Flannery O’Connor is a fascinating figure in American literature – a staunch Catholic who wrote macabre, misanthropic, even violent stories seem to stem from a mind like Cormac McCarthy’s, becoming a leader of the new Southern Gothic style before her death at 39 of complications from lupus. Her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find includes the title story, one of the creepiest I’ve ever read, a story that seems completely without hope and presents as dark a view as possible of humanity.
O’Connor wrote two novels, including Wise Blood, about a young man named Hazel Motes who decides he’s going to start a Church Without Christ, a sort of anti-church, not a church of atheism specifically but a church opposed to churches. If it sounds like a less than coherent philosophy, then you’ve got the idea, as Hazel is very mad and not very smart. He’s befriended by the teenaged zoo employee Enoch, an eager and socially inept youth who is looking for anyone to whom he can attach himself. Hazel’s half-hearted attempts to preach his anti-gospel are quickly subsumed by a local con man, who names his church the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ and starts collecting donations while steering attention away from Hazel. Hazel’s rage gets the best of him as he sees someone else profiting from his ideas, leading to violence and then a period of remorse marked by self-mutilation and asceticism.
Wise Blood is disjointed, and side characters and themes come and go without much bother, so it wasn’t surprising to see (after I read it) that O’Connor cobbled it together from previously written short stories and her master’s thesis (the first chapter). The one unifying element is Hazel himself, a damaged World War II veteran whose family has disappeared while he was away, and who returns believing in nothing at all – a pure nihilist, angry at the world and at the God in which he claims to disbelieve. He’s a comic antihero, in part because he’s a bit of a moron, and in part because so much of what he does goes awry. So while the novel does have a climax and long resolution, it’s more a connected set of stories around Hazel’s return from war and anti-religious fervor, culminating in his attempt to find redemption via masochistic means after committing a horrible crime.
But despite comic elements and text rich with metaphor and allusion, Wise Blood feels inconsequential; I read it, but never felt absorbed at all in the story, and found the redemption arc too inverted to connect with it. The side characters are all too one-dimensional and serve as props for Hazel’s actions, not as fully-realized individuals themselves. And the ending moves more into speculative fiction territory, losing any threads of realism we’d had earlier in the book. The Guardian named this one of the 100 best novels ever back in 2003, but I’ve read a few hundred novels better on both a literal and a symbolic level.
John Huston directed an adaptation of this novel in 1979, which is screening on TCM next Tuesday. The Guardian named it one of its “50 Lost Movie Classics” in 2006. Sounds like you wouldn’t be interested in watching, but I thought I’d make you aware.
Several years ago I visited a friend in northern Italy who was working as an ESOL teacher. The company he worked for kept an apartment for visiting teachers, who would typically stay for a few months — as a result, the little bookshelf in the living room had the most varied collection you could imagine. No Southern Gothic, though, so I contributed my copy of Wise Blood, which I’d read on the plane. I thought it was a cracking good character study, and an effective gateway into the genre. Movie was good, too!