ABSTRACT
This chapter, following the pattern of the previous chapter, considers the work of another female author who writes of the transcendence of a male character. But rather than the relatively gentle tale of Silas Marner, Flannery O’Connor writes the painful transcendence of one of the oddest male characters a reader is likely to encounter in American literature. In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes seeks—though he denies it through his preaching of The Church Without Christ—the Jesus who moved “from tree to tree in the back of his mind.” Through transgression, a deliberate strategy of “sin” and violence which, paradoxically, sets him loose him from the world and binds him to the “wild ragged figure” of Jesus, and a self-emptying which strips away the false layers of “the old man”—ton palaion anthropon—and facilitates putting on “the new man”—ton kainon anthropon—Hazel reaches internally for a transcendent connection to that “wild ragged figure” of the Other.
