Wise Blood
Our book this week is ‘Wise Blood’ by Flannery O’Connor.
Born in Savannah, Georgia to a family of Irish immigrants, Flannery lived out most of her early childhood in the city. In 1938, she was forced to relocate to her mother’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia after her father’s lupus erythematosus condition worsened. Following her father’s death from the illness in 1941, she decided to stay in the town and study sociology and English literature at the Georgia State College for Women. During her time there, she served as editor of the university’s literary magazine and campus cartoonist, displaying early signs of her penchant for sly humour and dark satire within her poetry and essay submissions.
Upon graduating, she received a scholarship to complete an MFA in writing at the acclaimed Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. After completing the programme, she was awarded the Rinehart-Iowa Fiction Award for a novel that would form the foundations of what would later be ‘Wise Blood’ and was accepted into Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. At the retreat she continued to work on the novel and befriended Robert Lowell, her future editor, Robert Giroux and Caroline Gordon. Following the retreat, she decided to stay in the East Coast and moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut to live with her workshop friends, poet Robert Fitzgerald and his wife.
She dedicated the next two years into compiling some of her published short stories into what would comprise ‘Wise Blood’. Published in 1952, the book centres around the taunted figure of Hazel Motes, a discharged WWII veteran who returns to his hometown to find it derelict and decayed. Seeing his childhood home entirely dissipated, he resolves to abandon it and any notion of the fundamentalist teachings he inherited through his long dead relatives. Instead, he decides to preach a new kind of refractory ‘Church without Christ’ that vows only to teach you the one truth: that there is no truth at all.
Charged with this zest of anti-religious, religious fervour, Motes descends into a spiral of moral depravity; a sordid figure that lives and dwells in lust, violence, iniquity and eventually murder. Through her writing, Flannery captures the innate darkness that is found in the stillness of American life in the South, a sort of violence revolved around the concepts of sin, guilt, and alienation. A devout Catholic, Flannery brings forth her faith through her writing in the way that in the ugliness and grotesque world of her characters, there is still a way to find moments of grace within their disparity.
Sources
https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-flannery-oconnor-birthday-20150325-story.html
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/flannery-oconnor-1925-1964/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/12/reading-group-flannery-o-connor-wise-blood
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Flannery-OConnor
https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-3
https://www.georgiawomen.org/flannery-oconnor
https://lithub.com/of-songs-and-stories-what-bruce-springsteen-learned-from-flannery-oconnor/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O%27Connor#CITEREFO'Connor1979