Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor

 WISE BLOOD - FLANNERY O'CONNOR

My excuse is that I've never really considered it before but I never realised that Flannery O'Connor was a woman. I say 'was' not in the sense of her once being a woman but is now a man but in the sense of her now being dead, having passed away in 1964 from Lupus at the age of thirty-nine. Too young. 

Have you seen the film Wise Blood, made in 1979, directed by John Huston, and if so did you think it any good? It starred Brad Dourif in the main role, who also played the stuttering patient Billy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; the guy who Jack Nicholson said should be 'out in a Convertible, bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver'. Right? Right. It's a strange, idiosyncratic film, the kind that could only have been made in the Seventies when Hollywood was a lot more experimental than it is these days.

Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor - the book on which the film is based - was written in 1949 and first published in 1952. Have you seen a picture of Flannery O'Connor? Have you seen what she looked like? You should never, of course, judge a person by their appearance (nor a book by its cover) but to look at Flannery O'Connor you might never imagine such a book as Wise Blood could have been written by her, particularly knowing she was born into a Roman Catholic family in Georgia, USA, in what would have been a very ultra-conservative era. But so it goes. 

The story centres upon a character by the name of Haze Motes who on returning home from active service in the Second World War, sets himself up as a preacher in the evangelical Deep South of America. His is no ordinary religious doctrine, however, but instead is his own personal religion given the name Church Without Christ. Under his new religion there is no such thing as sin or judgement, the blind don't see, the lame don't walk and what is dead stays that way. In particular there is no such thing as Redemption because there is no Fall because there is nothing to fall from. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.

Interestingly, the term 'wise blood' is never really explained and when it is mentioned it's in regard to a young zookeeper who tries to befriend Motes only to be met by rejection. 'You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,' the zookeeper says to Motes 'but you ain't! I'm the one has it. Not you. Me.' This accusation highlights the question of authenticity of religious conviction and suddenly throws into doubt who the main character in the book should be - the street preacher Motes, or the lonely zookeeper? As the story unfolds their lives entwine though in the end their fates head off in completely opposite directions with the zookeeper's (involving dressing in a gorilla costume and scaring people in the woods) probably a lot better than Motes'.

Flannery O'Connor's story is embedded in a comically macabre world of religious fundamentalism, ignorance, sex, violence, and twisted, near-gothic dialogue. You can see where Nick Cave would have got some of his influences from. On an even more sub-cultural level, it's the kind of book that Nick Blinko (of Rudimentary Peni) should have written rather than his Primal Screamer novel.

The Motes character would nowadays probably be diagnosed as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder though of course back then the term wouldn't have existed. And curiously, even though the Motes character preaches a kind of anti-religion the book is in no way anti-religious or a case for atheism. Instead it raises the question as to whether once the idea of Jesus is introduced to a person (or in regards to Motes, as a child born into a deeply religious family) can that person ever be free of Jesus? Even when Jesus is viewed as 'a wild ragged figure moving from tree to tree in the back of your mind, motioning you to go off into the dark where you're not sure of your footing, where you might be walking on water and not know it but then suddenly know it and drown'? And if you were ever able to free yourself of Jesus then what might you gain from it? If anything, what might you lose? Of what benefit would it be? Where would it leave you? Adopting the guise of the very animals you guard in their cages as in the case of the zookeeper heading off into the woods in a gorilla costume? Or blind from self-inflicted lime to the eyes and dead in a ditch as in the case of Motes?

Wise Blood - as it says in the blurb on the cover - is a work of very strange beauty and totally original.

John Serpico