I’m becoming increasingly convinced that a disquieting percentage of what we consider thought is filling in slots. We think along the lines of life equations such as threat + offense - vigilance = disaster, or shame + visibility = rejection, or happiness + resources = safety. Each portion of these equations are slots in our understanding and we seek out variables to fill these slots. You notice that your boss seems frustrated during a meeting, you think back over your recent interactions with him to see if you’ve offended him thinking that vigilance will somehow ward off disaster. You find yourself happy while taking a walk on a cool fall day and without realizing it you begin to measure your financial savings, your friendship group, your job security—your resources—to see if your happiness is safe. We focus on the content—the frustrated boss, the amount in our savings account—and fail to see that we are just filling in the slots in our equation yet again.
As I read Wise Blood I watched the different characters seeking to fill—or deny—the salvation slot in their understanding. They found all sorts of lower cases “jesus” content—as O’Connor regularly makes explicit. Hazel Motes spends most of the book adamantly preaching against the existence of a jesus-void even as he tries to fill it. O’Connor’s disturbing imagery and almost juvenile imagination of interpersonal situations paint us as creatures of habit—habitually filling our slots.
I chose to read O’Connor after Graham Greene knowing that they both play around with unexpected Christianity. Greene’s torturously self-divided Catholic protagonists tend to bleed into one another and I thought it would be nice for a totally different take on an apparent follower of Jesus who didn’t even know he was following. Greene was far more experienced in life and writing by the time The Heart of the Matter came out than O’Connor was with her first novel. Greene’s characters are well-rounded and act according to their character while in Wise Blood they often appear to be more representations than real people. That critique being said, I’m still reading the novel nearly seventy-five years later while you might be the only person who ever reads my thoughts online so there’s that to humble me.