IN The Violent Bear It Away (1960), the second novel by the Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964), Tarwater, the disturbed young central character, hitches a ride with a truck driver. Self interest rather than humanitarianism motivates the driver, who makes it clear he merely sees company as a way of "keeping himself awake. The pair hardly strike up an instant friend ship. "You belong in the booby hatch," the driver says. "You ride through the states and you see they all belong in it. I won't see nobody sane again until I get back "to Detroit."
It is a harsh observation, but O'Connor's South, inhabited by crazed preachers and fanatical misfits, is a strange world at the mercy of an often demented, frightened religiosity born of traditional Catholicism. Nowhere in her work is this dangerously ambivalent attitude to religion more graphic, or grotesque, than in her unsettling first novel Wise Blood (1952). Now re issued as the tenth title in the revived Faber Library series, Wise Blood retains its brutal comedy and also reveals a timelessness which it has acquired with the years.
Hazel, or Haze, Motes sits on a train holding "a stiff black broad brimmed hat on his lap, a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear". The grandson of a preacher, he is on a mission of self salvation: "There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin."
Since his childhood he had known "Jesus would have him in the end". By the age of 12, a prisoner of his faith, he knew he was going to be a preacher. "Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then, suddenly, know it and drown." But the haunted Motes has been damaged by far more than the demands of a maverick God intent on collecting souls. At the age of 18, he had joined the army intending to give it "exactly four months of his time". In a single sentence, O'Connor encapsulates the young man's deeper hurt: "He was gone four years, he didn't get back, even for a visit."
With his train still hours away from the big city he is bound for Motes feels trapped in his berth and shouts: "I can't be closed up in this thing. Get me out! ... Jesus, Jesus." His sensation of claustrophobia is a metaphor for the narrative which follows. As is the porter's response to Haze's exasperated cry for help: "Jesus been a long time gone." Asked by a cab driver if he is a preacher, Motes" reply is blunt: "Get this: I don't believe in anything."
For all her interest in the grotesque, O'Connor builds her narratives on exact, economical details. All of the colour and atmosphere is provided by the vicious, brutally rhythmic, mutually threatening exchanges. Her characters involve themselves in religion, the very thing they want to escape. Intent on freeing himself, Haze establishes his own religion, "The Church Without Christ". A diversion appears in the form of a bogus blind preacher and his young daughter. "Help a blind preacher. If you won't repent, give up a nickel. I can use it as good as you. Help a blind unemployed preacher. Would you rather have me beg than preach? Come on and give a nickel if you won't repent." Amid the cynicism and perversion, Haze's obsession appears curiously pure. Near the end of, the novel, having engaged in various forms of self torture, he blinds himself.
It is an episodic book, a surreal odyssey rather than novel; three of O'Connor's earliest stories, "The Train", "The Peeler" and "The Heart of the Park" are self contained chapters from Wise Blood. The fanatical Haze is tempted by the bogus blind preacher's daughter, yet even as his attempt at self salvation is seen as an elaborate act of honest self destruction, there is no feeling of sympathy for him.
Initially intending to be a cartoonist, O'Connor remained interested in the form and regarded this novel, with its elements of sophisticated cartoon, as a comedy. The theme of comic picaresque is sustained by Haze's purchase of a suspect car, and by young Enoch Emery's meeting, with Gonga, a gorilla known as the Giant Jungle Monarch and famous for his movie appearances. Obviously star struck, Enoch, who has previously tried in vain to become Haze's friend, now begins to tell the gorilla all about himself: "I've seen two of your pictures. I'm only eighteen year old but I already work for the city. My daddy made me . . ." The gorilla moves closer to Enoch. "The star leaned slightly forward and a change came in his eyes: an ugly pair of human ones moved closer and squinted at Enoch from behind the celluloid pair. `You go to hell,' a surly voice inside the ape suit said, low but distinctly . . ."
Haze has a madman's logic. After he becomes blind, it takes his landlady some time to adjust to his new self. "She first told him he couldn't stay because he wouldn't wear dark glasses and she didn't like to look at the mess he had made in his eye sockets."
While Wise Blood certainly captures the essence of Southern Gothic and grotesque humour, its weakness lies in its excessive distortions. The Violent Bear It Away is less inventive, yet is far more imaginatively and narratively convincing. Wise Blood offers an entry into O'Connor's violently surreal world, but the later, superior novel supplies the missing humanity. Tarwater, a victim of Satan in search of redemption, sins and suffers, and finally, though driven to madness, achieves a tragic grandeur denied to Haze.
Yet the true genius of Flannery O'Connor rests in her short stories, particularly classic works such as "The Artificial Nigger", "A Good Man is Hard To Find", "The Lame Shall Enter First" and "Parker's Back". She died at 39, but left some of the strangest and accomplished of American short stories. Wise Blood is not the best of O'Connor, but certainly open the door to her bizarre and singular artistic vision.
