Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Ten)
Posted on February 26th, 2010
Making the Abject Body Count(s):
An Autobiographical Reading of
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
– Part Ten: Configuring the Abject (Continued) –
(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.)
Text
This study before you does not pretend to be an analysis of narrative strategies. But I do need to pause long enough in the next few postings to look briefly at the ways in which O’Connor’s own language demonstrates the text’s, the narrator’s, and the author’s complicity in the erasure of distances and borders. Such erasure exposes subjects to the abject forces. My own vulnerability to the text occurs especially as the text focuses upon the human body: the corpse.
The corpse, after all, as previously noted, “seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection” (Kristeva Powers 4).
Personal Reflection: Tuesday morning. The doctors do not tell me very much. Neither do the nurses. Three pounds two ounces. Under-developed lungs. Serious breathing difficulties. Too soon to tell, they say. But she seems like a fighter, says the doctor. Let’s just remain confident, he goes on. Would you like to see your daughter? the nurse asks. I am led into the glass-enclosed world of neonatal nightmares. On the incubator someone has attached a card: Baby Girl Davis 07/06/76. You can touch her if you want to, says the nurse. I put my hand into my daughter’s sterile, heated, Plexiglas world. Tiny perfect fingernails, a million wrinkles on skin barely covering the millions of microscopic blood vessels, tight eyes closed. Purple skin the color of children’s hands stained with blackberries. Time to go now, says the nurse. I pull my finger free from my daughter’s frightened grasp. Her name is Sarah Elizabeth, I say to the nurse. Thursday morning arrives. A small opening is dug into the earth. A few baskets of flowers surround the opening. The undertaker, thinking Sarah Elizabeth’s father will not notice, opens the rear of the hearse and retrieves a small, plain wooden box. Time passes quickly, and absurdly empty words spill out over the small box and the earth. “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.” And now, so much later, the grasp from the grave remains.
And so I know for certain—at that moment like too many others—that the abjection of death destroys us all.
TO BE CONTINUED
Tags: Abjection, Bibliographies, Blood Vessels, Body Count, Breathing Difficulties, Complicity, Endnotes, Fingernails, Flannery O Connor, Installments, Kristeva, Microscopic Blood, Narrative Strategies, Parenthetical Citations, Personal Reflection, Plexiglas, Purple Skin, Space And Time, Tuesday Morning, Wise Blood
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