ENG328Y1 Lecture 31: Lecture 31
Wise Blood
Flat, ironic voice used to explore the theme of the religious quest
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Non-realistic approach, use of flat characters and caricatures in West
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Image and motif prevail over linear plot
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Premature burial, doubling of characters
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Truth is there is no truth
No one cares about his blasphemy
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"Two things I can't stand. A man that ain't true and one that mocks what is."
And so he kills him
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Deep sense of dread that usurps his entire being
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Obsessive avoidance of Jesus
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Between two poles of existential thought
Polarity of being vs. focus of nothing
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Kierkegaard's fear and trembling in the face of death
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Death's omnipresence
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The life of the intensive point
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Seems there is no rational bridge between the sacred and the secular
Blind irrational fear that is faith
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To embrace an abrasive uncertainty with the passion of the infinite -
Kierkegaard
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Hazel is a walking paradox torn between beliefs
Ends up staring into the abyss
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If there is redemption, it's brutally minimalist
Relativistic nihilism of the existential philosophers
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Cauldron of opposites
Unconscious seeker of Jesus and a conscious opposer of Jesus
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Imagery of machines, animals and so forth
Almost as if he wants to turn himself into a machine for pure thought
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Felt that he should have a woman, to prove he didn't believe in sin
Obsessed with machines - like his car
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Enoch is obsessed with animals, gorillas in particular
Brain divided into two parts…
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Happily transforms himself into a gorilla
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Posits a new Jesus
That doesn't exist, but to say a thing
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Ascetic virtue - tries to immunise him/herself from the allures of the flesh and
the sensory world
Talks the language of sexuality, but really isn't someone driven by lust
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Driven by principle, not desire
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Association, paradox, contradiction, "sickness onto death" (Kierkegaard)
Cough sounds like a little yell for help
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SINsational naked woman in the coffin
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Centrality of the idea of descent into the abyss
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Seeks out confined spaces
Space itself being blank and empty
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Despite insistence that he's going places, he goes nowhere
"He looked as though he were help by a rope and attached to the
ceiling"
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Trying to catch his hat at the station and ends up stuck
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Trying to get away from what's in his mind, but gets nowhere because
of it
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Deeply undermined by the imaginings of death
Dreaming about his family being put into boxes while alive
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His mother doesn’t look more satisfied alive than dead
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As if Haze becomes his dead mother, experiences the closing of the
coffin and leaps up afraid
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Guilty desire and morbid fear
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Projection of her as a devouring monster and terror of claustrophobic
finality in his identification with her
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Raised a fundamentalist, he is obsessively aware of sin
Oedipal imagination substitutes the figure of his mother in the
SINsational ten
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Mother knows he's seen something sinful and beats him
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"If you've been redeemed, I don't wanna be"
Thus begins his rebellion
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Believes himself to be in full revolt against fundamentalist heritage
But ends up being a comic rebel at best
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Tries but he is already an anachronist
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City folk are already secular
They aren't shocked at all
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He's a preacher, let's go
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Inner struggle enacted almost as if in a vacuum
With his relentless subjectivity, his urge to found his own protest
Church, he embarks on a paradoxical journey
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Backward quest for the redeemer figure
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Can't see that Asa Hawkes is a con artist
Apparent embodiment of his desire
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Says he blinded himself but chickened out and is faking it
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Never recognises is that Hawke's hypocrisy mirrors in reverse Haze's own•
Hoover is another double as well
As consciously duplicitous as Haze is unconsciously
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Enoch functions as an anti-hero
Subverted image of the protagonist
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Comic embodiment of everything that Haze professes he could be
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Moronic actions
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Divided brain is the comic counterpart of Haze's
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Driven by blood into obscure quasi-religious rites and ceremonies
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He's the son of Cain (gets his wise blood from his Daddy)
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Far from simply irreligious
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Places faith in mystique of blood
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No transcendence in his mess, he literally descends, and washed in his
own blood, goes on
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In travesty of redemption, transformed into the new beast he had
longed to be
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Wholly embraced matter and bestiality
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Buries his human clothes (he would not be needing them anymore) and
steps into his animal identity
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Destruction of car marks end of Haze's blasphemous mission
Blinds himself
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Enoch turns outward, Haze turns inward
Enoch goes down into bestiality, Haze goes up to transcendent
spirituality
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Excess of subjectivity poured into the book
Naustic revulsion towards matter and the flesh
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Demiurge left us with a world infused with radical people
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Creation and the fall are the same catastrophic event
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World is but the excrement of God
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Irrational world presents it but there is a distance from it
Juxtaposed with Haze's dreams
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Tension between detached irony of the narration and the texture of
the world
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Horror of the world vs. distance from it
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Haze's nose resembles a Shrike's bill
Miss Lonelyhearts reference
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Imagery of repulsion that is beyond what is required of the novel's motif of
secularity
Too much nausea against matter, flesh and sexuality
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The self is buried alive in matter
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Haze rejects everything related to the body
Wants to get rid of his blood and finally succeeds
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Moment of conversion is when his car is pushed over a cliff
"nobody with a good car needs to be justified"
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Protective car gone and he comes face to face with the blank
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Lots of nightmares but no redemptive visions
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Turns wholly inward in his blindness and seeks out death
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Reality of the nothingness in himself and the world
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Faintest hint that there might be something more
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Takes everything in a Kierkegaardian leap
Even if it is just a pinpoint of light
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Repentance sets in and he declares himself not clean
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Goes from telling Enoch that he is clean to finally admitting that he is
not
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Lecture 31
Monday, February 6, 2017
2:11 PM
