Episode 51: Blind Seers: On Flannery O'Connor's 'Wise Blood'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2019

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and funny as hell. As O'Connor herself wrote in her prefac to the book: "(Wise Blood) 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. REFERENCES Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood James Marshall, George and Martha (here's a great NYT piece on the books) Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty Amy Hungerford's lecture on Wise Blood (Yale University) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in
0:55.8	1925. During her short life, she died of lupus at the age of 39. She wrote dozens of short stories,
1:04.0	and also two novels, the first of which was Wise Blood, the book we're discussing today.
1:09.5	Though written early in O'Connor's career,
1:11.7	Wise Blood packs all the strangeness that her short fiction is known for.
1:16.2	It was all there from the start,
1:18.1	menageries of so-called grotesque characters,
1:21.3	the cross-contamination of reason with dream logic,
1:24.0	the ubiquity of senseless and almost random violence, and most important for us,
1:30.2	that pervasive ambiance of weirdness whose source the reader can never quite pinpoint.
1:36.0	O'Connor didn't need fantastical tropes to evoke the weird because in her world, everything was
1:41.1	weird already, everything was already supernatural. Her Roman Catholic viewpoint and her
1:46.9	lifelong struggle with a debilitating illness gave her a unique perspective, one that made her keenly
1:52.9	aware of what we might call the intrinsic monstrosity of the world. Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes,
2:03.5	a preacher's son who travels to the fictional city of Takenham, Tennessee, to spread the gospel of what he calls the church without Christ.
2:08.9	In our conversation, Phil and I interpret the novel as a kind of descent into hell, a journey
2:14.3	into the dreamscape that opens up to those who take seriously the modernist claim
2:18.9	that the world has neither meaning nor purpose.
2:22.0	What Hazel Motz finds there is difficult to put into words,
2:25.8	and maybe the tortuousness of our conversation has to do with this difficulty.
	...

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