UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ BEARING A CROSS A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2006 by Joseph Ray Bates B.A. Clemson University, 1997 M.A. Clemson University, 2000 Committee Chair: Brock Clarke, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Bearing A Cross is a collection of stories which hail from Southern literature not in terms of reverting to the disingenuous constraints of regionalism or to the repeated, too-often-revered tropes of the tradition but rather in terms of aesthetics, manners, and aims. Borrowing from Flannery O’Connor, I define this approach in my introductory essay as a “realism of distance,” as a style of writing which engages the comic and the grotesque not simply as subject matters but as a way to undercut, and thereby approach, the more serious and sacrosanct subject. The realist of distance exaggerates in order to better examine, distorts in order to draw his subjects into focus…in other words, he seeks to remove distance in order to ask basic moral, ontological, even theological questions. While it is true that much of the fiction collected in this dissertation seems, at first glance, to embrace various secondhand Southernisms—including but not limited to Civil War reenactments, Elvis impersonators, and the marriage of church and firearms—my intended subjects, meaning, my truer subjects, are men and women questioning their faith, their love, their lives. The critical portion of this dissertation, “The Beginning of Thought: Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Aesthetics of the Protest Novel,” deals with similar issues of tradition, trope, and the individual talent. Specifically, I examine Wright’s Native Son, that work of social commentary and criticism that intends to be art, and Ellison’s Invisible Man, a work that rejects the limiting and simplistic schemas of protest fiction in favor of an aesthetic of complication yet which succeeds, on that very point, as a novel which provokes and invites serious social and political thought. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee for their inestimable guidance not only in the completion of this dissertation but throughout my doctoral work. In particular I would like to thank Brock Clarke for his years of encouragement and mentorship. My gratitude goes to the English departments at the University of Cincinnati and Clemson University and to the fine people there. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their love and support, without which I could not have undertaken this degree, much less completed it. Thank you for everything. And finally, my love and thanks to Lauren. Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. —Flannery O’Connor CONTENTS Introduction: A Realism of Distance…………………………………………………………………….2 Jesus Is Coming Soon…………………………………………………………………………………..15 Yankees Burn Atlanta…………………………………………………………………………………..33 Butterfinger……………………………………………………………………………………………..56 The South Will Rise Again……………………………………………………………………………..65 The Form of the Joke…………………………………………………………………………………...91 Boardwalk Elvis……………………………………………………………………………………….116 Bearing A Cross……………………………………………………………………………………….140 The UFOs……………………………………………………………………………………………...170 The Beginning of Thought…………………………………………………………………………….200 Introduction A Realism of Distance In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts that Authentic, high literature relies upon troping, a turning away not only from the literal but from prior tropes. Like criticism, which is either part of literature or nothing at all, great writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing. (xix) For the fiction writer, this anxiety of influence is ever-present—never more so, perhaps, than when he is writing about his own writing—and, as Bloom points out, this necessarily must be, if art is indeed both the process and the product of realizing, responding to, and rejecting the methods and manners of the artist’s forebears, an almost-Freudian balancing act between family tradition and family feud, and with equal neurosis. Of course the anxiety here is heightened all the more by the fact that the artist, unlike the rest of humanity, is able to choose his or her own family, his or her own forebears, to adopt him- or herself into a given tradition and then to search for ways to further that tradition by breaking it, reforming it, risking its ruin. If all of this is true, then the Southern writer must be the least anxious writer working today. Not that the Southern writer hasn’t misread his forebears; he has, rather seriously, enthusiastically, and it has brought him great, goofy, embarrassing joy. Rather, the Southern writer’s misreading of his own literary heritage—indeed, Southern literature’s continual misreading of itself—has tended to be not an act of anxiety at all but an act of happy acquiescence, of proud-to-be-here homage, and of blind, even dangerous devotion. The Southern writer, rather than rejecting his prior tropes, has taken them for gospel, has exalted and revered them, and any literature that reveres its own tropes is a dead literature. Put another way: The problem of the Southern writer is not simply that he makes use of the tropes of the tradition—the rural setting, the dirt-poor conditions, the crooked preachers and 2 politicians, the girls with wooden legs or glass eyes, the freakshows, the farmhands, the mule— but that he still believes them. Borrowing from Emerson, the Southern writer has been Faulknerizing for seventy-plus years, and he has done so, perhaps, for the worst reason possible: because he suspects that this is Southern literature. Thus the fundamental dilemma of Southern literature for those in its critical and creative pursuit becomes one first of definition, and Southern literature, despite the obvious, has none. Surely we can say that Southern literature is literature “of and from the South,” but this tells us nothing. Both point to region as the superficial qualifier, whether it is the region of birthright or the region of subject matter or, as a purist of the misguided definition might suggest, both. If it is region of birthright, then the Southern writer need feel no anxiety of influence: He is a member of the tradition by virtue of the fact he was spat out somewhere below the Mason Dixon. If it is region of subject matter, then bring in the crooked politicians and preachers, the girls with wooden legs, and one more dead mule to beat. Even if a Southern writer must be both at once, this is hardly an initiation. It requires a bit of luck and a bit of redundancy, and the ability to read. Of course, there are those defenders of Southern literature and its tradition who argue that this kind of blind faith in and stubborn adherence to the past are not faults at all but rather a defining feature of the Southern temperament, creative or otherwise. In “The Good Songs Behind Us: Southern Fiction of the 1990s,” Fred Chappell, one of the literature’s most revered elder statesmen, makes the claim that the fundamental burden of the Southern writer—as well as the Southerner in general—is history. “The Southern writer is entranced by Southern cultural history,” Chappell writes, “because it is the only story there is. Once upon a time things were the way they were supposed to be. Then something happened. Since that point, things have never 3 been the same” (3). Chappell goes on to make the link between this ubiquitous history—offered briefly in the above passage, in his own italics, as a kind of War of Northern Aggression bedtime story, though thankfully not in dialect—and the very earth that makes up the Southern landscape: “History is pervasive; certain poets…have posited the thesis that history is mystically but nevertheless physically present in the Southern landscape, in the soil itself” (2). In the end, Chappell argues, it is precisely this pervasive sense of the past that informs the Southern present: A Southerner will revere his forebears not because they were smarter, braver, or more virtuous than he believes himself to be, but because they inscribed with their lives the History that he sees as a counterpart of Nature; it is almost as large as Nature in his thinking and, as we have remarked, not entirely separate from it. Our ancestors did not simply die; they died in the cause of the past, in the service of the History that they lived in order deliberately to create. (6) Such is the prevailing sentiment of Southern literature, and thus its predicament: No workable definition has grown out of the tradition because none has been willing to outgrow it. Sometimes this reverence for the tradition and for the integrity of forebears requires the writer to set his work in the Deep Past, in that safeguarded