Wise Blood Reading Order

Wise Blood (1952) by Flannery O'Connor is the great Southern Catholic grotesque novel — the debut of one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction, a Georgian who died of lupus at thirty-nine and left two novels and thirty-one stories of startling formal and theological power. Hazel Motes returns from the Korean War to the Tennessee town of his childhood, determined to found the Church Without Christ — a church where 'the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.' What follows is O'Connor's comic-terrifying account of a man who believes he doesn't believe, who founds a nihilist anti-church in order to deny the faith he cannot escape, and who blinds himself with quicklime when he realizes that the nihilism he preached was itself a form of belief. O'Connor was a devout Roman Catholic writing for what she called 'a hostile audience' — readers who did not share her theological framework — and her solution was the grotesque: extreme violence, physical deformity, sudden grace in shocking form. She described her technique as 'to make violent the comic and to make comic the violent'; her characters are possessed by theological forces they cannot understand and that act through them despite their conscious intentions. Wise Blood's car chase, its mummy, its false prophet Solace Layfield, its landlady Mrs. Flood who realizes in Hazel's blindness something she cannot name — all are recognizable O'Connor: the South as a landscape of violent grace, the grotesque as the only adequate vehicle for the sacred.