Wise Blood (1952)

Wise Blood is the first novel by the American author Flannery O'Connor, published in 1952. The novel was assembled from disparate stories first published in Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review and Partisan Review. The first chapter is an expanded version of a story from her Master's thesis, "The Train", and other chapters are reworked versions of "The Peeler", "The Heart of the Park" and "Enoch and the Gorilla". The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric, fictionalized city in the Southern United States after finding his family homestead abandoned without a trace.

The novel received little critical attention when it first appeared but has since come to be appreciated as a classic work of "low comedy and high seriousness" with disturbing religious themes. It was placed 62nd in The Observer's list of 100 greatest novels.

Plot summary

Recently discharged from service in World War II and surviving on a government pension for unspecified battle wounds, Hazel Motes returns to his family home in Tennessee to find it abandoned. Leaving behind a note claiming a chifforobe as his private property, Motes boards a train for Taulkinham. The grandson of a traveling preacher, Motes grew up struggling with doubts regarding salvation and original sin; following his experiences at war, Motes has become an avowed atheist and intends to spread a gospel of antireligion. Despite his aversion to all trappings of Christianity, he constantly contemplates theological issues and finds himself compelled to purchase a hat and suit that cause others to mistake him for a minister.

In Taulkinham, Motes finds an address in a bathroom stall and seeks out Leora Watts, a prostitute. He enters her house, sits on her bed, and places his hand on her shoe without speaking to her first. He befriends Enoch Emery, a manic, 18-year-old zookeeper forced to come to the city after his abusive father kicked him out of their house. Emery introduces Motes to the concept of "wise blood", an idea that he has innate, worldly knowledge of what direction to take in life, and requires no spiritual or emotional guidance.

Emery and Motes witness the ostensibly blind preacher Asa Hawks and his 15-year-old daughter Sabbath Lily crash a street vendor's potato peeler demonstration to advertise for their ministry. Motes finds himself drawn to the pair, which Hawks attributes to a repressed desire for religious salvation. Angry, Motes begins shouting blasphemies to the crowd, declaring that he will found his own anti-God street preaching ministry. Motes' declarations are lost on everyone except for Emery, who becomes infatuated with the idea. He begins to more aggressively pursue his ministry, purchasing a dilapidated Essex to use as a mobile pulpit, preaching from the hood of the car at various street corners.

After Leora destroys his hat for her own amusement, Motes moves into the boarding house where Asa and Sabbath Lily live. Motes becomes fixated on Sabbath Lily and begins spending time with her. Asa has Sabbath Lily give Motes an old newspaper clipping announcing his intention to blind himself with quicklime at a revival meeting to detach himself from worldly pursuits. Initially intending to seduce Sabbath Lily in order to corrupt her spiritual purity, Motes discovers that she is in fact interested in him.

Now skeptical of her and of her father's entire ministry, Motes slips into Hawks' room one night and finds him without his sunglasses on, with perfectly intact eyes: Hawks faltered when he had attempted to blind himself because his faith was not strong enough, and ultimately left the ministry to become a con artist. His secret found out, Asa flees town, leaving Sabbath Lily to fend for herself. She moves in with Motes, eventually sleeping with him.

Meanwhile, Emery, believing that Motes' church needs a worldly "prophet", breaks into a museum and steals a mummified dwarf, which he begins keeping under his sink. He ultimately presents it to Sabbath Lily to give to Motes on his behalf; when she appears to Motes cradling it in her arms in a parody of the Madonna and Child, Motes experiences a violent revulsion to the image and destroys the mummy, throwing its remnants out the window.

Inspired by Motes' fledgling street ministry, local con artist Hoover Shoats renames himself Onnie Jay Holy and forms his own ministry, the "Holy Church of Christ Without Christ", which he encourages the disenfranchised to join for a donation of $1. The absurdity amuses passersby and they begin to join as a joke. This angers Motes, who wants to legitimately spread his message of antireligion. Despite Motes' protests, Holy moves to the next level in promoting his ministry, hiring an unemployed, consumptive man to dress up like Motes and act as his "Prophet".

During a rainstorm, Emery seeks refuge under a theater marquee, and learns that a gorilla will be brought there to promote a new jungle movie. An excited Emery stands in line to shake the animal's hand, but is startled to find that the gorilla is actually a man in a costume who, unprovoked, tells Emery to "go to hell." The incident causes Emery's "wise blood" to give him some inarticulated revelation, and he seeks out a program of the "gorilla"'s future appearances. That night, Emery stalks the man to another theater, stabs him with a sharpened umbrella handle, and steals his costume. Emery takes the costume out to the woods, strips naked and buries his clothes in a shallow "grave" before dressing up as the gorilla. Satisfied with his new appearance, he comes out of the woods and attempts to greet a couple on a date by shaking their hand. Emery is disappointed when they flee in terror, and finds himself alone on a rock overlooking Taulkinham.