Wise Blood: A Novel by Flannery O'Connor Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Wise Blood: A Novel
Book Review: "Stop one minute to listen to the truth because you may never hear it again."
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoy a lot of Irish writers and even though I have known the name Flannery O'Connor for a long time,this is the first time I have actually read this author. I ,like others ,assumed Flannery was a man and Irish.Before reading this novel,I checked the Amazon customer reviews and was completely surprised . Then, with some research on the net, that Flannery was a young woman of only 27 when she wrote this book,and rather than being Irish,was from an Old Deep South Catholic family,born in Savannah,Georgia. She was born in 1925,surrounded by poor whites in a Protestant area,left home at 18,graduated from college,wrote mainly Southern Gothic short stories,only 2 novels.She had a great interest in domestic birds,peacocks,pheasants,swans,geese,chickens and Moscovy Ducks. After college she lived on a family farm with her mother,outside Millidville Georgia.She was also a good painter. She was quite frail,never married,like her father,she contacted Lupus and died very young at only 39,in 1964. Her mother outlived her for many years. It is still possible to visit the farm in Millidville,Ga.She had a deep and knowledgeable faith.
As I read this book ,I was continually reminded of other writers such as James Joyce,Erskine Caldwell,Faulkner,Erskine Caldwell,Steinbeck and even some of those bible -thumping movies such as Elmer Gantry.
This is all about having or not having faith. O'Connor understands the difference between Faith and Religion and shows what a difficult thing it can be when someone lacks real faith and attempts to develop one's own through rationalization.Flannery does not make any attempt to preach or conince the reader one way or the other about faith,but she does an admiral job of showing how difficult and all encompassing it can be for some people who have doubts and try to resolve them.
While Flannery's life was all too short ;and we are all the poorer for that;she is remembered by words like these;
"Everything that rises must converge."
"Grace changes us and change is painful."
Book Review: A Black Mirror of the Human Landscape
Summary: 3 Stars
In the 18th and 19th centuries C.E., landscape artists often used a convex mirror made of darkened glass to aid in their work. It was called a black mirror. Turning their back to the landscape, they would paint using the reflection in the dark mirror as a reference. The image they saw had a compression of details, and a muting or loss of tonality.
Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood seems to have been crafted using a sort of literary black mirror to survey the human landscape. The characters, without exception, are darkly rendered, and many are physically deformed. Flannery reportedly gave little truck to psychology, saying that art wants to begin where psychology leaves off. Yet her main characters are tugged, yanked, and tumbled by deep and mysterious longings and compulsions that originate far beneath the crust of conscious thought.
Wise Blood is filled with completely undisguised hatred for the hyper-religiosity of Southern Bible-based fundamentalism, and O'Connor's ferocious characterization (maybe caricaturization is a better word for what she does) is both brilliant and repellant. O'Connor described this work as a dark comedy, and it is interesting to note how many reviewers comment on how comical they felt this book was. If indeed it IS comedy, it is a mocking, sneering sort of comedy, with as much warmth in it as a sleet storm. One can only laugh AT the characters, never WITH them.
When the landscape artist of the 18th and 19th centuries stared into their black mirrors, they saw a world deprived of color and somewhat distorted shape compared to the landscape that they had quite literally turned their backs on. In some sense, in Wise Blood, O'Conner turned her back on the fullness of human existence, and in this book painted a darkened and distorted human landscape. The full color of human behavior, including easy laughter, generosity, simple kindness, and love based on integrity and trust has been filtered out. There is, to be fair, a single act of kindness in the book: when a gentleman on a train is asked by a half-sane teenager to share his newspaper, he hands the youth the funny pages.
O'Connor was a Catholic, as was I when I grew up. She, like I in my youth, liked to draw a sharp line between what she felt was nonsensical Protestant/fundamentalist excess, and the (perceived) rationality and depth of Catholicism. One evening in a college dorm party that was well-infused with different varieties of alcoholic spirits, an atheist classmate of mine asked, "So, how exactly is Catholicism different than a cult?". It took me a few decades to work out a consistent answer to that question, and the answer led to a change in convictions. Flannery O'Connor's loyalty to Catholicism would have lead her to a different answer than the one I eventually arrived on. Which leads me to a line of questioning about her attacks on the hyper-religious that will surely earn me a fusillade from O'Connor-philes. It's a question about vision.
Self-blinding, both feigned for profit and real, is a theme in this dark novella. O'Connor relentlessly harpoons the hypocrisies and foolishness of overwrought Christianity (which many readers and critics have found of great comic value). Is her own Catholic Church any less subject to savage review (e.g. Christopher Hitchen's characterization of Catholicism as the church with the "No Child's Behind Left" policy)? Was the exceedingly well detailed history of the shallow spirituality and deep cruelty of the Inquisition known to her? Is O'Connor's distinction between her brand of faith and that of others no more than a highly literary and brilliantly conceived case of the blind leading the blind? Might those who laugh at the false prophets and shiny blue-suited preachers of O'Connor's novel, while taking comfort in their own safely distanced and advanced spirituality, be merely a case of the blind reading the blind? What might O'Connor have seen if she had eschewed the black mirror of her own religious convictions, and turned around to face humanity in all its richness rather than only the charcoal hues she so ably focuses on?
Lastly, this novel was cobbled together from stories that O'Connor had previously written. No mistaking it, there is brilliant writing here. But the roughness of the needle work used to sew these disparate pieces together, in my mind, denies Wise Blood a legitimate claim to the title of "classic",or the more mundane five star rating.
Book Review: A WIld, WIde-eyed View of the World
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is like a never ending acid trip. I loved to wildness and the dream like foggy-ness of it. I loved that I didn't know what was going on but at the same time i knew exactly what was going on. Its like the book melted through my fingers before i could grasp it well enough to make perfect sense of it.
Many people in my 12th grade english class hated this book and got too caught up asking why instead of just letting the book be. The whole genre of southern gothic is captivating in a so-horrible-you-have-to-laugh way and the way O'Connor writes it is fantastic.
Book Review: Another Book of Grotesques
Summary: 5 Stars
Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood delivers yokums to an alleged city where the main characters' lack of education makes them commit acts which most others would deem violative of common sense or Judeo-Christian ethic. They include: sex with a minor; self-injury; mutilation; murder; theft; assault; battery; stealing from the blind and more. Those committing these acts include preachers, policemen and other trusted persons.
Basically, all of these simple characters ". . . had had a hard life, without pain and without pleasure. . . " Their simple lives deprived of education had been their largest handicap. And, without enough education to know basic wrongs from rights, they do things onto others which assuredly one would not do unto others. Critics say that O'Connor's characters are "grotesques." This book certainly includes grotesque people and personalities.
Religion and blasphemy are the staples of the protagonist Hazel Motes - don't be fooled by the name, this is a man who is 22 and just finished stint as a soldier. Hazel, for whatever reasons, decides that proselytizing his message of truth meant to tell the followers that Jesus did not die for us, but because of us. His Church without walls was to be called Church Without Christ. This church ". . . don't have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that is all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don't look like any other man so you'll look at him."
Ultimately, the contradictions of this religion are merely formulaic of the book's core. There is another preacher whose pre-deacon days were so full of sin that he showed his devotion to God by blinding himself before a congregation of over 300 people. Later we discover that he scarred his face with lime, but had actually never touched his eyes with the volatile liquid and therefore never lost his sight. That man of the cloth lies, and so Hazel seeks to be of truth by preaching of a Church Without Christ.
So many other contradictions exist, many embroiled with religion. For instance, a girl who is born a [...] is told that the Bible asserts her illegitimate birth denies her soul access to heaven. So she asks herself, why live a good Christian life if the ultimate reward can never be obtained. Like a life-sentenced convict in prison, does any sentence repress her from committing violative acts -- can an inhabitant in a penitentiary really be told to act obediently "or else?" No.
Written in 1951 this book asks questions which probably would not be read by many Americans of that generation. Elmer Gantry received critical and public furor for reciting how clergy can be more common and hypocritical than their parishioners. And, making such twists of stereotype is exactly what Flannery O'Connor does so well.
Book Review: Anyone Who Had a Heart
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel combines startling images and an inscrutable Old Testament sensibility with funny scenes that will make you laugh out loud. It is the novel that helped cement Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation. She's a writer who will be part of the canon in a hundred years -- people will still be reading and discussing her. "Wise Blood" is the story of Hazel Motes, a man determine to strip Christ out of his life and out of the world, but, who, paradoxically, is also obsessed with Him. A walk through a haunted yet still good world filled with men who are made into monkeys, workaday street preachers, broke down autos, this is a kaleidoscope of sense, doubts, guilt, and humor: a must read tour de force.