Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist

2. Hazel Motes and the Desert Tradition

2 Hazel Motes and the Desert Tradition If you have a heart, you can be saved. -Pambo, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped . . . i For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. -Isaiah 35:5-6 NOT LONG AFTER the end of World War II in 1945, residents of Taulkinham, Tennessee, in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) have in their midst a man of twenty-two facing out-in the direst possible way-the consequences of his family history, war experience, and beliefs . The man is Hazel Motes, a veteran who believes in nothing and is the hero of O'Connor's first novel. Were the townspeople to observe Motes on one particular day, they would see him walk three h-ours from the outskirts back into town, stop at a supply store to buy a bucket and quicklime, and, on reaching the boardinghouse where he lives, go up to his room to pour the lime solution into his eyes. Motes's self-blinding presents itself as a mere preliminary to a new life of complete denial and self-injury. Motes takes to mortification as a bird sets out into the airand on -a comparable wing of freedom. An onlooker might understandably see this flight as an attempted release from the strictures ofMotes's body, for his determined abstinence easily overrides ordinary human 31 32 Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist physical satisfactions. Sexual desire quickly gets stamped out. Reversing the usual fee-far-pleasure relationship, Motes pays money to a pestering young woman to leave him alone. Smaller enjoyments and vices offer no resistance to his abnegation. He neither uses tobacco nor drinks whiskey . In his economy of refusal, money is superfluous. After paying rent, he throws bills and change into the trash. Voluntary poverty purchases whatever Motes needs. Nourishment is not one of his requirements. Motes soon curbs his taste for food to the point at which he loses flesh. To sharpen his grip on any remaining appetite and resistance, Motes wraps three strands of barbed wire around his chest. This tight restraint on his frail body allows the blind searcher to forge ahead on a lonely journey he has been undertaking for some time. The hairshirt of twisted metal apparently does not cut deep enough to get Motes to the destination he has in mind. Wherever that place is, he needs ceaselessly to push forward to get there. Weak and blind as he is, Motes develops the habit of taking walks, first around his room and then outdoors with a cane, as he totters five or six blocks, circling the house. All he seems to know is that by harnessing every sinew he has, he will move onward. He uses his body as fuel for perpetual motion to some indefinite objective, for a deliverance he cannot make clear. His final effort to subdue his body conspicuously challenges the bounds of natural life. To cross those borders, he searches out the added velocity of winter winds to propel him there. With reverence or fascinated horror, depending on their sensibilities, onlookers could follow this man to the frontiers of his desire. To do so, they would have to pay close attention to Motes for nearly three cold days as he limps, wracked by influenza and in rock-lined shoes, through icy rain until he reaches a drainage ditch at a peripheral abandoned construction site where two policemen find him. The policemen are under orders to take the spindling back to town, but the blind man lying in the trench is digging his way in the opposite direction . '''I want to go on where I'm going'" (CW 131), he tells the officers . They respond by clubbing the defiant stray unconscious, and he dies in the squad car on the way back to his rooming house. The blow is superfluous . The derelict's punishing will already has made a shell of his mortal remains. In that chiseled frame, Motes achieves a body and fate as spare as the strict aloneness that he sought. However bereft and stricken , he is always maneuvering onward, never finding rest. The outcome of Hazel Motes's struggle brings together the spiritual and cultural forces that underlie the essential drama of O'Connor's fiction. In working out of the conflicts leading up to this convergence, O'Connor outlines in a broad pattern the...