|
Reclaiming the Self: Chapter 5
Transcendence Through Transgression and
Kenosis: Sin as Salvation and Self-Emptying in Flannery
O'Connor's Wise Blood
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom-William
Blake
To this point we have seen transcendence as a voluntary
joining with divinity; an attempt by a man and a woman to leave
behind their own insecurities and join each with the other in a
"love's hete celestial" which puts the self in service of the
beloved; and as an attempt by an individual to first control,
then finally unite with, life and its source.
Arjuna is perhaps the easiest-if least familiar-example
of transcendence in this essay. His revelation is one which can
be-if not completely understood in its nuance and richness of
detail-at least recognized by the Western reader of the world's
literature. The story of Troilus and Crysede, while more
familiar to most Western readers than the Bhagavad Gita,
may be less easily seen as a tale of transcendence: Troilus
appears to be concerned with little more than satisfying his
immediate urges, and Crysede has long been interpreted as a
tragically unfaithful woman whose weakness led to the downfall
of a noble warrior. Ultimately, the story of Troilus and Crysede
is one of transcendence: the focus, however, is on the
failure of Troilus and the success of Crysede. The
story of Faust is even more problematic than that of Troilus and
Crysede: here is a man responsible for deaths, destructions, and
demonic use of magical powers, yet his transcendence in Goethe's
poem is as undeniable as it is, at least initially,
inexplicable.
After leaving Faust in heaven with the Eternal
Feminine, we come now to an even more problematic tale of
transcendence: the darkly comic story of Hazel Motes, a
fornicating, blaspheming, murdering aetheist who dedicates
himself to preaching the impossibility of transcendence.
In Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood,
transcendence is achieved through transgression and
kenosis, or self-emptying.(see note #1)
Hazel Motes loses himself, empties himself in his struggle
with, and search for, transcendence. His salvation-if it is to
be achieved at all-is to be achieved through sin, through a
transgressing of ordinary boundaries which serve to separate
humans from divinity. This is an idea with a long, distinguished
history. Before covering some of that history, however, it is
necessary to be clear about what is meant here by
transcendence and transgression.
Transcendence-in the context of O'Connor's
novel-is a reaching for the divine, that which is wholly Other.
This is, by now, familiar territory. What is different here, in
O'Connor's novel, as opposed to the works which have already
been considered, is the almost total absence of love as a
factor in the impulse to transcendence.
Flannery O'Connor is not writing in "maternal
language." Hers is not a "feminine discourse." Her novels-Wise
Blood and The Violent Bear It Away-are hard-edged,
brutal, and unflinchingly, remorselessly centered on the painful
necessity of achieving transcendence. The human relation to the
divine in O'Connor's novels finds no analogy in Christmas-card
tableaus of the baby Jesus scripted with rhymed messages of
unconditional spiritual love. In O'Connor, even God's mercy
burns. The path along which those called must travel is one
of violent action, self-mortification, and self-renunciation.
Those who would truly see must be blinded. Those who would save
their souls must lose them. Hazel Motes travels a violent road;
he is called-impelled-by an aspect of the transcendent too awful
and too demanding to be answered-"Here I am; send me"-by those
of us who prefer our lives safe, sane, and small.
Transgression can perhaps be best understood as
a going beyond, or shattering of, moral boundaries in pursuit of
a greater experience of truth, wholeness, or divinity. At its
root, transgression is a stepping across (transgredi: trans-across
+ gradi-to step); what are stepped across are the
boundaries, the behavioral and attitudinal limits, of a culture.
In Foucaultian terms, transgression is the process by which we
create knowledge, in a process of wresting new knowledge from
the determinative conditions of power. "History, unmistakably,
is a critical exposition of the constitution of knowledge
through the techniques of power" (Lemert and Gillan 64). The
uncovering of the discursive practices through which power has
constituted knowledge is a transgressive act; it is the breaking
of a taboo and a paradoxical reinforcement of that taboo. In
Foucault's transgression, what is transgressed is the notion
that knowledge can exist in a pure state apart from, or
unconstituted by, power. Acquiring knowledge always involves a
power struggle: "Foucault holds that knowledge is gained only by
the criticism of knowledge. Thinking, therefore, is a continual
transgression of established norms of truth. Thinking is a
political act because these norms are socially constructed and
maintained" (Lemert and Gillan 137).
The idea of transgression as crossing boundaries, as
violating taboos, as a struggle with power, is only part of what
transgression appears to mean in Flannery O'Connor's work. The
world created in Wise Blood can hardly be contained
within the wan poststructuralist notion of discourse. The
student of literature at the end of the twentieth century can
only imagine how O'Connor-who rejected sociology and
existentialism as bunk-would have reacted to the Parisian
invasion of the 60s and 70s had she lived long enough to see it
and have her work picked apart by it. To get a clear idea of the
interplay and interdependence of transcendence and transgression
in O'Connor's novel, it is necessary to go beyond notions of
socially constructed power relations, to retreat from the realm
of "discursive practices," and enter the realm of an author
"congenitally innocent of theory" by acknowledging the role of
the sacred in her work.
That which is sacred (from Latin sacer-blessed
and/or accursed) is beyond all taboo; it is beyond all "socially
constructed and maintained" norms and knowledges. That which is
sacred is beyond notions of finitude, of limits. Those limits,
those socially constructed norms, are precisely what stand
between us and the sacred. Here we get closer to the picture
O'Connor paints, and some of the details begin to come into
clearer focus. Hazel Motes goes out of his way to transgress,
to step beyond, the limits imposed by socially constructed
norms-even those norms constructed and maintained by traditional
religious belief.
The idea that such humanly imposed norms must be
violated in order to reach for something more does not originate
with Foucault, nor does it originate with anything which can
honestly and constructively be identified as "postmodern." This
was, in fact, precisely the soteriological strategy of certain
Gnostic groups. Treated in somewhat simplistic terms, the
Gnostic worldview held that divinity is absolutely transcendent
to the physical cosmos. The cosmos is "like a vast prison whose
innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man's life" (Jonas
43). This visible creation is the work of a demiurge who
has trapped portions of the divine substance from beyond which
have fallen into the world, enclosing that substance (pneuma
or spirit) in human bodies. This creation, this incarnation,
keeps us separated from our true source. The function of
gnosis is much like that of the Platonic doctrine of
anamnesis, a remembering of our true source, our proper
condition. Socially constructed norms-human laws, human
taboos-are "part of the great design upon our freedom . . . .
Both emanate from the lord of the world as agencies of his power
. . . mak[ing souls] subservient to the demiurgical scheme"
(Jonas 272). Transgressing these norms is a way of breaking away
from the demiurgical authority and returning to the transcendent
source of being. Thus sin, normally thought of as
disobedience to proper authority, is a salvific path by
which one can transcend the separation of Man from God. Jonas
speaks of "sinning [as] something like a program [which] has to
be completed, a due rendered as the price of ultimate freedom"
(274). In this vision, the sin is not a failure, but a refusal
to put oneself in accord with the social-but not the truly
divine-order.
Manicheanism-the Persian dualist system which Augustine
was associated with before his conversion to the Roman
Church-advocated a kind of sin-as-salvation strategy. Mani saw
the world as a duel of two opposed forces: light and dark, good
and evil. The phenomenal world around us springs from the force
of darkness and evil; our bodies are the "fallen" part of us,
constantly staining the spiritual, light, good side of us
through association. The way to minimize-or even escape-the
degrading influence of the body upon the spirit was to follow
three taboos: "signaculum oris, the taboo on meat and
wine, signaculum manus, the taboo on labour, and
signaculum sinus, the taboo on sex" (Goldberg 255). However,
these taboos were given an interesting twist; in order to escape
the power of the taboo items, the proscribed items must be
partaken of to excess:
Since the body and its passions belong to an entirely
different world from that of the spirit or light spark
dwelling in man, the less contact there is between the two,
the better it will be for the soul, the purer it may hop to
remain. The more the body is degraded, the deeper it wallows
in the mire, the further it sinks into the abyss of darkness,
the stronger and purer is the light of the spirit within it.
Consequently, indulgence in sex is a way of purifying the
soul by soiling the body. (Goldberg 255, emphasis added)
Transgression need not be quite as conscious a strategy
for achieving transcendence as it was in what Jonas refers to as
"gnostic libertinism" (273). Often the "sin" only appears to be
such with hindsight. In the case of Saul of Tarsus, his
"transgression"-the hunting down and executing of Christians-was
approved by the dominant social order. He was
upholding the socially constructed norms of Roman-occupied
Judea. Yet it was through this activity, this hunting and
executing of Christians, that he meet his transcendent moment.
Struck down off his mount, blinded, helpless in the dust he
heard the call: Why do you persecute me? The greatest persecutor
of Christianity was then on the road to being its greatest
apostle and central-apart from Christ-doctrinal figure. Saul was
dead, and Paul was born.
This is the role of transgression in Flannery
O'Connor. Transgression is the door to transcendence. Sin is the
gateway to salvation. Transgressing human social norms is
necessary in order to overcome separation from the divine.
Kenosis, or self-emptying, the process by which
Hazel Motes makes room for the transcendent divinity he
initially struggles against, is intimately connected in
O'Connor's novel to transgression, to sin. It is through sin
that Hazel struggles against making that room, but it is also
through sin, through transgression, that Hazel comes to the
realization that he cannot escape that divinity; the
self-emptying is a giving up of the struggle and an active
seeking of the figure that lives in the back of his mind. Hazel
is a strongly self-willed character, prone to a fundamentalist
dualism in outlook similar to that of the Misfit in O'Connor's
A Good Man Is Hard To Find:
'Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,'
the Misfit continued, 'and He shouldn't have done it. He
thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then
its nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow
Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but
enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by
killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other
meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.' (142)
Hazel Motes struggles mightily with the dualism of a
God-versus-Satan, for-Christ-or-against-Christ worldview. He
fears surrendering to the "wild ragged figure," and struggles to
adopt the nihilistically self-indulgent position of the Misfit
before ultimately not only failing to escape, but actively
seeking, the Christ-figures of his nightmarish dreams.
| Hazel Motes and
Transgression
Hazel Motes is on the transgressive path from the first
page of Wise Blood. His words to Mrs. Hitchcock, "I
reckon you think you been redeemed" (12), and his response to
his smoke-blowing companion in the dining car, "If you've been
redeemed . . . I wouldn't want to be" (14), announce to all
within hearing-and reading-distance that Hazel Motes will have
no part of organized, and socially approved, religion. Yet his
obsession with religion and religious ideas have a "methinks the
lady protests too much" character which those around
him-probably of more conventional religious persuasions-find
annoying:
"Do you think I believe in Jesus?" he said. leaning
toward her and speaking almost as if he were breathless. "Well
I wouldn't even if He existed. Even if He was on this train."
"Who said you had to?" she [his smoke-blowing
companion] asked in a poisonous Eastern voice. (13)
Two incidents in Hazel's childhood illustrate his later
orientation toward sin and salvation, transgression and
transcendence. When Hazel's preacher grandfather uses him as an
example in a car-top sermon, calling him "that mean sinful
unthinking boy," saying that "Jesus would die ten million deaths
before He would let him lose his soul . . . [and] chase him over
the waters of sin" (16), Hazel decided, with "a deep black
wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to
avoid sin" (16). There is no expression of joy in the necessity
of redemption-felix culpa (happy fault)-in Hazel's
attitude; he wants to avoid salvation by avoiding sin. He
is frightened by the Jesus who moves "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" (16).
In a later incident, Hazel's father brings him to a
carnival where Hazel sees "sin" for the first time. The father
enters a tent where the display "was so SINsational that it
would cost any man who wanted to see it thirty-five cents" (37).
Hazel-in a brilliant parody of the twelve-year-old Christ in the
Temple at the Passover festival ("How is it that ye sought me?
Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"-Luke
2:49)-gets about his father's business by lying to the carnival
barker about his age-saying he is twelve-and entering the
SINsational tent. When he entered he saw "a woman . . . She was
fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a
mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and
one on her side" (38). This incident leaves its mark on Hazel, a
mark visible to his mother who asks him "What you seen?" and
then hits him on the legs with a stick, saying "Jesus died to
redeem you" (39). Hazel's response "I never ast him" (39) is
followed by his first incidence of self-mortification:
The next day he took his shoes is secret into the
woods . . . . He took them out of the box and filled the
bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put
them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the
woods for what he knew to be a mile . . . . He thought, that
ought to satisfy Him. (39)
Hazel is now on the transgressive, and self-emptying,
path to transcendence: sinning against the Jesus he wanted to
avoid has brought the "wild ragged figure" closer rather than
put him farther away: "that ought to satisfy Him."
The adult Hazel pursues three kinds of transgression:
fornication, blasphemy, and violence. His liaisons with Mrs.
Leora Watts of 60 Buckley Road, possessor of the "friendliest
bed in town" (21), end ignominiously, as Leora gets up one
evening while Hazel is still asleep and "cut[s] the top of his
hat out in an obscene shape" (63). He pursued her-whose name he
got from a bathroom stall-only to "prove that he didn't believe
in sin since he practiced what was called it" (63), saying at
one point "I don't need Jesus . . . What do I need with Jesus? I
got Leora Watts" (34). His attitude is not quite that expressed
by Augustine: Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli
modo-"Make me chaste and continent, but not yet" (Confessions
bk viii, ch 7, p, 174); however, his "sin," his transgression,
keeps him in a state of awareness similar to that of the Saint.
Despite his denials, Hazel is binding himself more and more
tightly to that "wild ragged figure" with each defilement.
This defilement, this transgression, is what makes
Hazel attractive to Sabbath Lily Hawks, the daughter of the
pseudo-blind street preacher:
'Listen,' she said, with a quick change of tone,
'from the moment I set eyes on you I said to myself, that's
what I got to have, just get me some of him! I said look at
those pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look
don't hide a thing, he's just pure filthy right down to the
guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that way
and he don't. (92)
Sabbath then asks Hazel if he wants "to learn how to
like it" (92), and he answers "Yeah," and slips into bed with
her. Hazel never learns how "to like it," however.
As we have already seen, Hazel "blasphemes" from the
moment we meet him on the train to Taulkinham: "Do you think I
believe in Jesus? . . . Well I wouldn't even if He existed. Even
if He was on this train." For Hazel, these statements have
power; they have the thrill inherent in acts of open rebellion.
The trouble is, no one else is impressed by the power he feels
in these words. To rebel against something requires an admission
that that something has power and authority that can be rebelled
against. His fellow passengers on the train dismiss him as a
crank: "Who said you had to?" Hazel gets no response from the
passers-by on the streets as he preaches his Church Without
Christ less because of the blasphemy of saying that "Nothing
matters but that Jesus was a liar" (60), than because for those
passers-by, religion and spirituality are simply not the
pressing issues they are for Hazel. They feel no need to deny a
Christ that is not for them a "wild ragged figure . . . [moving]
from tree to tree in the back[s] of [their] mind[s]." The
inherent blasphemy of the name, Church Without Christ, is lost
on Mrs. Flood, the woman from whom he rents a room after his
second night of preaching:
'What church?' she asked. He said the Church Without
Christ. "Protestant?' she asked suspiciously, 'or something
foreign?' (61)
Hazel comes right out and tells the people in front of
the "picture show" that "The only way to the truth is though
blasphemy" (81). He tells the scam-artist, Onnie Jay Holy, that
"Blasphemy is the only way to the truth . . .and there's no
other way whether you understand it or not!" (84).
Although Hazel's words reach the ears of those passing
by on the streets, his preaching is primarily to himself. He
blasphemes for an audience of one, binding himself ever closer
to the "wild ragged figure" in the back of his mind:
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and
somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one
truth and that is that there's no truth . . . . Where you come
from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was
there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away
from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place . . .
You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's
time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right
now is all the place you've got . . . . Where in your time and
your body has Jesus redeemed you? . . . Show me where because
I don't see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had
redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which
of you can find it? . . . . Your conscience is a trick . . .
it don't exist though you may think it does, and if you think
it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down
and kill it, because it's no more than your face in the mirror
is or your shadow behind you." (90,91)
This sermon preaches a kind of individualism which
deliberately leaves no room for the "wild ragged" figure of
Jesus. There is no Jesus-"Nothing matters but that Jesus don't
exist" (33). There is no redemption. "In yourself right
now is all the place you've got." There is no transcendent
reality because that which is wholly Other does not exist; God,
and the conscience, "is a trick . . . no more than your face in
the mirror is or your shadow behind you." Despite this
individualist, radically atheist pose, Hazel fools no one. His
mind is always on God. He is always struggling with that
transcendence he is simultaneously trying to avoid and secure.
Asa Hawkes sees that in Hazel: "I can hear the urge for Jesus in
his voice" (31). Leora Watts sees this as well, mockingly
describing Hazel's hat as "That Jesus-seeing hat!" (37). Even
the taxi driver who takes Hazel to his first meeting with Leora
Watts in the "friendliest bed in town," takes Hazel for a
preacher:
'I ain't any preacher,' Hazel said, frowning. 'I only
seen her name in the toilet.' 'You look like a preacher,' the
driver said. 'That hat looks like a preacher's hat." . . . .
'It ain't only the hat,' the driver said. 'It's a look in your
face somewheres.' (21)
Hazel's struggle with the "wild ragged" figure at the
back of his mind turns violent. Violence serves to bind him to
that ragged figure. We see his violent side initially when he
stones Enoch, shouting "give me that address" (the address of
Asa Hawkes, the pseudo-blind street preacher) like an outraged
Saul of Tarsus towering over Stephen (57,58). Hazel destroys the
"new Jesus"-the "shrunken man" (itself a "ragged figure") in the
museum display (57), stolen and brought by Enoch and kept by
Sabbath-interestingly, the action is presented as if it were
more of his hand than his head: "it reached again,
slowly, and plucked at nothing and then it lunged and snatched
the shriveled body and threw it against the wall. The head
popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of
dust" (102). Sabbath screams at him: "I knew when I first saw
you you were mean and evil . . . . I seen you wouldn't never
have no fun or let anybody else because you didn't want nothing
but Jesus!" (102). His final transgressing of ordinary cultural
boundaries, however, comes with his murder of the "false"
prophet (and physical twin for Hazel), Solace Layfield. His
killing of Layfield, because Layfield "ain't true" (110), is
analogous to the killing and/or imprisoning of Stephen and other
Christians by, or at the behest of, Saul of Tarsus:
Then they dragged him out of the city and began to
stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a
young man named Saul . . . . And Saul approved of their
killing of him. That day a severe persecution began against
the church in Jerusalem . . . . Saul was ravaging the church
by entering house after house; dragging off both men and
women, he committed them to prison. (Acts 7:58, 8:1, 3)
Strangely enough, despite the obvious differences in
their situations (sincere belief in Christ accompanied by
preaching in his name on one hand, and belief in Christ
accompanied by preaching Onnie Jay Holy's "Church of Christ
Without Christ" on the other) both the first-century Christians
and Solace Layfield are killed because, from the point of view
of their pursuers, they "ain't true . . . [they] believe in
Jesus" (110).
This killing is also, for Hazel, a killing of self.
Solace Layfield is a double for Hazel, both in his physical
appearance and in his outward role of a preacher:
When Hazel murders Solace Layfield he kills a
disturbing double of himself, a man who physically resembles
Hazel in body and dress and one who preaches the same message.
[Not quite the same; Hazel preaches The Church without
Christ, while Solace Layfield and Onnie Jay Holy preach The
Church of Christ Without Christ. Despite Onnie Jay's
insistence that "It don't make any difference how many Christs
you add to the name if you don't add none to the meaning"
(86,87) the difference is important.(see note
#2) ] In seeing himself in Layfield, Hazel undergoes a
profound experience of otherness: He views himself from
outside himself, seeing himself as others see him. (Brinkmeyer
107)
It is his own "falseness" that Hazel ultimately kills
when he kills Solace Layfield. Here begins, at least
symbolically, Hazel's kenosis, or self-emptying. What
Hazel says to Solace, "Take off that hat" (110), before he kills
him could easily have been said by Hazel to Hazel. The hat has
been tied throughout the novel to the role of the preacher. Asa
Hawkes wears a "black hat" (25); Hazel wears a "dark hat" ((18);
Solace Layfield wears a "white hat" (91). Hazel's accusation
"You ain't true . . . You believe in Jesus" (110) might just as
well be made against himself as against Solace Layfield. Hazel's
repetition of "You shut up . . . You shut up now . . . Shut up
like I told you to now" (111), might also be just as well
directed at himself. It is after this killing that Hazel gives
up the idea of preaching the Church Without Christ in Taulkinham.
Hazel also gives up his belief in blasphemy as the way
to the truth after killing Layfield. On his way out of town he
stops at a gas station where he tells the attendant that "he had
only a few days ago believed in blasphemy as the way to
salvation, but that you couldn't even believe in that
because then you were believing in something to blaspheme (112
emphasis added). Having given up the path of blasphemy and
embarked upon the path of violence, Hazel's last option, his
last desperate attempt to avoid the "wild ragged figure" in the
back of his mind, is to try and leave Taulkinham. It isn't to
be. After being stopped by a patrolman who "just don't like
[Hazel's] face" (113), and watching as his car is pushed over
the embankment by the patrolman, Hazel stands "for a few
minutes, looking over the entire scene. His face seemed to
reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond,
the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank
gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space" (113,114).
This Pisgah-sight of the clearing, like Moses' dying look at the
Promised Land, is the last significant external sight of
Hazel's life. Like Saul of Tarsus, Hazel is blinded; unlike
Saul, Hazel blinds himself and his blinding is permanent. |
| Hazel Motes and Kenosis
Hazel continues down the violent path, the difference
being that now he turns his violence inward, directing it
against himself rather than others. Here begins kenosis,
self-emptying at the most literal level, in earnest. His
behavior-seen from the perspective of his landlady-becomes odder
than usual after the self-inflicted blinding. When Mrs. Flood,
his landlady, asks him why he doesn't start preaching again, he
responds "I can't preach any more"; when she asks why, he says
"I don't have time" (120). "He kept getting thinner and his
cough deepened and he developed a limp. During the first cold
months, he took the virus, but he walked out every day in spite
of that. He walked about half of each day" (118). "He walked as
if his feet hurt him but he had to go on" (120). Finally, his
landlady accidentally discovers his shoes while cleaning his
room: "The bottoms of them were lined with gravel and broken
glass and pieces of small stone" (121). When she asks Hazel why
he walks with rocks and glass in his shoes, he answers "To pay"
(121). Later the landlady finds Hazel asleep: "The old shirt he
wore to sleep in was open down the front and showed three
strands of barbed wire, wrapped around his chest." When she asks
him why he does it, he responds "I'm not clean" (122). This is a
complete reversal of his stance of not long before, when he
faced down the counter-woman at the FROSTY BOTTLE hot dog stand,
insisting "I AM clean . . . . If Jesus existed, I wouldn't be
clean" (53). Is Hazel's insistence that he is now not clean
to be read as an indication that he now believes what he has
long struggled not to believe? Or is his uncleanness, his
debt-once a common way of looking at the notion of sin-not tied
to a realization that he believes specifically in Jesus so much
as it is to a realization that he believes?
Hazel's blindness suggests an internal vision, deeper
than ever his external sight may have been. The blind
prophet/hero is a well-known archetype in literature and
mythology. From the figure of Tiresias to that of Saul/Paul
(whose temporary blindness accompanied his moment of
greatest spiritual-internal-vision), blindness has been
associated with temporary or permanent enhancements of
spiritual vision. Hazel follows Asa Hawkes at least in part
because he wants to see the-so he assumes-blind preacher's eyes.
What does the preacher "see" with those eyes? Hazel's discovery
that Hawkes is a fake immediately precedes the sermon in which
Hazel declares that "there's only one truth and that is that
there's no truth" (90 emphasis added). Hazel blinds
himself-committing the act that Asa Hawkes once advertised, but
failed to accomplish-after killing the "false" prophet Layfield,
and after having his option for external escape taken away by
the patrolman who pushes Hazel's old car off an embankment. His
blinding of himself is an attempt to see, to cut himself
off from the distractions of external vision: "If there's no
bottom in your eyes, they hold more" (121).
What he sees with his bottomless eyes is that "There's
no other house nor no other city" (124). His goal, to find the
truth-"I don't want nothing but the truth!" (103)-cannot be
pursued externally; it must be pursued internally. Hazel's truth
is esoteric rather than exoteric, and perhaps that is the most
helpful way to understand his Church Without Christ and his
insistence that "In yourself right now is all the place
you've got" (90 emphasis added). Hazel's uncleanness, for which
he is paying with the gravel-and-glass-filled shoes and the
barbed wire around his chest, is the uncleanness of idolatry: in
preaching blasphemy (against a publicly held and accepted
image of the divine) as the way to salvation, in killing the
"false" prophet Layfield for not being "true," and in berating
passers-by for their attachment to a symbol-the
Christ-image of "everyday" Christianity-Hazel has himself
unwittingly valued the symbol over the referent, the image over
that which is imaged. It is also the uncleanness of having
valued self above that "wild ragged figure" which is
wholly other. In turning his violence inward, Hazel
forcibly turns his focus inward, removing himself as far as
possible from the realm of images and icons, idols and exoteric
religion. In removing himself from these things, Hazel takes his
first steps-in shoes lined with gravel and glass-toward removing
his very self, that obstacle which has, in its determined
"cleanness" held that figure (who comes, at Luke 5:31,32, as a
physician only to the sick, and calls not the righteous,
but sinners to repentance) at bay. Hazel looks inside
with his bottomless eyes, searching for the "wild ragged figure"
at the back of his mind, the "God" of Bonaventure, "a sphere
whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,"
the "God" about whom Meister Eckhart said "Man's last and
highest parting is when, for God's sake, he takes leave of God."
This "God" cannot be contained in any image, thus it cannot be
seen exoterically, with the eyes of everyday vision; if it can
be seen at all, it is esoterically, with the "blind" bottomless
eyes of inner vision, eyes that "hold more."
Hazel Motes-the significance of his name should not be
overlooked; he spends nearly the whole of the novel berating
others for the motes in their eyes, while not noticing until
near the end the beam in his own-reaches this inner vision only
after he has transgressed, sinned against, the "normal"
conventions of a nominally "Christian" town, and mortified his
flesh, emptying himself through the complete abandonment of his
former role and a complete severing of his relationship to the
world. Through a prostitute and a young girl, he breaks sexual
taboos; through blasphemy he breaks religious taboos; and
through violence-both outward and inward-he breaks social
taboos. Through these "sins" he comes to a place where "There's
no other house nor no other city," where "In [himself] right now
is all the place [he's] got." Reaching that place in himself, he
then turns his fury upon that self through the infliction of
blindness, and self-mortifying physical pain. Does Hazel follow
the "wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come
off into the dark"? Has he left Hazel and become the "pin point
of light" (126) seen by Mrs. Flood? The reader of Wise Blood
never knows for certain what-if anything-Hazel Motes reaches,
where-if anywhere-Hazel arrives; Flannery O'Connor offers us no
such simple answers, and any answers we may construct from her
text are necessarily provisional and tentative, but perhaps such
answers are only to be found after taboos are broken and "God"
is "sinned" against, after eyes are "blinded" and inner vision
is found:
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and
somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one
truth and that is that there's no truth . . . Where you come
from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was
there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away
from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place . . .
You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's
time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right
now is all the place you've got . . .
There is, on first glance, no role here for the kind of
convergence spoken of by Teilhard de Chardin. The Jungian
concept of individuation also, on first glance, seems out of
place in Wise Blood. Individuation, in the sense of
"becoming one's own self" (Jung, vol 7, 173), seems to be a
phenomenon quite the opposite of the kenosis through
which Hazel finally seeks the "wild ragged figure" at the back
of his mind. However, on a closer look, the self-emptying that
Hazel engages in can be seen to be more akin to convergence and
individuation than it did initially. De Chardin calls
convergence "a sort of inward turn towards the Other" (The
Future of Man 58). Hazel Motes, since childhood, has seen
"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" (Wise Blood 16). Hazel's life, Hazel's
preaching, and Hazel's transgressions have been attempts to
avoid an inward turn to precisely that Other which has been
beckoning him, from "the back of his mind . . . to come off into
the dark." It is that Other to which Hazel turns, and it is the
dark to which Hazel eventually delivers himself, by blinding
himself, making his eyes bottomless so they would "hold more."
Hazel's individuation can be seen as a coming to terms
with the deeply religious self that he in fact is, and has been
since the beginning. "Individuation . . . can only mean a
process of psychological development that fulfills the
individual qualities given; in other words, it is a process by
which a man becomes the definite, unique being he in fact is"
(Jung, vol 7, 174). Hazel's dropping of the role of
anti-preacher, and his killing of the "false" Solace Layfield,
are both in line with what Jung defines as one of the aims of
individuation: "to divest the self of the false wrappings of the
persona" (Jung, vol 7, 174). It is through this persona that "a
man tries to appear as this or that, or he hides behind a mask,
or he may even build up a definite persona as a barricade"
(Jung, vol 7, 174). Hazel shatters his own "false" self, his
persona of the preacher of the Church of Christ Without Christ,
the man who has spent his life running from the Jesus "in the
back of his mind" all the while saying "I don't have to run from
anything because I don't believe in anything" (Wise Blood
45), through violence. By killing Layfield, Hazel kills his own
persona; by blinding himself, Hazel turns toward that "wild
ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the
dark."
The kenosis at work in the character of Hazel
Motes is thus not merely a self-emptying; it is, in fact, an
emptying of a "false" self, a distillation of elements, a
peeling of layers, a successive removal of masks. The goal is to
find a core to which one can hold, a unity which grounds and
underlies the fragmented nature of the everyday self. It is:
an act of self-recollection, a gathering together of
what is scattered, of all the things in us that have never
been properly related, and a coming to terms with oneself with
a view to achieving full consciousness. (Jung, vol 11, 263)
The transcendence which Hazel reaches-or strains for,
O'Connor allows us no easy answers in Wise Blood-is
ultimately a turning towards that which is Other, a turning
which is done with the deepest and most elemental "self" Hazel
has to offer. As a Christian malgré lui-in O'Connor's
description-Hazel, by affirming his belief in the very Other to
which he turns, affirms his own self.
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Works Cited List
Notes
1) Kenosis is not used here in the specialized
sense of the kenotic exegesis of Phillipians 2: 6-8, the
self-emptying of the Logos who lays aside the divine fullness of
his nature by descending to the level of a human individual. My
use of the term is a reversal of its more familiar theological
sense; where the "Self" which the Logos "empties" is a divine
fullness, the "self" which Hazel Motes "empties" is a sham, a
carefully arranged set of layers which conceal him from himself.Back
to main text
2) Hazel Motes' Church Without Christ seems like
an honest--if self-deluded--attempt to "for God's sake, take leave
of God." The atheism that Hazel insists on is none too
convincing, and his attempt to escape from the "wild ragged
figure" in the back of his mind could easily be seen as an
attempt to escape from an image or conception of divinity which
holds all too much power for him. Onnie Jay Holy's Church of
Christ Without Christ is an imitation, a manipulative imitation
which explicitly relies on the very symbol it claims to be
abandoning. In Hazel's words, it "ain't true." It "believes in
Jesus," when it claims to be dispensing with Jesus. One could
argue that Hazel is doing the same thing, believing in the very
symbol he claims to be abandoning, but both his abandonment of
and his belief (malgré lui) in that symbol are more
painfully sincere than those of Onnie Jay Holy.Back
to main text
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Works Cited List |
|