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In her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor creates in Haze Motes a character caught
in the struggle to find his faith, even as he purports to reject the religion in which
he was raised. O’Connor, a Southern writer who was only twenty-two when she began
work on the novel (which was published five years later, in 1952), was a devout Catholic
who often used her writing to explore the mystery of Christianity. As Haze embarks
on a mission to preach the “Church without Christ,” O’Connor uses imagery of light
and dark, vision and blindness, and eyes themselves to emphasize his protagonist’s
progression towards what he perceives as the truth, and to illustrate the transformation
he undergoes along the way.
O’Connor establishes Haze’s inner conflict between light and dark in the first
scenes of the novel, describing what is, initially, a physical aversion to an electric light.
As Haze crawls into his berth on the train to Taulkinham, “He wanted the light off…
He wanted it all dark, he didn’t want it diluted” (19). But as he begins to reflect upon the
religious experience of his youth in the blackness of his berth, he becomes wary of the
dark, remembering that the light provides a greater sense of security.
He saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his
mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around
and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his
footing, where he might be walking on the water and
not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
Where he wanted to stay was in Eastrod with his two
eyes open.(22)
Haze understands that Jesus demands a willing blindness among his followers, a
blindness for which he is not yet prepared. Opening his eyes, he cries out to the porter, “I
can’t be closed up in this thing. Get me out!” (27). Both literally and figuratively, O’Connor
sets Haze up for his impending spiritual journey through seeing and darkness.
Haze prefers the light so as to avoid the deception of Jesus; he says, “What do
I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts” (56), as though the illumination suggested by the
hooker’s surname is sufficient substitute for Christ. But O’Connor describes Haze’s eyes
so that it is unclear whether he sees at all. Asa Hawks, the blind preacher, boasts, “I can
see more than you… You got eyes and see not, ears and hear not, but you’ll have to
see some time” (54). The preacher’s claim appears to bear out: Enoch Emery observes,
“The reflection [of Hazel Motes] was pale and the eyes were like two clean bullet holes”;
Lily Sabbath declares, “I like [Haze’s] his eyes… They don’t look like they see what
he’s looking at but they keep on looking” (98, 109). Though Haze’s vision is perfectly
normal, he is already like the “eyeless stone wom[e]n” at the museum in the park (96).
While Haze tries to puzzle out his faith, O’Connor conveys that he is unable
to grasp what he discovers: “He couldn’t see how a preacher who had blinded himself
for Jesus could have a bastard” (118). Haze’s concept of Jesus is so rigid and deeply
rooted within him that it prevents him from comprehending reality and, in fact, leads
him to self-deception. Obsessed with the blind preacher, when Haze finally sheds light
on his face, “The two sets of eyes looked at each other as long as the match lasted;
Haze’s expression seemed to open onto a deeper blankness and reflect something and
then close again” (162). Later, Lily Sabbath tells him, “I thought anybody would have
seen what he was before that without having to strike no match. He’s just a crook”
(168). Because Haze has such specific expectations of preachers, it never occurs to him
that anyone would fake religious fervor. Before he discovers the truth, “Haze couldn’t
understand why the preacher didn’t welcome him and act like a preacher should when
he sees what he believes is a lost soul” (145). Not only is Haze blinded to the possibility
that his neighbor is not what he appears to be, he also goes so far as to perceive himself
as “a lost soul,” the way he thinks a preacher should perceive him. When Haze discovers
the truth about Asa Hawks, it comes as an incomprehensible revelation, momentarily
eye opening, but too blinding to dwell on.
Though Haze declares, “I’m member and preacher to that church where the
blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way” (105), and he
continues to preach that “it was not right to believe anything you couldn’t see” (206),
his idea of seeing changes after the encounter with Asa Hawks and the subsequent loss
of his car. After he blinds himself with quicklime, Haze tells his landlady, “If there’s no
bottom in your eyes, they hold more” (222). Haze claims to have expanded his vision,
but in submerging himself in darkness, O’Connor implies that his spiritual journey has
led him back to Jesus, the very figure he wished to escape; he has chosen to “turn around
and come off into the dark” regardless of the risk. The landlady notes that “the deep
burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared” (231),
echoing the first description of Haze’s eyes from the perspective of the woman on the
train: “Their settings were so deep that they seemed, to her, almost like passages leading
somewhere…” (10). O’Connor uses Haze’s eyes themselves to reflect his struggle with
and journey into faith and to serve as constant reminders throughout the story of what
is at stake with the discovery of the “truth.”
Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.
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