Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Eleven)
Posted on February 28th, 2010
Making the Abject Body Count(s):
An Autobiographical Reading of
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
– Part Eleven: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All –
(Note: Previously posted installments of this series have included bibliographies in the form of endnotes for the text’s parenthetical citations; however, hence forth, the bibliographies will be omitted (to save space and time) but are nevertheless available to any reader who requests the complete bibliography for this series.)
Epigraphs
He thought about the chifforobe in his half-sleep and decided his mother would rest easier in her grave, knowing it was guarded. If she came looking any time at night, she would see. He wandered if she walked at night and came there ever. She would come with that look on her face, unrested and looking; the same look he had seen through the crack of her coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting the top on her. He had seen the shadow that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself; but they shut it. [. . .] He saw her in his sleep, terrible, like a huge bat, dart from the closing, fly out of there, but it was falling on top of her, closing down all the time. (O’Connor Wise Blood 26-27)
[. . .] the Bible was the only book he read. He didn’t read it often but when he did he wore his mother’s glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop. (O’Connor Wise Blood 23)
His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. [. . .] He moved behind a tree [. . . but] he could feel her watching him through the tree. [. . .] She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. [. . .] “What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said. “I never ast him,” he muttered. She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. (O’Connor Wise Blood 62-63)
Text
As Julia Kristeva points out in her study In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, “Freud saw religion as nothing less than an illusion, [. . .] a rather unrealistic construct of the reality of its subjects’ desires” (11). Unwittingly following Freud, Flannery O’Connor in writing Wise Blood, especially as she implicates the object she calls God, and as she imbues her text with parts of her self, exacerbates and celebrates that utmost of abjection: death. O’Connor, of course, would not likely agree with Ana-Maria Rizzuto, author of The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study, who argues that “God, psychologically speaking, is an illusory transitional object” (177). O’Connor, the devout Roman Catholic, would also have had difficulty accepting Kristeva’s views. Kristeva, for example, assesses Catholics as people who “put up a formidable resistance” to psychoanalysis; “Catholics count only for themselves: hostile to transference, more narcissistic or perverse than other patients, they are relative newcomers to analysis who pose new problems for the analyst as well as new avenues of research” (Kristeva In the Beginning 52). Because of O’Connor’s authorial intrusions into Wise Blood, particularly as they related to the problem of abjection, some analysis of O’Connor herself is called for in this study.
O’Connor—being unaware of her debt to him—joins Freud in his conclusion: “The idea of a single great god—an idea which must be recognized as a completely justified memory, [. . .] has a compulsive character: it must be believed” (qtd. in Rizzuto 212). O’Connor’s failure to apprehend these concepts paradoxically intensifies abjection’s power. She unconsciously serves as the perverse proselyte of the abject domain of death. This becomes a bit clearer upon closer inquiry into O’Connor’s biography. Along with some thoughts on parent-child relationships, some information from O’Connor’s life helps mark out ways in which the abject acts upon the text and then projects itself beyond the boundaries of the text. Next, a brief look at the relationship that exists between parent and child as a central concern in O’Connor’s works.
TO BE CONTINUED
Tags: Abjection, Bible, Bibliographies, Bibliography, Body Count, Chifforobe, Coffin, Crack, Dart, Endnotes, Flannery O Connor, Fly, Glasses, Installments, Legs, Parenthetical Citations, Short Time, Space And Time, Tone Of Voice, Wise Blood
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