Wise Blood, 2
Reading, Flanney O’Connor, Wise Blood, 117-231.
The plot thickens in this second half of Wise Blood, as Haze’s preaching scheme collapses in violence and Enoch’s wise blood leads him also to violence and to devolution. These two plot lines intertwine at certain points, but they have very different ending points.
As O’Connor follows Haze, she makes short work of his project to found the Church Without Christ, by having it generate both a doppelganger “Prophet” and Enoch’s crazy scheme for providing the “new jesus.” The Church Without Christ, with its would-be new jesus who is “without blood to waste” (140), represents Haze’s attempt to deny the existence of both sin and truth. Hoover Shoats (a.k.a., Onnie Jay Holy), tries to convince Haze that “if you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet” (157), and he thus offers an “up-to-date” “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ” (153, 151), which, he proclaims to the moviegoers, is “based on your own personal interpretation of the Bible” (153). Here and elsewhere, O’Connor is pretty clearly trying to attack various modern, watered-down forms of Christianity that don’t acknowledge human sinfulness and therefore have no need for grace or redemption. This strand of O’Connor’s critique has many facets that are worth exploring.
By the end of the novel, however, something has happened to Haze, and he undergoes a significant transformation. The critical question to ask is, why does Haze change? And, what’s the nature of his change?
Enoch, too, undergoes a major transformation as his storyline comes to an end. It’s worth asking again, what’s the deal with Enoch? What drives him? What is this “wise blood”? Oddly, the narrative voice comments directly (albeit negatively), on the symbolic meaning of Enoch’s final transformation. How might Enoch’s plotline (including this transformation) be fit into O’Connor’s larger critique. Absurd as Enoch’s story may be, it has a point.
Ultimately, O’Connor does not use Wise Blood to make a positive statement about her vision of the good. Instead, she draws “startling figures” for her “almost-blind” (and presumably hostile) audience in order to expose the absurdity (absence of meaning) in modern (secular) culture. If this interpretation is correct, it raises the question, why might she have taken this approach to conveying her message?
