Reading WISE BLOOD (Part Thirteen)
Posted on March 6th, 2010
Making the Abject Body Count(s):
An Autobiographical Reading of
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood
– Part Thirteen: The Abjection of Death Seeks to Destroy Us All (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
Within Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her fascination with death seems to metastasize exponentially from the infrequently mentioned cells isolated in her personal experience.
Jennifer H. Profitt, author of “Lupus and Corticosteroid Imagery in the Works of Flannery O’Connor,” observes that O’Connor was twenty-five years old when her health began to deteriorate, and at that time she was incorrectly diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis; later, in 1951, her diagnosis changed to disseminated lupus, but she was not told about this revised diagnosis until eighteen months later (Profitt 76). Nine years earlier, O’Connor’s father had died of the same disease (Profitt 85). O’Connor comments, “My father had it [. . .] but at that time there was nothing for it but the undertaker” (O’Connor Habit 57). These facts, among others, have led Dorothy Walters, with whom I agree, to the conclusion that both O’Connor’s father’s terminal illness and her own ongoing battle with the same disease were responsible for the powerful presence of death [and its abject quality] in O’Connor’s writing (Walters 16). To extrapolate a bit further, however, and say that O’Connor’s own medical condition influenced Wise Blood would be simple chronological error as the time-line of the novel’s composition cannot support any such conclusion. However, consider the following excerpt from a letter to “A” dated November 25, 1955:
I was five years writing that book [Wise Blood], and up to the last I was sure it was a failure and didn’t work. When it was finished I came down with my energy-depriving ailment and began to take cortisone in large doses and cortisone makes you think night and day until I suppose the mind dies of exhaustion if you are not rescued. I was more or less living my life and H. Motes’s too and as my disease affected the joints, I conceived the notion that I would eventually become paralyzed and was going blind and that in the book I spelled out my own course, or that in the illness I had spelled out the book. (O’Connor Habit 117-18)
This cannot be considered O’Connor’s prescience, and we cannot look at her concerns and experiences with her own health as matters after the fact so as to characterize them as influences upon Wise Blood. But, it remains essential, for purposes of understanding abjection in Wise Blood, to view the novel in terms of O’Connor’s awareness of and experience with her father’s medical condition. To the extent that her father’s condition influenced her outlook on her own health prior to her diagnosis, either as conscious or unconscious influences, and to the extent that any such influence can be stated with certainty remains impossible, although the speculation remains seductive.
WITH THIS INSTALLMENT, THE SERIES OF ARTICLES ON
FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S WISE BLOOD
WILL BE SUSPENDED UNTIL SOME LATER DATE.
Tags: Abjection, Bibliographies, Body Count, Dorothy Walters, Endnotes, Flannery O Connor, Installments, Lupus, Medical Condition, Nine Years, Parenthetical Citations, Personal Experience, Profitt, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Space And Time, Terminal Illness, Time Line, Twenty Five Years, Undertaker, Wise Blood
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