe. Well you are clean, let me tell you that. Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you think it’s because of Jesus Christ Crucified you’re wrong. I don’t say he wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere, I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth.” (p. 51)

He also says he’s going to “preach a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” (p. 51)

When Hazel finally gets rid of Enoch, who says, “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t. I’m the one has it. Not you, me.” (p. 55)

Next Hazel buys a used car for $40, though he can hardly drive and doesn’t have a driver’s license.

The one who has “wise blood” is Enoch Emery. He says he has “wise blood like his Daddy.” (p. 75) Enoch is neurotically compulsive. He just has to do certain things in a certain order each day. When he gets off work at “City Forest Park,” the municipal zoo, at 2:00 p.m., he goes to the swimming pool in the park, not to swim but to watch the women who swim there in the daytime. He is fascinated with the fact that some of the women’s bathing suits are split on the side so that their hips show, and when they lie down in the sun they frequently undo the shoulder straps on their bathing suits. He watches them surreptitiously, hidden in some bushes near the pool, apparently because he thinks what the women wear and do is scandalous.

Next Enoch goes to the Frosty Bottle, a hot dog stand in the park, to get a chocolate malted milkshake; then to see the animals in their cages, not because he like them but to curse and spit at them; and then he goes to the “MVSEVM” (which he pronounces “Muvseevum”) to see a shrunken man in a glass case. Enoch was in awe of this exhibit; he told Hazel, when he dragged him to see it, that “Some A-rabs did it to him in six months.” (p. 94)

Haze’s main goal is to find blind preacher with the girl who was with him handing out tracts. He tries to get their address from Enoch, but Enoch refuses to give it to him unless Haze will go see the shrunken man with him. His “wise blood” told him, a couple of days after he had met Hazel Motes, that this was the day a person would come to him and that would be the person he had to show the shrunken man exhibit to. When he did, he believed something was going to happen to him. (p. 88)

While Enoch and Hazel are at the hot dog stand, the waitress, a coarse woman who can’t stand Enoch, keeps telling Haze that he is a “clean boy” and shouldn’t be hanging around with that “son of a bitch.” Haze ignores her for a while, then leans over the counter and says, “I AM clean ... If Jesus existed, I wouldn’t be clean.” (p. 87) Compare what Jesus said to the Pharisees after healing the man born blind. He said, "For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind." Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, "What? Are we blind too?" Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” (Jn. 9:39-41) Isn’t this essentially what Hazel Motes is saying? Like the Pharisees, he didn’t believe in Jesus, so in his own mind he was “clean,” just as in their own minds the Pharisees thought they could see just fine. But Hazel recognizes, somehow, that if Jesus exists, he would not be clean, because then he would have to believe what Jesus said, which was totally contrary to his lifestyle. But note that later, toward the end of the book, when questioned by his landlady about why he does things like putting gravel in his shoes and wrapping barbed wire around his chest, he says he does it because “I’m not clean.” (p. 228)

Hazel, obsessed with Jesus, preaches the “Church Without Christ,” where “the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” It’s the church “that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.” (p. 101) That could be a lot of churches today.

He is also obsessed, or fascinated, by the blind preacher, who actually is a fake – apparently he tried to blind himself at a revival but failed to get the wet lime into his eyes. The preacher, Asa Hawks, is phony through and through. Even his smile is artificial; sometimes his daughter has to signal him to turn it on. (p.108)

Like Enoch, Haze is interested in women, but not so much for sex. He wants to prove he can sin with impunity. Though he sleeps with Mrs. Watts, she’s too lewd for him (one night, after he was asleep, she got up and cut the top of his hat out in an “obscene shape”) so he decides to seduce the blind man’s daughter. “He took it for granted that the blind man’s daughter, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.” (p. 106)

Haze gets his car fixed and is going to take it out in the country for a ride, but what he doesn’t know is that the blind man’s daughter, whose name is Sabbath Lily Hawks, was hiding in the back seat. When she surprises him and climbs over the seat to sit next to him, he isn’t too pleased but then he remembered that he planned to seduce her, so he tries to brighten up. The rest of the story is hilarious. She does all the tempting – stretching to touch his ankle with her toe, getting him to turn down a little dirt road, stop and sit under a tree, and then climb over a hill and sit under the trees, and taking her shoes and stockings off because “How I like to talk in a field is barefooted” – but he can’t bring himself to respond. “He saw that sitting under a tree with her might help him to seduce her, but he was in no hurry to get on with it, considering her innocence. He felt it was too hard a job to be done in an afternoon.” (p. 119)

Instead he was fascinated with her comment that she was a bastard because her parents weren’t married. She said she knew that “A bastard shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” and asked Haze if a bastard could be saved in his “Church Without Christ.” He says there’s no such thing as a bastard in the Church Without Christ, but then in his mind he began to think that “the truth didn’t contradict itself” and “her case was hopeless.” (p. 120) Where did they both get the idea that a bastard cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? In the King James version, Deut. 23:2 says, “A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord” and Heb. 12:8 says that those who are not chastised by God are “bastards, and not sons.” I guess those verses could be misinterpreted as excluding bastards from the kingdom of heaven.

There’s a great parody of a popular attitude toward Christianity in Sabbath’s description of the newspaper advice columnist’s response to her letter about whether she should “neck or not,” since she wasn’t able to enter the kingdom of heaven anyway. The columnist said:

Dear Sabbath, 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. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living if you put it in the proper perspective and do not let it warf you. Read some books on Ethical Culture. (p. 117; should “warf you” be “dwarf you”?)

Meanwhile Enoch Emery was doing strange things, like saving money and cleaning his room, because his “blood” told him to. This is pretty funny too, especially the part about his landlady’s framed picture of a moose in his room, which Enoch was afraid of until he decided to just take it out of the frame. When he did that, “the animal looked so reduced that Enoch could only snicker and look at him out the corner of his eye.” (p. 133) After doing a number of other things he didn’t want to do, like stopping at the soda fountain and then going to the movies, because his “blood” was leading him, Enoch meets up with Haze Motes who is preaching in the streets about finding a “new jesus” for his Church Without Christ. Enoch decides to steal the mummified shrunken man out of the case in the museum to be Haze’s “new jesus.”

Haze wants so much to believe! He wants to believe in the blind preacher, who is a drunkard and a fake. He knocks on his door two or three times a day, to try to see behind the dark glasses, but the blind preacher just sent Sabbath out to him and bolted the door behind her. “Haze couldn’t understand why the preacher didn’t welcome him and act like a preacher should when he sees what he believes is a lost soul.” (p. 145) He abandons his idea of seducing Sabbath, and keeps trying to get rid of her, while she tries – and apparently eventually succeeds – in seducing him.

But Haze keeps preaching, with no success whatsoever. He thought he’d found a follower, but it was only a 16-year-old boy who wanted Haze to take him to a whore-house. When they came out, Haze asked him if he wanted to join the Church Without Christ, but the boy said he was a Lapsed Catholic, that what they had just done was a mortal sin, and then asked Haze if he would like to go again the next night. A couple of nights later Hazel found his first disciple, but he turned out to be a con artist who wanted people to pay $1.00 apiece to join the “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.” Haze kept interrupting him, trying to tell the people who’d gathered that the man was lying and that wasn’t the name of his church, and finally Haze drove off, although the man jumped in and stayed with him until Haze finally pushed him out and slammed the door on his thumb.

O’Connor’s writing is so great! Quotable expressions on every page. And funny! I laughed out loud at a lot of her writing. The con artist Haze picked up and then tried to get rid of, Onnie Jay Holy (whose real name is Hoover Shoats), says to the crowd, “This church is up-to-date! When you’re in this church you can know that there’s nothing or nobody ahead of you, nobody knows nothing you don’t know, all the cards are on the table, friend, and that’s a fack!” (p. 153) Onnie Jay has a perpetual smile on his face, but he has to work to keep it on. “Onnie Jay Holy’s face showed a great strain; he put his hand to the side of it as if the only way he could keep his smile on was to hold it.” (p. 154) When talking to Onnie Jay, Haze repudiates his own preaching about a “new jesus,” and says, “There’s no such thing as any new jesus. That ain’t anything but a way to say something.” “The smile more or less slithered off Onnie Jay’s face.” (p. 158)

When he gets back to his room after another night of unsuccessful preaching, he finds Sabbath in his bed. She says about Haze, after determining that he is not going to hit her, “That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way and he don’t. Yes sir! ... I like being that way, and I can teach you how to like it. Don’t you want to learn how to like it?” “Yeah,” he said with no change in his stony expression, “I want to,” and then gets undressed. (p. 169)

But he really doesn’t want to have anything to do with Sabbath. He wants to be a preacher, albeit a preacher of the Church Without Christ. He wakes up, apparently sick, but as soon as he realizes that Sabbath is not in the room, he forms a plan to get away to another city where he would get another room and another woman and make a new start with nothing on his mind. (p. 186)

Meanwhile Enoch has stolen his new “jesus” – the shrunken man from the museum – but then tries to get rid of him by giving him to Sabbath and telling her to give him to Haze. But Haze grabs the little man, slams him against the wall so hard that its head sprayed out a cloud of dust, and then threw him – or it – out in the rain. Sabbath, who had taken a motherly liking to it, was furious.

The story then switches back to Enoch, who has an adventure with “Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch” which ends up with Enoch apparently stealing the gorilla costume from Gonga, burying his own clothes, and putting on the costume. Why this fascination with other bodies, first the shrunken man and then the phony gorilla? Maybe Enoch was abused as a child. He recalls how, when he was four years old, his father had brought him a tin box from the penitentiary, which had a picture of peanut brittle on the outside and said, “A Nutty Surprise!” When he opened it a coiled piece of steel had spring out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. The author says, “His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger.” (p. 178)

The book gets weirder and weirder. Haze finds his former follower, Hoover Shoats, preaching in the street with a hired “prophet,” Solace Layfield. Haze follows Solace, rams his car, demands that he take off his hat and suit (which made him look like Haze), and then finally runs over him and kills him. The next day he sets out in his Essex to drive to a new city to preach the Church Without Christ, but on the way a patrolman stops him, persuades him to drive to the top of a nearby hill, tells him to get out and see the view, and then pushes Haze’s car over the embankment. Haze walks back to the city, buys some quicklime, and tells his landlady that he was going to blind himself.

Everybody is either phony or crazy or both in this novel. The preachers are all fakes, except for Hazel Motes. The shrunken man in the museum was fake; dust poured out of him when he was slammed against the wall (p. 188). The gorilla was fake; just some guy dressed up in a gorilla costume. Haze and Enoch are not fakes, but they are crazy.

And the characters in the story do not react to each other like normal humans would. Haze ignores – doesn’t even seem to notice – Sabbath’s efforts at seduction. Solace Layfield hardly objects when Haze rams his car and orders him to take off his hat and suit; he just whines “What you want? ... I ain’t done nothing to you.” (p. 204) The policeman who pushes Haze’s car over the cliff doesn’t seem to have any reason; he just says, “I just don’t like your face” (p. 210), and then after he destroys the car, he’s concerned about where Haze was going and offers him a ride. (p. 211) Later, when two young policemen find Hazel lying in a ditch, they show no concern about his condition; one of them hits him over the head with his billy club when he realized he was conscious. (p. 235)

Well, Hazel Motes did blind himself, but that was not enough. He continues to live with his landlady, after she has Sabbath put in a detention home, but he is an unfathomable mystery to her. He has no interest in money; he pays whatever she asks him to pay for room and board, and she finds that he has literally been throwing money away “when it’s left over.” (p. 224) He started walking with a limp, and she discovers why: he puts broken glass and gravel in his shoes. When she asks, “[W]hat do you walk on rocks for?” he says, “To pay” but won’t explain to her what he’s paying for. (p. 226) Then she found out that he had wrapped three strands of barbed wire around his chest. When she persists in asking him why he does these things, he says, “I’m not clean.” (p. 228)

What’s this all about? Apparently Hazel is haunted by his sins and is trying to atone for them by himself. He totally rejects Jesus, even toward the end. He tells his landlady that she’s better than those who believe in Jesus. “You’re better,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “If you believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t be so good.” (p. 225)

This is a wonderful, strange, insightful novel, full of symbolism and paradoxes. The literally blind Hazel tells his landlady, who can see physically, that she “can’t see.” She asks him whether he thinks that dead people are blind. He says, “I hope so,” and when she asks him why, he says, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.” (p. 226)

I wonder if Hazel Motes’ name is symbolic. See Mt. 7:3-5 KJV: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye ... Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” And “Haze,” of course, indicates cloudy sight. Hazel wants to preach to cast the mote out of other people’s eyes, but realizes that first he has to cast the beam out of his own eyes. Which he does!

In a way, Flannery O’Connor’s world is terrifying, because those who want salvation the most seemed doomed to reject it. However, it’s not a “realistic” novel; the characters and their actions are too strange to be believable. Final grade: B+.