Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor is properly understood as a dark comedy. She says in the introduction that “it is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui [Fr. In spite of himself], and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.” Consequently, it is a novel filled with grotesque, ugly, and dirty things, filled with prostitutes, loose mothers, corrupt preachers, abusive fathers, cartoonish drunks, and, in the middle, Hazel Motes, who is trying to prove to himself that he is not a Christian. O’Connor’s use of profanities is especially interesting – there are practically no pages where “Jesus”, “Christ” or “sweet Jesus Crucified” are not used. But, this is not mere blasphemy – Hazel Motes tries to say “Jesus” and can’t without making it an ironic, inadvertant declaration of his faith, and in the many times the other characters “curse”, O’Connor puts it in a context that only mocks Hazel Motes’ futile attempts to get away from his belief.

The most shocking thing of all is O’Connor’s devout belief in the inescapable nature of Jesus. Her comic vision of redemption is not a mockery of it but a mockery of anything that tries to avoid it. At the center of the novel is a naked human in a museum glass-case, who is three feet long, has one side of his face nearly bashed in and an eyelid torn in half. O’Connor’s use of ambiguity makes us laugh too. She intends us to see this museum exhibit as a shrunken man who is alive and can react to his environment, until the climax of the book, when what is described as a child is thrown across the room and its head pops off and dust and trash falls out of its neck. This child, or man, or doll, or mummy, is the inescapable Christ-figure that brings upside-down redemption.

As Christians living in a world saturated with abusive fathers and profanities, we should be asking “Why more?” Further, most Christians object to her stories, not only because of their shocking realism, but because of bizarre elements that use maimed and deformed characters as centerpieces, not of sympathy or compassion, but of grace. Why should a devoutly Catholic author write such a novel that is admittedly influenced by Kafka? O’Connor explains in her posthumous collection of prose Mystery and Manners. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The book’s cast is a list of ugly characters you wouldn’t be comfortable sitting next to. Hazel Motes is the Christian in spite of himself, always mistaken for a preacher wherever he goes, who has traveled to a new town for a change of scene. On his second night there, he meets blind preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter Sabbath Lily, homely and innocent. Hazel finds out later that Asa Hawks is neither blind nor a preacher, and that, although homely, Sabbath Lily is far from innocent. Scattered through the book are minor characters like Leora Watts, the ugly prostitute, Onie Jay Holy, another preacher out for the money, and the “Prophet” whom Onie Jay hires.

Hazel also meets Enoch Emery, the kid with Wise Blood that apparently tells Enoch What To Do.  It’s never clear if this character is delusional or if the blood really does what Enoch thinks it can do. And it is Enoch, or rather, his blood, that leads Hazel to the secret in the “heart of the city”, to what is inside the glass exhibit in the museum. No one (including the reader) seems to understand the significance of this maimed child inside except Enoch (or his blood). After O’Connor shows us Hazel’s passionate destruction of the dummy, or doll, or whatever it is, Enoch finds a new life through his new clothes. He wanders outside town, strips, buries his old things, and jumps into a gorilla suit. The last we see of Enoch is a clumsy attempt at trying to shake the hands of a terrified couple watching a sunset.

The story line largely follows Hazel Motes’ attempt to start The Church Without Christ. He stands on top of his car after theater shows get out and tries to preach a church with nihilist values. Strangely, however, Hazel seems unsuccessful, since everyone assumes that he’s really just another Southern Protestant preacher. But Hazel desperately wants to prove to people that there is no such thing as sin and no need for Jesus.

Flannery O’Connor writes in concretes. I have given an overview of characters and a few events in vague terms. But it’s no less confusing in the book than it is here. It may be even more confusing because I’m actually attempting to give a coherent explanation of the bizarre events of the book, and O’Connor gives the reader none. But O’Connor places herself firmly in the tradition of nearly all American authors, pitching symbols at a terrifying rate. I’m not sure one can understand all the symbolism, nor do I claim that the few I’ve interpreted here are monolithic.

O’Connor immediately grabs our attention with that thing in the glass case that we’re not sure of. To get there, Enoch and Hazel must go through the first room of the museum to a door at the end, through a second room to a door at the end, and then to a glass box in which is found this deformed man or child. Parallels here and elsewhere to the Jewish tabernacle seem fairly strong. This is also an example of O’Connor’s comedy shining through the wild sacramental potency of the deformed child. O’Connor traces her belief in visible means of God’s invisible grace throughout all her fiction. Enoch’s blood has been pandering to the unconscious will of Hazel throughout the book, and, after Hazel has broken this deformed child beyond repair, Enoch puts off the old man and clothes himself in robes of a gorilla. “Burying his clothes was not a symbol to him of burying his former self; he only knew he wouldn’t need them any more.” The grace the deformed child brings is a grace so contorted that it forces the reader to see the laughable nature of life without Christ.

This also illustrates another level of symbol at work in O’Connor’s novel that is more internal. Enoch’s wise blood mimics the spiritual struggles of Hazel Motes as soon as we see the two characters juxtaposed. This mimesis is illustrated through a series of internal symbols that correlate between the characters: Hazel purchases a car and, in a rare moment of explanation, says that it will be his home; simultaneously Enoch’s wise blood tells him to clean up his apartment and make it like a home. Hazel asks for a “new jesus [sic]” that will be all man and show that there’s no need for redemption; simultaneously, Enoch’s blood tells him to go steal the mummified child from the museum. Again, these symbols don’t symbolize something outside the reality of the book, but within it.

There is also an interesting parallel to Augustine’s pear story. In his Confessions, amidst lurid tales of a pre-conversion life, St. Augustine relates how he stole some pears and considered this the worst thing he’d ever done because he didn’t like pears. Much the same theme is running through Wise Blood. Hazel blasphemes, fornicates, and even murders for no good reason. He does not enjoy or desire to do any of these things. O’Connor makes this quite clear when she relates an anecdote of Hazel, when he was a boy, visiting a circus tent that showed some obscene pornographic show (thankfully, in this area O’Connor is her usual ambiguous self). “He forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him.” After this, he walks for several miles in shoes lined with jagged pebbles and pieces of glass. Hazel finds out that he doesn’t sin because he likes it, any more than Augustine liked pears, and that all his sins are only evidences of his “unplaced guilt” and need for redemption.

I have to admit that I am not yet accustomed to dark comedy, let alone Southern fiction. O’Connor has drawn caricatures for characters, but for all their unusual aspects, the triumph of Wise Blood is the tense proximity between the grotesque, bizarre elements and the raw realism. Through her deftness, O’Connor’s uncompromising Christianity has evidently left the literary community overwhelmingly impressed.