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Wise Blood (1952) was the first novel written by Southern author Flannery O'Connor.
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Wise Blood began with four chapters published in Mademoiselle, Sewanee Review, and Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949. Flannery O'Connor then published it as a complete novel in 1952, and Signet advertised it as "A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption."
In the novel, O'Connor takes up her consistent theme of a disaffected young person returning home and the struggle of the individual to understand Christianity on a purely individualistic basis. O'Connor's hero, Hazel Motes, sneers at communal and social experiences of Christianity, sees the followers of itinerant, Protestant preachers as fools, and sets out to deny Christ as violently as he can.
Against his individual attempts, Motes faces the tendency of all around him to identify him as a preacher. Enoch Emery, a partially retarded friend of Motes who is in search of a new Jesus, explains that some people have "wise blood," that the blood knows even if the mind does not. Hazel is obsessed with preachers, with salvation, and with denying redemption. He seeks to save people from salvation, eventually becoming an anti-priest of "the Church of Christ without Christ," where "the deaf don't hear, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, the dumb don't talk, and the dead stay that way," and, in the end, becoming a hallowed ascetic.
Some critics have argued that what Flannery O'Connor consistently writes about is not salvation, but heresy. Each of her "heroes" encodes one or another of the classic heretical movements, whether Chartist in "That Enduring Chill" or Jansenist in Wise Blood. At the same time, O'Connor's heretical heroes often flirt with existentialism (e.g. The Misfit from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") and its demands that only the solitary individual's experiences can provide a basis for belief. O'Connor saw these ancient heresies blooming in a post-Reformation world, and particularly in the fertile fields of the decentralized evangelical realm of the South.
Flannery O'Connor was a Roman Catholic living in the American south, and her fictions consistently illustrate not merely religious, but theological points of view. By the time of Wise Blood, O'Connor was herself diagnosed with lupus and was receiving treatment with hydrocortisone therapy at Emory University hospitals in Atlanta.
O'Connor's first major attack of lupus had occurred in 1950, and she had been forced to return home to Milledgeville, Georgia to live with her mother on the family farm. Since O'Connor's father had died of lupus, she was under no illusions about her prospects. Having been a writer and lived in Iowa and New York City, she found her mother's company, and the general area of Milledgeville, to be difficult. The smart-aleck child coming home, and resentment of mother figures and parents in general, permeates all of O'Connor's fictions, and Wise Blood is no different.
Wise Blood can be read simply as a comedy of grotesques (the so-called "Southern Gothic"), for it is comedic and has grotesques. It can also be read as a rare philosophical novel, for it does posit alternating views of reality against one another and ask the reader to resolve the conflict. It can even be read as a social text, for the novel does capture the South at a time of great tension, when, after World War II, the rural and cosmopolitan populations were jarring, and tent-revival preachers met big city marketing.
Hazel Motes (whose name recalls Jesus warning us not to complain of the mote in another's eye, when we have a beam in our own) returns from the military without family, but with an inheritance. He is a man in religious crisis. He has rejected faith as "a trick on niggers," and rejected the entire story of Jesus. In particular, he rejects guilt and redemption. He is, as O'Connor said the South was, "not Christ centered, but Christ haunted." Motes is tormented by belief and rejects it violently because of how much it is a part of him.
Enoch Emery, on the other hand, believes readily but cannot see beyond the body. He, like other O'Connor characters, wants and demands a physical Jesus. He is a creature of clay, a man whose blood speaks to him. It was his blood that led him to Hazel, whom he latches onto as a candidate for the "new Jesus." Asa Hawks, on the other hand, is one of O'Connor's mountebanks. He has no belief in anything but himself. He takes no pleasure in evil or good, only in gratification of himself. His daughter, too, believes only in self-gratification.
Hazel is a believer without belief and a seer without vision. Each of O'Connor's stories has, she said, a moment of grace, but it is a Roman Catholic grace -- grace that brings a person to the brink of belief, but not grace that saves by itself. It is transformative, but those to whom the grace is given must choose to accept it or not. Hazel's own moment of grace comes with his destruction of the "new Jesus" that Enoch Emery has discovered (a body from a tomb). Whether Hazel's mote is removed or not is not clear in the novel.
Hazel Motes begins the novel coming home from army service. His grandfather was a tent revival preacher, and Hazel himself is irresistably drawn to wearing a bright blue suit and a black hat. He is told repeatedly that he "looks like a preacher," though he despises preachers. Hazel makes his way to the big city of Taulkinham, where he obtains a "rat colored car" and founds the "Church Without Christ."
A young man named Enoch Emery is attracted to Hazel's new "church," and a legendary preacher named Asa Hawks (and his daughter, Sabbath Lily) takes Hazel under his wing. Asa Hawks had blinded himself with lime, and his daughter is his only aid as he preaches the joys of redemption. Hazel wants to challenge Hawks, for he is sure that Hawks is the sort of simple-minded Bible thumper that Hazel most hates. It turns out, however, that Asa promised the public to blind himself and then did not, though he carries on as if he did. Hawks is not only sighted, but he is a raptor who is preying upon those who pray. The pure daughter, Sabbath Lily, instead of being pure, has a wild sex drive, and she uses the semblance of purity and virginity to heighten her sexual allure.
Hazel believes that "sin is a trick on niggers," but he is obsessed with sin, guilt, cleanliness, and the figure of Jesus. Enoch explains that he, like his father, has "wise blood" that tells him secrets about things. His blood tells Enoch that a mummy in a museum is "the new Jesus," and so he steals the corpse. Enoch later violently steals and then wears a gorilla costume. Hazel, who insists that "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," destroys this new jesus when it is given to him without explanation.
When Hazel's car, the symbol of his faith in the material world, is destroyed, he faces his moment of grace and crisis. Having passed between the body-obsessed believer of Enoch on one side, and the entirely faithless charlatan of Hawks on the other, Hazel invests his passionate belief in suffering, binds himself with barbed wire, puts stones and glass in his shoes, and blinds himself with lime, becoming an ambiguous figure of redemption.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of Flannery O'Connor. She has cast a very long shadow over Southern literature, in particular. Imitators are common.
In her own day, O'Connor was accused of writing about "grotesques." Her image of the south as populated with religious fanatics and the malformed has influenced a great many writers to emphasize Southern eccentrics. From John Kennedy Toole to Harry Crews, novelists have focused on the South as home of curious people who put belief into action. However, O'Connor's characters are as much theological embodiments as descriptions of real people. Wise Blood, in particular, is a novel of philosophical debate.
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