Wise Blood

"It’s another of my favourites. It’s a comic novel, yes. It’s incredibly funny. It’s always billed as a ‘Southern Gothic’; that’s the label that gets slapped on it. Southern Gothic, to me, sounds like a book that must be dark and knotted and heavy, covered with Spanish moss and mist. But it’s not that at all. It’s bright and barbed and conversational and simple. But it is also nasty, and it is about serious things. It’s grotesque. I use that word with hesitation, because I think O’Connor hated being called grotesque. She saw that as a condescending framing of her characters and her world. But Wise Blood does have an element of the grotesque to it: these are damaged, unmoored people rattling around a fictional Tennessee town. Hazel Motes is the grandson of a traveling preacher, and he is a furious atheist—at least on the surface. He wants to establish the Church Without Christ, as an alternative religion. The further we go, though, we realise it is no different from any other old-time religion. It’s a resistance that’s not really resistance. He is utterly besotted by and defined by the things he hates and fears. He’s pushing back in the way that most people in the South, O’Connor implies, are. When you travel in the South, you find a lot of these small towns—sorry, this is a real digression—but as you are coming into these towns, you go through the strip malls, the chain motels, the McDonald’s. They’re always the same, these strip malls, and you always think: This must be a sizeable, bustling town I’m coming to, there’s all this stuff in the outskirts. Then you get to the town and there’s nothing there. It’s boarded up, there’s literal tumbleweed blowing through. A couple of people asleep on a park bench. That’s it, that’s the town. And you realise that the town is actually what you passed, on the way into the historic, haunted centre. So Wise Blood catches the sense of these places in the South being provisional, just stitched onto the landscape, ghost towns. A jerry-built society where the characters are without foundations. The only thing that seems to be driving them is the wild electricity of Jesus. They’re either fighting against this current that is hot-wiring them, or they’re riding it for all they’re worth. Either way, it’s not going to end well. These people aren’t really in relationships with each other, or even in relationships with the town that they’re in. They are just channelling this unstable current of God-talk. They are all products of their time and place. By our vantage, they are all huge racists. Faulkner, O’Connor, Twain… it’s unavoidable. But do we then discount what they have to say? Their experiences, their knowledge of their time, their particular window on history? I think that, if we do, we are missing the point of literature, or any kind of art. Art is always the product of its time and place, and that includes the prejudices and ignorances of the artist who produced it. That’s the thing that makes it interesting, the thing you engage with. The thing you quarrel with and argue with and pit your own ideas against. Of course, if someone is blinded by prejudice and writing crude stereotypes, then that obviously is going to make their work lesser. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true of Flannery O’Connor, and actually I’m particularly thinking of the short stories here. They manage an interesting depiction of the privacy of the Black world of the South. They give the sense that it exists and has its own codes of behaviour and conversations that she is only tangentially party to. She captures that quality very well. Absolutely. While we are on the subject of films, though, they made a great adaptation of Wise Blood , really first rate. It was directed by John Huston, who did The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , all that. It was quite near the end of his life. It’s great. It captures that sort of antic, savage, weird quality of the book, and also the peculiar ahistorical quality of the South. It’s set in the late 1970s, although the book was written in the early 1950s. But though it’s set in a town with 1970s cars, there are still steam trains, and there is a sense that time is slightly out of joint."