5 - The Woman without Any Bones: Anti-Angel Aggression in Wise Blood

Summary

InTestimony Shoshana Felman suggests that giving testimony or bearing witness has become “a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times,“ especially to traumas of contemporary history such as the Holocaust or the invention of the nuclear bomb. If testimony is one strategy for facing horror, it may also be an action that seems involuntary, that feels out of control. Even when we bear “witness to a trauma, to a crime or to an outrage; witness to a horror or an illness,” the event itself may be so shocking that its “effects explode any capacity for explanation or rationalization” (Felman and Laub 1–6).

This is certainly the effect that Flannery O'Connor's fictions have on me. Reading her stories – for the first time or the tenth – I feel wounded, traumatized; I feel a simultaneous need to bear witness to the outward pain O'Connor's characters endure, as well as to the inward phantasm of my own body in pain. How can we rationalize Sabbath Lily Hawks's description of a baby's death in Wise Blood, for example? Do we excise it from our memory of the text, or do we sanitize it, torment it, until this anecdote seems to offer a clean, pure, uplifting vision of the morality to be attained when reading O'Connor's fiction?

“Listen,” she said in a louder voice, “this here man and woman killed this little baby. It was her own child but it was ugly and she never give it any love. This child had Jesus and this woman didn't have nothing but good looks and a man she was living in sin with. […]