Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

[Readers should read part one of this article first.]

In his crusade to increase the membership of the Church Without Christ, Hazel Motes stands every night on his Essex preaching, but he can only garner one follower and that had been a mistake. A teenager wanted to go to a house of ill repute, but he did not want to go without a person of experience and invites Hazel to join him. Afterwards, Hazel inquires if the boy wants to be a member, or even an apostle, of the Church Without Christ. The boy says that he is sorry that he can’t be a member of Hazel’s church because he is a lapsed Catholic. He adds that what they did is a mortal sin and that if they die unrepentant of it, they will suffer eternal punishment and never see God. Haze shouts at the boy that there is no such thing as sin or judgment, but the boy only shakes his head in disagreement and asks Haze if he would like to go again the next night.

Two nights after the encounter with the boy, Haze notices a plumpish man with a big face smiling at him in the crowd. “He was not handsome but under his smile, there was an honest look that fitted his face like a set of false teeth.”[1] When the crowd starts to leave, he grabs Haze’s pantlegs, gives him a wink, and cries out, “Come on back heah, you folks. I want to tell you about me.” He smiles at a lady as if spellbound with her good looks and announces that he wishes that he had his “gittarr” with him, because when you talk about Jesus you need a little music. He introduces himself as Onnie Jay Holy and invites the people to join the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ and its new jesus.

Haze tells all that the man is not true, that he has never seen him before that night, and that the name of the church isn’t the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ! Onnie Jay ignores Haze’s outburst and tells the crowd that it would just cost a dollar to join. Haze shouts that it does not cost any money to know the truth and attempts to drive away. Onnie Jay jumps on the running board of the Essex, Haze knocks him off, but Onnie Jay gets back on. He tells Haze his idea has great potential, but it needs promotion, the key being a new jesus. Haze replies that there is no such thing as a new jesus, that it is only a way to say something.

Suddenly, the man’s demeanor changes, and he announces that his name is Hoover Shoats and that he knew from the first time he saw Haze that he was nothing but a crackpot. He also announces that Haze will have some competition the next time he goes out preaching.

When Haze returns to his rented room that night, he picks the lock to Asa Hawk’s room and lights a match close to the sleeping man’s face. The man opens his eyes, and the two sets of eyes looked at each other as long as the match lasted. “Now you can get out,” Hawks said in a short thick voice, “now you can leave me alone.”[2]

The following night Onnie Jay Holy/Hoover Shoats[3] announces the True Prophet, Solace Layfield. Preaching from the top of a rat-colored car, Solace looks so much like Haze that the woman next to Haze asks, “Him and you twins?” Haze answers, “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.” Confused, the lady answers, “Huh? Who?”[4]

That night Haze returns home and finds Sabbath Lily in his bed. She tells him that after he lit the match in Asa’s face, he ran her off and she has no place to go. When Haze doesn’t react, Sabbath Lily changes her tone and tells Haze that she knew from the start that she had to have him.

Enoch and the Shriveled Man

The next day, Enoch slips past the sleeping guard at the museum. He breaks the glass case with a wrench, puts the little shriveled man in his backpack, and escapes past the still sleeping guard. When Enoch returns to his home, he wonders why he had done it. As far as he is concerned, one jesus is as bad as another.

He flees out into the rain and stumbles across a line of children at the movie house. They were there to meet GONGA, the gorilla star of the matinee that day. Enoch gets in line, and when he shakes the gorilla’s hand, it is the first hand that has been extended to Enoch since he came to the city. He hurriedly tells the gorilla his life story—that his name is Enoch Emery, that he went to the Rodemill Boys’ Bible Academy, that he works for the city, and that he has seen two of his movies. “You go to hell,” a surely voice inside the ape-suit says and jerks his hand away.[5]

Enoch’s humiliation is so painful that he runs directly to Hazel’s house to get rid of the new jesus and never see it again. Sabbath Lily takes the wet bundle into another room and unwraps it. She holds the new jesus in her arms as if he is her child.

Hazel, however, determines that he is going to make a new start in a new city preaching the Church Without Christ. He packs his stuff in his duffel without touching the Bible that was at the bottom of it like a rock. When he finds his mother’s glasses in the duffel, he puts them on. Wearing the little silver-rimmed spectacles, he snatches the little shriveled body away from Sabbath Lily, throws it against a wall, and then throws it out. Furious, Sabbath Lily pronounces that she knew that he was mean and evil, that he “wouldn’t let nobody have nothing. . . . I seen you were mean enough to slam a baby against a wall. I see you wouldn’t have no fun or let anybody else because you didn’t want nothing but Jesus!” [6]

Hazel shouts that he only wants the truth and heads for his car, but is stopped by a cough so fierce that it sounded like a cry for help at the bottom of a canyon. He throws his mother’s glasses out the door and decrees that he will leave after he gets some sleep.

The next day, Enoch holds out hope that the new jesus is going to do something for him in return for his services. He returns to the theater and sneaks into the back of the truck that he sees Gonga enter. The drone of the motor drowns out the thumping noises, and Enoch departs out the back once the truck slows. He then buries his clothes, knowing that he would not need them anymore. Growling and beating his chest, no gorilla in existence was happier than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

Hazel’s Blinding

Solace Layfield never thought that being the True Prophet of the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ would be a dangerous thing, but driving home to his wife and children, an Essex kept slamming into his car until it ditches. Haze approaches the wrecked car and orders Solace to take off his hat. He demands to know why he gets on his car to say things that he does not believe in. Solace answers that a man has to look out for himself. Haze replies, “You ain’t true . . . you believe in Jesus.” Haze then orders Solace to take off his suit. As Solace does so, Haze runs him over with the Essex. The dying man tries to confess his sins, “Jesus hep me,” but Haze gives him a hard slap and Solace becomes quiet. Before Haze departs, he takes a rag and washes away the man’s blood from the bumper.[7]

The next morning at the gas station, Haze tells the boy servicing the car that it is okay to believe in something as long as you could hold it in your hands or test it with your teeth. The boy replies that the Essex had a leak in the gas tank, two in the radiator, and a bad rear tire. Haze disagrees and proclaims that the car is only beginning its life.

On the road, however, Haze senses that he is not gaining any ground. A patrolman motions for him to pull over to the side of the road and asks to see Haze’s license. Haze answers that he does not have one. The patrolman responds, “I don’t reckon you need one.”[8] He then instructs Haze to drive to the top of the next hill and get out of the car. Once Haze is out of the car, the patrolman pushes the Essex over an embankment, the car galloping across a field before hitting a tree.

Hazel stares blankly at what has just happened before walking back to the city. The destruction of his idol, the Essex, has snared him in the nets of grace. He once proclaimed that “nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”[9] He now believes that he needs to be justified.[10] When he reaches the rented house, he fills a bucket with water and pours lime into it. His landlady, Mrs. Flood, asks him what he is going to do. “Blind myself,” he says. She reasons that perhaps Mr. Motes was only being ugly, for what possible reason could any sane person want to blind himself.

Mrs. Flood

In the days that follow, Mrs. Flood finds herself staring into the blind man’s face as if to see something that she has not seen before. His face “had a peculiar pushing look as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the distance.”[11] She enjoys sitting on the porch with him, although anyone who saw them from the sidewalk might think she was being courted by a corpse. Thin, coughing, walking with a limp, Hazel’s routine is such that Mrs. Flood thinks that he might as well have been a monk.

She wonders what is going on in his mind and imagines that it is like walking in a tunnel and all you see is a pinpoint of light. “She saw it as some kind of star, like the star on Christmas cards. She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem and she had to laugh.”[12]

One day she asks him why he does not preach anymore. She tells him that being blind would be something different that people would come to hear.

“For myself,” she continued, “I don’t have that streak. I believe that what’s right today is wrong tomorrow and that the time to enjoy yourself is now so long as you let others do the same. I’m as good, Mr. Motes,” she said, “not believing in Jesus as a many a one that does.”

“You’re better,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “If you believed in Jesus, you wouldn’t be so good.”

He had never paid her a compliment before! “Why Mr. Motes,” she said, “I expect you’re a fine preacher! You certainly ought to start it again.”[13]

He tells her that he cannot preach anymore and gingerly walks away as if she had reminded him of some urgent business. She discovers later why he limped. His shoes were filled with rocks and broken glass. She asks why he has to walk on rocks, and he replies that he has to pay. She objects that what he’s doing is not normal, that it is something that people have quit doing—like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats. He replies, “They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it.”[14] He further tells her that he does what he does because he is not clean. She responds that she knows that he is not clean because he has blood on his night shirt and on the bed. “That’s not the kind of clean,” he tells her. She answers, “There is only one kind of clean, Mr. Motes.”[15]

Mrs. Flood determines the best thing to do is to marry him and keep him. “‘If we don’t help each other, Mr. Motes, there’s nobody to help us,’ she said. ‘Nobody. The world is an empty place.’”[16] She announces that she is willing to give him a permanent home with her so that he no longer would have to worry. As he walks past her out the door, she cries out, “Maybe you were planning to go to some other city!” “That’s not where I am going,” he said. “There’s no other house nor no other city.”[17] She informs him that since he does not value this place, the door would not be open to him when he returns.

Still, when he does not return, Mrs. Flood calls the police. Two policemen find him lying by a ditch. “I want to go on where I’m going,” the blind man says. They return him into the house and, not realizing that he has died, lay him on Mrs. Flood’s bed. She welcomes him home, but then notices his face. She had never seen it more composed. She grabs his hand, holds it to her heart, and shuts her eyes. She sees a pinpoint of light, but so far away that she could not hold it steady in her mind. Continuing to stare at him with her eyes shut, she sees him moving further away in the darkness, until he was the pinpoint of light.

Reviews

The reviews that followed for Wise Blood were for the most part severe. An anonymous reviewer in New Republic believed that the book was marked by insanity.[18] Oliver LaFarge in his review, “Manic Gloom,” in the Saturday Review thought that Hazel Motes was so repulsive that no reader could become interested in him.[19] William Goyen in his New York Times Book Review review, “Unending Vengeance,” believed the characters to be so bizarre that they did not seem to belong to the human race.[20]

Publisher Robert Giroux tried to combat the poor reviews by reaching out to Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh to obtain a positive statement about Wise Blood. Waugh read the book and wrote Giroux: “You want a favorable opinion to quote. The best I can say is: ‘If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.’ End quote. It isn’t the kind of book I like much, but it is good of its kind. It is lively and more imaginative than most modern books.”[21]

Ten years later in 1962, Giroux was eager to republish Wise Blood. O’Connor’s reputation as a master of the short story alongside Poe and Hawthorne in American literary lore was steadily being secured and the opportunity for a reassessment of Wise Blood was ripe. Giroux realized, though, that there was still the problem of O’Connor’s point in the book being misunderstood. Consequently, he prevailed upon O’Connor to write “Author’s Note to the Second Edition.” She wrote,

Wise Blood has reached the age of ten and is still alive. My critical powers are just sufficient to determine this, and I am gratified to be able to say it. The book was written with zest and, if possible, it should be read that way. It is a comic novel about a Christian malgre lui [French, in spite of himself], and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death. Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block to readers who prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel’s Motes’ integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one’s integrity ever live in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.[22]

The Essex

Brian Regan points out that in Wise Blood the Essex serves for Hazel as the embodiment of freedom, freedom from the past and freedom from responsibilities, including the stain of original sin and the need for a savior. When Hazel’s freedom is threatened by Jesus as savior, Hazel protests that he is clean, that he does not need any redeemer, and that his car will take him anywhere he wants to go. This becomes the content of his preaching, there was no Fall into sin, and therefore there is no need for Jesus and redemption. Since Jesus come as God in the flesh is not necessary for salvation, Hazel turns to a jesus who is all man with no God in him.[23]

Nihilism

Ralph Wood maintains that in O’Connor’s writings Hazel Motes is the single character in whom O’Connor’s Augustinian theology is most fully realized. Despite his solitary conversion to nihilism, Hazel is restless. Since anything worth believing is also worth evangelizing, he feels the need to convert others to the good news of nothingness. But made in the image of God, Hazel cannot escape God’s divine imprint upon his heart, a homing instinct for God that makes his heart restless, until he is reconciled and at peace with God.[24]

T. S. Eliot

Sally Fitzgerald makes the case that T. S. Eliot served as a primary inspiration to O’Connor in the writing of Wise Blood. Hazel’s skull under his skin matches Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin” in his “Whispers of Immortality”; Enoch’s shriveled man parallels Eliot’s Phlebas the Phoenician in Eliot’s “Wasteland”; and Enoch in his gorilla suit is another Apeneck Sweeney from Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. She further maintained lines about the tortured and driven Orestes in Eliot’s Choephoroi could serve as an epigraph for Wise Blood. Orestes says of his Furies: “You don’t see them you don’t—but I see them: they are hunting me down, I must move on.” Fitzgerald believed that O’Connor had replaced the vengeful Furies with the unvengeful but inescapable figure of Christ, “a wild, ragged figure moving from tree to tree in the back of Hazel’s mind.” Hazel must move on from Christ, either getting away from or destroying him.[25]

John Huston’s Wise Blood

In the late 1970s, Michael Fitzgerald, son of O’Connor’s literary co-executors Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, convinced academy award winning director John Huston to film Wise Blood. Huston, however, struggled in understanding what Wise Blood was about. He said, “From page one, you don’t know whether to laugh or to be appalled.”[26] According to actor Brad Dourif, who portrayed Hazel Motes, a difference of opinion developed once filming began between Huston and Fitzgerald over the book’s meaning. Huston thought it was a comedy about how ridiculous Christianity was; Fitzgerald believed the book was a tragedy about redemption, that contained comic elements.

The conflict was resolved with the filming of the conclusion of the movie. Confused about Huston’s direction, Dourif asked him, “If I don’t revert to Christianity, what does happen?” Huston told him, “Oh . . . I think that’s just some kind of existential rebellion.” Dourif challenged Huston’s answer, noting in the script that Hazel mutters, “My Christ” and kneels down. Dourif recalled that Huston went “white,” thumbed through the script, and said that was a mistake. Dourif countered that he thought the whole movie was leading up to that point. Huston went off to confer with Michael and Benedict Fitzgerald. When Huston returned, he sat down in his director’s chair and said to Dourif, “The end of the film, Jesus wins.”[27]

Endnotes

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 148.

[2] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 162. According to R. Giannone, the only precise date that O’Connor gives in her fiction is Asa Hawks’s deception of blinding himself on October 4, which is the date of the death of Francis of Assisi in 1226. Giannone argues that the identification is deliberate. Francis gains God’s blessing by giving up earthly wealth to live by the will of God. Hawks makes God a commodity that he markets for personal gain, and he is transformed negatively. Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love (Fordham University Press, 1999), 7–8.

[3] Margaret Whitt writes, “In the choice of the name ‘Onnie Jay Holy’ for the former radio preacher, O’Connor employs a form of pig Latin, suggesting Holy John, the one who would come before and announce the Messiah. One of his functions in the novel is to introduce the ‘True Prophet’ after Haze rejects Holy’s scheme for money.” Margaret Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor (University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 19.

[4] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 168.

[5] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 182.

[6] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 188.

[7] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 203–205.

[8] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 209.

[9] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 113.

[10] Ralph Wood, “The Catholic Faith of Flannery O’Connor’s Protestant Characters,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 13 (Autumn 1984): 22.

[11] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 214 (emphasis added).

[12] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 218.

[13] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 221.

[14] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 224.

[15] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 224.

[16] O’Connor, Wise Blood, 227.

[17] Francis Asals argues that “however one responds to Haze’s final otherworldliness, the novel dramatizes no acceptable alternative in this world, nor does the narrative imply any other source of value.” There is immersion in the repellent world of matter or the grotesque search for God. Francis Asals, Flannery O’Connor, The Extremity of Imagination (University of Georgia, 1982), 57.

[18] “To Win by Default,” New Republic (July 7, 1952): 19.

[19] Oliver LaFarge, “Manic Gloom,” Saturday Review (May 24, 1952): 22.

[20] William Goyen, “Unending Vengeance,” New York Times Book Review (May 18, 1952): 4.

[21] Brad Gooch, Flannery (Little, Brown & Company, 2009), 212. Caroline Gordon also did her part in trying to promote Wise Blood by asking J. F. Powers if he could lend some esteem to the book by reviewing it. He admired the book and started a review with the memorable working title Hell on Wheels, but he did not finish it. See, Sally Fitzgerald, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 13 (Autumn 1984): 47.

[22] O’Connor, Wise Blood, “Author’s Note to Second Edition.”

[23] Brian A. Regan, A Wreck on the Road to Damascus (Loyola University Press, 1989), 108–109.

[24] See Ralph Wood’s Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005), 5, and “The Catholic Faith of Flannery O’Connor’s Protestant Characters,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 13 (Autumn 1984), 22.

[25] Fitzgerald, “The Owl and the Nightingale,” 54.

[26] Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons (Scribner’s, 1989), Kindle.

[27] Grobel, The Hustons, Kindle location 13653. Wise Blood premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a standing ovation, and Vincent Camby in the New York Times gave it a rave review. Camby wrote, “Wise Blood, based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel about an inside-out religious fanatic of the rural South, is one of John Huston’s most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the thirty-third feature by a man who is now in his seventies and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.” Vincent Camby, New York Times (September 29, 1979).

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, December, 2025