A novel about a man's search for faith

The “short”:

I can’t figger out if the engrossing world that Flannery O’Connor creates draws me in ’cause it’s a world I’m sorta familiar with (a small Midwestern town that gits dusty in the summer and is populated by people who’s liable to say reckon) and yet not (given that people still wore suits back then) — if it intrigues me ’cause it’s about a man’s struggle with faith — but no matter why I got sucked in, I did, and I’m still thinkin’ ’bout this book and I imagine I will for a while. It has a koan-like quality for me, but I’m not edumacated ‘nough to know if it’s ’cause she’s a real good writer and stuff, or if it’s more like Wise Blood is like them poems I used to try and write in high school about, like, forsythia bushes, tryin’ all hard to be deep and stuff and floaty and ambiguous and mysterious but really all surface and no substance. But if Wise Blood‘s all surface then I guess I’m okay with that, I’m glad I read it, I’m still turnin’ it over, and maybe the effect the book had on me was sorta like the effect that the search for faith had on the main character Hazel Motes. But don’t worry; I ain’t gonna pluck my eyeballs out, orbital blowout or otherwise.

The “long”:

Hazel Motes is preachin’ outside a movie theater when interloper Onnie Jay Holy steps in and starts to bringin’ it to the crowd:

“Not even my own dear old mother loved me, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t sweet inside, it was because I never known how to make the natural sweetness inside me show. Every person that comes onto this earth,” he said, stretching out his arms, “is born sweet and full of love. A little child loves ever’body, friends, and its nature is sweetness — until something happens. Something happens, friends, and I don’t need to tell people like you that can think for theirselves. As that little child gets bigger, its sweetness don’t show so much, cares and troubles come to perplext it, and all its sweetness is driven inside it. Then it gets miserable and lonesome and sick, friends. It says, ‘Where is all my sweetness gone? where are all the friends that loved me?’ and all the time, that little beat-up rose of its sweetness is inside, not a petal dropped, and on the outside is just a mean lonesomeness. It may want to take its own life or yours or mine, or to despair completely, friends.”

(Stuff like this makes me feel bad for Osama.)

But Hazel Motes doesn’t want anything to do with Onnie Jay Holy, who was only tryin’ to help. So Onnie Jay Holy stamps his feet at Hazel Motes and speaks his truth:

“That’s the trouble with you innerleckchuls,” Onnie Jay muttered, “you don’t never have nothing to show for what you’re saying.”

Them’s fightin’ words, says this here wannabe-innerleckchul. But Haze don’t back down, and he’s back the next day in front of the theater to preach to the folks comin’ out of the picture shows.

“Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”

He sounds a little Buddhist here, minus the killing bit, insofar as he advocates an illumination of one’s shadow conscience, a bringing-it-out-into-the-open type action. Not sure I’d go so far as to say you need to skewer your conscience and jam it into your Ronco rotisserie oven for din-din, but it sure don’t hurt to know what you’re dealing with, to know what informs the way in which you interact with the world, to confront your own secret personal Jesus and take a look at it real good, no matter how ugly, shrunken, hideous, or un-sweet some if its parts may be. When we are gentle with ourselves, we are naturally gentle with others.

Continues Haze:

“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

Now, now, Haze. I think we’re getting a little bit dualistic-mind there, don’t you? Take it down a notch, buddy.

But he doesn’t take it down a notch. Instead, he ratchets it up.

And by golly, just in writing this up I realize that this book has ratcheted up its rating in my mind. This thing is four stars. I can’t explain why. But I guess that’s just sometimes how it is. No rhyme. No reason. Just is.

——–

Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood

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