Wise Blood
by Flannery O’Connor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962
Wise Blood, like most of Flannery O’Connor’s works, is not an easy, comfortable read. O’Connor’s short stories (the most famous of which are “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”) are often assigned in high school English classes and introductory college lit courses. The stories are bizarre, grotesquely funny, satirical of almost everything, and appeal to the ironic tastes of late adolescence. They are also full of the symbolism and imagery so dearly loved by English teachers trying to lead class discussions. Wise Blood, while having much in common with its short story cousins, is unlikely to be assigned to the typical high school reading list – particularly in the South. If it was, it would probably be banned faster than Harry Potter meets Holden Caufield. Here the critique of simple minded religion, played out by (fake) evangelical, fundamentalist preachers, is even more evident. The disdain of religion by the major characters is strong. The sex is more prominent. The violence, as usual, is, well, pretty violent. O’Connor called the book a comedy, but it’s not comic in the sense of causing laughter. It’s not a comedy in the Shakespearian sense where all the characters marry at the end. It’s dark, but not darkly funny, like “Good Country People” is. Of course, after one has stepped away from the book, remembering scenes such as the theft a mummified corpse from the museum or a character running through the city dressed in a gorilla suit do seem absurd and bizarrely humorous. Trying to describe what the book is about, particularly to a non-reader, one is faced with the faced with the completely absurd plot line. On the other hand, while reading it, one has a parallel, more serious, experience, of facing the darkest elements of the human condition. Do I recommend Wise Blood? I’m not sure how I feel about it. As I said, it made me uneasy. O’Connor thinks that’s good for us.
