Peacock Apology
Superbass, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Like a prosthetic leg acquired under false pretenses, Flannery O’Connor’s works of fiction are notoriously difficult to know what to do with. From blind preachers who lie about their blindness to tractor hit and runs to a seemingly endless amount of desperate, judgmental old women, O’Connor’s imagination is undeniably one of boldness and clarity so sharp it pierces like a knife—indeed, her stories overflow with blood and peacock feathers.
So, why is it so devilishly difficult to read Flannery O’Connor? In addition to the gratuitous violence, miserable circumstances, and prevalence of characters whose ugliness unfortunately seems to reflect what’s on the inside, we are all familiar with the contingent of infuriating O’Connor fans claiming the stories are really about God’s overabundant, unmerited love for us. This disparity raises the question: Are O’Connor’s stories nothing more than ugly people having a bad time, or is she a comic genius and master of sacramental theology in fiction? To find the answer to this question, we should begin with ancient philosophy and your fake Bible salesman valise, which I hope you brought, because that’s where we keep the flask.
O’Connor’s brilliance can perhaps most easily be discerned by considering her works as something like inverse Platonic parables. She tells a tale with the ideal of God’s overabundant grace in mind, but it’s as if she writes the shadow of the thing instead of the ideal itself. If you can figure out the shape the shadow makes, it’s as though a key turns and unlocks the treasure box of grace hidden within.
O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood is fraught with such inversions, most horrifically in the case of the shrunken mummy and its ultimate destruction. Enoch Emory, who sates his frustrated longing for human connection by insulting animals at the local zoo, decides to steal a mummified little person from the museum close by the zoo. His plan is to deliver the mummy as an offering to the viciously anti-faith Hazel Motes, Wise Blood’s main character and preacher of the church of Christ without Christ. Enoch believes that these dusty remains will be a perfect “new jesus” for Hazel’s church, so he wraps the mummy like a babe in swaddling clothes and makes a delivery to Motes’s apartment. There, Enoch finds the teenage girl Sabbath Hawks—who is more like the Black Sabbath of Ozzy Osborne fame than the actual Lord’s Day—and she accepts the package as a sign of her domestic claim on Hazel Motes and their life together. It gets weirder. Sabbath unwraps the mummy and immediately begins treating it as if it were her own baby. She presents the mummy to Hazel as a sign of their union, and Hazel destroys the mummy, hurling it against a wall so that its “head popped off and the trash inside spayed out in a little cloud of dust.”
Instead of a newborn Messiah whose flesh and blood would give eternal life, there is a dusty old mummy turned by time to so much trash. Instead of Resurrection and salvation, there is a dead body that stays dead and redeems no one. No Virgin birth, just a disillusioned, abused young girl who has never been valued in her life. No real human connection between persons, just a young man who ultimately dons a gorilla suit and becomes one of the animals he despises. And certainly no Savior, just a would be preacher who hates the Truth he has seen and cannot stop seeing.
It is in this perverse way that O’Connor makes her reader aware of grace. To O’Connor, the truth, the real Truth, is not some quiet, private affair that must be “kept sweet,” like one of the false prophets of Wise Blood, the scam artist preacher Onnie Jay Holy, claims. The real Truth must be shone by dragging the reader under its white hot light, rather like a homicide detective’s incandescent lamp in an interrogation room. To O’Connor, Truth is unbearable. Grace is intransigent. While an architect builds a beautiful cathedral to lift one’s heart and mind to God, O’Connor tattoos the face of God on a man’s back. While theologians muse on the universal connection between persons in the Body Of Christ, O’Connor puts a murderer in a gorilla suit and sends him on an impossible mission to shake hands with unsuspecting strangers.
O’Connor respects mysterion but readily reveals her careful purpose in her craft, articulated in her note on the second edition of WiseBlood: “It is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death…. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.” O’Connor’s concern is with her anti-hero’s integrity, his wholeness.
Hazel Motes spends the entirety of Wise Blood trying to escape his faith, and viciously so. He rails against the wholeness of his human person by preaching his church of Christ without Christ and indulging in sin not because he has any real enjoyment in it, but because he knows it’s an act of rebellion against the God he desperately wishes he could stop believing in.
Hazel Motes is well named, for sight and blindness play a critical part in understanding the character: Hazel has spiritual motes in the eyes of his soul but can discern the true intentions of those around him, like the scam artists Asa Hawks and Holy. Perhaps he has the ability to read hearts like the great preacher it seems he was destined to be—like the proselytizing grandfather he resembles. Towards the end of the story, Hazel blinds himself with lime in one final attempt to break himself off from the Creator, but the best he can achieve is a general malaise. He still feels compelled to perform odd penances, such as wrapping barbed wire around his chest as if it were a 20th century hair shirt of the American South. In fact, when his landlady finds sharp rocks in his shoes that he walks on to deliberately give himself pain, she becomes nervous that he has turned to a darker drug: Catholicism. St. Paul’s divinely inflicted blindness led to his healing into the Truth of Christ; Hazel Motes’s self mutilation could not even help him escape from the knowledge that there is sin and there are wages for it that somehow must be paid.
Does Haze have integrity in the end, lying in a ditch, being treated like a common criminal—rather like the Christ he did not want to emulate? Church Fathers historian Mike Aquilina once commented that Hazel Motes is rather like fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Raised Christian and educated alongside theological masters St. Basil the Great and St. Gregory Nazianzen, Julian had the makings of a saint but turned against his faith and spent the rest of his life obsessively trying to re-paganize the Roman Empire. Like Motes, Julian was always haunted by Christ, who perhaps moved from ancient pillar to pillar in the Apostate’s mind. Julian’s last words as he died on the battlefield were reportedly, “You win, Galilean.” It is not difficult to imagine Hazel Motes saying something similar before he meets his end. As for whether Hazel Motes—or Julian the Apostate—had integrity and final friendship with God in the end, we must surrender to mystery, as O’Connor says in her note: “It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”
Grace Fitzpatrick is a Catholic wife, mother, and iconographer living in New Orleans. Her art can be found at gracefitzpatrick.art.
