The Spatial Turn in Contemporary American Southern Fiction: A Deleuzian-Guattarian Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

The spatial turn in literary studies, a paradigm shift that reorients critical focus from temporal linearity to the material and relational dimensions of space, finds fertile theoretical ground in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose collaborative project redefines space not as a static, bounded container but as a dynamic, processual field of connections. Central to their spatial framework is the opposition between “striated space” and “smooth space,” concepts articulated in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) that illuminate how power structures organize territory while alternative spatialities resist such ordering. Striated space, as Deleuze and Guattari define it, is the space of enclosure and hierarchy: it is mapped, measured, and partitioned by systems of control—from property lines and legal jurisdictions to the ideological boundaries of race, class, and gender. Smooth space, by contrast, is the space of the nomad: it is unsegmented, continuous, and characterized by fluid movement and emergent connections, unconstrained by the rigid grids of striated order. Complementing this dyad is the concept of the “assemblage” (agencement), a relational constellation of heterogeneous elements—human, non-human, material, and ideological—that interact to produce meaning and agency. Unlike static structures, assemblages are contingent and adaptive, their identities shaped by the shifting connections between their components rather than fixed essences.

To apply Deleuzian-Guattarian spatial theory to the American South is to unpack the region’s historical and cultural geography as a contested terrain where striated and smooth spatialities collide and coexist. The American South, as a socio-historical formation, is deeply marked by striated space: its post-Reconstruction landscape was carved by Jim Crow segregation, which enforced rigid spatial boundaries between Black and white communities through redlining, sundown towns, and segregated public spaces. These striations were not merely physical but ideological, embedding a racial hierarchy into the region’s material environment. Simultaneously, the South has long been a site of smooth spatial resistance: from the Underground Railroad’s network of hidden routes and safe houses—nomadic paths that subverted the striated space of slavery—to the unregulated margins of the rural landscape (swamps, backroads, abandoned barns) where marginalized groups forged alternative communities beyond the reach of dominant power structures. The South’s agricultural economy, too, reveals this tension: the plantation system, a quintessential striated space of labor exploitation and racial control, coexisted with the smooth, unruly space of the cotton field’s organic growth, which resisted perfect calibration by plantation owners and became a site of covert labor resistance (slowdowns, sabotage) by enslaved workers.

This Deleuzian-Guattarian lens offers a critical alternative to traditional literary interpretations of the South, which often frame the region through essentialist tropes of “the Lost Cause” or “Southern gothic decay.” By focusing on spatial assemblages, the theory shifts attention to how the South’s literary landscapes are produced by the interaction of diverse elements: a dilapidated sharecropper’s cabin (material), a Black farmer’s oral history of resistance (ideological), a storm that destroys the cabin’s roof (non-human), and a white landowner’s attempt to evict the farmer (power). Together, these elements form an assemblage whose meaning is not fixed by the cabin’s physical structure or the landowner’s authority but by the dynamic tensions between them. For contemporary Southern fiction, this framework illuminates how authors reimagine the region’s spatiality: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952), for example, juxtaposes the striated space of a small Georgia town’s conservative Christian institutions with the smooth, disorienting space of the protagonist Hazel Motes’ aimless wanderings, while Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) transforms the post-apocalyptic South into a desolate smooth space where the father and son’s nomadic journey subverts the remnants of the pre-collapse striated order.

Beyond literary analysis, Deleuzian-Guattarian spatial theory deepens our understanding of the South’s ongoing spatial struggles. It reveals how modern gentrification in Southern cities (e.g., Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward) re-striates historic Black neighborhoods by displacing long-term residents, while grassroots movements (e.g., community land trusts) create smooth spatial alternatives by communalizing property and resisting market-driven enclosure. In this way, the theory bridges literary interpretation and social critique, positioning the South’s literary spaces as microcosms of broader spatial politics. By centering the region’s spatial assemblages, Deleuzian-Guattarian theory challenges static narratives of the South as a “fixed” cultural entity, revealing it instead as a dynamic, contested field where spatial practices shape both identity and resistance.

The Southern Gothic territory, as it frames Hazel Motes’ initial context in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, functions as a striated space in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms—one segmented by rigid religious and social norms that anchor individuals to fixed identities and behaviors. Motes’ origins in a rural Georgia farm and his immersion in small-town revival circuits situate him within a landscape where every physical and ideological boundary is inscribed with Calvinist predestination and sin-and-redemption binaries. The farm itself, with its dilapidated outbuildings and the weight of familial religious duty (his grandfather, a traveling preacher, haunts his memory), is not merely a setting but a territorialized space: its fields, porches, and even the silence of its empty rooms enforce the expectation that Motes will inherit the role of a preacher, a identity preordained by both blood and the South’s communal piety. Small-town revival circuits amplify this over-territorialization: tent meetings, with their shouting congregants and fire-and-brimstone sermons, reduce spiritual experience to a scripted performance of repentance, while the surrounding community polices deviation—gossiping about those who skip services, shaming those who question doctrine, and collapsing individual agency into the collective demand for piety. These spaces are striated in the sense that they divide the world into “saved” and “damned,” “obedient” and “rebellious,” leaving no room for ambiguity or movement beyond the boundaries of religious orthodoxy.

Motes’ physical and ideological escape from this territory begins with his decision to leave the farm and reject the preacher’s calling, a act that Deleuze and Guattari would frame as incipient deterritorialization—a reaction to the suffocating over-territorialization of his identity by religious and social structures. His wandering, first as a soldier and later as a drifter in the city of Taulkinham, is not aimless; it is a deliberate attempt to unmoor himself from the fixed coordinates of his past. Yet even as he flees, the Southern Gothic’s spatial markers of oppression cling to his journey: gloomy, isolated roads stretch before him like unbroken chains, their emptiness mirroring the loneliness of his rebellion, while abandoned farmsteads—their roofs caving in, their fields overgrown—stand as ghostly reminders of the territories he has left behind. These spaces reinforce the fixities he seeks to escape: the roads, though seemingly open, are bordered by the same religiously charged landscape that defined his childhood, and the dilapidated farmsteads echo the decay of a system that crushes those who resist.

Central to Motes’ deterritorialization is his rejection of Jesus, which is inseparable from his rejection of the South’s religiously imposed spatial boundaries. In Taulkinham, he preaches the “Church Without Christ,” a doctrine that denies the very foundation of the South’s territorialized faith. This rejection is not merely theological; it is spatial. The South’s religious spaces—churches, revival tents, even the quiet corners where prayer is expected—are designed to position Jesus as the center, the fixed point around which all life revolves. By declaring that “I don’t have to believe in Jesus,” Motes refuses to be anchored to that center. His Church Without Christ is not a new territory but an attempt to create a smooth space—a space without fixed boundaries, where spiritual experience is not dictated by doctrine but emerges from individual struggle. Even his act of blinding himself, a violent gesture of self-punishment, can be read as a final attempt to deterritorialize his vision: by destroying his ability to see the striated spaces of the South, he seeks to free himself from the visual cues that enforce religious and social norms.

In this way, Motes’ journey illustrates the tension between territorialization and deterritorialization in the Southern Gothic. The South’s over-territorialized religious and social spaces push him to the brink of collapse, but his wandering and his rejection of Jesus become acts of resistance—small, messy attempts to carve out a space where he can exist beyond the fixities that have defined his life. The Southern Gothic’s dark, oppressive landscapes, far from being mere backdrop, are active participants in this struggle: they both enforce the boundaries Motes flees and bear witness to his desperate attempt to escape them.

Southern moral cartography refers to the region’s historically sedimented spatial mapping of religious and moral norms, where physical locations are inscribed with hierarchical values that align with evangelical Protestant frameworks: churches, revival tents, and rural homesteads are coded as sacred spaces of salvation, while bars, brothels, and urban alleys are marked as profane zones of damnation. This cartography is not merely geographic but identity-forming, as individuals’ proximity to these spaces signals their status as “saved” or “damned”—a fixity rooted in the South’s post-Reconstruction emphasis on evangelical piety as a core component of regional identity. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood functions as a radical deterritorializing force within this context, deploying the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of deterritorialization to unravel the rigid spatial-moral hierarchies that undergird Southern life. Deterritorialization, in this framework, involves the unmooring of signifiers from their fixed spatial contexts, eroding the taken-for-granted links between location and moral value to create a “smooth space” where traditional boundaries dissolve.

O’Connor enacts this disruption first through the blurring of sacred and profane spatial boundaries, most vividly in Hazel Motes’ decision to preach his anti-religious “Church Without Christ” in a movie theater—a space historically marginalized in Southern moral cartography as a den of secular indulgence and moral decay. For the novel’s minor characters, the theater is a place of idle entertainment and temptation, but Motes appropriates it as a platform for his heretical rhetoric, reframing its flickering screens and rowdy audiences as a stage for challenging the region’s obsession with sacred spatiality. Where revival tents once monopolized religious discourse, the theater becomes a site of counter-preaching, stripping the church of its exclusive claim to moral authority and recontextualizing the profane as a space of ideological confrontation. This act is not merely provocative; it is a deterritorializing gesture that severs the sacred from its traditional spatial anchors, forcing readers to confront the arbitrariness of the South’s moral cartography.

Motes’ confrontation with the blind preacher Asa Hawks amplifies this dissolution of moral-spatial boundaries. Hawks sets up his revival tent on a city sidewalk—a liminal space that blurs the line between public thoroughfare (a neutral zone) and sacred revival ground (a space of spiritual transformation). Yet Hawks’ performance is a fraud: he pretends blindness to exploit the faith of passersby, while Motes, standing outside the tent’s symbolic perimeter, challenges his hypocrisy with a ferocity that undermines the tent’s sacred aura. The sidewalk, once a space of casual transit, becomes a battleground where traditional religious spatial hierarchies collapse: the revival tent’s claim to spiritual authenticity is exposed as a performance, and Motes’ anti-religious tirade (“I don’t have to see Jesus! I got wise blood!”) reframes the sidewalk as a site of radical moral questioning rather than passive adherence. Here, the spatial divide between “saved” tent and “neutral” sidewalk vanishes, replaced by a chaotic interplay of competing ideologies that refuse to be contained by the South’s fixed cartography.

Motes’ anti-religious rhetoric further enacts deterritorialization by rejecting the geographic ties between place and identity. Raised in a rural Georgia home where the local church was the center of community and salvation, Motes flees to the city of Taulkinham to escape the “wise blood” he inherits from his evangelical family—a bloodline that links his identity to the sacred spaces of his childhood. Yet his flight is not a mere physical relocation; it is a deterritorializing act that severs his identity from the spatial-moral fixities of his upbringing. In Taulkinham, he declares, “I’m not from anywhere,” rejecting the South’s assumption that one’s birthplace and proximity to sacred spaces determine their spiritual worth. This rejection is tied to the post-WWII social shifts reshaping the South: the rise of urbanization, the influx of secular media, and the erosion of traditional community structures had already begun to challenge the region’s evangelical hegemony, and Wise Blood amplifies these tensions by framing them as spatial crises. The novel’s deterritorialized spaces—movie theaters, sidewalks, cheap boarding houses—become mirrors for the region’s own anxiety, as traditional fixities collide with emerging secular and anti-religious impulses.

In the end, Wise Blood does not offer a new moral cartography to replace the old; instead, it leaves the South’s spatial-moral landscape in disarray, a testament to the destabilizing forces of modernity. By deterritorializing the region’s sacred and profane spaces, O’Connor exposes the fragility of Southern moral identity, showing that the links between place and piety are not natural but constructed—and thus vulnerable to collapse. In doing so, the novel positions itself as a critical intervention into post-WWII Southern life, using spatial disruption to articulate the quiet chaos of a region caught between its evangelical past and an uncertain, secular future.

In Deleuzian-Guattarian (DG) theory, re-territorialization refers to the process by which deterritorialized flows—those stripped of their fixed meanings, structures, or spatial anchors—are reined back into new or modified systems of order, attempting to reimpose stability after the destabilizing force of deterritorialization. Unlike the static fixity of traditional territorialization, re-territorialization is often provisional and reactive, emerging in response to the chaos of deterritorialized states; it seeks to anchor unmoored elements but rarely achieves the absolute closure of original territorializations, as the traces of prior deterritorialization persist to undermine its coherence. In Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, Hazel Motes’ “Church Without Christ” embodies a quintessential attempted re-territorialization, born from the deterritorialization of his childhood religious certainty. Raised in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist context where faith was tied to rigid spatial and doctrinal structures—church pews, sermons, and the absolute authority of Christ—Motes rejects this system after his military service, deterritorializing the flow of religious belief by stripping it of its Christological core. His Church Without Christ is an effort to re-territorialize this unmoored belief into a new anti-religious territory: a space where “you don’t have to believe in Jesus to be saved,” and salvation is redefined as rejection of the divine. Yet this attempt is inherently unstable, as it remains trapped in the same religious-anti-religious binary it purports to transcend. Motes frames his church as the negation of traditional Christianity, using the same vocabulary of “salvation,” “church,” and “belief” that structured the system he rejects; the very act of defining his movement against Christ means it cannot escape the gravitational pull of the binary, leaving its territorial claims hollow and dependent on the enemy it seeks to erase.

The spatial ambiguities surrounding Motes’ church further resist full re-territorialization, underscoring the fragility of his project. Unlike the traditional Southern church, which occupies a fixed, visible location—a white-frame building with a steeple, a center of community and doctrinal authority—the Church Without Christ has no defined physical space. Motes preaches from the back of a beat-up Essex car, a mobile platform that never anchors to a specific lot or neighborhood; he does not establish a permanent congregation or a fixed meeting place, so the “church” exists only in his proclamations and the transient moments of his preaching. This lack of spatial fixity mirrors the instability of his anti-religious doctrine, as a territory without a bounded space cannot fully contain or organize the flows it claims to govern. Compounding this ambiguity is Motes’ perpetual wandering: after his initial attempts to preach, he never settles in one place, moving between hotel rooms, the streets of Taulkinham, and the countryside. His wandering is not a deliberate rejection of space but a symptom of his failure to anchor his church; even when he occupies a room in Mrs. Flood’s boarding house, the space remains blurred between public and private. Mrs. Flood’s parlor, where Motes sometimes preaches to a handful of curious onlookers, is a domestic space repurposed as a makeshift pulpit, erasing the line between the private sphere of home and the public sphere of religious (or anti-religious) discourse. This blurring prevents the Church Without Christ from solidifying into a distinct territory, as the boundaries that would define it—between sacred and profane, public and private—remain porous and undefined.

Secondary attempts at re-territorialization, imposed by external forces, similarly fail to stabilize the deterritorialized flows of Motes’ world, further emphasizing the resistance to fixed order. The police, as agents of state territorialization, attempt to regulate Motes’ wandering and his unlicensed preaching; they stop him on the streets, question his motives, and demand he adhere to the spatial and behavioral norms of Taulkinham’s public order. Yet their efforts are futile: Motes ignores their warnings, continues to preach from his car, and his wandering persists beyond their reach, as the state’s regulatory power cannot contain a subject who refuses to anchor himself to a fixed location. Mrs. Flood, the landlady, also attempts to re-territorialize Motes through domestic order: she tidies his room, cooks his meals, and tries to impose the routine of a stable home, framing her boarding house as a space of normalcy in contrast to his chaotic anti-religious project. But this attempt collapses when Motes rejects her domesticity, smashing his room’s furniture and fleeing, as the domestic order she offers cannot reconcile with his unresolved anger and the instability of his church.

These failed re-territorialization attempts and the persistent spatial ambiguities converge to reflect O’Connor’s critique of both traditional religious fixities and hollow anti-religious alternatives. Traditional Southern Christianity, with its fixed churches and doctrinal certainties, is a territorialization that stifles individual agency and reduces faith to ritual; Motes’ Church Without Christ, as an anti-religious re-territorialization, is equally hollow, as it cannot escape the binary it rejects. The spatial ambiguities—undefined church locations, perpetual wandering, blurred public-private spaces—resist the closure of any fixed system, whether religious or anti-religious, suggesting that true meaning cannot be found in either rigid fixity or reactive negation. O’Connor uses these ambiguities to argue that both traditional faith and its shallow opposites are insufficient; the only certainty is the instability of human attempts to anchor belief, a truth embodied in Motes’ tragic struggle to find a territory that can finally contain his unmoored soul.

In Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy, nomadic space is defined as a fluid, anti-hierarchical, and process-oriented expanse that resists the fixed boundaries and regulatory logics of “striated space”—the ordered, mapped, and enclosed spaces of state power, private property, and institutional control. Unlike striated space, which is divided into discrete territories (e.g., cities, farms, legal jurisdictions) to enforce stability and domination, nomadic space is a “smooth space” characterized by continuous movement, connection, and the dissolution of fixed identities. For Deleuze and Guattari, nomadic subjects are those who traverse smooth space without being tied to a single location, their identities forged through the act of moving rather than belonging to a pre-defined place. This framework provides a critical lens for analyzing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where the post-apocalyptic South is reconfigured as a nomadic smooth space that dismantles the striated spatial order of the pre-collapse United States.

The pre-apocalyptic South, as a striated space, was organized around fixed markers of identity and power: family farms with fenced boundaries, small towns with Main Streets and municipal institutions, and cultural narratives of regional belonging tied to land ownership and heritage. These spaces enforced social hierarchies—between landowners and laborers, between white and Black communities, between the “insiders” of a town and the “outsiders” passing through—and imposed a sense of static place-based identity. In The Road, however, this striated order is annihilated by an unspecified cataclysm: cities lie in ruins, farmlands are reduced to ash, roads are cracked and overgrown, and all institutional authority has collapsed. The South no longer exists as a bounded, named region; it is instead a desolate, unmarked expanse where the only “map” is the road itself—a continuous, unbroken line that stretches through the wreckage of former striated spaces. This road becomes the primary smooth space of the novel, a nomadic pathway that the father and son traverse without destination, their movement not a means to reach a fixed “home” but an end in itself.

The father and son emerge as nomadic subjects in this post-apocalyptic smooth space, their identities shaped entirely by their traversal of the road rather than by ties to a pre-existing place. The father’s pre-collapse identity—likely tied to a job, a family home, and regional belonging—is erased; he is now defined solely by his role as a protector who guides his son through the wilderness. The son, born after the cataclysm, has no memory of striated space; his entire existence is nomadic, his understanding of the world limited to the movement of the cart, the sound of the wind, and the need to keep moving to survive. Unlike the “bad guys” in the novel—groups of cannibals who attempt to reimpose striated control by seizing and enclosing small pockets of territory (e.g., the fortified house with prisoners in the basement)—the father and son reject all attempts to fix themselves in a single location. When they stumble upon an underground bunker stocked with food and supplies, a potential striated space of enclosure, the father insists they leave after a few days: the bunker’s fixed boundaries feel like a trap, a return to the static order that failed to prevent the apocalypse. Their decision to continue moving reaffirms their nomadic subjectivity, as they prioritize the fluidity of the road over the false security of enclosure.

The nomadic space of The Road’s post-apocalyptic South also serves as a site of ethical reconfiguration, challenging the hierarchical moral codes of the pre-collapse striated order. In striated space, ethics were often tied to place-based loyalties—protecting one’s family’s land, obeying local laws, upholding regional customs—that excluded outsiders. In the smooth space of the road, however, the father and son’s ethics are forged through their encounters with other nomadic subjects: a starving old man they share food with, a pregnant woman they briefly meet, even the cannibals they avoid. Their core ethical principle—the vow to “carry the fire,” a metaphor for human decency—is not tied to a specific place or community but to the act of moving and connecting with others in the absence of fixed boundaries. This nomadic ethics prioritizes relationality over hierarchy, emphasizing that survival depends not on enclosing oneself but on recognizing the shared vulnerability of all who traverse the road.

In this way, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic South, as a nomadic smooth space, transcends the traditional literary trope of the South as a site of fixed regional identity. Instead, it becomes a canvas for exploring the possibility of a post-hierarchical, movement-based existence—one where identity and ethics are not imposed by striated power but created through the continuous, nomadic act of moving forward. The Road thus uses Deleuzian-Guattarian nomadic space to argue that in the aftermath of systemic collapse, the only viable way to survive is to embrace the fluidity of smooth space, rejecting the fixed boundaries and hierarchies that once defined human life.