Wise Blood and Cinematic Writing

Wise Blood is one of those novels I found difficult to put down. The narrative flows in a sort of trajectory and much of this for me can be attributed to its form of cinematic writing. Fannery O'Connors descriptions within the text form very concise visual pictures in the way a director might describe their vision of a shot sequence within a film:

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.

Even more so the third person narration seems to negate Hazel Motes view, judging by his actions and carefree nature, had the book been written from his perspective I'd imagine his voice to be like Jack Kerouac, traversing the American landscape. The objectivity in the writing, mimicking the lense of a camera that only shows but does not interpret what is occurring on screen. The sense of the author creating a distance between the character and the reader, does shroud Hazel in mystery, making him enigmatic which certainly encouraged me to continue reading the text in the hope of finding out more information about this character. I never did quite figure out his character.

Hazel Motes seemed for me less like a character from a novel then like a character who belongs in a cinematic history of fugitives. In the chapter where Motes goes to buy a car and then proceeds to drive it, was quite a cinematic episode. Afterwards O'Connor describes Motes driving in the novel as well as all the figures, and the sights he comes across:

In a second he got it going forward and he drove off crookedly, past the man and the boy still standing there watching. He kept going forward, thinking nothing and sweating. For a long time he stayed on the street he was on. He had a hard time holding the car in the road. He went past railroad yards for about half-mile and then warehouses....He went past long blocks of gray houses and then blocks of better, yellow houses. ...He went past blocks of white houses, each sitting with an ugly dog face on a square of grass. Finally he went over a viaduct and found the highway.

It was an interesting episode, in so far as I've never come across a novel before that has described a character driving with that depth of narration. Its almost quite documentarian in that it appears as if we are going along this journey with Hazel Motes in present time as we read the words. Yet this event echoes a long line of cinematic films, in particularly Godard's 1960 film Breathless (A Bout de Souffle), whereby Godard shows an extended sequence of the young criminal, Michel, driving after having stolen a car. The camera swerves around the interior of the car, mediating the audience's perspective of the outside, from Michel's perspective, as he goes past rural countryside, women on the road and his frustration at being stuck in traffic behind what he presumes to be a slow female driver but is roadworks.

Similarly, Godard's documentarian film making style, places the viewer at a distance, the viewer never quite connecting with Michel in the same way O'Connor denies an understanding of interior emotions of Motes in Wise Blood.

The act of driving is visually represented through a catalogue of film history particular in America, where the road journey narrative holds a myth, and a symbol of the fugitive character who having been exiled from mainstream society, seeks refuge by travelling to the American South. Hitchcock in his films Psycho and Vertigo portrays characters driving away running away from their fear of their secrets being exposed. There also exists a whole genre of American road movies for instance the recent Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde that have also been satirized in Chevy Chase National Lampoon films which feature the highway as the backdrop to its characters. Perhaps O’Connor's Hazel Motes belong with the characters within such road films. They are fugitives, loners, self destructive, rebellious characters, who can’t quite fit in with the society they live within. The heart of the American landscape and the extensive roads naturally become the space for these individuals traversing from civilized normal society, into the heartland, where dark past secrets can lurk hidden.