Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hapless Irony

Flannery O'Connor was a woman who knew her world. Not just the gentile facade of a world but the nits and grits and dirt under the finger nails world of poor black folk and edgy white trash, of the huckster and the street beggar, the good ole boy and the smug gossip, the person of faith and the person of lost faith, the arch prostitute and her bumbling client. They are misfits, defectives, near-psychotics, needy obsessives, fanatics.

O'Connor knew how these people act in this world, and how they speak, and, more important, what they are completely unaware and incapable of. They don't know how to act and speak in many circumstances. Not necessarily because they are uneducated or inexperienced but because the culture of which they are a part demands their role of ignorance and ineptitude. It's in their blood. They have a place and best stay put.

Call it the Old South for convenience or American Gothic for legitimacy. But this world is the one in which we all live. We might shiver a bit at the casual racism of a Hazel Motes, or chuckle at his use of a toilet wall in a public convenience as a local yellow pages. Nonetheless, our everyday language is equally thoughtless. And the evening television news is hardly any less gossip-ridden and tawdry than the scrawls in the average men's room. Enoch Emery's pointless attachment to Haze and his bizarre interpretation of what's needed to help him succeed are symptoms of an insanity equally evident in recent American political rallies.

The suspicion-laden, functionally autistic interactions we have every day - on public transport, walking down the street, in run of the mill commercial transactions - are essentially no different from those of O’Connor’s country bumpkins. But this is how she gets us to pay attention to them, by using the bumpkins and rubes to make her point fairly painlessly. But that point is no less clear as a consequence: no one escapes life undamaged; and the damage only gets repaired through other (damaged) folk.

Despite the apparent horror of the book, it is her underlying, soft, meticulously articulated irony that makes O'Connor so hypnotically attractive to me. A rusted iron glove filled with scented cotton rather than a fist. But oh what an after-effect. The blow comes after one stops reading. Understanding comes without an argument but through her so precise hints and suggestions. What unites us as human beings is not some abstract essence or capacity but a thorough-going and fateful haplessness. Through her we become conscious of being subject to the vagaries of our time and place. Paradoxically, it is an appreciation of this haplessness - not religious belief or its absence - that offers freedom.

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