Book Review: Wise Blood

Book Review: Wise Blood

Author: Flannery O’Connor

Date: 1949, 1983

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (1949), Signet (1983)

ISBN: none

Length: 232 pages (1949), 120 pages (1983)

Quote: “Do you think I believe in Jesus? Well I wouldn’t even if He existed.”

The Bible says, “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Wise Blood (which exists in a bulky, eye-friendly form and in a compressed, closely printed form) is an expanded variation on this theme. Whether you have the original 232 pages or the unabridged packed-down 120 pages, what you have is the tragic history of a young fool.

The word “fool” has always included the ideas of genuine stupidity, of sickness, and of wrongheadedness, or any combination of all three. Hazel Motes, a shell­shocked veteran, seems to be both sick and wrongheaded. He is also ignorant. He probably would never have been at the head of any class in any school, and he didn’t spend much time in school, but he’s not stupid enough to be easily written off. He is not more than twenty-three years old, apparently attractive to women, very serious, very sensitive, and very confused. Deeply religious before the war, he comes home determined to be an atheist, but he’s not cynical enough to be a good one. He gives up his attempt to organize a “Church of the Truth Without Jesus Christ” when his followers fail to keep his doctrine pure.

Before he dies—and there’s no room for doubt that he wants to die—Haze is determined to commit some Major Sins, and he commits some, in the laughable way that’s probably only possible for a very young and very goodhearted ex-Christian. He offers his virginity to a sleazy woman. That’s not bad enough. He rents a room from a decent woman, preaches atheism, is revulsed by his followers, and decides to seduce an old blind preacher’s daughter. To his disgust, the preacher is neither really blind nor really a Christian; it’s not clear whether his partner-in-fraud is really related to him, but being seduced is nothing new to her. The landlady steps in to help Haze get rid of this pair of scam artists, tries mothering him and even gets her hopes up about marrying him, but by this time Haze is walking around with barbed wire wrapped around his chest and gravel in his shoes, trying to die of pneumonia.

O’Connor was a Catholic, looking down on the Protestant peasantry of North Georgia. It’s hard to imagine her ever thinking of Haze as someone that God, as O’Connor understood God, wasn’t actively trying to redeem, through the grotesque days of his decline; but she couldn’t quite bring her antihero to salvation. And Wise Blood is probably easier to take if the reader is also Catholic, or Buddhist, or something that allows some hope for Haze’s posthumous redemption.

It’s also an anti-war tract. Men like Haze are still floundering around the streets of our cities today. As I read I found myself thinking, “Not true: friends and relatives of mine who saw horrible things, not even in Germany where they were told they could feel good about them, but in Korea and Vietnam, came home and were okay, as long as they hadn’t taken drugs.” Yes, but they had homes to come back to. Haze doesn’t. Haze, as fictional character, represents all the guys who joined the Army because their parents were homeless or on welfare or dead, or because they’d stomped or been kicked out of their parents’ or wives’ homes, or because they’d done something stupid and needed to get out of town fast. These were not the soldiers to whom we sent food treats in Vietnam. They were the ones to whom nobody wrote letters. I used to see them, and some of them were as old as Haze but were still alive, at soup kitchens in Washington. They were still visibly deranged. Most of them had, at some point between 1945 and 1985, taken some sort of drugs or “medication.” Mostly it hadn’t helped. Most of them were still carrying heavy loads of hate, grief, and guilt; many were also twitching. This is one of the things wars have always done to young men, and, these days, to young women.

O’Connor’s way of writing stories like Wise Blood is not for everyone. How can this tragic story be told as if it were a satirical comedy? O'Connor probably intended that most readers would want to rescue, if not to adopt, Haze. She intended to kill him by torture, anyway, and part of the torture is setting him in a scene like a Hogarth painting. These things exist, O’Connor tells us, and you, who are almost certainly stronger than I am, can do something about them, now that I’ve forced you to see that they’re there. Go and do it.