On May 15, 1952, American readers were given their first extended opportunity to travel to Taulkinham, the setting of Flannery O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood. The city was a place of strangers forced together, lost souls wandering in a concrete landscape of sin devoid of salvation. Her no-hope metropolis was a Southern Grotesque Hieronymus Bosch, sketched with inimitable images of words. It was, in the economic boom and cultural shifts of post-WWII America, a brutal portrait of what the country was rushing to become.
As O’Connor’s main character, Hazel Motes, walked through Taulkinham on the second night of his mission to escape God, O’Connor had him exploring the city under a sky that seems to reveal in the wonders of its stars God’s hand in an ongoing act of creation. Motes endeavored, however, like everyone else in the city, to pay the heavens no mind. He tried to distract himself with electric lights and machine-made wonders. Motes, determined to escape the shadowy figure of a pursuing God, believed Taulkinham the perfect place to do so. It was a city of cheap thrills, conmen, and theft—rife with abuse, falsehoods, and quick lust.
These sins, however, were easily seen and identified, meaning people could still recognize them as wrong. The true evil of O’Connor’s Taulkinham was more pernicious. It was loneliness, despair, and disbelief. It was a desperate clinging to false idols and perverse ideologies. It was a culture of consumerism, waste, and celebrity. Taulkinham seemed, in fact, a complete absence of God. O’Connor’s genius was to use this absence to lead Motes not away from but inexorably toward his redemption.
As Motes explored Taulkinham, a salesman was peddling a miracle on the street, a potato peeler, and his spiel had gathered a crowd. The appearance of a “blind preacher” was nothing more than an annoyance to the people out to purchase salvation from the drudgery of life. Cheap plastic promises were hawked in Taulkinham, a religion of constant consumption and waste. Man was not justified by faith nor good works but by what he bought, owned, and consumed. In its bleak and loveless streets, O’Connor’s city was prescient in capturing what Saint John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, called “the culture of death.”
The people of Taulkinham had no need for God nor His will. They had their own instinct and desire, their “wise blood.” Religion, if permitted at all, was nothing more than cheap comfort, a social club, a patriotic duty. O’Connor wrote to Louise Abbot, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” Hazel Motes tried to preach his rejection of God to the people of Taulkinham, but his Church of Christ Without Christ was nothing more than a fundamentalist version of what was preached in all of Taulkinham’s churches, and his “new Jesus” was the very image of modern man. But unlike his fellow city dwellers, Motes suffered from belief not indifference. He, alone, broken and blinded, could see beyond the lies of the fallen city.
In 1952, Wise Blood’s intensely Christian story of conversion and penance was incongruous with an increasingly secular society. At the same time, many religious readers found themselves quite horrified by Taulkinham. O’Connor had written with brutal honesty about a fallen world. Her novel was no pious tale of virtue but a sucker punch of grace.
This action of grace in the novel baffled many of the book’s first readers. Wise Blood, if read without acknowledging its urgent moral vision, could only be viewed as bleak. Many tried to read it as a satire exposing the folly of religion. Few were prepared for the searing allegory of God’s relentless pursuit of His children. This misunderstanding about her writing bothered O’Connor. She wrote to her friend Betty Hester that “All my stories are about the action of Grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal . . .”
Taulkinham was populated by the hard, hopeless, and brutal. Its streets teemed with false prophets, prostitutes, shady used car salesmen, corrupt cops, and lonely losers. But as essential as these eccentric characters are to O’Connor’s tale of unexpected conversion, it is Taulkinham that claims the role of antagonist.
Taulkinham is a dangerous place and not only because “the near occasion of sin” lurks around each corner. The greatest threat in O’Connor’s monstrous metropolis is that it exults in the seeming absence of God. The city becomes O’Connor’s nightmare portrait of a fallen world. There, Motes tries to flee God, yet even in Taulkinham, Motes cannot outrun the hound of heaven.
It is not surprising that O’Connor should create Taulkinham as such a bleak and loveless place since she didn’t find much comfort in cities. The bulk of her writing life was spent on Andalusia, a farm outside of Milledgeville, GA. There, surrounded by her beloved peafowl, swans, and other birds, she wrote, removed as far as possible from the innumerable sins of a city. She described herself as a “Hillbilly Thomist” and read twenty minutes of St. Thomas Aquinas each night before bed. As such, she was familiar with Thomistic concepts of city and the rightness of community.
It is the particular genius of her vision that O’Connor does not write of this ideal but rather explores its opposite. For her readers, she creates the hunger for community by the depiction of loneliness, just as she sparks their hunger for God by the city’s efforts to banish Him.
O’Connor wrote to Betty Hester that her stories were “hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian Realism.” In another letter to Hester, O’Connor stated:
One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead.
Wise Blood’s Taulkinham is a city made up of the people O’Connor considered her audience. It was an up-to-date, true-to-life city. Its citizens were modern men with no need for preachers or prophets.
In his 1979 film adaptation of the novel, John Huston updated the story to the Vietnam War era and used the streets of Macon, Georgia, to play the role of Taulkinham. The triumphalism of the city was now fading; the post-war boom is gone. Huston’s Taulkinham is a distillation of O’Connor’s, for the evil of her God-less metropolis is even more perverse when the façade of success and hope has been scraped away. Huston’s bleak city past its promise, however, is unabashed in its disappointment. Its hungers and lusts grow even more ravenous, more hollow.
To re-read Wise Blood seventy-three years after its initial publication is to wonder what O’Connor would make of her Taulkinham now. Could she have imagined the full excess of secular humanism that has polluted our culture, its fundamentalist orthodoxy preaching extremes of self-aggrandizement? Having given us the pernicious publicity tour of Gonga, what would she make of celebrity culture played out in the poisonous environment of social media? How might she react to her “miracle” peelers no longer peddled on the street but mass produced in China and hawked on the internet to a shrinking middle class?
What would her modern day Taulkinham miracles be? Weight loss injections? Artificial Intelligence? Any technological trick designed to make us humans feel like masters of our own destiny? Surely, Hazel Motes would now preach, “Any man with a good smartphone doesn’t need to be justified,” and Enoch Emery’s “wise blood” could tell him exactly what gender he should choose to be.
Unfortunately, lupus took Flannery O’Conner before she was 40. Taulkinham lost its creator, and the United States lost its most passionate, radical, and demanding Catholic literary voice. Yet in our increasingly desperate times, as we encounter O’Connor’s 1952 nightmare city again and observe in it the seeds of our own dangerous times, her absence sparks a hunger for new O’Connors, bold voices in Catholic fiction obsessed with the reality of the Incarnation and observing our contemporary world and all of its Taulkinhams with a pitiless, realistic, and faithful gaze.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
