Review: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Wise Blood’
Flannery O’Connor’s is a novel about zealotry and materialism in the evangelical South, but it lacks the ironic narrative power of her later work
When Hazel Motes, dismissed from the United States army, returns to the evangelical South loaded with a little cash and enough nihilism to fill a library’s worth of books, he soon finds himself at odds with preachers, proprietors, and frankly anyone who would even suggest he holds a single Godfearing bone in his body. It isn’t long before he clashes with Asa Hawks, a beggar-cum-preacher who claims to have once blinded himself as a demonstration of faith, and his wayward daughter; although Hawks shows little interest in Motes, Motes’ ballooning atheistic fervour leads him to develop and obsession with the preacher that culminates in him creating a “Church Without Christ” and taking up the mantle of prophet himself.
Zealotry, naturally, is a key point of study in the novel; the harder Motes resists the religious people of the South, the more apparent his need to be one of them becomes. He feels himself compelled to fight against their ideals, as if in search of some salvation for them—a salvation from religion, rather than through it. (Hawks, contrarily, carries little conviction in his words or actions.) Then, muddying the waters, there are the prophets of the commercial world — pop-up preachers whose only goals is to profit by swindling the local populace into paying entry fees into their fictional churches. They aimlessly go about their preaching in the town square, perfunctorily chattering away the day and driving home in the evening as though working a nine-to-five. But while their lack of conviction mirrors Hawks’ in this way, their material values mirror Motes’: for every day Motes spends in the town fighting against religion, he spends another dollar on nights with sex workers who revolt him; bizarre hats that bely him as the various types of people he loathes; repairs for a beaten-up car he will forever insist is the cream of the crop, the very ideal of a material reality. And lastly, there is the author’s zealotry, painting this picture of a world inadequately populated by ardent, moral preachers, her mirror to reality where the misguided and the half-arsed apparently reign supreme.
Yet, while her prose is undoubtedly powerful, and her taste for the distasteful remarkable even relative to other southern gothic works, O’Connor’s debut novel lacks any real impetus to give it a strong sense of meaning or purpose, or frankly even cogency. When I finished her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, I felt like she had almost accomplished the opposite of what she had been aiming for. In his 1980 introduction of the book, Paul Bailey notes her doubts about the novel:
Had she, she wondered, made it clear to the layman that Rayber is motivated by the Devil — indeed, is the Devil himself? … “The modern reader will identify with the schoolteacher,” she wrote… “but it is the old man who speaks for me.”
That it is nearly impossible for anyone of sound mind (i.e. any “modern reader” as O’Connor somewhat disparagingly phrased it) to consider the wild “prophet” Tarwater as any kind of moral authority over the “Devil” Rayber, only adds to the power of her second novel; not unlike the poignancy of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo emerging in part from its status as an example of the very colonialism it critiques, The Violent Bear It Away excels as a demonstration of the absurdity of religious moral authority, which derives entirely from dogma rather than reason or result—“authority,” in other words, is the sole active word of the phrase in O’Connor’s understanding of it. The more ardently we imagine O’Connor to have believed the novel to be a valid expression of her religious convictions, the more powerfully the novel itself resists her by exposing the insanity of this fervour. Nobody, in other words, writes anti-Catholic fiction quite like devout Catholics.
Yet, with Wise Blood, the novel borders an absurdity and a lack of drive which makes it even fail in this regard. It is not that the characters are directionless or unmotivated—one need only look as far as Cormac McCarthy to find works where this can be not a hindrance but a help to its narrative power—but that they scarcely resemble the people O’Connor thinks she is writing about. When Motes succumbs to the faith he has so desperately resisted throughout, there is little power to it because he, completely unlike any of the characters in her second novel, has no real dimension except as a cardboard cutout waiting to be bowled over by the author’s inevitably narrative authority—a strawman.
O’Connor, in other words, falls into the same pitfalls that plagues the novelistic work of many philosophers (and “philosophers”) such as Camus, Sartre, and even (at the most extreme end of this flaw, far beyond any of the others here mentioned) Rand: that of a lack of consummate narrative skill with which to disguise the novel’s superficial allegory of religion morally and spiritually triumphant over atheism. It’s all too easy to suggest that religious conviction is ideally supreme to the careless materialism of grifters and swindlers—the real challenge lies, as in her later novel, to attempt to triumph over something which is both valuable and fairly portrayed, even if one does not succeed. And regrettably, when the ideology of the novel falls flat, so does the rest of it; neither the narrative nor quality of prose (while strong) is enough to carry the novel to greatness.
