The Cage of Matter

IN Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, Frederick Asals observes that Wise Blood seems to have become the whipping-boy of the O'Connor canon, a mass of faults that reveals the greater expertise of The Violent Bear It Away or the superiority of the stories to both novels.1 Objections to, Wise Blood go as far back as the letter one man wrote to O'Connor demanding to know what happened to the guy in the ape suit.2 Subsequent complaints about the novel have also centered on Enoch Emery-in particular on the supposed disconnectedness of his subplot from the structure of the rest of the story. One critic, for example, while admitting there are thematic parallels between Enoch and the Christ-haunted Hazel Motes, concludes that the episode of Enoch and the gorilla would have better been deleted from the novel.3 Taking the opposite position is Jonathan Baumbach, who, far from viewing Wise Blood as a collection of thematic loose ends, argues that the novel is overly schematic.4 In the last fifteen years or so, however, a critical consensus has emerged that Wise Blood neither lacks unity nor suffers from an excess of it, whatever that might mean Critics have demonstrated how Enoch's story intricately parallels and parodies Haze's inverted quest for salvation, and how Enoch's donning of the ape suit is the culmination of O'Connor's theme of reverse evolution, an idea she makes explicit with a profusion of animal imagery.5 Other critics have pointed out the

Art · Cage · Combinatorics · Flannery · Genealogy · O'Connor · Theology · Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Merton · History · Mathematics · Philosophy

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