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Wise Blood (1952)

Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (44)

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
-Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood is Flannery O'Connor's grotesque picaresque tale of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee; a young man who has come to the city of Taulkinham bringing with him an enormous resentment of Christianity and the clergy. He is in an open state of rebellion against the rigidity of his itinerant preacher grandfather and his strict mother. So when one of the first people he encounters is the blind street preacher Asa Hawks and Motes finds himself both attracted and repelled by Hawks' bewitching fifteen year old daughter Lily Sabbath, he reacts by establishing his own street ministry. He founds the "Church without Christ":

    Listen you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go. I'm going to preach it to
    whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was
    nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there
    wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

As you can guess the church is singularly unsuccessful, although he does attract a couple of other crackpots: Enoch Emery a young man who works at the zoo and longs for a kind word from anybody; and Onnie Jay Holy, yet another rival preacher who believes Motes when he says he's found a "new jesus."

While at first this cast of bizarre characters, ranging from merely repugnant to truly evil, and the scenes of physical, moral and spiritual degradation through which they pass all seem to be just a little too much, the reader is carried along by O'Connor's sure hand for dark comedy. The book is very funny. But as the story draws to a close, O'Connor's true mission is revealed; Motes loses his fight against faith and he achieves a kind of grace, becoming something like a Christian martyr to atone for his sins. O'Connor has something serious and important to say about the modern human condition and the emptiness of a life without faith. That she is able to disguise this message in such a ribald comic package is quite an achievement.

Reading the book inevitably called to mind Carson McCullers' dreadful book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century list. It too is a Southern gothic, populated by dismal misanthropes. But it is devoid of humor and has nothing to say about the characters and the world they've created. Wise Blood is a superior novel in every sense and really deserves that spot on the list.

(Reviewed:22-Mar-00)

Grade: (A+)

Websites:

GENERAL:
    -BOOK LIST: The best titles proclaiming or applying a biblical worldview in a hostile 20th century (The Editors, World Magazine)
    -ESSAY: What makes for 20th Century Catholic fiction? A theory of what Catholic fiction is and what books conform to it (Tracy Dowling, Catholic Standard)
    -ESSAY: Reconstructing Southern Women's Literature: A literary critic says it's more than sugar and honey (SCOTT HELLER, Chronicle of Higher Education)
    -ESSAY: AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR CREATOR (Dan Wakefield, NY Times Book Review)

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Wise Blood (1952)

Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels (44)

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