3 - Framed in the Gaze: Haze, Wise Blood, and Lacanian Reading

Summary

Though critics have questioned its integrity, read within the framework of the post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, Wise Blood demonstrates that Flannery O'Connor's fictional instincts are virtually flawless. Apart from the traditionally theological, the Lacanian reading provides a foundation for Hazel Motes's characterization, explains some of the otherwise hard-to-explain details of the text, and reveals the perfectly symmetrical structure of the narrative. A Lacanian reading, moreover, explains Haze's pathology, tracks the expressions of that pathology in his preoccupations with others, and shows that many of the specific details of O'Connor's text are more than merely stylistic or idiosyncratic. While every work of art must offer its own justification, justifications change over time, and any new interpretive approach must in some way highlight or bring one out for a new epoch. A Lacanian approach to Wise Blood does precisely that, finally, by showing how the novel is at once both modern and postmodern, a product of its own time (just barely past) and a meaningful work to be valued in a later one.

In this Lacanian reading, I want to assess Hazel Motes at the expense of others such as Enoch Emery. As every reader of O'Connor's novel realizes, Haze Motes is not an ordinary or “nor-mative” subject. He is troubled, mentally. Indeed, he seems quite psychotic to most of us in his behavior. After all, he has no ordinary sense of sociality, no ordinary understanding of sexuality, no ordinary grasp of the immorality of murder. He operates by a code of values and behavior entirely his own. But as with every subject of this sort, the real question is why.