Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

67 | Autumn 2016 Special Issue: Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1745 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 December 2016 ISBN: 0294-0442 ISSN: 0294-04442

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Linda Collinge-Germain

Introduction Gérald Préher and Emmanuel Vernadakis

Articles

The "Rape Complex" in Short Fiction from the American South Ineke Bockting

Ellen Glasgow's "Jordan's End": Antigone in the South Inès Casas

From "Faithful Old Servant" to "Bantu Woman": Katherine Anne Porter's Approach to the Mammy Myth in "The Old Order" Susana Maria Jiménez-Placer

Myth and Metaphor in James Agee's "1928 Story" Rémi Digonnet

Myth for the Masses: Erskine Caldwell's "Daughter" Amélie Moisy

Frontiers of Myth and Myths of the Frontier in Caroline Gordon's "Tom Rivers" and "The Captive" Elisabeth Lamothe

William Faulkner's "My Grandmother Millard" (1943) and Caroline Gordon's "The Forest of the South" (1944): Comic and Tragic Versions of the Southern Belle Myth Françoise Buisson

Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me) Ben Forkner

Violent Fragility: The Mythical, the Iconic and Tennessee Williams' Politics of Gender in "One Arm" Emmanuel Vernadakis

Black Image and Blackness: Rewriting Myth as Cultural Code in Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game" Françoise Clary

Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction Ruth Fialho

Revisiting the Universal Significance of Mythologies: Barbara Kingsolver's Syncretic and Mythopoeic Short Story "Jump-Up Day" Bénédicte Meillon

Appalachian Myths and Stereotypes in Chris Offutt's "Sawdust" and "Melungeons" Marcel Arbeit

Bobbie Ann Mason Challenges the Myth of Southernness: Postmodern Identities, Blurring Borders and Literary Labels Candela Delgado Marin

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Ron Rash's Burning Bright (2010): Rewriting the Debacle of the South in the Present Frédérique Spill

Joyce Carol Oates's "Little Maggie": Southern Myth in Ballad Form and Beyond Tanya Tromble

Short Story

Trick or Treat Alice Clark

Interviews

"… trying to find out how to balance tragedy and comedy": an Interview with Lisa Alther Alice Clark, Sarah Delmas, Nicole Moulinoux, Gérald Préher and Frédérique Spill

Something Rich and Strange: Ron Rash on Short Story Writing – an Interview Frédérique Spill

Journal of the Short Story in English, 67 | Autumn 2016 3

Foreword

Michelle Ryan-Sautour and Linda Collinge-Germain

1 We are very pleased to present this special issue – "Representation and Rewriting of Myths in Southern Short Fiction" – devoted to short stories of the American South. It is a voluminous issue which includes a selection of the papers presented at the conference held at Lille Catholic University in 2013, as well as interviews with writers from the American South and a short story. We would like to sincerely thank the Editors of this issue, Gérald Préher, Professor and specialist of American Literature at Lille Catholic University, Alice Clark, Associate Professor of English at the University of Nantes, and Emmanuel Vernadakis, Professor of English-Language Literature at the University of Angers and specialist of the study of myth and mythology, for their enlightening introduction to the issue and their meticulous editorial work in the preparation of this volume. We would also like to thank our colleague Yannick Le Boulicaut, University Professor and professional photographer, for the photograph featured on the cover of this issue.

AUTHORS

MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor

LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication

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Introduction

Gérald Préher and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 As a form, myth has been used in various contexts, endowed with various meanings, and approached in various ways throughout a complex, conflicting, and far-reaching history that makes it a slippery term—in Marcel Détienne’s terms “a fish emulsified in the waters of mythology.”1 As a term, “myth” derives from the Greek mythos (μύθος), and means “plot” or “story.” Originally, mythos contrasted logos (λόγος), namely a “truthful account.” A competitive dynamic between mythos and logos can be traced back to Plato: although Plato uses myths—imaginative frames—to draw the reader in, he downplays his/her role in philosophical thought, worried as he is about the appeal of myth to our most basic passions. A common narrative grew out of this polemic approach through Christianity’s insistence on reading myths allegorically, which late Renaissance scholarship used to tell about ancient civilisations: human progress followed a trajectory from mythos to logos, from myth to logic. Still going strong until the mid-20th century, this view made myths objects of contempt (Morales 12-15, also see 56-63). However, the rise of comparative anthropology as a discipline in the mid-19th century has turned myths into “interesting” objects (although they were still objects of contempt) mainly for the light they supposedly shed on the character of the mythmaker. The fortune of myths then rose gradually as, in the context of colonisation, the dialectics between mythos and logos brought about comparisons between, for instance, early Europeans and Native-Americans—with both peoples and myths disparaged as savage and unsophisticated. Then the mythmakers, whether ancient European or Non-European, turned out to be significant as objects of comparison, and mythology developed into a tool of self-discovery for both Europeans and European settlers in the New World, becoming an important figure in the discourse on self and other (See Csapo 12-15). During the second half of the 20th century, ancient and colonial rituals as well as various types of narratives, such as folktales, legends, fables, both written and oral, were seriously discussed in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, ethnology, psychology, linguistics, literature and structuralism. Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. Still, to circumscribe myth’s form or content has proved notoriously difficult, the more so as definitions rarely confront the equitability of concepts across time and cultures. This is

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particularly embarrassing, for myth, as a concept, is supposed to date back to the origins of mankind and span across the globe. As it is, then, myth does not lend itself to a clear definition.

2 However, when an attempt is made to break with the essentialist tradition of defining myth for what it is, it becomes possible to understand it in relation to what it does. Eric Csapo notes that “Myth might be more usefully defined as a narrative which is considered socially important, and is told in such a way as to allow the entire social collective to share a sense of this importance [...]. There can be myths about recent events, contemporary personalities, new inventions. To insist that a myth or legend be a traditional tale is to confuse a symptom of their function of transmitting something of collective importance for part of their essence. Myth is a function of social ideology.” (9). As such, to use Roland Barthes’s formulation, it can “control and oppress” indeed, carry pernicious ideological overtones (190, our translation). In other terms, the stories, the lore, are only part of what constitutes the subject. Myth “happens” only when the stories become active agents: when people use them and share them. As Helen Morales has it, myth is not an object or a series of objects to be known, “[r]ather, it is a continual process of telling and retelling, of provoking and responding, of critiquing and revising. It is process rather than event. Or, to borrow Mary Beard’s formulation, we should think of it as a verb, and not a noun” (115).

3 In a 2003 lecture, Tomson Highway acknowledges “The world [...] is filled with mythology—or rather mythologies. [...] Every race, every language, even every city, every town, every village has its own” (27). The present collection of articles illustrates such an idea for it demonstrates that such mythologies particularly inspire and sustain the letters of the South of the United States, a region where a strong oral tradition of storytelling and myth-making has always been of singular importance: religion and magic, traditional roles and characters, stereotypes and icons, local modes and codes, folktales and folk-songs all brand Southern literature with lore and ideology, prestige and pleasure, mystique, and fantasy. Southern Belles, cavaliers, mammies, slaves, plantations, the frontier… all endowed with symbolic dimensions find their way in myths that are made to speak to the South’s new conditions. As Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway explain: “Readers of Southern fiction are familiar enough with the rough chronology of the plantation myth. As the South moved toward the final separation from the Union in mid-century, a growing movement of pro-Southern apologists began to praise the planter and project his life back into an old-world civilization, improved and humanized by its new setting and its uncorrupted agrarian values” (xvi). The plantation myth—paradise regained then forever lost—and the lore that came with it went round the world and seem to have stolen the limelight, elbowing other myths from other American regional cultures out of the way.

4 As Forkner and Samway suggest, some of the ways these myths operated, and still operate, are disturbing. Southern mythology may indeed be complicit in promoting a subjective and perhaps questionable view of history. The South has always been engaged in its own historical process of mythological construction. Thus, in L’Aristocratie sudiste, Etienne de Planchard has observed that in the South “history and myth are inextricably linked, one being the subjective interpretation of the other” (14, our translation). Myth can also be conniving in encouraging racism, nationalism, misogyny, and illusions. For instance, in the 19th century, William Gilmore Simms was regarded as the arch-defender of the increasingly mythical image of the South. In the

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long swan song of his novels and short stories he contributed to inflating the ideals and values of the agricultural foundations of the South. But Simms was a pro-slavery writer and the use he makes of the plantation myth—and quite a few other concurrent myths —can be embarrassing. Myths have often been denounced (notably by Barthes) for their pernicious effects and ominous achievements. Should we, then, discard Simms and Southern myths or even say goodbye to mythology?

5 The present volume seems to answer the above question by a firm “no.” Not just because Simms’s fiction is of a high standard—Poe, who considered the short story unique and viewed its tightly knit structure as its primary asset, viewed Simms as a model short story writer—nor just because myths tell delightful stories: as this collection points out, myth may affirm oppressive ideologies, but it also has the capacity to provide spaces beyond them. Most of the essays show that myth can also be an instrument of subversion. It is certainly a tool endowing short fiction—and society— with a force for change. Indeed, several articles show how the mythical is grounded in the psychological and the political. This happens through four indigenous features: race, the frontier, the Puritan legacy, and political utopianism; to which gender must also be added. It therefore often comes to cross the path of the gothic, a mode (or genre?) particularly cherished in the South, a place which has a shared interest in the above indigenous features (Smith 164).

6 W. J. Cash proposes a panoply of different critical perspectives in The Mind of the South (1941) and the collective work directed by Charles W. Eagles (1992), The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later, provides us with distinctive traits to examine the 20th and 21st century South. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Spencer, to name only a few Southern short story writers, plant their stories in a mythical Southern topos. They create a background for ruins of all sorts: historical, social and familial in association with the Southern past, and this is propitious for creating a narrative space particularly permeable for literary myths to unfold. In keeping with the image of the dispossessed garden, Lewis P. Simpson and C. Hugh Holman have described the Old South as a “kind of Eden.” From this perspective, the Civil War is held responsible for having provoked a break with the South’s prelapsarian roots—Holman points out that the Civil War tends to be viewed “as the bloody expulsion from that Eden” (38).

7 In I’ll Take My Stand (1930), myth represents a fundamental source of inspiration for Southern identity. If the description of seasons and landscapes allows for a portrayal of linear time, depicting the cycles of nature opens up on the mythical dimension of nature encapsulating the atemporal narrative level of the story. These myths crystallize in tropes of early American untainted pastoral representations. One of the twelve Agrarians, Stark Young, challenged the limitations of the manifesto. He began by exalting the image of civilization as a constantly budding organism: “out of any epoch in civilization there may arise things worthwhile that are the flowers of it. To abandon these, when another epoch arrives, is only stupid, so long as there is still in them the breath and flux of life” (328). Numerous writers have used mythological figures—the phoenix, Penelope, or the Medusa—in order to enhance the Southern narrative space of the imaginary. The permanence of the past in Southern literature is thus inextricably linked not only to the region’s history, but also to the myth it creates and keeps alive.

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8 As a result, rereading this literature through the prism of myth allows us to better understand how Southern writers have integrated myth so as to affirm or negate their cultural heritage in the nation, their social-economic relationships and gender roles. As Todorov has pointed out, due to its brevity the short story does not represent life in the way a novel does; it thus becomes a fertile space for myth and fable to take root. This is in keeping with Charles E. May’s theory regarding the origins of the short story. According to him, “the wellsprings of the form are as old as the primitive realm of myth [...]. [B]rief episodic narratives, which constitute the basis of the short story, are primary, preceding later epic forms which constitute the basis of the novel. In many ways, the short story with its usual focus on a single event and a single effect has remained close to its primal mythic source” (1). Myth survives through story-telling and story-writing; and so does the Old South. In the entry devoted to the “Mythic South” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, George B. Tindall quotes anthropologist Raphael Patai according to whom “myth not only validates or authorizes customs, rites, institutions, beliefs, and so forth, but frequently is directly responsible for them” (126). When it comes to the South, such an idea can be used to suggest that the “mind of the South” stems out of a set of preconceived ideas that have been accepted and are now taken for granted. Myth can also be used as a means to debunk the real—Eudora Welty’s “Worn Path” published at the beginning of the 1940s conjures up the figure of the phoenix through its central character, Phoenix Jackson, to assert the African-American presence in the region. Women writers in the South seem to be mirroring the endeavor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s narrator in the “Yellow Wall-Paper” though the wall-paper appears to be a Confederate Flag. They are trying to define their identity by questioning the validity of the expression “Southern Belle.” In their short fiction, they want to “communicate realistically the secret psychic life formerly presented allegorically in the mythic romance” (May 47) and, to do so, they somehow deconstruct Southern myths.

9 Myth can therefore inform paradigms of marginality, disruption and clan conflict encoded within Southern culture. Frank O’Connor has famously defined the short story as a genre that focuses on “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” (18) and it is obvious that Southern short fiction also revolves around such figures. By engaging in the study of the representation and rewriting of myth, this collection of essays endeavors to demonstrate the extent to which myths tap into the resources of short fiction. It considers how they are inherent to, and formative of the literary genre of brevity, which draws on symbolic sources.

***

10 The following essays, organized chronologically, stem from a conference that took place at Lille Catholic University in 2013. It was sponsored by Lille Catholic University, the CRILA research group at the University of Angers and the Suds d’Amériques research group at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Two guest writers attended the conference: Lisa Alther and Alice Clark. The round-table interview with Lisa Alther is included here as well as an exclusive interview with Ron Rash conducted by Frédérique Spill. In addition to the Southern scholars on the reading committee of the Journal of the Short Story in English, several colleagues accepted to review articles for this issue: Michel Bandry, Jacquie Berbin-Masi, Anne Garrait-Bourrier, Constante González-Groba, Jan Nordby Gretlund, Nicole Moulinoux, Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis,

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François Pitavy, Jacques Pothier, Sarah Robertson, Owen Robinson, Hans Skei, Noel Sloboda, and Linda Wagner-Martin. We take this opportunity to thank them for their assistance and time.

11 The first article, by Ineke Bockting, analyzes “The Rape Complex in Short Fiction from the American South.” It links the Southern Rape Complex, the erroneous belief that every black man is constantly on the outlook to rape a white woman, with the Myth of Southern Womanhood, which stages the southern woman as the epitome of purity and righteousness and as a symbol of the South as a whole. Her rape, then, is felt as a rape of the South and warrants the severest punishment. In this essay, Bockting analyzes the different aspects of the two interwoven myths in several short stories from the South, in prose and in poetry form.

12 In “Ellen Glasgow’s ‘Jordan’s End’: Antigone in the South?,” Inès Casas shows that Glasgow’s imagination was triggered by her realization of “the triumph in Virginia of idealism over actuality.” Glasgow’s first instinct was to denounce the facile myths of southern romanticism, especially those revealing the patriarchal indoctrination of the South. In “Jordan’s End” (1923), Glasgow makes use of the classical myth of Antigone to explore the male-created, crippling myths of inferiority and innocence that tied southern women to their pedestal. Like the Greek tragic figure, Judith Jordan questions the Southern moral order by her pious act of euthanasia. Because of her final rejection of deference to myth, she is structurally silenced and caged just as Antigone is condemned to be entombed alive, for the narrator’s idealization of her denies her the right to redefine her heritage in her own terms and free herself from the shackles of patriarchal oppression.

13 Susana Mª Jiménez Placer, in her article “From ‘Faithful Old Servant’ to ‘Bantu Woman’: Katherine Anne Porter’s Approach to the Mammy Myth in ‘The Old Order’,” discusses Porter’s Miranda stories that have been mostly interpreted as the writer’s attempt to deconstruct the myth of the Old South. Jiménez Placer’s analysis focuses on Porter’s exploration of the mammy myth and its role in Miranda’s development. The situation reflects Porter’s intuition of the ultimately destructive effects hidden behind the affective connotations supposedly characterizing the relationship between mammies and their white families. In addition, Porter’s depiction of the mammy parallels Miranda’s adoption of a tomboyish attitude after Grandmother’s death, which suggests that Miranda’s tomboyism has connotations of uncertainty concerning not only the traditional gender roles but also the traditional racial roles.

14 In “Myth and Metaphor in James Agee’s ‘1928 Story’,” Rémi Digonnet explains that myth and metaphor intersect from the perspective of the constituent characteristics of the two literary processes. The figure of one word for another, along the substitutive perspective of metaphor, echoes the substitution of reality for myth. Transfer, like translation, seem to occur in a displaced and misplaced reality triggered by the mythic intention. The interactive perspective of metaphor between the metaphorical and the literal, if less obvious in myth or fable, which are both conceived as homogeneous interpretations, persists in a mythology which constructs a semantic impertinence, a caesura, yet also an intersection between fiction and reality. Like the reactivation of a metaphor, myth is constantly reactivated, thwarted in order to be re-enacted. Through the study of James Agee’s “1928 Story,” Digonnet’s article shows what is being re-acted in both myth and metaphor. He analyses in what ways what initially resembles a

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repetition or a reiteration turns into creative energy, producing meaning, rewriting and reinterpretation.

15 Amélie Moisy’s “Myth for the Masses: Erskine Caldwell’s ‘Daughter’” focuses on Caldwell’s personal take on Southern mythology for he rewrites ancient myths and creates a new one. In “Daughter,” a poor sharecropper is in jail for murdering his daughter who complained of hunger. Caldwell’s flouting of expectations and use of repetition creates a socialist myth of working class solidarity, having the crowd mete out its own justice, deciding that “it doesn’t seem right” that a poor man should be prosecuted. Moisy illustrates how the story’s ending is both a departure from Caldwell’s usual bleak sharecropper stories bespeaking a political purpose, and a habitual shattering of Southern myth. Recalling Roland Barthes’ opposition of leftist and conservative mythologies, which the story seems to bear out, Moisy determines in what ways it is nonetheless representative of Caldwell’s stature as mythmaker.

16 In “Frontiers of Myth and Myths of the Frontier in Caroline Gordon’s ‘Tom Rivers’ and ‘The Captive’,” Elisabeth Lamothe focuses on Gordon’s variations on the genres of the frontier story and the captivity narrative to debunk the artificiality of the South’s scripts of masculine and feminine identity. Departing from the captivity narrative’s reliance on the reinforcement of identity and social norms, Gordon explores through “The Captive” the many forms of subjugation and control of women and Natives devised by a so-called civilized American society. She explores the paradoxical liberation there is in her protagonist’s so-called captivity while questioning the notion of redemption.

17 Françoise Buisson provides us with another facet of Gordon’s oft-forgotten genius in her comparative piece “William Faulkner’s ‘My Grandmother Millard’ and Caroline Gordon’s ‘The Forest of the South’: Comic and Tragic versions of the Southern Belle Myth.” She shows that in both narratives the heroines are led to play a major role that points to the collapse of the Southern belle myth. Nevertheless, while Faulkner’s story takes on a comic dimension and turns out to be both a personal and a historical farce, the tone of Gordon’s text, with its more oblique and ambivalent message, proves to be bitter and tragic. In fact, Buisson demonstrates, the ironical mode prevails in both stories which are aimed at debunking the Southern belle myth. The authors play with the codes of the romance and the Plantation novel. The use of Southern topoi, traditional episodes and stock characters gives the writer the opportunity to gain in narrative space; hence the symbolical, even allegorical dimension of the genre which can be compared to myth.

18 Looking at another major author, Eudora Welty, Ben Forkner in “Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Memory in ‘The Wide Net’ (and Me),” analyzes the story and reads it in a very personal perspective. His reading is framed by his own experience as a Southerner but, beyond the anecdotal element, what he shows his readers is that the meaning of a story can only stem from a personal experience. It is a Southerner’s reading of “The Wide Net” which highlights the width of the net itself—a net that is big enough for any reader to express his/her own interpretation.

19 In his essay “Violent Fragility: The Mythical and the Iconic in Tennessee Williams’ Politics of Gender in ‘One Arm’,” Emmanuel Vernadakis discusses “One Arm,” a 1945 story which sides against the death penalty. In it, however, capital punishment is combined with a socially constructed structure of gender and a symbolic illustration of the South. Specific features and identity principles relating to Apollo and Dionysus find

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their way into Williams’s hero whose flaw—the missing arm—makes of him an epitome of the myth of the South. As an antinomian figure dominated by the Nietzschean conflict between Apollonian form and Dionysian matter, Oliver discovers that his flaw is also a weapon. The effect of his paradoxical identity is translated into visual similes and metaphors which draw on Iacchus’, Dionysus’ avatar (as revisited by D.H. Lawrence), in order to transform Oliver into an icon that serves gender oriented politics and makes the story operate at a high ideological level. Williams’ bisexual character transcends the strictures of morality of the time of writing and baffles the borders of the story pleading for individual completion and social inclusiveness. Hovering between fragility and violence, Oliver’s icon seems eventually to stand for Williams’ own oeuvre whose politics of gender are promoted by drawing on myth.

20 Françoise Clary, explores another facet of the South in her discussion of the African- American, “Black Image and Blackness: Rewriting Myth as Cultural Code in Ralph Ellison’s ‘King of the Bingo Game’.” Focusing on the idea that African American short stories are tools for learning, Clary examines how Ellison revisits the issue of myth in the context of the African-American experience and questions whether the rewriting of myth as cultural code gives birth to a new black image akin to Houston Baker’s view of “blackness in motion toward modernity.” Clary uses varying perspectives: a repositioning of center and margin, the exposure of transcendence rising from a discovery of self and a framing of blackness predicated on the modernization of the black hero. The ethno-cultural dimension of myth—as it is notably emphasized by Ellison—is therefore to be seen as a way to keep black people from engaging in a pathological adjustment to the ethnocentric context of white American society. Clary argues that in Ellison’s short-story, African American social myths get inspiration from black folklore where the weak can outwit the oppressor thus encouraging the underdog to search for ways to outsmart the system.

21 In “Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction,” Ruth Fialho suggests that any reader, when confronted with a work of fiction located in the American South, expects to be presented with a pastoral vision of America, thus forgetting the dramatic growth of Southern cities since World War II. The “Good Country People” that the reader meets in the three short stories by Flannery O’Connor analyzed here (“A Circle in the Fire”; “Greenleaf”; “A View of the Woods”) are caught between two perspectives: the continuity of cyclical time that links them to the land and an unwavering belief in God’s approval or the disruption implied by modernity. O’Connor chooses to question these narratives and offers the reader an encounter with a new myth whose meaning and purpose will be unveiled through social tension, textual games and a religious awakening.

22 Focusing on the short story “Jump-Up Day,” Bénédicte Meillon, in “Revisiting the Universal Significance of Mythologies: Barbara Kingsolver’s Syncretic and Mythopoeic Short Story ‘Jump-Up Day’,” shows how Kingsolver’s transcultural rewriting of myth reconnects with the origins of the short story genre in myth. The story might offer a syncretic vision that reveals a different reading of Christian myths, made compatible with other cultures and myths. Meillon argues that this story triggers a two-fold, dynamic process, as it demythologizes while paradoxically re-mythologizing the relationship between story and myth. She first looks at the magic and religious elements in the story which may read as fantastic, uncanny or magical realist and then ventures a psycho-analytical reading of the story, staging a return of the repressed

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leading to the final, enchanting revelation. Finally, she explores the role of the Obeah Man as a Caribbean Janus, whose character functions, like the Roman God of passages, as mediator between black and white, life and death, Christianity and Obeah, magic and reality, dream and waking life, or myth and short story. Essentially, Meillon explains, Kingsolver’s story deals with liminality and in-betweenness. It may read as postcolonial and ecofeminist, and helps bring about an antidualistic and numinous revelation, the universal significance of which Kingsolver’s Southern and global readers alike can bring home.

23 Marcel Arbeit’s article “Appalachian Myths and Stereotypes in Chris Offutt’s ‘Sawdust’ and ‘Melungeons’,” analyzes two short stories with a focus on two stereotypes connected with Appalachian people involving both their contempt for education and their violent and vengeful nature, resulting in feuds. It explains the relationship between myth and stereotype and, in accordance with recent psychological and sociological research, considers stereotypes to be a specific kind of so-called “legitimizing myths.” The background against which the stereotypes are explored is the myth of the origin of Appalachian people. Discussing Sarah Hardy’s research into affinities between short stories and oral narratives, Lisa Alther’s historical investigation of the Melungeons, and Chris Offutt’s theoretical remarks about storytelling, Arbeit shows that it is the close relationship of short stories with folk tales that makes the short story the best genre for rendering myths and stereotypes.

24 Candela Delgado Marín looks closely at Bobbie Ann Mason’s short fiction in “Looming Myths of Frontiers in The South: Bobbie Ann Mason and Postmodern Uncertainties.” She shows that Mason portrays a South that still operates around the North/South division, whilst being surrounded by liminal spaces of postmodernity. The concept of “southernness” becomes in this context a myth, unable to encompass the complexities of Mason’s Kentuckian characters. Delgado Marín’s article attempts to illustrate how the past manifests itself in Mason’s southern places, language and identities that belong, however, to post-southern contexts. Mason creates stories that challenge cultural and formal myths to represent accurately the contrasting nature of the South she writes about with an underlying pride and optimism, but, nevertheless, never idealizing her roots.

25 In her discussion of another Appalachia writer, Ron Rash, Frédérique Spill, in “Ron Rash’s Burning Bright (2010): Rewriting the Debacle of the South in the Present,” shows that the South that is brought to life is dark, desolate, miserable and haunted by figures of failure. For Spill the major reason for this is that Rash’s Appalachia played a very singular part in the American Civil War and Burning Bright constantly seems to be replaying and reinterpreting the script of the essential defeat of the region. The stories thus show how the South is inexorably trapped in the vicious circle of its own debacle. And yet, despite the bleakness of their contexts, they literally “burn bright,” developing compelling poetic figures that leave deep marks on the reader’s mind. Building up around a key trauma somehow become a myth, Burning Bright sprouts from a characteristic tension—that between bleakness and brightness.

26 The last article is Tanya Tromble’s “Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Little Maggie’: Southern Myth in Ballad Form and Beyond” which also deals with Appalachia but this time from an outsider’s point of view. “Little Maggie” is a traditional folk song, probably from the late 1800s, which tells the tale of a hard-drinking, fun-loving heartbreaker. Oates’s story “Little Maggie—A Mystery” is the tale of the rise to fame of country singer Blue-

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Eyed Bill Brandy from mythical Vergennes County, Kentucky, and its repercussions on his left-behind wife and children. “Little Maggie,” Bill’s most popular song, has had generations trying to unravel the mystery of the elusive woman’s identity. By the end of the story, the narrator, Bill’s daughter, has solved the mystery of Little Maggie, knowledge that brings a certain closure, but little peace. Tromble discusses the mysteries of the mythical Little Maggie ballad character explored in the story as well as Oates’s continued perpetuation of the myth through reference to the character in yet another story, “The Haunting.”

27 The essays are followed by a new story by Alice Clark, “Trick or Treat,” which revolves around Southern violence and makes clear that the line between reality and myth can be quite thin at times.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. 1957. Paris: Seuil, “Points,” 1970. Print.

Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. 1941. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.

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Détienne, Marcel. L’Invention de la Mythologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Print.

Forkner, Ben and Patrick Samway, ed. A New Reader of the Old South. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1991. Print.

Highway, Tomson. Comparing Mythologies. Charles R. Bronfman Lecture in Canadian Studies Series. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003. Print.

Holman, C. Hugh. The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1972. Print.

May, Charles E. The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. New York: Twayne, 1995. Print.

Morales, Helen. A Very Short Introduction to Classical Mythology. Oxford: OUP, 2007. Print.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. 1963. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Print.

Planchard de, Étienne. L’Aristocratie sudiste. Paris: Michel Houdiard Éditeur, 2009. Print.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1975. Print.

Smith, Allan, Lloyd. “Nineteenth Century American Gothic.” A New Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. 163-75. Print.

Tindall, George B. “Mythic South.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 4, Myth, Manners, & Memory. Ed. Charles Reagan Wilson. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. 125-31. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Trans. Arnold Weinstein. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3.1 (Autumn 1969): 70-76. Print.

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Young, Stark. “Not in Memoriam, But in Defense.” I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by 12 Southerners. 1930. New York: Harper, 1962. 328-59. Print.

NOTES

1. “un poisson soluble dans les eaux de la mythologie” (238, our translation).

AUTHORS

GÉRALD PRÉHER Lille Catholic University

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS University of Angers

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Articles

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The "Rape Complex" in Short Fiction from the American South

Ineke Bockting

1 Edgar Allan Poe, master of the American gothic short story, defines the genre first of all by its brevity, “the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.” This gives it “the immense force derivable from totality.” It is a force that the novel does not possess, because there “worldly interests . . . necessarily intervene between sittings,” to “modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book.” Then there is the unity of its effect on the reader. As Poe puts it, the “wise” author does not fashion his thoughts “to accommodate his incidents” but “having conceived, with delicate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.” “In the whole composition,” he concludes, “there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design” (572).

2 Rape stories tend to answer these requirements, moving towards their “pre-established design”: the combined feeling of fascination and fear surrounding the transgression of racial boundaries and the elaborate defences against this transgression of the so-called “Southern Rape Complex.” It was the Southern journalist W. J. Cash who introduced the term “rape complex” in his 1941 work The Mind of the South, arguing: It is a subject on which there has been much misunderstanding. Negro apologists and others bent on damning the South at any cost have, during the last decade or two, so constantly and vociferously associated the presentation of figures designed to show that no rape menace exists or ever has existed in the Southern country, with the conclusion that this rape complex is therefore a fraud, a hypocritical pretext behind which the South has always cynically and knowingly hidden mere sadism and economic interest, as to have got it widely accepted. In fact, the conclusion is a non sequitur. (117)

3 Placing this “rape complex” against the actual physical act of rape by showing that, even if “the actual danger of the Southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro” had always been “comparatively small” and the chance was “much less, for instance, than the chance that she would be struck by lightning,” Cash argues that there were,

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indeed, “genuine cases of rape” and “more numerous cases of attempted rape” (117). He therefore insists that because of this, “there was real fear, and in some districts even terror, on the part of the white women themselves. And there were neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls, to react to all this in a fashion well understood now, but understood by almost nobody then” (118).

4 Although he does not say so outright, Cash seems to refer, here, to the greater knowledge of psychology and psychiatry at the time of writing his book, undoubtedly of Freudian origin, such as we also find it in the work of his fellow Southerner, the social critic Lillian Smith. To explain these reactions as psychological, of course, makes them universally human. Indeed, in all societies and at all times, women have been raped, have feared being raped, have secretly dreamt of being raped (“to be abused is better than not to be used at all,” these old maids may have had in mind) and have pretended to have been raped, if they were caught in the act of love-making or fell prey to an unwanted pregnancy, especially if the father belonged to a different class, race or ethnicity.

5 Yet, when we think of the specific “Southern Rape Complex,” we must start with the so- called “Cult of Southern Womanhood” which stresses the purity of the Southern white woman and the need to protect her from all that could “soil” her. Cash inflates the image through heavy irony when he presents her as a statue: “the South’s Palladium,” “the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying,” “the mystic symbol of its nationality in the face of the foe,” “the lily-pure maid of Astolat,” “the hunting goddess of the Boeotian hill,” or “the pitiful Mother of God.” And he imaginatively presents the devotion that was her due when he writes: “Merely to mention her was to send strong men into tears—or shouts. There was hardly a sermon that did not begin and end with tributes in her honor, hardly a brave speech that did not open and close with the clashing of shields and the flourishing of swords for her glory (89).1

6 “The Cult of Southern Womanhood” is the most important realization of the Southern code of honor, what Cash calls the “ultimate secret of the Southern rape complex” as a phenomenon that rests on “the central status that Southern women had long ago taken up in Southern emotion [and] her identification with the very notion of the South itself” (118).2

7 The punishment attached to the “Rape Complex” was thus—unsurprisingly—extremely severe. The black author Richard Wright starts his collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children with an “autobiographical sketch”—a story that happens to be true— called “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” In the part numbered VII, Wright talks about the time he worked as a “hall-boy” in a hotel in Jackson, Mississippi. He writes: One of the bell-boys was caught in bed with a white prostitute. He was castrated and run out of town. Immediately after this all the bell-boys and hall-boys were called together and warned. We were given to understand that the boy who had been castrated was a “mighty, mighty lucky bastard.” We were impressed with the fact that next time the management of the hotel would not be responsible for the lives of “trouble-makin’ niggers.” We were silent. (7)

8 Obviously, the message was that the bell-boy was lucky only to have been castrated and not to have been lynched as well. But many are the true stories of those accused of rape that were not so lucky. As the story goes, in August of 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen- year-old boy from Chicago, who was visiting a small town in the Delta country of

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Mississippi, entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. When the young boy was subsequently found mutilated, the white woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam,” were arrested. But an all- white jury found them not guilty.3 Look Magazine (1956) published, together with pictures of Emmett Till’s mutilated body, Big Milam’s story: When a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. “Chicago boy,” I said, “I’m tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand. (Bradford)

9 Not surprisingly, the “Rape Complex” plays a large role in Southern stories, more often than not including pervasive gothic elements. Indeed, interracial relationships can be seen as a gothic subject, if one defines the Gothic as a genre of borders, such as there are between life and death (ghost stories), between man and animal (stories of werewolves), man and machine, as well as between such opposites as dream and reality, sanity and madness, innocence and guilt, and, indeed, black and white. It is not for nothing, after all, that Lillian Smith writes of children of mixed race as “little ghosts playing and laughing and weeping on the edge of southern memory,” which “can be a haunting thing” (125). This gothic emphasis is also present in the essay, “Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the South Through Gender” by Susan Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones: Surely no bodies ever appeared more haunted by society. From the body of the white southern lady, praised for the absence of desire, to the body of the black lynching victim accused of excessive desire, southern sexuality has long been haunted by stories designating hierarchical relationships among race, class, and gender. (1)

10 A relatively innocent example to start with is the short story by Eudora Welty entitled “June Recital,” from the collection The Golden Apples. In it, Miss Eckhart, a single music teacher of German descent, is attacked, raped, or threatened with rape, by a “crazy nigger” who “had jumped out of the school hedge and got Miss Eckhart” one evening after dark, when, according to the town etiquette, she should not have walked around by herself anyway (57). What is worse, afterwards she does not behave in a way that would constitute a proper reaction, not, as Nicole Donald puts it, as “an emblem of both sexual and racial purity.” Indeed, Miss Eckhart does not show herself as devastated as she should be, and she does not leave the town in disgrace. Cassie, one of her pupils, who functions as the focalizer in most of the story, believes that “it was the nigger in the hedge, the terrible fate that came on her, that people could not forgive Miss Eckhart” (58). The story, meanwhile, does not explore any actual rape, which happened —if it did at all—before the story starts. But, as Peter Schmidt argues in The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction, it “brings into focus as none of Welty’s other stories do the social pressures that ostracize a woman” (86), in this case by members of her own sex. Indeed, it shows very clearly the demand for female purity that is an essential element of the “Rape Complex.” In a way, this spinster, a foreigner moreover, whose “cabbage was cooked there by no Negro and by no way it was ever cooked in Morgana. With wine” (62), got what she had been asking for.

11 A more complex story is William Faulkner’s “Dry September.” Here the thirty-eight or thirty-nine-year-old maid Minnie Cooper seems to have been raped by a black man,

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Will Mayes. Half of the story presents itself as a celebration of the way in which this makes Miss Minnie feel special, a feeling she could no longer obtain during her everyday life of fading Southern Belle: She was the last to realize that she was losing ground; that those among whom she had been a little brighter and louder flame than any other were beginning to learn the pleasure of snobbery—male—and retaliation—female. That was when her face began to wear that bright, haggard look. She still carried it to parties on shadowy porticoes and summer lawns, like a mask or a flag, with that bafflement of furious repudiation of truth in her eyes. One evening at a party she heard a boy and two girls, all schoolmates, talking. She never accepted another invitation. (174)

12 But now that the news of her rape has become known and people pity her, the young girls who had started to call her aunty find her interesting enough to include her again. Indeed, as she “enters the square, she in the center of the group, fragile in her fresh dress,” and trembling, she walks “slower and slower, as children eat ice cream” (180), the simile showing perfectly Miss Minnie’s desire to make her position of victim last. By showing her devastation, Miss Minnie is able to fit in again, thus undoing some of the “snobbery” and “retaliation” that she has been experiencing, something that Miss Eckhart, in Welty’s “June Recital” refuses or neglects to do.

13 Yet there is more to the story, as the other half of it follows the local men that track down the presumed rapist. The barber is, in fact, the only one who dares to voice a doubt, using the type of “snobbery” that Miss Minnie had been victim of, in order to defend the presumed rapist: “I dont believe anybody did anything. I dont believe anything happened. I leave it to you fellows if them ladies that get old without getting married dont have notions that a man cant—.” But the other men, normally guilty of this same “snobbery,” show that racism will overrule sexism any time: “Then you are a hell of a white man. [...] Do you accuse a white woman of lying?” (170). Even if the barber tries to repeat his attack on the woman, who, like Miss Eckhart, does not fit into the Myth of Southern Womanhood, by saying: “I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never—” he is interrupted by the other men: “You damn niggerlover!” and with irony: “You’re a fine white man” (170). Will Mayes, night watchman at the ice plant, is mercilessly tracked down. He is allowed exactly three short sentences that nobody listens to—“‘What is it, captains?’ the Negro said. ‘I aint done nothing. ‘Fore God, Mr. John’” (177)—after which he is most likely thrown into a sinkhole.

14 Faulkner’s “Dry September,” then, goes beyond Welty’s story “June Recital,” by showing, in addition to the failure of a woman to live up to the myth of “Southern Womanhood,” the obviously more urgent need to defend her in the face of the “Rape Complex.” Indeed, Miss Minnie is seen as a hysterical spinster, untrustworthy, and unworthy of respect. Yet, if it is a matter of either stifling her voice and believing a black man on his word or else believing her and silencing the black man, the choice is not difficult and she changes, in the eyes of the men, from a hysterical old maid into the Southern Lady who should be respected, listened to and defended.

15 While the first story discussed here excludes the possible fate of the black man altogether, and the second one presents the tracking down of the victim but not his punishment, the story “Saturday Evening” by Erskine Caldwell goes one step further by describing a lynch mob performing an actual lynching. This story closely resembles the case of Emmett Till. As in Till’s case, the glance at a white woman, or the addressing of a few words to her, is enough to set the whole scene in motion. Indeed, as the butcher Tom Denny is told by his partner Jim Baxter, the black man,

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[Will Maxie] said something to Fred Jackson’s oldest gal down the road yonder about an hour ago. [Soon] there were thirty or forty cars headed for the creek bottom already and more getting ready to start. They had a place already picked out at the creek. There was a clearing in the woods by the road and there was just enough room to do the job like it should be done. Plenty of dry brushwood nearby and a good-sized sweet-gum tree in the middle of the clearing. (30-31)

16 The unsuspecting victim is chased up the road with “a couple of dozen men [...] behind him poking him with sticks” and “steered [...] into the clearing [where it] was all fixed. There was a big pile of brushwood and a trace chain for his neck and one for his feet. That would hold him. There were two or three cans of gasoline, too” (31). Still, the actual lynching is dealt with quickly in the story and as soon as the man is burning, he is gone, his body to be shot at at liberty: Will Maxie was going up in smoke. When he was just about gone they gave him the lead. Tom stood back and took good aim and fired away at Will with his shotgun as fast as he could breech it and put in a new load. About forty or more of the other men had shotguns too. They filled him so full of lead that his body sagged from his neck where the trace chain held him up. (32)

17 Known as “the gingerbread Negro,” Maxie was likely a man of mixed race—a mulatto, the embodiment of transgression—yet making more money than even the two butchers: Will could grow good cotton. He cut out all the grass first, and then he banked his rows with earth. Everybody else laid his cotton by without going to the trouble of taking out the grass. But Will was a pretty smart Negro. And he could raise a lot of corn too, to the acre. He always cut out the grass before he laid his corn by. But nobody liked Will. He made too much money by taking out the grass before laying by his cotton and corn. He made more money than Tom and Jim made in the butcher shop selling people meat. (31)

18 By being more successful than the butchers, whose meat is smelly and full of buzzing flies, the black man has clearly infringed on the right to superiority of the white race. This economic superiority in itself symbolises the sexual threat he presents. As many critics have argued, the focal point of the white man’s concern was in reality not the purity of the white woman but the potency of the black man, or, as Calvin Hernton puts it in Coming Together: White Hate, Black Power and Sexual Hangups: [The white man] sees in the Negro the essence of his own sexuality, that is, those qualities he wishes for but fears he does not possess. Symbolically, the Negro at once affirms and negates the white man’s sense of sexual security. [...] Contrary to what is claimed, it is not the white woman who is dear to the racist. It is not even the black woman towards whom his sexual rage is directed. It is the black man who is sacred to the racist. And this is why he must castrate him. (111-12)

19 Indeed, it is by way of the “manly” act of filling Maxie with lead—so that his body “sagged”—that the white men re-establish their own potency.

20 In Caldwell’s story, as well as in Faulkner’s, the victims are obviously men of qualities and competence, known as such by the whites, but they are given no voice. This is totally different in the story “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936), from Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children. As J. Watson has shown: “every tale in Uncle Tom’s Children opens in a similar way, on a scene, however brief, of black world-making. We see black people involved, singly and collectively, in labors of imagination and invention” (167). This is very clear in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” where we are introduced to four boys who are coming out of the woods together, improvising:

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YO MAMA don wear no drawers . . . Clearly, the voice rose out of the woods, and died away. Like an echo another voice caught it up: Ah seena when she pulled em off . . . Another, shrill, cracking, adolescent: N she washed ’em in alcohol . . . Then a quartet of voices, blending in harmony, floated high above the tree tops: N she hung ’em out in the hall . . . (10)

21 In a brilliant way, Wright presents the togetherness (harmony) of the boys, their youthful audacity, their link with the tradition of the Blues and the mournful whistle of a passing train, setting them going on another song, which promises a better future: Dis train boun fo Glory Dis train, Oh Hallelujah Dis train boun fo Glory Dis train, Oh Hallelujah Dis train boun fo Glory Ef yuh ride no need fer fret er worry Dis train, Oh Hallelujah Dis train . . . (11)

22 Finally, the boys decide to take a swim in a local swimming hole, even though they know that “ol man Harvey don erllow no niggers t swim” there (15). This is how misfortune strikes: “a white woman, poised on the edge of the opposite embankment, stood directly in front of them” (18). The woman, of course, screams as a Southern Belle should, and Big Boy gets a chance to say one sentence twice: “Lady, we wanna git our cloes […] we wanna git or cloes” (19). But the scream of the young woman, who sees four adolescent boys naked in front of her, is enough to set the “Rape Complex” in motion. Her fiancé comes running and shoots two boys right there and then, and in the struggle that follows, Big Boy more or less accidentally shoots him. Big Boy is able to hide and eventually to escape up North but the other boy, Bobo, is found and lynched.

23 As Watson argues, in “Black Boy Leaves Home,” what inevitably follows in Wright’s monomyth of Jim Crow is the intrusion of whiteness onto the scene of black making. That whiteness may take the explicit form of physical violence, as here, or it may take other forms, such as a white visit to a black home, white-owned property, or simply white ideology objectified and dramatized as character perspective. But the result is always the same: black making, by which I refer to cultural invention and performance by African Americans, quickly deteriorates into black unmaking, by which I refer to the infliction of pain on African Americans and the deconstruction of those artifacts that extend them into their world or envelop and protect them. (168)

24 Indeed, the lynching scene, as it is watched by Big Boy from his hiding place, where he is effectively silenced so as not to give himself away, starts by replacing the joyful singing of the four boys by the hateful singing of the lynchers, first a single voice and then with the voices of women joined in, which “made the song round and full”: “We’ll hang ever nigger t a sour apple tree…” (37).

25 In contrast to the stories we have seen before, the visual, olfactory and auditory imagery becomes overwhelming here. Indeed, through Big Boy’s eyes, we are forced to see exactly what happens to his friend: “a black body flashed in the light. Bobo was struggling, twisting; they were binding his arms and legs. [...] a tar-drenched body glistening and turning [...] a writhing white mass cradled in yellow flame (38). And we are forced to smell what Big Boy smells, “the scent of tar, faint at first, then stronger,”

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and hear what Big Boy hears, “screams, one on top of the other, each shriller and shorter than the last.” We cannot help, meanwhile, to note that it is the superficial futility of the white woman’s “scream” that leads to the essential horror of the black boy’s. Here we are finally confronted with the unimaginable pain inflicted as part of the “Rape Complex.”

26 Two shorter texts expose even more deeply the “Rape Complex” as they leave everything out except the body of the victim. First of all, there is the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday and since performed by many other singers. The story is based on a poem by Abel Meeropol, alias Lewis Allan, a Jewish high school teacher and poet-songwriter from the Bronx.4 The poem was first published in The Masses, a Marxist publication. But, as Robert O’Meally puts it in his autobiography of Holiday, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, the songstress “learned the song’s melody and then radically altered it, compressing it into her best range and concentrating its power. In this sense, Holiday, the recomposer, did write the song herself [...] Whatever the name on the sheet music, ‘Strange Fruit’ became an unmistakable part of Billie Holiday’s artistic territory” (qtd. in Griffin 201, n. 4). Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, here is a strange and bitter crop.

27 With its juxtaposition of pastoral elements—trees, leaves, roots, magnolias, fruit, wind, rain, sun, fertility—and of death—blood, bulging eyes, twisted mouth, rot—; with the gallant South next to the brutal monosyllabic verbs pluck, suck, rot, drop, the story makes present all the bodily horrors of the “Rape Complex.”

28 Whereas the small story in song form, “Strange Fruit,” brings together in the purest form lynching victim and region, sufferer and South, a tiny lynching story in blazon- form from Jean Toomer’s poem “Georgia Portraits”5 brings the black body into direct contact with the embodiment of “the gallant South,” the white female body: Hair—braided chestnut, coiled like lyncher’s rope, Eyes—fagots. Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath—the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame. (29)

29 In these lines, as Jay Watson shows, the physical attributes of the Southern woman’s “slim white body” are “balanced directly against the victim’s own: lips to wounds, living breath to dying gasp, intact torso to incinerated one.” Thus, as Watson argues, “the blazon’s anatomizing conventions meet their nightmare image—a perverse anti- blazon—as the poem’s second body materializes to haunt and shadow the exemplary body that occasioned the poem” (4). In fact, in the last, dash-less line, the two bodies

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can be seen to have merged. Thus the poem, as Watson puts it, “brilliantly exploits the irony that it was precisely such entangling intimacies between white women and black men that turn-of-the-century lynching ideology sought to prevent” (4).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bradford, William. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look Magazine (1956). Web. 5/02/2016.

Caldwell, Erskine. “Saturday Afternoon.” 1930. The Stories of Erskine Caldwell. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 28-33. Print.

Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. 1941. New York: Vintage, 1969. Print.

Donald, Nicole M. “Of One Kind or Another”: Rape in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. B.A thesis. Millsaps College, 1999. Print.

Donaldson, Susan V. and Anne Goodwyn Jones. “Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the South Through Gender.” Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Eds. Donaldson and Jones. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. 1-22. Print.

Faulkner, William. “Dry September.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1930. New York: Random House, 1943. 169-83. Print.

Griffin, Farah Jasmin. “Who set you flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Hernton, Calvin. Coming Together: White Hate, Black Power and Sexual Hangups. New York: Random House, 1971. Print.

Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. 1941. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Reviews of American Authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Essays and Reviews. New York: The Viking Press, 1984. Print.

Rice, John R. Sermon. “Negro and White,” Is God a “Dirty Bully”? Wheaton, Illinois: Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1958. Print.

Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. Print.

Smith, Lillian. Killers of the Dream. 1949. New York: Norton, 1994. Print.

___. Strange Fruit. 1944. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 1985. Print.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.

Watson, Jay. Reading for the Body, the Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2012. Print.

Welty, Eudora. The Golden Apples. 1947. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Print.

Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2006. Print.

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Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. 1936. New York: Signet, 1954. Print.

NOTES

1. Indeed, one of Mississippi’s politicians went as far as to state in 1948: “When God made the Southern woman he summoned His angel messengers and He commanded them to go through all the star-strewn vicissitudes of space and gather all there was of beauty, of brightness and sweetness, of enchantment and glamour, and when they returned and laid the golden harvest at His feet He began in their wondering presence the work of fashioning the Southern girl. He wrought with the golden gleam of the starts, with the changing colors of the rainbow’s hues and the pallid silver of the moon. He wrought with the crimson that swooned in the rose’s ruby heart, and the snow that gleams on the lily’s petal; then, glancing down deep into His own bosom, He took the love that gleamed there like pearls beneath the sun-kissed waves of a summer sea, and thrilling this love into the form He had fashioned, all heaven veiled its face, for lo, He had wrought the Southern girl…” (qtd. in Smith 169). 2. Many complimentary explanations have, of course, been given. Males of the higher classes had usually been taken care of, and sometimes even breast-fed, by a black woman, so that their smell, their skin texture and their voices had been woven into the very fabric of their sensuality and desire. Memoirs by white Southerners seem to confirm this never-ending love for the black skin. William Alexander Percy, for instance, expresses it as follows: “I loved her devotedly and never had any other nurse. Everything about her was sweet-smelling, of the right temperature, and dozy. [...] Chiefly I remember her bosom: it was soft and warm, an ideal place to cuddle one’s head against” (26). This romanticized world is conveyed in many white Southerners’ memoirs as well. To give another example, Tennessee Williams writes about “the wild and sweet half- imaginary world” in which he and his sister Rose, together with their “beautiful black nurse Ozzie existed, separate, almost invisible to anyone” (14) and he explains their fondness “of the blacks” as the result of their “devotion to [their] beautiful black nurse Ozzie when [they] were children in Mississippi” (319). 3. The fundamentalist preacher John R. Rice argued that the not guilty verdict was perfectly justified. According to him, the NAACP and other “race agitators” were responsible, rather than any white men. In one of his sermons, “‘Negro and White,’ Is God a ‘Dirty Bully’?” the accusation of having whistled at a white woman is “enhanced” to include an attempt “to embrace and to make a date with and to seduce the young married white woman,” which amounted to a cocky attitude agitators have cultivated among colored people.” Bringing in all of the aspects of the “Rape Complex,” Rice continues: “remember, it was down in the delta country in Mississippi, where a white woman dare not walk the streets alone at night or go anywhere alone at night because of the animosity and the standards of the large Negro population.” (158) 4. Meeropol took the pen name Lewis Allan in commemoration of his two stillborn sons. He and his wife Anne adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert and Michel Rosenberg, six and ten years old, after their parents’ execution for high treason in 1953. 5. This three-part poem was first published in 1923, in the inaugural issue of the journal Modern Review. It was later republished in Cane.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article porte sur le complexe sudiste relatif à la question du viol qui a pour origine l’idée erronée que tout homme noir est constamment à la recherche d’une femme blanche pour l’agresser sexuellement. Ceci repose sur le mythe sudiste selon lequel la femme symbolise la pureté et les bonnes manières et qu’elle représente ainsi la région dans son entier. Toute atteinte à son intégrité est perçue comme un viol, comme un crime contre le Sud. À travers l’étude de plusieurs textes brefs, on remarque combien ces idées sont ancrées dans les mentalités et combien il est difficile d’envisager des rapports interraciaux basés sur des relations seines

AUTHOR

INEKE BOCKTING Ineke Bockting holds doctoral degrees from the Universities of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Montpellier, France. She has taught at Universities in The Netherlands, Norway and France, and she is now a full professor at the Catholic University in Paris. Her publications include articles on various aspects of the American South, ethnic literatures, travel-narrative, autobiography, and literary stylistics and pragmatics, as well as a book length study of the novels of William Faulkner, entitled Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner: a Study in Psychostylistics.

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Ellen Glasgow's "Jordan's End": Antigone in the South

Inès Casas

1 Like the generation of Southern writers who followed her, most notably Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner, Ellen Glasgow was “complexly ambivalent” in her attitude toward the South (D. Holman 87). “I had grown up in the yet lingering fragrance of the old South,” she wrote in A Certain Measure, “and I loved its imperishable charm, even while I revolted from its stranglehold on the intellect. Like the new South, I had inherited the tragic conflict of types” (12). She was, after all, born eight years after the Civil War in the heart of the former Confederacy: in a large house in Richmond, Virginia—the town where she was to spend most of her life. Glasgow’s mother, Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow, came from a family of jurists claiming descent from the early English settlers of Virginia. The evident contrast between her progenitors led Glasgow to experience what she called “a conflict of types,” in her autobiography The Woman Within (16). While her mother was the embodiment of the Southern lady, her father, Francis Thomas Glasgow, a successful businessman who operated the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond from 1849 to 1912, was a living embodiment of all those forces in the postwar South that were steadily transforming its economic and social structures. A descendant of Scottish Calvinists, he represented unbending authority and male power, mainly malevolent, as he combined Calvinist devotion with numerous sexual liaisons— often with the black servants of the house.1 Certainly, the daughter learned from her mother about ancestral pride, the burden of the past and tradition—and, not least, about the sad story of decline. And what is more essential for the purposes of this article, in Ellen Glasgow’s eyes her mother represented the “curious fate of trying to be a Southern lady” (Gray 37): she had lived too much in terms of the burdens she had had to carry, and too little in terms of her own personal needs.

2 Glasgow was aware that in the same instant that the Old South’s extinction after the Civil War was being lamented upon, a mythical South, which had died proudly at Appomattox without ever having been “smirched by the wear and tear of existence” (Gray 42), was being created. So if she became more interested than most other Southern writers in people who were, as she herself put it in The Woman Within,

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“unaware of the changes about them, clinging with passionate fidelity to the empty ceremonial forms of tradition” (193), it is hardly surprising. Those forms, and the conflicts they generated, were felt everywhere in postwar Virginia and the South in general: but they were felt with unusual intensity in the streets of the state and the region where she lived. As a spectator of the disintegration of the Old South, Glasgow’s first instinct was to quarrel with the myths of Southern romanticism, especially those revealing the patriarchal indoctrination of the South.2

3 Structural anthropology, in the tradition of Levi-Strauss or Barthes, reads myths as the expression of a narrative system, designating a level of symbolic or cultural connotation. Glasgow was one of the first Southern writers to challenge extensively the authenticity of the myth of the South and the ensuing patriarchal paradigm. She saw this myth as a collective effort of white male Southerners in power to establish and solidify a societal structure for their apparent benefit, by means of manipulating the other gender, race and classes into believing in the myth. This is in keeping with Roland Barthes’s notion of myth as a form of signification conditioned by ideology which can control and oppress (Mythologies). Against the public yearning, she wished for a different and better South, “not just the simple restoration of past values and mores some of her contemporaries wanted to undertake” (Niewiadowska-Flis 20), and so she bitterly criticized the values of the past.3 As Elizabeth Ammons puts it, Glasgow would write “unpretty, complicated, fierce fiction—not the delicate imaginings of a Lady, which she as the daughter of solid upper-middle-class Virginia parents had been raised to epitomize” (169). Along this line, all the archetypes of the classic story of decay of Southern culture, from Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! are compacted in “Jordan’s End” (1923): the big house, the inbreeding, the madness, the Gothic quality. Glasgow, who was the first Southern writer to use the phrase “Southern gothic” in 1936 in an address she made to a group of librarians at the University of Virginia, uses such elements in “Jordan’s End” to suggest the harsh reality of life in the South, and to convey the idea that danger comes from within, as if, as Brigitte Zaugg has put it, “some invisible canker were gnawing at the South’s entrails and killing it by degrees” (134).4 And such danger, she acknowledged, was especially threatening to women. As one of the leading feminists of that era in the South, she wished to represent female experience in her novels. The “tenaciousness of Glasgow’s wish to free women from bondage and her frustration with male supremacy” cannot be denied (Niewiadowska-Flis 14)—she herself claimed: “I was always a feminist, for I liked intellectual revolt as much as I disliked physical violence” (Woman 163); yet often her feminism became, however unwillingly, tinted with romanticism and sentimentalism.

4 The patriarchal indoctrination of the South created an image of the lady as a “submissive wife, whose reason for being [was] to love, honor, obey, and occasionally amuse her husband, to bring up his children and manage his household” (Scott 4). The cardinal virtues of Victorian women—“piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Welter 152)—well defined Southern white elite women. To force ladies to be a static symbol of the South, patriarchs invented crippling myths of inferiority, innocence and influence, so as to vindicate their hegemony: it was a “conscious male conspiracy” (Frazee 169). Ellen Glasgow penetrated the web of pretences and illusions surrounding the Southern lady’s existence; as Pamela Matthews has put it, she believed that, “whatever the permutations, the male-created ‘woman myths’ … defined women solely from masculine viewpoints” (12). In her essay “Some Literary Woman Myths,” Glasgow stated the following: “It is the peculiar distinction of all woman myths that they were

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not only sanctioned but invented by man. Into their creation has entered many of the major prejudices and a few of the minor prerogatives of the male sex” (36). She effectively realized the menace that the myth of white Southern womanhood posed to female integrity.

5 But on the mythologizing of traditional materials Glasgow said the following: “It was not that I disliked legend. On the contrary, I still believe that legend is the noblest creation of man. But I believe also that legend to be a blessing must be recreated not in funeral wreaths, but in dynamic tradition, and in the living character of a race” (Measure 12). Accordingly, in “Jordan’s End” (1923) Glasgow makes use of the classical myth of Antigone to penetrate the male-created, crippling myths of inferiority and innocence which tied Southern women to their pedestal, as according to Julius Raper, it is a story “about setting the self free of its past” (Sunken 74)—the “female” self, I would specify, as I argue in this article.

6 According to Sophocles, who makes use of the most common form of the legend in his play (442-441 BC), Antigone was the product of the incestuous marriage between King Oedipus of Thebes and his mother Jocasta. In his version, Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices, agreed to alternate rule each year, but when Eteocles decided not to share power with his brother after his tenure was expired, Polynices gathered an army and attacked the city of Thebes in a conflict called the “Seven against Thebes.” The Thebans won the war, but both sons of Oedipus were killed, leaving their uncle Creon as ruler once more, serving as regent for Laodamas, the son of Eteocles. Creon gives Eteocles a full and honorable burial, but orders (under penalty of death) that Polynices’s corpse be left to rot on the battlefield as punishment for his treason. Antigone, who is betrothed to Creon’s son, Haemon, determines this to be unjust, immoral and against the laws of the gods, and defies him by burying her brother. After being found out, she is brought before Creon, to whom she declares that she knew the royal law but chose to break it, expounding upon the superiority of ‘divine law’ to that made by man, and is condemned to be entombed alive in her ancestors’s mausoleum as punishment. Sophocles’s “Antigone” ends in utter disaster, even though Creon finally relents after Tiresias tells him to bury the body. When Creon arrives at the tomb, Antigone has already hanged herself, and his son, Haemon, ends up taking his own life. Queen Eurydice, King Creon’s wife, also kills herself at the end of the story due to seeing such actions allowed by her husband; significantly, she had been forced to weave throughout the entire story and therefore, her death alludes to the Fates.5 Sophocles’s play directly alludes to the subjected position of women in patriarchy, as Antigone’s sister, Ismene, states toward the end of her opening intervention (at this point, Antigone is trying to convince her to bury their brother): Now there are only the two of us, left behind, And see how miserable our end shall be If in the teeth of law we shall transgress Against the sovereign’s decree and power. You ought to realize we are only women, Not meant in nature to fight against men, And that we are ruled, by those who are stronger, To obedience in this and even more painful matters. (Sophocles 141)

7 Like the Greek tragic figure, who defied King Creon by piteously burying Polynices, Judith Jordan questions the Southern moral order by her pious act of euthanasia toward her husband, who like previous generations, suffers from mysterious mental

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and physical ailments which are the result of inbreeding—a notion also present in Antigone’s myth, since she herself is the product of incest.6 It is essential to consider that, thrown back on the defensive after the Civil War, Virginia became a society living perpetually in the shadow of the Civil War, a society oppressively fanatical when dealing with contemporary problems, obsessed by principle, and rapidly suspicious of ideas other than its own. “Jordan’s End” broaches an ethical question, that of euthanasia or beneficent death, which is one of those intolerable themes that runs like an unmentionable current through much writing—it is suggested, for instance, in the ending of Absalom, Absalom! And by associating such an act to the character of Judith, Glasgow defines the new Southern woman as she sees her: independent, self-willed, with the virtues of fortitude and endurance, with that Calvinist “vein of iron” that Glasgow would emphasize in the character of her later female protagonists—especially Dorinda Oakley in Barren Ground (1925) and Ada Fincastle in Vein of Iron (1935). Judith’s act of euthanasia responds to her wish to liberate her husband—death becomes a positive alternative to a life of suffering, which recalls Antigone’s words when facing her punishment: How can such as I, that live among such troubles, not find a profit in death? So for such as me, to face such a fate as this is pain that does not count. (Sophocles 156)

8 But ultimately Judith, like her Biblical namesake, kills the man who had a claim on her. In the Old Testament, Judith saved the city of Bethulia from the Assyrians besieging it by beheading their chief, Holofernes. He had invited her to share his meal and he drank the strong wine she had brought; once he had fallen into a stupor she drew his sword and cut off his head. In Glasgow’s story, Judith presumably kills her husband by making him drink too strong a dose of the opiate—actually the whole phial—the doctor had given her. The subtext is complexly ambivalent, as biblical Judith functions as an instrument of the patriarchal system who eventually kills the man who was bound to subject her.7

9 So, if like Judith, the Southern lady and her adolescent counterpart, the southern belle, rebelliously challenged the assumptions of patriarchy and departed from the domestic ideal, her defiance would have implications extending beyond her own existence: women who “asked for greater scope for [their] gifts [than domesticity] … were tampering with society, undermining civilization” (Welter 172). Thus, women apparently had two options: either accept the myth as a viable option for their lives, and in so doing deface their real selves, or reject deference to the patriarch, which translated into social oblivion. But in fact, there is a third option: silence, and no less effective: rebellion. In “Jordan’s End,” Glasgow appears to defy genteel traditions and subvert the situation in which Southern women are unable to redefine their roles, for she knew that if Southern women continued to acquiesce in having their lives shaped, limited and crippled by patriarchs, “they would never find the strength and courage to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal oppression” (Niewiadowska-Flis 107).8

10 However, even though Judith defies this patriarchal order by not adhering to the alleged morality expected of a Southern lady, at the very same time that she is likened to the Greek heroine, she is forced into the oppressive mythical ideal of the Angel in the House.9 She appears distanced, idealized, on a pedestal to the eyes of the narrator: Against the gray sky and the black intersecting branches of the cedar, her head, with its austere perfection, was surrounded by that visionary air of legend. So Antigone might have looked on the day of her sacrifice, I reflected. I had never seen

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a creature who appeared so withdrawn, so detached, from all human associations. It was as if some spiritual isolation divided her from her kind. […] Her step was so slow, so unhurried, that I remember thinking she moved like one who had all eternity before her. (214)

11 As in “Dare’s Gift” (1917), Glasgow uses a male narrator as a reminder of women’s entrapment in male narratives that endorse male entitlement within the patriarchal system.10 Judith, despite her “unconventional”, transgressing acts, is placed on the pedestal by a male narrative voice that idealizes her from their very first encounter, with echoes of Platonism—regarding her utter perfection—and Renaissance canons of beauty: That was thirty years ago; I am not young any longer; I have been in many countries since then, and looked on many women; but her face, with that wan light on it, is the last one I shall forget in my life. Beauty! Why, that woman will be beautiful when she is a skeleton, was the thought that flashed into my mind. She was very tall, and so thin that her flesh seemed faintly luminous, as if an inward light pierced the transparent substance. It was the beauty, not of earth, but of triumphant spirit. Perfection, I suppose, is the rarest thing we achieve in this world of incessant compromise with inferior forms; yet the woman who stood there in that ruined place appeared to me to have stepped straight out of legend or allegory. The contour of her face was Italian in its pure oval; her hair swept in wings of dusk above her clear forehead; and from the faintly shadowed hollows beneath her brows, the eyes that looked at me were purple-black, like pansies. (207)11

12 In the tradition of the Female Gothic, the result is twofold. On the one hand, Judith is literally imprisoned within a Poesque house functioning as patriarchal metonym. Houses of Gothic fiction are both literal places of residence and metaphoric descriptions of the family called by its patriarchal name. The name Jordan’s End has its origin both in the geographical location of the house, at the end of a rough country road, and in the family who erected the house and have been living there for several generations; as the story unfolds it becomes clear that it also stands for the fate awaiting all its members, including Judith—the influence of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is clear in the dual symbolism of this name. As in Poe’s story, in “Jordan’s End” the analogy between place and the Jordans is made explicit in the narrator’s comparison: “A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile” (208). But on the other hand, the result is also structural imprisonment. Despite her final rejection of deference to myth, Judith is silenced and caged just as Antigone is condemned to be entombed alive, for the narrator’s idealization of her denies her the right to redefine her heritage in her own terms and free herself from the shackles of patriarchal oppression. The house is a place restricting language and free expression; this is mainly due to its oppressive atmosphere, but there are other elements that contribute to such a depiction. For instance, the presence of the three old Jordan women, who are dressed in mourning even though their respective husbands are not dead but locked up in an asylum, serves as a reminder of the past and the family history and they simultaneously fulfil a proleptic function, showing what Judith is bound to become if she remains in the place: But the dread was there at that moment, and it was not lessened by the glimpse I caught, at the foot of the spiral staircase, of a scantily furnished room, where three lean black-robed figures, as impassive as the Fates, were grouped in front of a wood fire. They were doing something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw? (210)

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13 Their black garments, together with their leanness, make them figures of death—an image reinforced by their being in front of the fire. Their exact activity remains unclear to the narrator, but he understands that they are “doing something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw.” This fits in with their being compared to the Fates, the three women in Greek mythology who control the metaphorical thread of life —again, Glasgow makes effective use of mythical intertextuality. In such an environment, Judith is not only a prisoner of the walls but seems also to be held under a spell, tongue-tied, and denied the possibility of voicing her fears, especially when indoors. Pamela Mathews sees this as part of the female heritage at Jordan’s End: “stay in the house, shoulder domestic responsibility, protect the men, and do not tell your own story” (145). The house, therefore, is an instrument of oppression and imprisonment because as the symbol of domesticity it provides Judith’s only sphere.

14 In her rewriting of the myth of Antigone, Glasgow exposes, via Judith, the psychological injuries imposed by such a rigid society, as her most positive, life-affirming action remains an act of rebellion.12 The patriarchal paradigm still silences and imprisons women within male-created models of femininity that do not allow for self-definition and independence; and transgressing such models is out of the question, as the story suggests. There is no room for rebellious Antigones in the old South of moonlight and magnolias: they threaten the stability of the oppressive myth created by white male Southerners to solidify a societal structure for their apparent benefit. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that in Judith is the sketch of the woman that Glasgow casts in her masterpiece Barren Ground (1925) as the figure best able to assuage the anxieties of the developing New South. If life is difficult to endure, Ellen Glasgow insisted that the pioneers and their descendants had the “vein of iron” she described in Dorinda Oakley to meet its sometimes unexpected and inexplicable demands; they possessed “moral integrity, self-reliance, devotion to a cause of their own or of God’s formulation, endurance, and fortitude” (McDowell 205). At the end of “Jordan’s End,” before bidding farewell to the narrator, Judith acknowledges that she will remain where she has suffered and endured. She is tied to the land and what it represents, but like Dorinda, she will face her plight with stoic endurance: “As long as the old people live, I am tied here. I must bear it out to the end. When they die, I shall go away and find work. […] While my boy needs me, there is no release.” (215)

15 The very last passage of the short story presents a Dorinda-like figure, unattainable, beyond the reach and comprehension of the narrator, who still keeps forcing her into his subjective idealized models of feminine virtue and misinterprets her refusal to take his hand: I held out my hand, but she did not take it; and I felt that she meant me to understand, by her refusal, that she was beyond all consolation and all companionship. She was nearer to the bleak sky and the deserted fields than she was to her kind. (216)

16 Despite the bleak and ambiguous ending, subject to heated critical debate, I believe that there is still a subtle glimmer of hope, as Judith intrinsically represents renewal. Benjamin, her nine-year old boy, is not the product of inbreeding, as Judith is only a Jordan by marriage; above all, the fact that she is an outsider to that family in a state of “abject decay” who can question the mores and models of such a society presents a possible alternative. All in all, Judith, like Dorinda, seems in many ways an archetypal female martyr of the New South; a Southern Antigone who, by her selfless sacrifice and

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her fortitude, questions oppressive male-created myths and brings the past into a dynamically creative, rather than destructive, relationship with the present.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.

Barnes, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” Incest and the Literary Imagination. Ed. Elizabeth Barnes. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2002. 1-16. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc., 2012. Print.

Frazee, Monique Parent. “Ellen Glasgow as Feminist.” Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1976. 167-187. Print.

Glasgow, Ellen. A Certain Measure: an Interpretation of Prose Fiction. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943. Print.

---. “Dare’s Gift.” The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow. Ed. Richard K. Meeker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1966. 90-118. Print.

---. “Jordan’s End.” The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow. Ed. Richard K. Meeker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1966. 203-16. Print.

---. The Sheltered Life. New York: Penguin, 1933. Print.

---. “Some Literary Woman Myths.” Ellen Glasgow’s Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of her Writings. Ed. Julius Rowan Raper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. 36-45. Print.

---. The Woman Within: An Autobiography. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia, 1954. Print.

Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Classical Mythology. London: J. M. Dent, 1993. Print.

Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000. Print.

Gwin, Minrose. “Nonfelicitous Space and Survivor Discourse: Reading the Incest Story in Southern Women’s Fiction.” Haunted Bodies: Rethinking the South through Gender. Eds. Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. 416-40. Print.

Holman, David Marion. A Certain Slant of Light: Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. Print.

Holman, Hugh. The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2009. Print.

MacKethan, Lucinda H. Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. Print.

Matthews, Pamela R. Ellen Glasgow and a Woman’s Traditions. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994. Print.

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McDowell, Frederick P. W. Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1963. Print.

Niewiadomska-Flis, Urszula. Aristocratic Ethos in Ellen Glasgow’s and Walker Percy’s Fiction. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2011. Print.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. Print.

Raper, Julius Rowan. From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980. Print.

Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1970. Print.

Sophocles. “Antigone.” The Theban Plays. Eds. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. 137-88. Print.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151-74. Print.

Zaugg, Brigitte. “Ellen Glasgow’s Gothic Streak: ‘Jordan’s End’.” Nouvelles du Sud: Hearing Voices, Reading Stories. Ed. Marie Liénard-Yeterian and Gérald Préher. Palaiseau: Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2007. 123-38. Print.

NOTES

1. As Richard Gray puts it, “the conflict is so fundamental, in fact, that it seems almost too pat, too neat” (37): the female emblem of the Old South and the male emblem of the New South, the romance of the past and the reality of the present, the fluid, yielding, feminine and the rigid, authoritative masculine. What Glasgow’s self-analyses in The Woman Within tend to leave out of account, however, are elements in herself that for whatever reason she wanted to deny or suppress and her double-edged relationship with the inheritances of her family and her region. Her fiction is a compelling hybrid, because it not only diagnoses historical tensions in her native Virginia, but also offers an analysis of the symptoms of those tensions; it explains what it was like to live in difficult place during times of turmoil. 2. The myths of Southern romanticism as Glasgow interprets them are those male-created notions that aim to control women by subjecting them to an idealized set of expectations, in order to consolidate a societal structure for the benefit of patriarchy (e.g. the Southern belle, the Southern lady). 3. Lucinda MacKethan describes Glasgow’s use and revision of the past as the idea of the “prodigal daughter”: her homecoming is marked “not with repentance nor with a request to return to the old order,” but with the assertion to rewrite patriarchal definitions (38). Glasgow returns through memory to her daughterhood home, but assesses that home “with writer’s eyes” (40). 4. Glasgow’s novels are permeated with a sense of evil. Hugh Holman indicates that this sense of the blackness at the center of life is certainly not uniquely Southern, “but it is a portion of the Southern vision of experience to a greater extent than it is of that of any other region in America” (113). The sense of evil in Glasgow’s work is coupled with pessimism about human potential—an awareness of man’s imperfectability and inadequacy. The world for her is not and probably will never be civilized (Measure 38-39). Humans—especially women—are subject to hopeless oppression. As Glasgow puts it, “people who have tradition are oppressed by tradition, and people who are without it are oppressed by the lack of it—or by whatever else they have put

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in its place” (Sheltered 295). She could never recall a time when “the pattern of society, as well as the scheme of things in general, had not seemed to [her] false and even malignant” (Woman 42). 5. The Fates are usually conceived as three female deities who supervise fate rather than determine it. To Hesiod the Fates were three in number, the daughters of Nyx (‘night’): Clotho (‘the spinner’), Lachesis (‘the drawing of lots’) and Atropos (‘inevitable’). In Greek tradition, the name Clotho with its reference to spinning gave rise to the picture of the Fates as three old women, spinning out men’s destinies like thread: one drew them out, one measured them, and one cut them off (Grant and Hazel 137-38). 6. As many critics before have noted, charges of incest have historically been aimed at marginal or underprivileged groups or areas as a way of demonizing them (Barnes 4). Minrose Gwin has observed that incest narratives “have long circulated in Southern popular culture and in popular culture about the South” (416). Gwin argues that Southern women’s fictional stories of father- daughter incest create a space for actual survival and resistance by questioning the ideological construction of the Southern patriarchal home and the identity that “home” and “place” impose upon Southern daughters, a notion relevant to the reading of “Jordan’s End” presented in this article. Such stories rebel against the Southern patriarch’s ownership of female bodies and insist upon the necessity for Southern women, like Judith, to write their own cultural scripts. 7. Many thanks to Dr. Emmanuel Verdanakis for pointing this out during the presentation of a version of this paper at the conference Southern Short Fiction: Representation and Rewriting of Myth (Lille Catholic University, June 20-22, 2013). 8. Pamela Matthews explains Glasgow’s defiance of the patriarchal order in terms of writing: “To write women’s lives, whether actual or fictional […] requires outright defiance, a quietly rebellious subversion, or, less productively for the woman writer, deception that often comes dangerously near self-delusion and loss of identity” (10). 9. The expression Angel in the House is taken from the title of a 1854 narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he provides an idealized account of his first wife, Emily, whom he believed to be the perfect woman. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular during the later 19th century. Following the publication of Patmore’s poem, the term Angel in the House came to be used in reference to women who embodied the Victorian feminine ideal: a wife and mother who was selflessly devoted to her children and submissive to her husband. 10. Both “Dare’s Gift” and “Jordan’s End” are set in symbolic country houses that exert a moral influence over their inhabitants, and in each the unnamed narrator’s gender, although obscure, is detected by their activities—male professions at the time the story is set. In “Jordan’s End” the narrator is a doctor, and “Dare’s Gift” begins with the narrator describing himself as leading “the ordinary life of a corporation lawyer in Washington” (90). 11. The canon of beauty in the Renaissance period was derived from those prevalent in Ancient Greek and Roman art, highlighting the importance of mathematical proportion and order. Beautiful feminine features were pale skin, strawberry blond hair, a sharply-defined chin, high delicate eyebrows, a strong nose and full lips. 12. As Peggy Prenshaw notes, Glasgow would create characters who exposed “the psychological injuries imposed by a rigid, often reactionary society and whose most positive, life-affirming actions would be rebellions” (218).

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ABSTRACTS

En tant que spectatrice de la désintégration du vieux Sud, Ellen Glasgow vécut de si près ce qu’elle appela « le triomphe de l’idéalisme sur l’actualité en Virgine » que sa première réaction fut d’affronter les mythes faciles du Sud romantique, en particulier ceux révélant de l’endoctrinement patriarcal. Dans « Jordan’s End » (1923), elle a recours au mythe classique d’Antigone afin d’élucider les mythes écrasants de l’infériorité et de l’innocence crées par le patriarcat et qui maintiennent les femmes attachées à leur piédestal. Tout comme le personnage de la tragédie grecque qui défia le roi Créon en enterrant pieusement Polynice, Judith Jordan remet en question l’ordre moral du Sud en commettant, par pitié, l’acte de l’euthanasie. Malgré son ultime refus de se soumettre au mythe, Judith est réduite au silence structurel et piégée, tout comme Antigone fut condamnée à être ensevelie vivante, car l’idéalisation que fait le narrateur d’elle lui nie le droit de redéfinir son héritage dans ses propres mots et de se libérer du carcan de l’oppression patriarcale.

AUTHORS

INÈS CASAS Inés Casas is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she is a member of the research group “Literature and Culture of the US.” Her PhD traces the regional elements present in the work of Southern women writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Madox Roberts or Caroline Gordon. She has recently completed articles on Ellen Glasgow’s representation of her conflicted Southern identity in her novel Barren Ground and on the intersections of natural imagery and space in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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Susana Maria Jiménez-Placer

The Mammy Image: Between the Old South and the New South

1 The idealization of the South started before the Civil War, but it was after the Reconstruction period that the past of this region of the United States acquired a mythical status: according to Grace Elizabeth Hale in her book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, “not until the federal government had repudiated Reconstruction and repealed the Civil Rights Act did the plantation past become for many whites a time and space of pleasure and escape, the ‘Old’ South understood as ‘a golden age of perfect race, class, and gender harmony’” (52-53). The term “Old South” refers to an idealized, pastoral version of the antebellum South, represented as a land of prosperous plantations inhabited by honest gentlemen, elegant belles, virtuous ladies and happy slaves, who were grateful and faithful to their masters in exchange for the latter’s care and protection. Prominent among these faithful slaves was the figure of “mammy,” a popular cartoonish representation of African American women between the 1820s and the mid twentieth century.

2 According to Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, the term mammy goes back as early as the 1810s, when it referred to African American women taking care of white children, but its association with a series of stereotypical features was not prominent in literature until the mid-nineteenth century, more or less coinciding with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852: I define the standard, most recognizable mammy character as a creative combination of extreme behavior and exaggerated features. Mammy’s body is

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grotesquely marked by excess: she is usually extremely overweight, very tall, broad-shouldered; her skin is nearly black. She manages to be a jolly presence […] and a strict disciplinarian at the same time. First as slave, then as a free woman, the mammy is largely associated with the care of white children or depicted with noticeable attachment to white children. Her unprecedented devotion to her white family reflects her racial inferiority. Mammy is often both her title and the only name she has ever been given. She may also be a cook or personal maid to her mistress—a classic Southern belle—whom she infantilizes. Her clothes are typical of a domestic […] Her own children are usually dirty and ill-mannered […] She is typically depicted as impatient or brusque […] with her own children, in contrast to her lavish, affectionate patience for her white charges. Mammy wields considerable authority within the plantation household and consequently retains a measure of dubious, unreliable respect in the slave quarters. (Wallace-Sanders 5-6)

3 In the 1890s, just a few decades after the publication of Stowe’s novel, these features were popularized through the trademark image of Aunt Jemima, introduced by Nancy Green, “a fifty-nine-year-old servant for a Chicago judge” (Manring 75), at the World’s Columbian Exposition of May-November 1893 in Chicago.1

4 The mammy image became an essential ingredient in what Hale calls “the fiction of continuity,” which characterized the New South after the Reconstruction period: according to her “images of integrated domesticity were central to this fiction of continuity as African American servants, symbolized and idealized most frequently as mammy, replaced slaves” (87). Thus, although at that time the domestic space was a site of drastic changes as a consequence of the gradual replacement of the old traditional plantation households by the homes of a new white middle class in the South,2 the presence of African American domestics in the kitchens of the new white homes kept the illusion or “representation of continuity between old and new” alive in the New South (Hale 93). Ironically, while racial segregation was rampant in the Southern public space, the domestic space became “an island of racial mixing” (Hale 87), where interaction between white housewives and children on the one hand, and their African American domestics on the other, was allowed, expected and to a certain extent welcomed as a recreation of the past.

5 In order to keep the illusion of continuity alive, black domestics were expected to perform the role of loving mammies devoted to their white families regardless of exploitive work conditions. According to Rebecca Sharpless, “White people expected certain highly prescribed behaviors from their African American employees” (134), and African American employees felt compelled to fulfill these expectations. As Micky McElya states, “Black domestic workers […] faced a white popular culture that persistently conflated or compared their work and their lives with the fictitious mammy figure” (208). McElya goes even further to conclude that “the continuing effects of both racial slavery and popular historical memory shaped twentieth-century domestic work” (209) in such a pervasive way that it also spread north: “the long- standing national romance with the plantation idyll and its narrative of the faithful slave also shaped the desires and expectations of white employers outside the South who hired recently migrated black women” (214).

6 Although the mammy image was shaped primordially by the expectations and demands of the white people’s imagination and its popularity reached a peak in the first decades of the twentieth century, its origin is found not so much in the experiences of actual slave women—who were called mammies—as in the combination of the workings of the whites’ imagination and the black slaves’ strategies for survival. According to Hale,

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white-crafted representations of slave and ex-slave identity were not, especially in the antebellum South, created in isolation. Instead, in a dangerous dialectic, slaves constructed masks of simplemindedness and sycophancy, loyalty and laziness to play to their owners’ fantasies and desires while securing very material benefits— more food and movement, less work and control—in return. (16)

7 She goes on to assert that “The problem was that these ‘play things,’ these masks […] became the reality of black existence for most white Americans” (17). The mammy image constituted one of these masks, probably the most popular one for African American women, although as Hale specifies “Southern whites in particular missed the performance, and usually confused slave and ex-slave masks with black selves” (17).

8 The confusion between black masks and black selves is evident in many of the literary works written by white writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the case of the mammy mask, this confusion may even account for the historical, critical and literary disregard which according to Wallace-Sanders has affected the treatment of the black mammies’ biological experience of motherhood (5, 7). The adoption of the mammy image demanded from black women an almost complete devotion to their white charges, which left them with little energy, space and time for their own children. For this reason, in the Southern imagination, mammies were childless or they seemed to be so, given the invisibility of their own children. Thus the mask of the black mammy was designed to cover up both the self of the black woman and that of the black mother.

9 One of the central tasks assigned to black mammies in the Old South was the transmission and promotion of white supremacist values and the white social order. In her article “The Black Mammy in the Plantation Household” published in the Journal of Negro History in 1938, Jessie W. Packhurst “defined the accomplishments of the mammy as enforcing the master’s rules, helping the other slaves to follow them, and minimizing punishment when they were broken. The mammy taught white children when to speak and not to speak, how to dress and eat, and told black children what whites expected of them” (qtd. in Manring 31). As the embodiment of “the fiction of continuity between the Old South and the new Southern world” (Hale 101), the black mammy was supposed to perform a similar role in the context of the New South: thus she was expected to respect and even actively support and promote white supremacist attitudes which defined segregation as the new Southern racial order (Hale 102). The mere presence of a black mammy made a white home “a central site for the production and reproduction of racial identity precisely because it remained a space of integration within an increasingly segregated world” (Hale 94). As a result, it was at home that white children began to learn the meaning of race and to absorb the ideology of white supremacy and black inferiority.

10 Within the context of the New South, most Southern whites adopted a sentimental, conformist and uncritical attitude when remembering and reviewing their own childhood process of learning the meaning of race at home (Hale 98, 104). Since race awareness was usually prompted by contact with a black domestic, African-American domestic workers fell victim to whites’ sentimentality and were remembered unrealistically as stereotypical mammies. According to Hale, “For most middle-class white Southerners [mammy] taught them to be themselves, an identity as white that gained its power in part through the unself-consciousness with which it was held. Their conception of the naturalness of their own racial identities blinded them to the contradictions of learning whiteness […] from black women” (104).

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11 In contrast, a few white Southerners showed a less conformist reaction to the racial lessons which they were supposed to learn at home: Hale mentions passages from the fiction and memoirs of writers such as Sara Haardt, Ellen Glasgow, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, and especially Lillian Smith, where they recall “the home-centered scenes in which their racial epiphanies occurred” (94) under a more critical light than offered by their contemporaries. Here the writers focus on the disturbing effects of “their racial epiphanies” as enlightening moments which eventually helped them open their eyes not only “to the contradictions of learning whiteness […] from black women,” but also to the injustice fueled by the racist discrimination and segregation of the New South. According to popular sentimental accounts, the black mammy’s contribution to the process of making ladies out of white girls was essential; in the more critical accounts black domestics are usually seen as influential companions for white girls who do not fit the stereotypical image of Southern femininity, white girls who, for this reason, are characterized as tomboys.

12 According to Constante González Groba, tomboyism usually implies a redefinition of traditional gender roles and established white supremacist notions: as González Groba suggests, in order to question not only traditional gender expectations and heterosexuality itself, but also the monolithic construction of whiteness white tomboys are usually conveniently associated with the non-white (280). As a consequence of segregation everywhere, except in the white homes, this non-white element is often provided by an African American domestic. Susan Tucker corroborates this point when in her presentation of testimonies of black and white Southern women she concludes that “white girls, as they grew up, did draw from black women many of their learned behaviors. This was particularly true among those white women who felt most keenly the social changes concerning the roles of women in recent years” (132). These white girls were thus exposed not only to the contradictions of the mask of white femininity which they had to wear, but also to the artificiality of the color line and the mammy mask which their black domestics were forced to wear in front of the white world.

13 Within the context of Southern short fiction, one of the most prominent examples of the conflicted white girl is provided by Katherine Anne Porter’s literary alter ego: Miranda. Much has been said about the influence of Grandmother, Sophia Jane, on Miranda’s development, while the relationship between this white girl and her black mammy, Aunt Nannie, has received comparatively scarce critical attention, in spite of the fact that, as Tucker states, “Katherine Anne Porter, in ‘The Last Leaf,’ is one of the few white writers who shows a black domestic growing very old and tired” (107).3 “The Old Order” focuses on Miranda’s growing up and her confrontation with several aspects of human nature; therefore, Porter’s relative originality in her treatment of Aunt Nannie suggests an interest in underlining the role that this black character plays in Miranda’s development.4

“The Faithful Old Servant Nannie”: Blackness between Brackets

14 In “The Old Order,” Miranda’s Grandmother is identified as “The Source,” the origin of the family order and the protector of the old white code of behavior to be passed on to the younger generations, although in “The Journey” her role as guardian of the old order depends on her ability to conceal her own youthful misgivings about the

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demands of Southern ladyhood. In contrast with Grandmother’s definition as “The Source,” Aunt Nannie is “The Last Leaf” in her old age, the last vestige of the old order: her attitude in this sketch brings to the fore the instability of the white code and of the myth of the Old South, although in her case the end of the old order is not portrayed as a catastrophe but as the promise of a more genuine future. Thus, Aunt Nannie eventually triumphs where Grandmother failed: in contrast with Grandmother, who despite her misgivings never completely liberates herself from the gender constraints of the Southern order, Aunt Nannie eventually liberates herself from its gender and racial constraints.

15 In “The Journey,” we learn that as a child, Aunt Nannie was purchased at bargain price by Sophia Jane’s father, who eventually gave her as a gift to his young spoiled daughter. As Hardy has observed, from this moment onwards Aunt Nannie’s development in “The Old Order” is parallel to that of Miranda’s grandmother until the latter’s death (40): when they were children they were playmates; when Sophia Jane got married Aunt Nannie was married off to another slave; then both of them started their “terrible race of procreation” (CS 334);5 and when they were old, they spent most of their time together taking care of their grandchildren and talking about the old times. Sophia Jane and Aunt Nannie’s friendship is such that in their old age they hope they will be allowed to share their afterlife in heaven.

16 Throughout Sophia Jane’s life Nannie behaves as a faithful mate and servant, and Sophia Jane as a kind, sympathetic mistress: if “Grandmother’s rôle was authority,” Aunt Nannie “had all her life obeyed the authority nearest to her” (CS 328). At first sight, their relationship is one of perfect harmony, thus symbolizing the balance and stability characterizing the paternalism that supposedly ruled race relationships in the Old South. But far from offering a sentimental account, Porter’s story often hints at the high price Aunt Nannie has more or less consciously paid for such a friendship. In spite of the benevolent and friendly treatment she has apparently received from her mistress, the degrading conditions that black women were forced to experience is obvious: Aunt Nannie served twice as a gift for Sophia Jane, first after having suffered the traumatic and dehumanizing experience of being purchased by Sophia Jane’s father, and then after having been married off for the sole purpose of being given as a wedding present to her mistress; from an early age she had felt she was lucky to live in the white house, but this meant her separation from her parents who were field hands and lived in the slave quarters; and in contrast with Sophia Jane, who in her old age “could still point to nine of her” eleven children, Nannie had given birth to thirteen children, but had lost ten of them.

17 Most of these hardships are treated in Porter’s story in a misleading matter-of-fact way, probably to suggest a generalized passivity and the self-deception in race relations from which at least part of Southern society suffered: the paternalistic distortion was so pervasive that, according to Sally McMillen, during the Civil War many Southern ladies were shocked to discover that slaves did not like slavery and servitude (148). In Porter’s story this paternalistic misconception distorts Nannie’s self-image to the extent that even in her old age she seems to feel as grateful to the white family as she felt at the beginning of her relationship with Sophia Jane: “A good worming had cured Nannie’s potbelly, she thrived on plentiful food and a species of kindness not so indulgent, maybe, as that given to puppies; still it more than fulfilled her notions of good fortune” (CS 332). This is probably the reason why, although “Emancipation

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seemed to set right a wrong that stuck in her heart like a thorn” (CS 336), and although she could not understand the reason “why God, Whom she loved, had seen fit to be so hard on a whole race because they had got a certain kind of skin” (CS 336), her attitude during Grandmother’s life is not resentful. Nannie simply accepts her lot without worrying about the injustice, prejudice and abuse which it conveys: “Old Nannie had no ideas at all as to her place in the world. It had been assigned to her before birth” (CS 328).

18 Nannie’s “notions of good fortune,” her consequent lack of resentment and her conformist attitude make her a perfect candidate to wear the mask of a faithful mammy, and this is what she does for most of her life until Grandmother’s death. Nannie’s adoption of this role starts early when as a child Sophia Jane inscribes her name in the family Bible, thus symbolically ratifying her inscription in the white order and her adoption of a place within this established order. Significantly, the entry written by Sophia Jane is “Nannie Gay …. (black)” (CS 329), suggesting that although Nannie’s place in the white world will be conditioned by her being black, her role will require the suspension of a part of her true self: her blackness. Fitting into the white world forces Nannie to perform a black role and wear a black mask designed by whites. It is paradoxically meant to keep her blackness between brackets, thus symbolically concealing and limiting the range of possibilities of her self as a black woman.

Blackness Rediscovered: “The Faithful Old Servant Nannie” Becomes “an Aged Bantu Woman”

19 Nannie’s conformism and lack of resentment suggests that she is not aware of the restrictions her mammy role puts on her racial identity until Grandmother, her sponsor in the white order, dies and symbolically liberates her. Therefore, in “The Last Leaf,” after Grandmother’s death announces the imminent collapse of the white order, Nannie is given the chance to discover the blackness without brackets which Porter overtly associates with her ancestral African past when she describes Nannie in her old age as “an aged Bantu woman” and compares her face with an all-black “eyeless mask” (CS 349) reminiscent of the African masks.

20 At first sight in “The Last Leaf” Porter suggests that Nannie’s end of life discovery of her all-black Bantu identity functions as a rebuke to the white children’s image of her as “the faithful old servant Nannie,” “a real member of the family, perfectly happy with them” (CS 349). But Porter does not seem to be completely satisfied with this simplistic definition of Nannie’s new liberated self merely in terms of her black ancestral past, and adds information about how “now and then” Nannie chooses to wear her old mammy mask and perform her mammy role in the white house of the white family: on these occasions “She would again for a moment be the amiable, dependent, like-one-of- the-family old servant” (CS 350). This seems to be how Nannie manages to reconcile her past at the service of the white order and of her new black self reminiscent of her ancestral African past. Thus what Porter suggests in “The Last Leaf” is in accordance with the conclusion she reaches at the end of “Old Mortality” when she describes Miranda’s attitude with the words “her hopefulness, her ignorance” (CS 221) to discredit the white girl’s determination to build a new self and a new life totally independent from her family and her family past. Similarly in “The Last Leaf” Porter does not seem comfortable presenting Nannie’s liberated self simply as that of an aged

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Bantu woman. She suggests that Nannie’s true self can never depend on the utter erasure of her personal past. Nannie needs a self that can integrate her past life immersed in the white old order and her ancestral African past; the black mask designed by whites and her new black face “like an eyeless mask”; her old identity as “the faithful old servant Nannie, a freed slave,” and her new identity as “an aged Bantu woman of independent means” (CS 349). Nannie’s dilemma somehow condenses that experienced by many African Americans whose attempts to give voice to this conflict by resorting to artistic, literary, political or social means reached a peak during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

21 Porter’s sketch was published in January 1935 and probably written in 1933 or 1934 (DeMouy 207), when the artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance were already addressing central issues concerning the question of African American identity. In the South, segregation was still the law, the Civil Rights Movement was relatively far away in the horizon, and Martin Luther King had not dreamt his dream of freedom and racial integration yet. For a white Southern writer like Porter, the elaboration of a solution for Nannie’s dilemma was probably too difficult a task… Her final proposal fails to perfectly integrate Aunt Nannie’s two selves, though it reconciles them by allowing her to choose freely. After Grandmother’s death Nannie is an aged Bantu woman who occasionally chooses to rely upon her mammy mask to evince that her life as mammy was and still is indispensable for the white family, and to denounce the white family’s laziness as well as the lack of effectivity of the white order when deprived of the work provided by her in her mammy role. Now Nannie is free to wear her mask when she chooses to and she is aware that she is wearing it.

22 To reinforce this complexity, the narrator reminds us in the last two paragraphs of the old days and recalls Nannie’s vindication of the authority associated with her mammy role whenever Harry, Miranda’s father, “stood out against her word in some petty dispute” (CS 351). Nannie’s attitude as well as Harry’s reaction suggest to what extent the black woman and her former white charge had interiorized the conventions that ruled their black mammy-white child relationship. The conventionality and artificiality at the basis of their relationship are underlined by the fact that in the past, when Nannie vindicated her authority, she did so on the grounds that Harry had fed at her breasts though he “knew this was not literally true” (CS 351) and both had assumed their roles to the extent that what was literally true had become secondary. This emphasizes the artifice surrounding the mammy mask and gives us a glimpse of Nannie’s taking advantage of her role.

The Reaction of Miranda’s Family

23 Harry’s daughter, Miranda, is one of the white children that witness the collapse of the old order when Grandmother dies and Nannie leaves the white house to live in “a little cabin across the narrow creek” (CS 348). Although it is her elder sister Maria that “years afterward […] thought with a pang, they had not really been so very nice to Aunt Nannie” (CS 348), we suspect that Miranda, like the other children, is also chastened by Aunt Nannie’s attitude after Grandmother’s death, and that like the rest of the family she is “surprised, a little wounded,” and even

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astonish[ed] to discover that Nannie had always liked and hoped to own certain things, she had seem so contented and wantless. She moved away, and as the children said afterwards to each other, it was almost funny and certainly very sweet to see how she tried not to be too happy the day she left, but they felt rather put upon, just the same. (CS 349)

24 The reaction of Miranda’s family suggests the same blindness and self-deception affecting Southerners who, during the Civil War, were shocked to discover that their slaves did not like slavery, as mentioned above. Nannie’s new attitude functions as a symbolic crack in her mammy mask, which causes mental confusion and mixed feelings in Miranda and the other children as they are suddenly exposed to the fragility of the race relationships that they had taken for granted. Nannie’s crack functions as a fracture that offers them a glimpse of the artificiality of the old order, and as a destabilizing force uprooting the ideological system which until now had provided stability to their lives: the ideology of white male supremacy disguised as paternalism.

25 The mental and ideological confusion caused by Nannie’s attitude and its destabilizing power finds expression in the symbolic collapse of the domestic order after she leaves: They [the children] missed Nannie every day. As their fortunes went down, and they had very few servants, they needed her terribly. They realized how much the old woman had done for them, simply by seeing how, almost immediately after she went, everything slackened, lost tone, went off edge. Work did not accomplish itself as it once had. (CS 349-50)

26 Miranda and the other children are forced to realize to what extent the white order had depended literally, as well as symbolically, on Nannie’s performance. By wearing her mammy mask and assuming her identity as “(black),” Nannie had contributed to the perpetuation not only of the domestic but also of the ideological order of her white family. From her position as a “(black)” mammy within the domestic sphere, she had actively participated in the promotion of the ideology of the white supremacy, especially among children, and as a consequence her new old age attitude as “an aged Bantu woman” brings to the fore the existence of contradictions and inconsistencies in this same ideology. From this perspective, although Porter’s work focuses on questions of gender rather than race, it displays a racial awareness reminiscent of that which Hale discerns in the works of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin or Lillian Smith (94).

27 Although Porter does not develop this theme further and there is not a clear experience we may classify as a racial epiphany for Miranda in “The Old Order,” it is clear that Aunt Nannie lives long enough to be a living lesson on race and race relationships especially for children. Nannie’s occasional visits to the home of the white family and the temporary recovery of her mammy role give the white children like Miranda a last glimpse of the old order and its paternalistic conception of race relationships. Nevertheless, the visits are depicted as fleeting moments, as extraordinary events purposely designed to highlight their contrast with the more permanent state of present decay and chaos. As a result, these extraordinary moments seem to convey a transitionary and illusory quality that suggests both the anachronism and the artificial character of the old racial harmony which they supposedly recreate. Moreover, Nannie’s temporary adoption of her mammy mask during these visits repeatedly exposes the children to the distance that separates Nannie the “(black)” mammy and Nannie the independent black woman, thus casting serious doubt on the reality and genuineness of both these moments and the old days they recreate.

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Ironically, in these visits, it is Nannie that treats the white family with condescension and a bit of paternalism.

Aunt Nannie’s Contribution to Miranda’s Tomboyism

28 As suggested above, in “The Last Leaf,” there is no racial epiphany for Miranda, who is not even mentioned in this sketch—she is just one of the children—, but her reaction to Uncle Jimbilly’s dramatic account of slavery in “The Witness” suggests that, for her, Nannie’s racial lesson does not fall on deaf ears: when Uncle Jimbilly tells the children about the cruelty of slavery, “Paul would have changed the subject, but Miranda, the little quick one, wanted to know the worst” (CS 342; emphasis added). Paul’s evasive attitude and his attempt to conceal and ignore the evidence are in tune with the demands of the established order and recreate the paternalistic artifice that surrounded race relationships in the South. In “The Grave,” he shows a similar attitude when he forces Miranda not to tell anybody about a she-rabbit, but this time his anxiety concerns the artifice surrounding gender rather than race relationships. In contrast with Paul, in “The Witness,” “The Grave” and “The Fig Tree” Miranda is repeatedly portrayed as an alert girl whose first impulse is to see—as her name suggests —, to learn, to know. In “The Circus,” Porter shows how Miranda’s perceptive acuteness threatens to alienate her from the rest of the family. This attitude makes us suspect her readiness to at least intuit Aunt Nannie’s lesson in “The Last Leaf.”

29 Aunt Nannie’s leaving and Grandmother’s death destabilize Miranda and the other children’s process of growing up: “They [the children] were growing up, times were changing, the old world was sliding from under their feet, they had not yet laid hold of the new one” (CS 349). The absence of their grandmother and their mammy makes the children’s personal progress from childhood to adulthood unstable both literally and symbolically: literally because Sophia Jane, as their grandmother, and Aunt Nannie, as their mammy, had been in charge of rearing them and indoctrinating them with the ideology of the old order, and symbolically because the two women’s absence announces the loss of two essential pillars in the old patriarchal order, the white lady- mother, and its complement, the black mammy. “The Witness” and “The Last Leaf” are mainly concerned with the effects of these historical changes on race conceptions and race relations: as a consequence of their exposition to Uncle Jimbilly’s accounts of the cruelty of slavery and to Aunt Nannie’s development in her old age, the children become witnesses to the change from slavery to emancipation; their growing process from innocence/ignorance to knowledge gets tinged with racial overtones especially for Miranda, since she is the one who demands knowledge of “the worst” more actively. These two sketches are designed mainly—although not exclusively—to shake the children’s race awareness and contribute to the delineation of their identity as whites.

30 In contrast, the last two sections of “The Old Order,” “The Fig Tree” and “The Grave,” focus on Miranda and on the effects of the historical changes on her. Her characterization as a tomboy at the beginning of “The Grave” is highly significant since it announces that her gender identity is at stake: She was wearing her summer roughing outfit: dark blue overalls, a light blue shirt, a hired-man’s straw hat, and thick brown sandals. Her brother had the same outfit except his was a sober hickory-nut color. Ordinarily Miranda preferred her overalls to any other dress, though it was making rather a scandal in the countryside, for

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the year was 1903, and in the back country the law of female decorum had teethin it. (CS 364)

31 After Grandmother’s death, Aunt Nannie gets rid of the mammy mask, and similarly Miranda gets rid of her own mask, the one designed for white girls immersed in the process of becoming Southern ladies. Liberated from the mask that defined femininity in the South, Miranda truly becomes a tomboy. In “The Grave,” deprived of the white female model that her Grandmother represented, Miranda enjoys wearing overalls and hunting and shooting with her brother, Paul. Even so, to underline her uncertain gender identity, when Miranda and Paul find the silver dove and the gold ring in the old family graves, she suddenly feels the temptation represented by the wedding ring as a symbol of the traditional Southern female experience: the kind of experience which shaped Grandmother’s life first as a Southern belle and then as a Southern lady and which she had tried to perpetuate through the rules and education she had imposed on her grandchildren.

32 Most critics have focused on the question of gender when dealing with Miranda’s growing up because Porter’s primary interest in the Miranda stories is placed on the main character’s construction of her gender identity rather than on her racial identity. There is nonetheless evidence that both processes are subtly connected in Miranda’s progress towards “knowledge.” Thus, although Miranda’s transformation into a tomboy is an overt expression of the gender confusion and instability which characterizes her identity as a girl, it also contains a covert reference to the collapse of the racial order which the new Nannie evinces in “The Last Leaf.”

33 Miranda’s tomboyism can be seen as a manifestation of the collapse of the traditional image of the Southern lady, but this collapse is a result of the symbolic absence not only of her white Grandmother but also of her black mammy. As in the case of the stereotypical Mammy in Gone with the Wind, who according to Manring “has no real function beyond maintaining white Southern ladyhood” (39), during Grandmother’s life Aunt Nannie’s alliance with the standards of white ladyhood was undeniable, so we may conclude that Miranda loses her sponsor in the female experience of white ladyhood twice, first when Grandmother dies, and then when Aunt Nannie leaves to become “an aged Bantu woman of independent means.” Aunt Nannie thus contributes to the white children’s confused interpretation of race relationships by exposing the gaps separating her two identities: the mammie, who “had seemed so contented and wantless,” and the black woman, who “had always liked and hoped to own certain things” (CS 349). By so doing, she exposes the instability which shakes the traditional gender roles in Miranda’s experience.

34 At the beginning of “The Fig Tree,” as Miranda’s mammy, Nannie forces the girl to wear a bonnet instead of a hat to symbolically protect the whiteness of her skin; she grips her with her knees to hold Miranda as she brushes her hair or buttons her dress: a habit of gripping with her knees to hold Miranda while she brushed her hair or buttoned her dress down the back. When Miranda wriggled, Aunt Nannie squeezed still harder, and Miranda wriggled more, but never enough to get away. Aunt Nannie gathered up Miranda’s scalp lock firmly, snapped a rubber band around it, jammed a freshly starched white chambray bonnet over her ears and forehead, fastened the crown to the lock with a large safety pin, and said: “Got to hold you still someways. Here now, don’t you take this off your head till the sun go down.” (CS 352)

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35 Aunt Nannie’s acts of repression to bring Miranda up as a white lady are more than evident in the previous passage. In contrast, in “The Last Leaf,” the same Nannie is portrayed as a living symbol of idleness, calm and freedom while she sits on the doorstep in “serene idleness,” “breathing the free air” (CS 349): now Aunt Nannie’s message, that is “the lesson [that] sank in as the years went on and Nannie continued to sit on the doorstep of her cabin” (CS 349) has nothing to do with the repression and the restrictions associated with Miranda’s education as a future Southern lady in “The Fig Tree”… Quite on the contrary, Nannie’s lesson has changed to denounce the distortion of the human identity and the perversion of the human self brought about by the myth of the Old South and its masks which affect both blacks and whites. Like Sophia Jane in the past when she started nursing one of her babies, now Nannie seems to become aware of the fact that she had also been “badly cheated” by the old order (CS 334). Nonetheless, in contrast with her mistress, who suspended her submission to the old order temporarily and eventually chose to push truth aside, Aunt Nannie’s attitude functions as a permanent lesson for Miranda and the other children.

36 The lesson on race and race relationships that Nannie represents in “The Last Leaf” involves the collapse of her mammy image and consequently the white children’s loss of their black mammy. It seems that in Miranda’s case, this loss complicates her ascension to the pedestal of white ladyhood since one of the tasks of her black mammy had been her indoctrination with the traditional Southern ideology and her training as a Southern lady. As soon as Nannie starts “sitting on the steps, breathing the free air” (CS 349) and symbolically stops “gripping with her knees to hold Miranda” (CS 352), the girl becomes free to wriggle and use a hat instead of a bonnet, which implies a loosening of the protection and of the repression required to preserve the unnatural immaculate whiteness associated with the myth and the mask of the Southern lady. Thus Nannie’s liberation from the restrictions of her mammy mask contributes to the interruption of the process of Miranda’s education as a lady and probably propitiates her tomboyism, which represents the first step in her unconscious development towards knowledge: thanks to Aunt Nannie’s lesson Miranda can at least intuit the truth about race and race relations in the South, and come closer to a more accurate understanding of her female sexuality by leaving aside the lady image.

37 The second aspect of Miranda’s tomboyism is especially evident in “The Grave,” a story where Aunt Nannie is not even mentioned. In spite of this, the temporal references suggest its chronological proximity—or even its simultaneity—to “The Last Leaf”: if the latter records Aunt Nannie’s development after Grandmother’s death, the former starts just after Grandmother has died, when “part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale,” so “[i]t was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again […]” (CS 362). This temporal coincidence corroborates the idea that Miranda, the tomboy who in “The Grave” is “wearing her summer roughing outfit: dark blue overalls, a light blue shirt, a hired-man’s straw hat, and thick brown sandals” (CS 364) is one of the children who witness Aunt Nannie’s metamorphosis in “The Last Leaf” and who, as a result, are left without a mammy figure in their lives. As suggested above, this absence contributes to the dismantling of Miranda’s bringing up as a lady, a process which culminates in “The Grave” when Miranda, facing a pregnant she-rabbit which has just been shot dead by her brother Paul, affirms “I know, […] like kittens; I know, like babies” (CS 367), thus connecting animal and human experiences of pregnancy and sexuality. Consequently,

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she acknowledges the existence of a more natural interpretation of female sexuality and of the experience of womanhood than the one which she had learnt from her Grandmother supported by her black mammy, and which she had evoked when she was wearing the wedding ring in the first part of the story.

38 Furthermore, the fact that Aunt Nannie’s liberation from the mammy mask in “The Last Leaf” may covertly favor or propitiate Miranda’s development towards the kind of knowledge which she intuits in the scene of the pregnant she-rabbit is symbolically announced in “The Fig Tree” when Nannie, still wearing her mammy mask, offers Miranda figs from the fig tree, that is, from the tree of knowledge. At that stage, Miranda is too young and too much under Grandmother’s influence to accept the figs which traditionally symbolize the female womb and the sexual awareness resulting from the human Fall. In “The Grave,” with the help provided by Aunt Nannie’s lesson and her new symbolic alliance with knowledge, Miranda seems ready to go a step further in her own progress towards knowledge.

39 After Grandmother’s death the attitude of Nannie, who as a (black) mammy had apparently blindly contributed to the promotion of the race and gender roles sanctioned by the ideology of the old order, becomes an important contribution not only to Miranda’s discovery of her sexuality but also to her intuition of the truth about race relations in the South. In both Aunt Nannie’s and Miranda’s cases, Grandmother’s decease triggers the process which causes first a crack and then the collapse of the masks or the roles which had defined the experience of both black and white womanhood in the old order: the mammy image and the lady image. Miranda, as her name suggests, is always eager to see, and after Grandmother dies she is offered the chance to peep through these cracks and see what lies behind to discover the flaws and inconsistencies of both race and gender relationships in the Old South. References to Miranda’s initiation as a process of discovery of her female sexuality in contrast with the image of the Southern lady are central in “The Old Order,” but the story also hints at the artificiality of race relations in the Old South and at how they may have affected Miranda’s development especially after Grandmother’s death. Miranda’s tomboyism is evidently a manifestation of her state of uncertainty concerning her gender identity, but this uncertainty is undeniably promoted by the new attitude shown by old Aunt Nannie as a consequence of the symbolic loosening of the brackets that had defined her as a “(black)” mammy all along Grandmother’s life. Although Miranda’s tomboyism in “The Old Order” is not so prominently portrayed as that of Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) or Scout Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the role of Aunt Nannie in Miranda’s development announces the relevance achieved by the two African American domestics, Berenice and Calpurnia, in Frankie’s and Scout’s growing up process respectively.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brinkmeyer, Robert H. Katherine Anne Porter’s Artistic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993. Print.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Childress, Alice. Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001. Print.

Demouy, Jane Krause. Katherine Anne Porter’s Women: The Eye of her Fiction. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983. Print.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988. Print.

González-Groba, Constante. “El tomboy cuestiona las rígidas dicotomías de género y raza de la sociedad sureña.” Hijas del viejo sur. La mujer en la literatura femenina del sur de los Estados Unidos. Ed. Constante González-Groba. Valencia: Universitat de Valéncia, 2012. 259-82. Print.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Print.

Hardy, John Edward. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973. Print.

Machann, Clinton & William Bedford Clark, eds. Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1990. Print.

Manring, M. M. Slave in a Box. The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998. Print.

McElya, Micky. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

McMillen, Sally Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. 1992. Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson, 2002. Print.

Nance, William L. Katherine Anne Porter and the Art of Rejection. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1964. Print.

Porter, Katherine Anne. The Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1979. Print.

Sharpless, Rebecca. Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010. Print.

Stout, Janis P. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: The UP of Virginia, 1995. Print.

Tanner, James T. F. The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter. Denton: U of North Texas P, 1990. Print.

Tucker, Susan. Telling Memories among Southern Women. Domestic Workers and their Employers in the Segregated South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. Print.

Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter’s Fiction. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Print.

Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print.

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NOTES

1. Old Aunt Jemima was originally a character in a minstrel show performed by the blackface comedy team of Baker and Farrell. For more information on the genesis of this image, see Manring 60-78. 2. Both Fox-Genovese and Hale analyze the peculiarities of the plantation household as a space of both consumption and production, in contrast with the middle-class home characterized almost exclusively as a space of consumption easily distinguishable from the public sphere and its eminently productive capacity (Fox-Genovese 60-82; Hale 88-93). 3. Most scholars see Grandmother as representative of the Southern past in the Miranda stories and as a symbol of the prevalence of the old order in Miranda’s childhood education even if Grandmother herself experienced the flaws and inconsistencies of the system especially during her adolescence and youth (Brinkmeyer 150-55, 162-65; DeMouy 116, 119-26, 136-37; Hardy 15-18, 40; Machann & Clark 92-93; Nance 80-83, 88-100, 107, 114; Stout 191-92, 134-35; Tanner 65, 69-74, 75-76; Unrue 30-31, 46-48). 4. Porter published “The Old Order” as a sequence of six short stories and sketches in The Leaning Tower and other Stories in 1944, although most of the sections which constitute this sequence had been originally published independently between 1935 and 1936: “The Witness” and “The Last Leaf” were published in January 1935; “The Grave” in April 1935; “The Circus” in July 1935; and “The Journey” in the winter of 1936. Only one of the stories was published for the first time later than 1936: “The Source” in 1941. The seventh story to be incorporated in “The Old Order” was “The Fig Tree”: according to DeMouy “The Fig Tree” was written in 1929 but it was not published until June 1960 (215), and then incorporated in this sequence in 1965 for its publication in The Collected Stories (115). 5. Hereafter I shall use the abbreviation CS to refer to Katherine Anne Porter’s Collected Stories in which “The Old Order” is reprinted.

ABSTRACTS

Les nouvelles que Katherine Anne Porter consacre au personnage de Miranda ont été généralement interprétées comme l’expression d’une tentative de l’auteure de déconstruire le mythe du Vieux Sud. Elle présente les expériences de Miranda, une petite fille blanche qui grandit dans le Sud à la fin du XIXe siècle. La vie de Miranda est principalement déterminée par le mythe de la dame blanche du Sud que représente sa grand-mère. C’est probablement la raison pour laquelle le traitement de la Mammy noire et son rôle dans le développement de l’enfant a reçu peu d’attention. Pourtant, en recréant l’image de la Mammy au travers d'Aunt Nannie, Porter révèle ses inquiétudes quant aux effets destructeurs sous-jacents à ces relations interraciales. En outre, Aunt Nannie change tout au long de la série, passant de la “faithful old servant” à la “Bantu woman of independent means” – évolution qui peut être mise en parallèle avec celle de Miranda qui adopte, après le décès de sa grand-mère, une attitude de garçon manqué. Ce changement semble indiquer un degré important d’insécurité à l’égard des rôles traditionnels relatifs à la question du genre et de la race.

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AUTHORS

SUSANA MARIA JIMÉNEZ-PLACER Susana Mª Jiménez Placer teaches North American literature and culture at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). She wrote her dissertation on the Mexican stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and published a book on this topic: Katherine Anne Porter y la revolución mexicana: de la fascinación al desencanto. She has written several articles and papers on different aspects of Porter’s work, and has participated in several research projects dealing with Southern literature, the depiction of the domestic sphere in the work of Southern women writers, and the literary manifestations of the Civil Rights Movement. Her most recent publications are: “Damas y esclavas, madres y mamis en el Viejo Sur: Gone with the Wind de Margaret Mitchell y ‘The Old Order’ de Katherine Anne Porter,” Hijas del Viejo Sur edited by Constante González Groba (2012) and “Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement in the Domestic Sphere: the Mammy Image in Like One of the Family and The Help,” Dixie Matters: New Perspectives in Southern Femininities and Masculinities edited by Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis (2013).

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Myth and Metaphor in James Agee's "1928 Story"

Rémi Digonnet

1 As a form of literature, the short story embodies and develops myths. Northrop Frye suggests that “myth is and has always been an integral element of literature, the interest of poets in myth and mythology having been remarkable and constant since Homer’s time” (119). Not only should myths be pervasive in short stories, they should also represent the central part of any story since myths are at the very origin of literature. According to F. Guirand, the mythic form is the essential form of the mind; it is at the core of any kind of poetry and any kind of literature. The short story, more than the novel, seems to share the mythical intention based on F. Loriggio’s common definition of a myth: “Fully summarized, in its most conventional version myth has been: (1) a story (2) about gods or exemplary figures, narrating events of a time before or beyond history and periodically re-enacted” (234). Granted of course, that short stories do not generally appeal to gods or exemplary figures, the genre happens to be perfectly fitted for the existence of myths if we observe P. Wheelwright’s definition of it: “Myth may be defined as a story or a complex of story elements taken as expressing, and therefore as implicitly symbolizing, certain deep-lying aspects of human and transhuman existence” (332). Due to its innate concision,1 the short story matches the symbolic scope of myth. Defined as “merely” a story, which nonetheless tells “a tale that is not according to the facts,” myth can then be seen as a representation, a F0 F0 figuration of humanity and transhumanity as posited by G. Highet: “ 5B Myths 5D deal with love; with war; with sin; with tyranny; with courage; with fate: and all in some way or other deal with the relation of man to those divine powers which are sometimes felt to be irrational, sometimes to be cruel, and sometimes, alas, to be just” (199). If the identities of myth are varied and often supply a moralistic signification, its function should not be left aside as suggested by Aristotle’s definition of mythos: “Both words (plot and narrative) translate Aristotle’s mythos, but Aristotle meant mainly by mythos what we are calling plot: narrative, in the above sense, is closer to his lexis. The plot then is like the trees and houses that we focus our eyes on through a train window: the narrative is more like the weeds and stones that rush by in the foreground” (Frye 120).

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2 In this study of myth and metaphor in Southern short fiction, both the “trees” and the “weeds” will be examined. A focus on the short story by James Agee entitled “1928 Story” will bring out the intertwined relationships between myth and metaphor. Agee’s title is quite explicit about how his writing epitomises modern (“1928”) storytelling (“story”). As such, Agee’s text is an interesting illustration of the short story as a modern genre entrapped in the paradox of telling a lot in a few words. The short story, unlike the novel,2 yet like the lyric, has the undeniable capacity of cramming tales of epic dimensions into the format of “a little postage stamp” as suggested by William Faulkner. The presence of a poem in Agee’s short story not only foretells the variety of myths to be found in the text, both the evocation of old myths and the creation of new myths, but also bespeaks the various narrative processes of condensation. An economy of words is indeed the principle at the heart of the short story and the lyric poem, a concision and condensation that can be equally found in metaphor and myth, as opposed to comparison, and used to this end in modernist engagements with problems of scale.

3 Agee’s short story, published posthumously in 1968,3 is about Irvine, a would-be writer reminiscing about his brief encounter with a young girl on the beach located near the cottage where he regularly goes on holiday. The image of the girl will remain embedded in his mind until he decides to write a poem dedicated to his beloved mermaid entitled “Sea Piece.” The mythical portrait of the girl which resembles another famous portrait, Barthes’s “Garbo’s face,” is one among the many other myths that can be found in the short story. The reconstruction of a mythical South in Irvine’s mind paradoxically mirrors the deconstruction of another myth, the writer’s myth, another reminiscence of Barthes’s mythology with “The writer on holiday”. The comparison of myth and metaphor in terms of theoretical perspectives and literary matter will focus first on the notion of displacement through transfer, analogy and the existence of a conflictual literary space, to envisage how such a displacement can either lead to a repetitive pattern or to a highly creative dimension.

Grounded in Displacement?

4 The concept of placement seems well rooted in metaphor and myth since both processes rely on the placement of uncommon and unexpected elements in a text. The metaphorical placement is often viewed as the addition of an unexpected word, a foreign word (alliotros in Aristotle’s terms) in a coherent sentence leading to some incoherence. The mythical placement would rather correspond to bringing up elements of myth in a text and then change the overall meaning of it. Both processes define a figurative placement since the metaphor generates a change in meaning from the literal to the figurative, and the myth implicitly “symbolises aspects of human and transhuman existence” (Wheelwright 332). Yet the placement is perceived differently in metaphor and myth. If the metaphorical placement is often visible as it illustrates a visible conflict, the mythical one is less obvious as it shares properties with the allegory, i.e. an initial incoherence which is made coherent through the pervasive use of the figurative process. The result of such a placement of unexpected elements then triggers a new placement of the text. The understanding of a metaphorical text or a mythical one develops a new positioning of it giving way to new interpretations. The placement gives birth to replacement, a concept well anchored in metaphor through

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the substitutive perspective, a notion which properly matches myth when the latter brings old stories back to the fore. More than replacement though, myth and metaphor have common ground with the idea of displacement. Both processes epitomise displacement in terms of truth value. A metaphor, like all figurative language, stages a displacement between what is said and what is true: But yet if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead judgment; and so are perfect cheats. (Locke 2, 3, 10, 34)

5 In its colloquial use, myth means “a tale that is not according to the facts and the adjective ‘mythical’ (is) a synonym for false” (Wheelwright 333). Falsity is then well anchored in myth and metaphor since both processes are distant from what stands for reality and truth. At the end of the short story, the mythical poem “Sea Piece” and the underlying metaphor in “She is like the sea herself” (18) are only falsity, deception and poor substitutes to replace the absence of the girl who disappeared in the house: “but the girl was nowhere in sight, and there were no lights on upstairs” (18). Both processes engender a different, distorted, and displaced vision of reality.

6 The embodied displacement in myth and metaphor generated by the gap between what is said and what is meant represents the result of a translation, a transfer. In its primary definition, metaphor was perceived as a translation, a transference of a name from the thing which it properly denotes to some other thing: “Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion” (Aristotle, 1457b). Myth shares the transference property of the metaphor, on a broader scale though. It allows a transference of a story from the reference it properly denotes to some other reference. Myth tells an imaginative story which resonates and echoes in more realistic terms: And while myths themselves are seldom historical, they seem to provide a kind of containing form of tradition, one result of which is the obliterating of boundaries separating legend, historical reminiscence, and actual history that we find in Homer and the Old Testament. (Frye 130)

7 In both processes, a transfer occurs when a word or a story is used to express something else than its proper reference. The traditional transfer coined by Aristotle can be similarly rephrased by the more recent cognitive definition of mapping elaborated by Lakoff: The metaphor involves understanding one domain of experience [...] in terms of a very different domain of experience [...]. More technically, the metaphor can be understood as a mapping (in the mathematical sense) from a source domain [...] to a target domain [...]. The mapping is tightly structured. (206-07)

8 The mapping theory which synthesises the transfer of one word to another, one semantic trait to another, in the projection of one conceptual domain to another is useful to describe both metaphor and myth. A myth represents the projection, the transfer of one initial story to another one. The abstract imaginative story is described in terms of a concrete realistic story. The episode relating Irvine’s obsession of the image of the young girl he met on the beach is a good illustration of the mythical transfer from a real figure to an imaginative picture: “he watched himself carefully in

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the mirror. But his mind was so absorbed in her image, as she came out of the water, that he hardly saw himself” (14).

9 Yet, the recourse to mapping to envisage the transfer in myth and metaphor seems to lack the creative dimension which can often be found in both metaphorical and mythical processes. The mapping frame which appears quite useful for pre-existing or pre-established conceptual metaphors or conceptual myths should be enlarged with the blending frame elaborated by Fauconnier allowing a creative dimension through composition: “If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined” (Lévi-Strauss 121). Instead of viewing metaphor and myth in terms of transferable properties from one source domain to a target domain, the blending principle gives way to a possible intersection and interaction, a potential porosity between initial spaces. Transfer would no longer be the essential feature in myth and metaphor but interaction, as a key process, would allow the merging of two different domains, two different temporalities.

10 From displacement to absence of displacement, another view on myth and metaphor underlines the existence of an analogy. Indeed, both processes tend to force a resemblance between two domains, two stories. The power of myth like the power of metaphor lies in the attempt to connect two distant elements. If Aristotle was the first to mention the analogical dimension in metaphor, many have stressed such an analogy: “A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The essential common ground between two entities to generate a metaphor can also be found in myth where the mythical story tends to identify a fictional tale to real events. Myth attempts to erase the limits between reality and imagination, between nature and human form: “The two great conceptual principles which myth uses in assimilating nature to human form are analogy and identity. Analogy establishes the parallels between human life and natural phenomena, and identity conceives of a ‘sun-god’ or a ‘tree-god’” (Frye 131). In order to unify different geographic locations or different temporalities, myth nullifies the distinction between fiction and facts and as such partakes of the creation of an analogon. Time is the first analogon developed by a myth and the most obvious. To know the date of birth of a myth is impossible (ritual origin) and paradoxically any myth has the power to match any period of time. It is not restrained in time and has the capacity to merge different temporalities. Myth allows understanding one present fact in relation to a past event, as such, myth is a good vehicle for identifying or unifying one past to one present: Now myth, the appeal of which lies precisely in its archaism, promises above all to heal the wounds of time. For the one essential function of myth […] is that in merging past and present it releases us from the flux of temporality, arresting change in the timeless, the permanent, the ever-recurrent conceived as “sacred repetition.” (Rahv 255)

11 The merging of past and present through myth is made obvious in the short story when the playing of old records brings the pre-war period and the post-war period together: “Even the nineteen thirties had been increasingly distasteful, one year worse than the next before it; then the war, which in one curious sense hardly counted as a part of living […] and now, the middle, the last half, of the nineteen forties” (2). The second analogon generated by a myth is space since very often a myth is anchored in a specific

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geography: “It is our job to intertwine understandings of myth, memory, and landscape with presentations of the complex pasts we discover through sound interdisciplinary archaeological, documentary, and ethno-and oral historical research” (Horning 39). The mythical process facilitates the assimilation of different geographical areas, either real or unreal. The forced geographic analogy initiated by the myth tends to minimise the idea of displacement. The cardinal points highlight the fact that the American myth is well rooted in geography. As Irvine’s father proudly re-states “East is East and West is West” (7) about the difference of music between Mozart and Armstrong, the mythical image of the South is pervasive in the short story. The mythical South comes to the surface during Irvine’s reverie4 when sitting outside the porch of his house and listening to jazz music, he fancies himself in a Southern landscape. The analogy between a purely imaginative space and a city in the South, New Orleans, demonstrates the power of the mythical South populated by “musicians,” “Negroes,” “hundreds of men, along the tracks, and the paths invisible along the great field, on their way to work,” where “whites and Negroes, however fond of the same music, would be so thoroughly at ease together as this” (10). The last analogon a myth can give birth to stands for ontology. A mythical saying has the power to indicate and stress resemblances between various ontologies. Its function is much like a metaphor which coins a resemblance behind an apparent discrepancy of terms, of meanings, of references. Myth has the property to coin resemblances despite impossible temporal, geographical and ontological properties. On the beach, Irvine’s vision of the young girl getting out of the sea is turned into a mythical process when he writes the following stanza of his poem dedicated to his beloved mermaid: “Like a wild creature of the sea, colored like the sea at dawn, so you first appeared to me” (19). The assimilation through comparison (“like”) of the girl with the mermaid is nothing more than a forced ontological analogy. Through the study of various analogons, the myth has shown its power to unify or to merge, to develop resemblances and analogies between initially distant elements.

12 Resemblance may be reached through various processes such as myth or metaphor, yet the advent of analogy often previously suffers from conflictual5 tensions. If both processes have long been perceived in terms of analogy, more recently, the acknowledgment of a conflictual space has permitted a better understanding of such devices. Instead of viewing metaphor as a transfer or an analogy, the interactive perspective considered it as an intersection between two words, two parts of speech. The intersection initiated by Richards and followed up by Black illustrated the open conflict between a metaphorical expression (“vehicle,” “focus”) among a literal context (“tenor,” “frame”): A metaphorical statement has two distinct subjects, to be identified as the primary subject and the secondary one. In Metaphor, I spoke instead of the “principal” and “subsidiary” subjects. The duality of reference is marked by the contrast between the metaphorical statement’s focus (the word or words used non-literally) and the surrounding literal frame. (Black 27)

13 This same intersection between the figurative and the literal can be applied to the myth where fiction and reality coexist. Myth can be situated half-way between imagination and reality, between fiction and facts: “The reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (Barthes 20). Intersection appears as the first step to conflict. Myth and metaphor can then be described as conflictual spaces. Prandi insists on the conflictual aspect of metaphor: “The existence of a substantial analogy is not the

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necessary condition for a metaphor to be recognized—for a metaphor to exist, only a transfer and typically a conflict is required” (Prandi 18, my translation). Contrary to metaphor where heterogeneity is often visible at first sight (ontological conflict), myth seems to describe a homogeneous story without visible conflict. Yet this apparent homogeneity is counterbalanced by a more global heterogeneity as myth represents a hiatus as a whole, an impertinence, a conflict between fiction and facts. As such, myth embodies external conflict as the allegory does. Conversely, metaphor embodies both internal and external conflicts: “The linguistic and cognitive conflicts only affect the surface of coherent concepts without affecting their inner coherence. Ontological conflicts, on the contrary, challenge the essential properties of beings, which are the basis of the coherence of concepts” (Prandi 14, my translation).

14 There is conflict in both metaphor and myth. The conflict in metaphor is often ontological; the conflict in myth is rather contextual. However both processes produce distortion: “Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion” (Barthes 21). The short story, often relying on myth or metaphor to allow multiple readings, represents a conflictual space in itself. From the beginning to the end, a conflict must be solved. Myth and metaphor, as conflictual processes in essence, often partake of the conflictual story in the short story. Irvine’s generational conflict with his parents echoes a more internal conflict: the struggle of the process of writing poetry. From transfer as displacement to analogy as absence of displacement, conflict is deeply-rooted in myth and metaphor. Paradoxically, the real displacement in both processes is to be found in the conflictual analogy: “For us to recognize a statement as an analogy, we must recognize that it is in some way putting pressure on our category structure” (Turner, Categories and Analogies 3). The conflictual analogy of writing poetry is to be found in Irvine’s struggle to write—an attempt to give a vision of the world, yet often conflictual—which oscillates between disillusion through repetition and self-satisfaction through creation.

From Repetition to Creation

15 A synchronic vision of myth should not prevent the diachronic vision of the same story since the reason of being of a myth is its reactivation through constant re- appropriation. Repetition is twice-rooted in myth. First, a myth is properly a repetition since it represents a copy of reality. Myth has the power to reproduce reality, to repaint facts. Not only has a myth the faculty of mimesis, but it also has the power of decoration: Occasionally “myth” can still be found, in its naïve or popular sense, as a synonym for “illusion,” “legend,” or false propaganda, or in an earlier literary sense of decorative or illustrative material. More often it occurs as a surrogate term for the fact that the characters and the actions of literary works have qualities that make them representative of types or classes or ideas. (Douglas 68)

16 Similarly, metaphor was long assigned an ornamental power added to a power of imitation: “As to their use, (Aristotle) believed that it was entirely ornamental. Metaphors in other words, are not necessary, they are just nice” (Ortony 3). Also, myth is doomed to undergo repetition through time. Myth tends to be repeated through time without much evolution: “Myth is reassuring in its stability, whereas history is that powerhouse of change” (Rahv 255). The repetitive process of myth, like conventional- metaphors, used-metaphors and catachresis, may nullify the first conflictual

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perception of it. Myth remains but a copy of the past imprisoned in its meaningless bleaching.6 Irvine’s listening to West Side Blues figures a mythic repetitive process emphasised by the repetition of “perfectly” and the use of the repetitive prefix “re-” in “He heard the delicate, passionate music through, now, in a strange state of mind: perfectly, fiber by fiber, in cold and helpless regret; perfectly, at the same time, recalling, re-experiencing, the best that he had ever heard in it” (6). Likewise, if the strict repetition of his prediction “It was going to be a wonderful summer” (6 and 11) partakes of myth, the mythical world seems already trapped in the sterile repetition like his parents’ re-singing of old tunes (7). Repetition is often the first step to imprisonment.7 The over use of a metaphor or a myth pertains to its isolation among creative processes. The figurative device is no longer a speech process but is imprisoned in language. Myth loses its mythical function like the metaphor which loses its metaphoricity. Myth is trapped by its own pervasive use as Irvine is “almost imprisoned, in the prospect of a whole summer in this place” (12). Repetition can also mean inclusion when a myth is included in another myth. Then, the myth becomes the story in a story, the tale in a tale: the embedded structure of writing, when an author tells the story of a pseudo-writer (“If I could write about this” [3]), when a short story stages a poem, when a short story entitled “story” tells about the satisfaction of a writer to achieve a “carefully written story” (5), highlights the repetition of stories as myths through an inclusive pattern. If the coexistence of the same metaphors can lead to allegory, the coexistence of myths will lead to mythology. Such an accumulation of myths will paradoxically free the worn-out myth because of the creative potential connexions between various myths.

17 The consideration of myth as a mirror of reality is twofold. Either it can be seen as a faithful reproduction of reality and consequently as a plain repetition of reality, or it can be viewed as a distortion of reality because it is understood as an illusion. The second definition entails a creative dimension which mirrors Eudora Welty’s perception of the short story: Stories are new things, stories make words new; that is one of their illusions and part of their beauty. And of course the great stories of the world are the ones that seem new to their readers on and on, always new because they keep their power of revealing something. (159)

18 As an illusion of reality, myth and metaphor develop a creative meaning due to a specific insight on reality. The existence of myth, or metaphor, generates a specific and subjective vision of reality. Though it does not mean that all illusions are deprived of truth: “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour” (Nietzsche 46-47). Myth can consequently be highly creative and express some truth: “Contrary to the ‘tale’ that only children take seriously, myth and legend are supposedly transmitting some truth” (Pottier 16, my translation). Though imaginary, illusionary, or creative, myth, like metaphor, can tell some truth about the world. Irvine’s mental construction of a mythical South remains an illusion, yet a familiar one: “He had never been to a place like the one he imagined, yet it was more familiar to him than any place he had ever known” (9). Creation does not only lie in the distortion of reality but also in the new meaning conveyed by myth or metaphor. Metaphor is known to bring new meaning especially the so-called “creative” metaphors or literary metaphors: “Sharp differences between the organizing frames of the inputs offer the possibility of rich

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clashes. Far from blocking the construction of the network, such clashes offer challenges to the imagination. The resulting blends can turn out to be highly creative” (Turner, Compression and Representation 19). Myth is equally creative when it confers a new meaning to a text or when it gives a new insight, like music which can create a whole new world in Irvine’s mind: “The music had developed in him a distinct image of a place he had never known” (7). From a local creation to a global one, from the new meaning to the literary creation, myths are highly productive as they represent stories: “Literature is a reconstructed mythology, with its structural principles derived from those of myth. Then we can see that literature is in a complex setting what a mythology is in a simpler one: a total body of verbal creation” (Frye 137). Similarly, but on a different scale, metaphors take part in the literary creation in widening and transgressing the existing possibilities of a limited lexicon. By transgressing the reality of facts, myths give birth to new imaginary stories and texts.

19 Irvine’s plain poem of the beloved mermaid at the end of the short story is a good illustration of literary creation through myth. The protagonist uses the mermaid myth to fuel his literary creation even if his production is far from being a work of art. Myth meets art when it gives reinterpretation of reality. The distorted vision of reality conferred by art is also deeply embodied in myth: “As a type of story, myth is a form of verbal art, and belongs to the world of art. Like art, and unlike science, it deals, not with the world man contemplates, but with the world that man creates” (Frye 130). From creation to re-creation myth undergoes an ongoing process of production. The myths produced once are expected to reappear again and again in literature: “The myths live on, with the deathless youth which breathes from the statues of Apollo and his sister Artemis” (Highet 183). Yet, the same myth will have a different meaning each time it is called for, depending on the specific context. Myth is then continually reactivated through context, perpetually re-enacted according to the circumstances. Like a metaphor, which often follows a process of de-metaphorisation through time, myth can sometimes lose its mythical dimension and miss the figurative expression of certain deep-lying aspects of human and transhuman existence: “As I said, there is no fixity in mythical concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely. And it is precisely because they are historical that history can very easily suppress them” (Barthes 12). De-mythification would then follow the same process through time as de-metaphorisation: “Much of the history of every language is a history of demetaphorizing of expressions which began as metaphors gradually losing their metaphorical character” (Halliday 348). Conversely, a dormant myth can sometimes regain its mythical property like a metaphor undergoing re- metaphorisation: “The reanimation of a dead metaphor is a positive operation of de- lexicalizing that amounts to a new production of metaphor and therefore of metaphorical meaning” (Ricœur 370). A specific context can then re-fuel the active part of the myth through a recycling process. After a long period of inaction, the mythical dimension can come to the surface thanks to new interactions and make the myth alive again. Recreation of myth is visible in the constant rewritings and reinterpretation of myth: “A myth may be told and retold: it may be modified or elaborated, or different patterns may be discovered in it; and its life is always the poetic life of a story, not the homiletic life of some illustrated truism” (Frye 131).

20 The recourse to the classical mermaid myth is clearly recycled in Irvine’s poem as a personification of his encounter, but also as a representation of his untalented writing:

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“he knew that he was quite unqualified to write” (3). Recreation can also be understood in terms of playing with myth as Irvine at the very beginning of the short story plays with myth by “playing the old records” (1). A myth can be perceived as a recreation, a play on language, a storytelling8 game. Indeed, since myth represents an illusion, a disguise of reality, the myth-teller has the opportunity to play with conventionalised schemes and imaginary images: Hence, like the folk tale, it is an abstract story-pattern. The characters can do what they like, which means what the story-teller likes: there is no need to be plausible or logical in motivation. The things that happen in myth are things that happen only in stories; they are in a self-contained literary world. (Frye 129)

21 The pervasive use of the free indirect style in the short story is a good illustration of the re-creative narrative process: “Don’t be a fool, he insisted again. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. She is just another girl: she may be a very nice one, she may stink, you’ll find out” (16). The recreation part of the myth is situated in the interstice formed by the boundaries of facts on one side and fiction on the other side. In between those two boundaries, the myth can be perceived as a recreation area, inclined to take advantage of the blurred limit between the real world and the fiction world: On the one hand, it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity […]. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. (Lévi- Strauss 119)

22 Recreation is also vivid through the highly creative network of the various myths in a mythology where relationships and connexions can be drawn to expand the recreation area of the myth: “The best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstructed myth will in fact be a mythology” (Barthes 27). Ancient mythologies or more recent mythologies (Barthes) have brought individual myths together for an interrelated mythical recreation: “The process of modernization of myth is bound to engender a tension between the model from Antiquity and its modern reincarnation. As a process it is of necessity simultaneously subversive and creative” (Furst 151). The recourse to the Antique myth of the mermaid by Irvine to describe his vision of love on the beach is but a surrogate for a summer short-lived romance. The initial myth is reinterpreted through a banal situation of a summer crush. Even more, the mermaid myth appears as a metaphor for the deconstruction of another myth, the writer’s myth. The recourse to an over-used myth to write bad poetry shows the deconstruction of a myth by another one. The writer’s myth symbolised by Irvine is badly damaged as Irvine, in his attempt to write a poem, ends up with the following conclusion: “nuts” (19). Of all his poems, he acknowledges at the end of the short story that “he had seldom written a worse poem” (19) than “Sea Piece.” The Antique mermaid myth has only served the deconstruction of the writer’s myth, a mythical re-creation in the whole sense of the word.

Conclusion

23 If the short story represents a text dedicated to the production or the reproduction of myths, with for example the recreation of the mythical South—“With each critical repetition, in fact, he only added further detail to the reality of the place” (10)—it can also be perceived as an attempt to demystify. The translation of an Antique myth into a

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banal context filled with irony9 rather pertains to deconstruct the initial myth. Likewise, the deconstruction of the writer’s myth—“though he had long ago pretty thoroughly given up the idea that he was a writer. Or had he? If I haven’t, he thought, it’s high time I did” (4)—is demystification per se just as Irvine’s effort to demystify the image of the girl on the beach: “He began to resent the girl, to try at least to reduce her to what she really was” (15). As such, the short story appears as an ongoing myth trapped between mythification and attempts of demystification.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agee, James. “1928 Story.” Stories of the Modern South. Eds. Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway. 1977. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. 1-19. Print.

Aristotle. Poetics. Translation by S. H. Butcher. London: Macmillan, 1950. Print.

Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Structuralism in Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland. Publishing, 1996. 1-29. Print.

Black, Max. “More about Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. Second edition. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 19-41. Print.

Cortázar, Julio. “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” The Arizona Quarterly 38.1 (Spring 1982): 5-17. Print.

Douglas, Wallace W. “The Meanings of Myth in Modern Criticism.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 68-78. Print.

Forkner, Ben and Patrick Samway, eds. “Introduction.” Stories of the Modern South. 1977. New York: Penguin Books, 1995. xi-xxix. Print.

Frye, Northrop. “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 119-37. Print.

Furst, Lilian R. “Mythology into Psychology: Deus ex Machina into God Within.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 139-54. Print.

Guirand, Félix and Joël Schmidt. Mythes et Mythologie, histoire et dictionnaire. Paris: Larousse, 2006. Print.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold, 1994. Print.

Highet, Gilbert. “The Reinterpretation of the Myths.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 183-99. Print.

Horning, Audrey J. “Of Saints and Sinners: Mythic Landscapes of the Old and New South.” Myth, Memory, and the Making of the American Landscape. Ed. Paul Shackel. UP of Florida, Gainesville, 2001. 21-46. Print.

Lakoff, George. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. Second edition. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 202-51. Print.

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Levi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Structuralism in Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland. Publishing, 1996. 118-34. Print.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Print.

Loriggio, Francesco. “Myth, Mythology and the Novel: Towards a Reappraisal.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 233-52. Print.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Print.

Ortony, Andrew. “Metaphor: A Multidisciplinary Problem.” Metaphor and Thought. Second edition. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 1-16. Print.

Pottier, Richard. Anthropologie du mythe. Paris: Kimé, 1994. Print.

Prandi, Michele. “La métaphore: de la définition à la typologie.” Nouvelles approches de la métaphore. Eds. Antoinette Balibar-Mrabti and Conenna Mirella. “Langue française n°134,” Paris: Larousse, 2002. 6-20. Print.

Rahv, Philip. “The Myth and the Powerhouse.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 253-67. Print.

Ricœur, Paul. La Métaphore vive. Paris: Seuil, “Essais,” 1975. Print.

Turner, Mark. “Categories and Analogies.” Analogical Reasoning. Ed. D. H. Helman. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988. 3-24. Print.

---. “Compression and Representation.” Language and Literature 15.1 (2006): 17-27. Print.

Welty, Eudora. “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories.” 1949. Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. 159-77. Print.

Wheelwright, Philip. “Myth.” Literary Criticism and Myth. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996. 332-37. Print.

NOTES

1. “Always, the short story in the oral tradition demands fewer words to relate the fullness of the story than does, for example, the epic or the novel form” (Forkner and Samway xix). 2. The novel and the short story can be compared to the film and the photograph (Cortázar 5-17). 3. The posthumous publication of “1928 Story” belongs to this “great period of the Southern short story (…) in the 1940s and ‘50s. It was as if a conscious effort had been made in the South to choose one genre and to excel in it” (Forkner & Samway xi). 4. “In James Agee’s ‘1928 Story,’ a relatively unknown story that combines some of the best narrative writing of A Death in the Family with the aesthetic sensibility of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an adolescent’s love of jazz and his vision of a Southern city are ways of describing his imaginative life” (Forkner and Samway xx). 5. Metaphor can be primarily seen as forcing together two different ontologies in “When the quiet sea gave you birth” (18) when no sea has the ability to give birth. Myth remains conflictual when the unreal mermaid is made real through the poem. 6. A different perspective though would suggest that instead of being locked into circuits of repetition, a myth partakes of a variety through varied iterations in the ever-changing present moment. 7. A statement underlined by Forkner and Samway about the writers of the South: “There were those who locked themselves in the elegant myth of an idealized ante-bellum aristocracy and who

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refused to live in the present, and there were those who zealously, often blindly, sought to remake the South after the model of the industrial North” (Forkner & Samway xv). 8. “In the South, as in certain other regions of the United States where people have inhabited the land for long periods, the art of storytelling, whether it be the accounts of fathers and grandfathers who have gone off to war, or the passing on of local folk tales, has helped to shape the expectations of the short story. The short story originates in the told tale; the written story’s concentration of plot, the literary skills needed to stimulate interest and to hold it without waste, all these are conversational skills as well” (Forkner and Samway xix). 9. The mythical figure of the girl is soon demystified with irony: “Each time she turned a page, it was like watching someone take another mouthful of food, with perfect elegance. Then, with the same elegance, she put her fingertip into one nostril, and worked, patiently, without interrupting her reading, until she had extracted the annoyance” (18).

ABSTRACTS

Le mythe et la métaphore se rejoignent quant aux caractéristiques constituantes de ces deux procédés littéraires. La figure de l’un pour l’autre (Dumarsais 1988) dans une approche substitutive de la métaphore résonne avec la substitution du mythe à la réalité historique. Ainsi le transfert comme le glissement chers à la métaphore (Aristote) apparaissent-ils en filigrane d’une réalité à la fois contournée et controuvée par le propos mythique (Barthes 1957). L’analogie forcée par la métaphore (Lakoff 1980) fait écho à la ressemblance provoquée de lieux géographiques variés ou la similitude de temporalités distinctes, caractéristiques du mythe. L’approche interactive de la métaphore soulignée par Black (1962) ou Richards (1936) entre le métaphorique et le littéral, si elle apparaît amoindrie dans le mythe ou la fable, tous deux conçus comme des interprétations homogènes, résiste pourtant à l’intérieur d’une mythologie qui fabrique une impertinence, une césure, une intersection entre imaginaire et réalité. A l’instar de la métaphore sans cesse renouvelée (Prandi 1992), le mythe est constamment réactualisé, déjoué pour mieux être rejoué. C’est à travers la littérature du Sud, et plus particulièrement à travers l’étude de la nouvelle « 1928 Story » de James Agee, que cet article vise à montrer ce qui se rejoue dans le mythe comme dans la métaphore. En quoi ce qui a priori résonne comme une répétition, une redite, se transforme en énergie créatrice de sens, réécriture et réinterprétation ?

AUTHORS

RÉMI DIGONNET Rémi Digonnet is Assistant Professor at the University of Saint-Etienne, Jean Monnet, where he teaches linguistics. His research fields range from metaphor and its various analogues to the perception of the senses from a linguistic perspective. He has recently published Métaphore et olfaction : une approche cognitive (Paris, Honoré Champion, 2016), which deals with the use of metaphor in the expression of olfaction.

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Myth for the Masses: Erskine Caldwell's "Daughter"

Amélie Moisy

1 Raymond Williams, looking back over centuries of literature, established a difference between writers who resorted to myth, assuming “a subjective community where the specifics of actual societies are excluded as ephemeral or contingent” and appealing to the universal unconscious, and reformers seeking to unify the masses for social change, presenting the particulars of a society and specific social problems (The Country 246). In the case of Erskine Caldwell, the use of myth was in no way antithetical to his desire to promote social change, as the short-story “Daughter” will illustrate.

2 Erskine Caldwell’s social consciousness developed early. Born in 1903 in eastern Georgia, he accompanied his father, a minister, on visits to the rural poor; Ira Caldwell’s sermons and later, his column in the local paper dealt with issues like lynching, tenant farming, sharecropping, and malnutrition, and with Erskine he shared his doubts about the American capitalist system.1 Caldwell’s first published essay, “Georgia Cracker” (1926) is an indictment of Southern bigotry and injustices. Although he would never join the Communist party, he sought to write proletarian fiction in the 1930’s. In a 1931 application to the Guggenheim committee, Caldwell said he wanted to write on proletarian life in the South to “point out the direction the masses must take” (Miller 159). He aligned himself with the Communist party in the League of Professional Writers’ manifesto Culture and Crisis which he helped pen in 1932. While he also repeatedly insisted on taking his distance from the Communists and individualism in literary matters (Cook, Fiction 68), his famous dark, though grotesquely humorous, early novels are concerned with the oppressed. Tobacco Road (1932), about degenerate Southern sharecroppers, and God’s Little Acre (1933), depicting monomaniac small farmers and industrial workers, both illustrate the view Caldwell expressed in his New Masses book review about Edward Dahlberg’s From Flushing to Calvary (1932)—that hopelessness arising from capitalist exploitation was a characteristic of good proletarian fiction, for it showed the urgency of action more effectively than a hopeful vision and tone (Miller 166). Although Caldwell, who presented himself as “a backwoods everyman who decried sophistication of every variety” (Miller 155), never

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theorized his use of myth, he dealt in all of its aspects to effect societal changes. He sided with anti-“moonlight and magnolia” Southerners (Miller 131), which suggests he saw myth as a popular belief or tradition embodying the ideals of society and shaping social behavior, and, in the particular case of the myth of the traditional South, as a fallacy to be exposed. On another level, Calder Willingham termed him the “True Myth- Maker of the Post-Bellum South” for the “truly “mythic” and “legendary” characters” in his immensely popular early novels (206-07). His appeals for social justice also tapped existing mythologies; Richard Gray, in “The Comedy of Frustration,” demonstrates that in his first novels Caldwell used poor whites as grotesques to show how different reality was from the agrarian ideal of the yeoman farmer, concluding that “Caldwell—in every one of his finest stories—is trying to draw us back steadily into the world of Jeffersonian myth” (232).

3 We find all these workings of myth applied to reform in the short story “Daughter,” published in Anvil in 1933, the year Jack Conroy founded the little magazine advocating proletarian values. Presenting what was to become an iconic figure in a recognizable social context and a given economic situation, Caldwell exposes Southern myths to draw readers back to a democratic ideal consonant with a unifying national myth, and pins a leftist resolution to a crisis reminiscent of ancient legends, making his point unmistakable by taking the device of repetition to new artistic heights. Its hopeful emphasis on the righteous power of the working class distinguishes “Daughter” from Caldwell’s other sharecropper stories, but its directness seems to justify Barthes’ statements in Mythologies on the transparency of leftist myth, which shall be examined here.

***

4 In the first paragraph of “Daughter,” Colonel Henry Maxwell, who lives in “the big house,” calls the sheriff at sunrise to take Jim to the jail in town. As the townsmen crowd around the jail to ask Jim why he is inside, we learn that Jim is a sharecropper for Maxwell; his daughter had been complaining of hunger for so long that he “couldn’t stand it,” and shot her: “I’ve been working all year and I made enough for all of us to eat […] but they came and took it all away from me. I couldn’t go around begging after I’d made enough to keep us.” Colonel Henry Maxwell has been “taking all the shares” because a mule died at Jim’s; the assembled townsmen decide Maxwell has acted unfairly and get ready to “Pry that jail door open and let Jim out […]. It ain’t right for him to be in there,” as the outnumbered sheriff leaves them to it.

5 Expectations about the South are redirected in this short story so as to “point out the direction the masses must take” in actuality. De Tocqueville was told that the Northerner was animated by the spirit of enterprise, the Southerner by the spirit of chivalry: Clement Eaton, in The Mind of the Old South, elaborates upon this Southern ideal. “[T]he country gentlemen […] cherished a set of values that were different from those of the North […] notably a deep sense of obligation to the family and a willingness to put one’s life in jeopardy for the sake of honor. […] Many Southerners had a high sense of pride in regard to money matters; they did not wish to appear petty or mean in financial transactions” (267, 288-89). In Writing the South, Richard Gray accounts for the Southern ethos by the twin influences of the aristocratic planter and the yeoman farmer. The antagonists in “Daughter” are avatars of these types, and one might expect

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Colonel Maxwell, a landowner and an officer, to have integrated codes descending from the planter and Jim, the poor white, from the modest farmer—and foresee that Maxwell would act with honor, Jim with canniness. Instead, Maxwell is prompted by greed and does not treat his dependents fairly, so that the only recourse left for the cropper is to kill a child whose fundamental place in the family unit was clear in its appellation “Daughter.” Colonel Henry Maxwell’s flouting of common decency suggests that the Southern code of honor and “noblesse oblige” is a myth. “Daughter” is, in this respect, reminiscent of William Faulkner’s story “Wash,” where Wash Jones takes a scythe to Colonel Sutpen, whom he had imagined “bigger than this hyer durn country” (543), because Sutpen is more concerned about a horse than about the newborn daughter he has sired on Wash’s granddaughter Millie; seeing Sutpen and others like him as “bragging and evil shadows” (547), Wash is shot after killing Millie and her child. In “Wash” and “Daughter,” the dependents act according to a righteous code although they kill. Caldwell makes Jim the sharecropper the figure of the deserving worker, who does not fall far short of the ideal: he has worked unstintingly on land that is not his. His sense of honor and independence forbids him to beg; even murdering his kin, one might argue, was motivated by devotion for his daughter whose pangs he wanted to end. His daughter died pure, whereas Jeeter Lester’s daughters in Tobacco Road are forced to marry at twelve in order to eat or to seduce a brother-in-law for his green- turnips. In the story “Masses of Men,” published in Story in 1933 and reprinted with “Daughter” in Kneel to the Rising Sun (CS 448-458),2 a little girl is sold into prostitution by her mother to feed the family. More than a Soviet poster, the worthy Jim evokes the independent yeoman farmer, whose log cabin origins are a means of identification across the political spectrum in America, and whom Jefferson believed to be the most virtuous of citizens. His worth emphasizes the degradation of conditions he and other farmers face, made clear by the repetition of “hungry,” but also of the repeated complaints concerning “the shares” and “the mule.”

6 In The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash distinguishes between the relatively few aristocrats and the more numerous men of humble birth who achieved fortune and constituted the ruling class of the great South, with the brutally unscrupulous “horse trader” type prospering fastest in what was still, until the mid-nineteenth century, nearly a frontier environment (19). Then an increasingly nouveaux riche South, partly to counter the world’s disapproval at its continuing use of slavery, adopted the fiction that “every planter was in the most rigid sense of the word a gentleman,” enabling it “to sneer down the Yankee as low-bred, crass, and money-grubbing” (61). Cash confirms that around the turn of the twentieth century, due to the exhaustion of plantation lands in the South and the staggering demand for expensive fertilization, the drop in the price of cotton, the insolvency of the banking system and the decline in food crops, there was a change in the relatively recent aristocratic ideals of the planter class; even as the myth remained strong, landowners fell back upon the frontier qualities that had contributed to the rise of the ruling class in the South in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “For here […] was created a world in which the hard, energetic, horse-trading type of man was remorselessly indicated for survival” (149). By the 1920s and 30s, according to Cash, circumstances for the landowning farmer were so stretched that he could not get by without grinding or cheating his dependents. A cropper might earn ten cents a day per member of his family, and find himself with nothing left when accounts were settled at the end of the year, or even remain in debt to the landlord year after year (281-82). This is the situation shown in “Daughter.”

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7 In Tobacco Road, Caldwell advocated solutions for “Jeeter, and scores of [other tenant farmers]”: “Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all” (63). In “Daughter,” Caldwell shows the working-class responding to a landowner’s injustice by refusing what they call “the State’s […] grudge against Jim” and taking the law into their own hands, not to lynch the murderer but to free him. The implicit point is that masses capable of such discernment and momentum should organize to ensure that tenant farmers and sharecroppers get a fair deal, restoring true democracy—with the support of readers from all walks of life, for the distance from the agrarian and Jeffersonian myth of an independent, productive citizen rewarded for his honest labor on the land has been made apparent.

8 Appealing to a high and middlebrow audience who would still have had a classical education in early twentieth century America, the story also resonates with classical mythology to validate the crowd’s uprising. Greek myth clears the starving Jim of blame, for being under evil influences. Some sources say Hunger, the daughter of Night, a poor advisor, dwells in the antechamber of Hell (Commelin 219); others say the goddess of starvation is related to a cohort of disasters, being the daughter of Strife, and sister, among others, of “murders” and “man-slaughters” (Hesiod l.226-232). Now, it is as if Jim were pursued by the Eumenides, the deities to whom humans were supposed to leave the vengeance of crimes against kin to the extent that he cannot eat the breakfast the sheriff brings, although he has been hungry for days, and that there is no water in the jail bucket, although he is thirsty, recalls the torments described by Robert Graves for breaking taboos (Graves 396). What is more, Poverty, in Greek myth, is the daughter of Luxury and Idleness (Commelin 435)—but the industrious Jim has starved, so that the dishonorable Colonel Maxwell may continue to live well. Maxwell has profited from the blindness of Ploutos, who gives indiscriminately to the undeserving. Clearly, human justice can be more lenient with Jim. This comes across in Caldwell’s use of repetition, too.

9 Scott MacDonald states that Caldwell has made the greatest use of repetition since Gertrude Stein. He uses the device to convey aspects of a character’s personality, to establish simple settings reflecting unsophisticated lives, or to reflect a movement back to the starting point, emphasizing immovability or a contrast. MacDonald’s study of “Country Full of Swedes”3 shows repetition conveying an insane frenzy, while its use in “Candy-Man Beechum”4 and “The Fly in the Coffin”5 recalls the triumph of the spiritual and jazz against societal oppression (209-10, 218). Repetition in “Daughter” conveys something of all of these elements. But it also makes the story an obvious artifact and increases its political force.

10 The scene and the protagonists are referred to over and over: the cell with its pail, window and bars and the jail yard, the street, the vacant lot, the men and boys and automobiles and horse carts outside, the characters of Jim and the sheriff, and allusions to Colonel Henry Maxwell and Daughter all recur (Jim and Daughter are only once given full names, after four pages: “Word had spread all over town by that time that Jim Carlisle had shot and killed his eight-year-old daughter, Clara” (268). Their names bring to mind ancient lineage and the old world as well as an American town in Pennsylvania founded by pioneers known as the site of a Civil War skirmish in which the Confederate cavalry withdrew. As if addressing a jury of peers, Jim answers the men at the window who repeat, “It must have been an accident, wasn’t it?” as the Sheriff blurts out variations on “Now, just take it easy, Jim boy.” Repetition establishes Jim’s character

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and dilemma, the “particulars” of his lot. In incremental variations, Jim tells the men, “Daughter said she was hungry and I just couldn’t stand it no longer,” and refuses their repeated, belated offers of food for Clara: “I made enough working on shares, but they came and took it all away from me. I couldn’t go around begging after I’d made enough to keep us. They just came and took it all off.” Penalized for the Colonel’s mule’s death whereas it was too old to be of any use, he chants: “The mule dropped dead […]. It just dropped dead” (268). Repetition establishes the mood of the crowd, who repeats “It don’t seem right…” about Clara’s death and about the State having a grudge against Jim, and opines that “Henry Maxwell didn’t have no business coming and taking all the shares. He’s got plenty of his own. It ain’t right for Henry Maxwell to come and take Jim’s too” (268). As in “Country Full of Swedes,” repetition is used to create a sense of frenzied agitation. Throughout the text, more men come to the jail: “… everybody in town had heard about his being there…”, “Word had spread all over town by that time…”, and the ensuing pandemonium is given a blow by blow description, with the repetition of verbs like “to push,” “to elbow,” “to shout” conveying the growing force of the disapproving townsfolk. Moreover, repetition highlights change. In the din, Jim repeats his line “Daughter woke up this morning saying she was hungry,” even though he can no longer be heard. That his final words should be so similar to his first drive home the logic that to suffer from hunger when one has worked honestly is unacceptable as, with “a crowbar that was as long as he was tall […], [a] six-foot crowbar”, a townsman proceeds to pry the jail door open to let Jim out; and the sheriff leaves, ending the protracted struggle with the crowd, repeating his trademark, “Now, take it easy, Jim boy” (270), now that the tables have been turned and he has been deposed of his power and function.

11 Repetition gives “Daughter” unity and direction. Caldwell’s repeated vernacular or Vox Pop—“It don’t seem right,” “I just couldn’t stand it no longer” (267)—which Williams warns is a “linguistic contrivance for political […] reach and control” (The Politics 80), might be irritating but for the contrapuntal, musical effect of the montage of selected passages, which gives the text rhythm and form, renders it as memorable as a lively performance, and identifies it as a modernist, expressionistic artifact. When asked by interviewer Richard Sale whether he strove for an incantation effect by repeating key words or statements several times, Caldwell, who had earlier claimed that he didn’t know why he wrote as he did, said only: “Well, there’s artistry in words, of course, but then you’re getting very close to preciousness. You’re writing style rather than content, and to me content is far more important than style” (Cook, Fiction 47). But the repetition functions as what in a theatrical context Brecht was to call the Verfremdungseffekt, sometimes translated as “distancing effect,” in which the audience is prevented from sympathizing with the characters and the action in order to make them understand intellectually the problems exposed, creating the conditions for analysis and reform. And “Daughter” had a chance to function as a drama—Caldwell donated the rights to the Workers Laboratory Theater to adapt as a benefit for the Daily Worker, furthering the cause of working class solidarity (Miller 222).6

12 “Daughter” was reprinted as the opening piece in Proletarian Literature in the United States, a collection edited by Michael Gold and other radicals in 1935. That same year, the story was included in Caldwell’s Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories, a work leftist critics praised, as it continued to shatter Southern myths with tales on poverty, lynching, racism, and white degenerates without the sexual prurience which they had felt cheapened the cause in the novels. The ending on a feeling of brotherhood

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distinguishes “Daughter” from the earlier novels and the many stories in which (usually black) sharecroppers are expropriated or punished by the law and lynched rather than supported by mobs: in “Saturday Afternoon” (1929—CS 28-33), a good Negro cropper is lynched for talking to a white woman; in “Kneel to the Rising Sun” (1935—CS 641-64) a Negro is lynched for speaking out for the rights of a white man who betrays him; in “The People Vs. Abe Lathan, Colored” (1939—CS 474-81), a Negro cropper is expropriated and jailed for having no place else to go; in “The End of Christy Tucker” (1940—CS 263-68) a Negro refuses to be whipped for not buying at the plantation store and is shot by the plantation owner who says he threatened his life. And in the 1940 novel Trouble in July, the entire southern community becomes a lynch mob for Sonny Clark, a black man accused of raping a white woman, who only withdraws her false charge after his death. Within the short form of “Daughter,” solidarity among the working class is undisputed; landowners who do not care if children starve are the root of all evil. That the people’s mythologized, just power may apply to real social ills, may in fact save future children, is suggested in the author’s note preceding “Daughter” in a later compilation, Jackpot: “Does it make any difference, after all, whether an event actually happened or whether it might have happened?” (263)

***

13 Yet this purpose recalls Roland Barthes’ proposition in Mythologies that since the language of myth is essentially conservative, truly revolutionary language cannot be mythical because man uses it to transform the real and not to preserve it in images. If a woodcutter fells a tree, Barthes says, when he speaks of the tree he is talking about his action on the tree, the tree is not an image as it can be for one who describes or celebrates a tree (145-46). “It is because it generates speech that is fully, that is to say initially and finally, political, and not, like myth, speech which is initially political and finally natural, that Revolution excludes myth. […] the bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth” (146). Myth exists on the left, admits Barthes, and he cites “a sanctified Stalin” (147); but though all myth works from simple images such as caricatures or symbols, conservative mythologies, which hide their bourgeois sources, enjoy infinite variety, while leftist speech produces “threadbare myths” which “point to their masks” rather than seem organic and inevitable (127, 147-49). Barthes, for whom mythical language may speak through words, photographs, paintings, posters, rites, objects, or other constructs, is not exclusively concerned with literature, but does mention fiction in connection with Jules Verne, seeing in his ships substitutes for the bourgeois fireside (65). He mentions that the objects which left-wing myth has to take hold of are rare, “only a few political notions,” unless it has “recourse to the whole repertoire of the bourgeois myths” (147).

14 I have shown that Caldwell delved into this repertoire. “Daughter” is consistent with a conservative Agrarian ideology. Indeed, a consideration of proletarian productions of the time suggests that they adapt an ethos of conservative values such as love for the family and desire for the betterment of the children, or belief in God, to expose social conditions. Jack Conroy’s “A Coal Miner’s Widow” and “The Iron Throat” by Tillie Lerner, published alongside “Daughter in Proletarian Literature in the United States (57-62 and 103-10), respectively show a son’s love for the widow who kept the family together

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through hard work and a miner’s reluctant love and hope for a better life than his for his child; the heat of the house, the laundry, the iron and the rails in the first, the whistle and coal dust in the second, serve as symbols of the protagonists’ unhappy lot that will need to be changed by social justice, contrasting with the green lawn and sprinkler of the well-to-do woman and child in Conroy’s story, and the boss’s white tablecloth in Lerner’s. When in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) Richard Wright has the old black woman of “Bright and Morning Star” give up her sons to Communist organizing, and sacrifice her own life to shoot a traitor, he gives legitimacy to the cause that made her sons rebels by showing it blend with her cherished religion, thus establishing her as a martyr. Showing such affections, aspirations and capacities to be universal, as is the longing for “what’s right” or the quality of honor in “Daughter,” is an effective strategy. These literary works of the thirties contribute to a cumulative mythology, typically by addressing the themes which Walter Rideout has identified in radical novels: strikes, the development of class consciousness and conversion, bottom dogs, and the decay of the middle class (171, 181 ff.). Among the themes of “Daughter” are the moral decay of the ruling class and mass conversion to social justice. Notwithstanding its craft and the wealth of detail and symbol with which such motifs (a young man’s discovery of the decay of the middle class and conversion to solidarity) are treated in stories like Thomas Wolfe’s “The Party at Jack’s” (1939), the overall limitation of these four themes in proletarian literature seems to bear out Barthes’s theory of the relative paucity of leftist myth.

15 Raymond Williams’ view of a conflict in the twentieth century between the collective consciousness of myth and the mass consciousness of reformers whose works sought social means of change also makes leftist myth something of an oxymoron, stemming from contradictory impulses which Williams had placed in the city: “Out of the cities […] came these two great and transforming modern ideas: myth, in its variable forms; revolution, in its variable forms. Each, under pressure, offers to convert the other to its own terms. But they are better seen as alternative responses” (The Country 247). Yet this better enables us to judge the achievements of Caldwell, who from out of the rural American South, became celebrated as a natural mythmaker when he most desired social change. I have given examples of how he worked upon existing myths yet presented the specifics of an actual society to promote change on what might be considered an ephemeral problem. As a result, “Daughter” aggrandizes the subject of his early novels, the cropper, who was to become a new mythic Southern figure. According to Dan Miller, Caldwell was largely responsible for the iconizing of sharecroppers in the thirties—after he wrote two series on the South for The New York Post in 1934, which were reprinted as the pamphlet Tenant Farmer and included in his book Some American People (1935), sharecroppers were made “the heroic, beleaguered subjects of documentary films, newsreels, and even a Rockwell Kent commemorative Stamp. Caldwell’s Post series had played a central part in making the Southern sharecropper the most visible symbol of Depression woes” (222). A 1937 volume with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, the first of many works to illustrate the plight of croppers in the South, made that figure starker still.7 Moreover, as concerns “Daughter,” the relatively limited presentation of the socio- economic issue allowed Caldwell to attain what analyst Dominique Clerc Maugendre calls the essence of myth, “an element of abnormal exceptionality […] that remains insistent, identical, as time passes” (6)8—infanticide, the persecution of the small by the mighty, forgiving a wrongdoer are archetypal situations, found in legends and the

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Bible, that impact the imagination and reinforce the effects of the other myths that Caldwell reworks.

***

16 These timeless allusions make up for the transparency of the revolutionary myth, the fairy-tale bluntness of the figures and the element of kitsch in the manipulation of expectations. Both essential and topical, “Daughter” is a fine example of the “conversion of myth to the terms of revolution” as it was practiced in the thirties, when radical literature had its largest audience and practice in the United States, and working within leftist myth to change society gave Caldwell’s writing its greatest force.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Selected and translated by Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Print.

Caldwell, Erskine. “Daughter.” Jackpot: The Collected Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell. 1940. London: The Falcon Press, 1950. 265-70. Print.

____. The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941. Print.

____. “Georgia Cracker.” The Haldeman-Julius Monthly, 4 Nov 1926, 39-42. Print.

____. God’s Little Acre. New York: Viking Press, 1933. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Print.

____. Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1935. Print.

____. Some American People. New York: R.M. McBride & Company, 1935. Print.

____. Tenant Farmer. New York: Phalanx Press, 1935. Print.

____. Tobacco Road. New York: Scribner’s, 1932. Edition used: Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Print.

____. Trouble in July. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1940. Athens, U of Georgia P, 1999. Print.

____. You Have Seen Their Faces. Photos by Margaret Bourke White. New York: Viking Press, 1937. Print.

Cash, W.J. The Mind of the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941. Print.

Commelin, Pierre. Mythologie grecque et romaine. Paris: Bordas, 1991. Print.

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991. Print.

____. “Erskine Caldwell: Modernism from the Bottom Up.” Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays. Ed. Robert L. McDonald. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. 58-76. Print.

Eaton, Clement. The Mind of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1967. Print.

Faulkner, William. “Wash.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1950. 535-50. Print.

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Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. London: The Folio Society, 2000. Print.

Gray, Richard. Writing the South. Ideas of an American Region. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.

____. “The Comedy of Frustration.” The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell. Ed. Robert L. McDonald. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. 220-36. Print.

Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn White. 1914. Web. June 6 2013.

Hicks, Granville, et al., eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States. New York: International Publishers, 1936. Print.

Howard, William L. “Caldwell on Stage and Screen.” Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 59-72. Print.

Keely, Karen A. “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s ‘Tobacco Road’.” Journal of American Studies 36.1 (2002): 23-42. Print.

Lombardo, Paul. A Century of Eugenics in America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. Print.

MacDonald, Scott. “Repetition as Technique in the Short Stories of Erskine Caldwell.” The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell. Ed. Robert L. McDonald. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. 208-20. Print.

McDonald, Robert L., ed. The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.

____, ed. Reading Erskine Caldwell: New Essays. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print.

Maugendre, Dominique Clerc. “L’excessive nature du transfert.” L’Excès. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 43 (Printemps 1991): 5-19. Print.

Miller, Dan B. Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road. New York: Knopf, 1995. Print.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus, 1973. Print.

____. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. 1989. London: Verso, 1996. Print.

Willingham, Calder. “True Myth-Maker of the Post-Bellum South.” The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell. Ed. Robert L. McDonald. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. 205-08. Print.

Wolfe, Thomas. “The Party at Jack’s.” 1939. Eds. Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol Jr. University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Print.

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938. Print.

NOTES

1. Beginning in 1926, Ira Caldwell wrote a weekly column entitled “Let’s Think This Over” for The Augusta Chronicle. Ira and Eugene Caldwell’s exploration of Southern poverty fueled the eugenics debate and, according to some commentators, indirectly helped pass sterilization legislation (Lombardo ch.3; see also Keely, “Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell’s ‘Tobacco Road’”). As Sylvia J. Cook has pointed out, the advocacy of eugenics was widespread in the early decades of the century and it was considered compassionate and progressive. Ira Caldwell, in a 1929 column, argued for the impact of the environment on degeneracy. In 1930 he published the disheartening results of his experiment with a family of destitute farmers which he called “The Bunglers” in the magazine Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment, again insisting on the impact of poverty on development and character, but supporting sterilization in some cases.

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Although Erskine Caldwell presented grotesque rural figures, he wrote against the sterilization of tenant farmers in Some American People and consistently attributed the faults and disabilities of his characters or subjects to socio-economic factors, and as Keely admits, he showed other strata of humanity in a bleak light as well (Cook “Modernism” 70-71, Miller 125-26, Keely 42). 2. CS is the abbreviation of The Complete Stories of Erskine Caldwell. 3. A family stands by as rowdy Swedes settle in next door (1933. CS 3-17). 4. A black man in a hurry to see his girlfriend stops at nothing, not even when sheriff shoots him (1935. CS 23-27). 5. A black man hates flies, gets up out of his coffin because a fly was in there with him (1936. CS 576-79). 6. It is worth mentioning that, in contrast, both the stage and screen versions of Tobacco Road entailed a loss of political insight. The play “changed the characters’ motivations and revised Caldwell’s sociological beliefs,” and the film censored the suggestive sexual behavior and left- leaning political opinions contained in the novel, and, according to Caldwell, rejected “the reality of the story itself” with an absurdly falsified happy ending (Howard 61, 66). 7. This first work of photo-reportage on Southern rural poverty sold very well upon publication, was reviewed favorably by the left, and brought Caldwell together with Bourke-White, who would become his second wife. But besides the usual charge of libel from the South, it was criticized by other photographers and writers for its emotion and melodrama, and because Caldwell wrote the “quotes” himself. James Agee and Walker Evans, authors of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), attacked the book—whose popularity set the publication of their anti- documentary, planned for 1937, back by 4 years–-for its exploitation of the poor (Miller 241). Cook argues that Caldwell and Bourke-White’s book shows a modernist sophistication in its recognition of the impossibility of “writing impersonally and scientifically about their human subjects” (Cook, “Modernism” 68). 8. “…ce qui fait l’essentiel d’un mythe, ce qui fonde son universalité, réside dans son caractère d’exceptionnelle anormalité. Un caractère qui se reproduira, insistant, identique au fil du temps.”

ABSTRACTS

Dans « Daughter », publié dans Anvil en 1933, Erskine Caldell remet en question la mythologie du Sud, réécrit la mythologie grecque, et crée un mythe nouveau. Son pauvre métayer Jim Carlisle, travailleur mais affamé, et trop fier pour mendier, est en prison pour avoir tué sa fille, qui s'était encore plainte d'avoir faim. Le propriétaire, le colonel Henry Maxwell, « prenait toutes les parts », tenant Jim responsable de la mort d'une mule. Caldwell détourne les attentes et use savamment de la répétition pour créer un mythe socialiste de la solidarité entre les travailleurs ; la foule rend justice elle-même, décidant que « ça ne semble pas correct » que Jim soit condamné. J'explique brièvement en quoi la fin de « Daughter », motivée par un but politique, la distingue des nouvelles plus sombres que Caldwell écrit habituellement sur les métayers ; mais la vision désabusée du Sud est typique de l'auteur de Tobacco Road. Si ce récit semble confirmer l'opposition qu'établit Barthes dans Mythologies entre le mythe à gauche et le mythe conservateur, il illustre néanmoins comment Caldwell est devenu un faiseur de mythes.

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AUTHORS

AMÉLIE MOISY Amélie Moisy is Maître de Conférences in Applied Languages at Paris Est Créteil University, and a member of the TIES/IMAGER research group there. She is the author of a doctoral thesis and a book on the works of Thomas Wolfe, and has studied, and published articles on, other American authors (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jack London, Tennessee Williams, Anne Sexton, Louis Wolfson, John Fante, Harriette Arnow, Grace Paley, George Saunders). She is currently researching the social views of Southern writers of the 1930s, Wolfe’s contemporaries, especially Erskine Caldwell and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

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Frontiers of Myth and Myths of the Frontier in Caroline Gordon's "Tom Rivers" and "The Captive"

Elisabeth Lamothe

1 Since the American West and its volatile frontier conjure up as many myths or “mythologies”1 as the South does, both in the popular and literary imagination, it would be quite fruitful to examine the potentialities for renewed artistic expression produced by the conflation between the two spaces, or their “confluence” (Welty 103). To what extent did Southern women writers seek new territory as background for their stories and to what use did they put such displacement? Did they rely upon displacement for thematic but also stylistic change, innovation and maybe even liberation from a regional literary tradition which was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, quite entrenched in what critic Michael Kreyling has called “orthodox narratives of identity” (xii)?

2 The Agrarians’ manifesto I’ll Take My Stand sought to define and prescribe the region’s scripts of identity and development yet it is obvious that even those close to the members of the group engaged in forms of dis-location or displacement that sought to revise those very scripts. Caroline Gordon had a very conventional Southern upbringing and was able to take advantage of the Agrarians’ activities due to her husband Allen Tate’s central role in the movement.2 She nevertheless enjoyed significant success of her own and was singled out by another “grande dame” of the Southern short story, Flannery O’Connor, as “the lady who taught me so much about writing” (27). In the early thirties, Gordon was writing more about the frontier and the West, Texas and western Kentucky, after the American revolution and in the 19th century than she was on and about the Deep South, at least implicitly. Gordon was passionate about the history of the frontier and her childhood was filled with stories of eighteenth-century Virginia and of her relative Meriwether Lewis, leader of the illustrious transcontinental expedition alongside William Clark. These family connections were to become the subject of her unfinished last novel, Joy of the Mountains, which concerns Lewis’s relationship to President Jefferson, his explorations,

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and his mysterious death in Tennessee in 1809. Furthermore, Gordon’s interest in Native American culture and frontiersmen and women is evident in her writing. Her work depicts characters venturing forth, grappling with the harsh realities of frontier environment, an impulse she viewed as the very essence of storytelling. This is made clear in her critical study of fiction, How To Read A Novel, when she indicates that to her, “the one true subject of fiction is the adventures of a hero or heroine—that is the story of what happened to some man or woman who, through answering the call to adventure which constitutes the action of the story, comes to stand out from his or her fellows as a remarkable person” (74, my emphasis). The other essential ingredient in fiction resided, according to her, in the successful emergence of “voice, rather than plot” (How To Read a Novel 75). This stress on the central place of voice is in keeping with the concerns of Southern Renaissance women writers who, as analyzed by Carolyn Perry, “perhaps in reaction to a decidedly male tradition […] placed particular emphasis on women taking control of telling their stories” (Perry and Weaks 238).

3 The American frontier experience produced a very distinct genre, known as the captivity narrative, which is still taken up by contemporary writers: a beautifully crafted recent novel by Melanie Wallace, Blue Horse Dreaming, engages in such rewriting. In the novel, the members of a garrison lost in the West, plagued by hunger, strife and literal oblivion give way to the basest instincts while a former female captive, redeemed at last from the Natives, is far from rejoicing in her liberation. She actually mutilates herself and lets herself die because she has been returned to a civilized life that alienates and confines her, making her more captive than she was when she lived among the Natives who kidnapped her. The reader is thus led to wonder whether there is not greater, more stifling captivity in a supposedly free and civilized life than we think. Besides, not once does the narrative brush upon the notion of the protagonist’s suffering in captivity: such a significant omission is worth inquiring into, as it is also silenced in Caroline Gordon’s short story “The Captive” (1933). Kathryn Derounian observes that captivity narratives constitute “the first American literary form dominated by women’s experiences as captives, story-tellers, writers, and readers” (xi). Its central premise focuses on the disruption of identity through violent separation from family and community. Captives were traditionally concerned with asserting their identity in opposition to the Native community that had abducted them. However, what Gordon found more relevant were the boundary-crossing strategies her protagonist could develop in order not to remain captive of cultural “scripts of identity.”

4 Gordon adapts the genres of the frontier and captivity narratives, as this essay will demonstrate by focusing first on the rewriting of the traditional frontier short story in “Tom Rivers.” Later on this becomes apparent with a more radical transformation of the captivity narrative, a genre Gordon appropriated and condensed into the surprising “Captive.” Narrative point of view is dramatically different in the two stories, as the male voice in “Tom Rivers” adopts a very different perspective towards the frontier experience from the first-person, female narrator of “The Captive.” It would seem that, like her protégée Flannery O’Connor, whom she probably influenced in that respect, Gordon was a somewhat ambivalent and contradictory figure who functioned as a writer in the masculine realm of the Southern Agrarians by adopting a relatively misogynistic stance and denying female subjectivity. She obviously found it difficult to discard those masculine strategies yet the tour de force of “The Captive” testifies to the originality of her feminist perspective, as she deviates from representing captivity

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along the lines of what historian Richard Slotkin called “an exaggerated and emotionally heightened illustration of the moral and psychological situation of the community […]. Their ties with their families, with civilization itself, had been forsaken for the sake of their God’s will” (65).

Remapping Southern Literature

5 The two stories are, as mentioned earlier, somewhat at odds with Gordon’s relatively uniform focus on the South as a locale for her fiction; I would contend that it makes her the precursor of an ulterior tendency for Southern writers to adopt multiple regional identities. Critic Robert Brinkmeyer has devoted a study entitled Remapping Southern Literature to such writers. He begins by examining the attitudes toward identity and mobility which emerged during the Southern Renaissance. Focusing on the small town and the countryside as ideal settings, the dominant Southern myth, he writes, involved celebrating folks who do not leave their birthplace but who find ways of integrating themselves into the community while maintaining a certain degree of individuality. For these writers, he argues, the “solitary figure breaking free […] would, in the fiction of most Southern writers, be less a hero than a potential psychopath, a person tragically alone and isolated, cut off from the nourishing bonds of family and community” (4). The great majority of Southern writers tended to express ambivalence toward mobility, seeing it not as a positive sign of progress—an expression of freedom, independence, and self-reliance—but rather as “irresponsible escapism” (8). In other words, fixed scripts of identity and becoming were to be followed. Brinkmeyer notes that after the fifties however, place came to have a less powerful hold on Southern writers, as demonstrated in the works of Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver and James Dickey among others. A few decades before such entanglement with place and cultural norms was gradually forsaken, Caroline Gordon experimented with displacement and the figure of the loner: in “Tom Rivers,” she adopted a male narrator’s voice to interrogate the tension between a Southern community characterized by stasis and the mythical mobility of a frontiersman. My interpretation is that Tom Rivers is the captive of a “wide net” of myth-making, to borrow from one of Eudora Welty’s short-story titles.3

6 “Tom Rivers” has an extremely loose plot. It is a first-person narrative by Lew Allard, a young Kentuckian struck by wanderlust who goes West to Texas to “see life and ride horses” (27) and rejoin his outlaw figure of a cousin, the eponymous Tom Rivers. One notes the shallowness of such ambition, as riding horses could barely make for greater self-knowledge—but it is in keeping with the prescribed accomplishments expected of well-to-do, young Southern men. Writing from a male point of view, Gordon adopts the elements of the Southwestern mythology based upon the categories identified by Mark Busby: “journeying, ambivalence, primitivism, racism and sexism” (435). Indeed, as Larry Goodwyn also puts it in an essay dealing with “The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature,” “the legend is inherently masculine: women are not so much without courage as absent altogether” and “the myth is primitively racialist: it provided no mystique of triumph for Mexicans, Negroes and Indians” (qtd. in Busby 435).

7 The story first reads as a meditation on storytelling and the process at work in myth- making, as Lew Allard opens his narrative with a long reflection on vision, perspective and the powers of voice. The first-person narrator belongs to a large Southern “family

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connection” (25) whose relationships are measured by a “subtler cycle” (24) than that of mere family visits: the subtle art of storytelling which gives each one “his place and a sort of record in memory” (24) guarantees a form of immortality as “we hold them in our minds until they seem to live again” (25). Storytelling takes place under a tree, an apt symbol of continuity and connection, and voice is felt to have the power of breathing new life into those who are “dead now or gone to places so far away that they seem dead” (24). Yet despite the apparent revitalizing power of ritualized storytelling, the running metaphor of light and darkness calls the reader’s attention to the way perception also replicates a petrifying pattern. The voice of the male narrator holds Tom Rivers captive in his own myth, reproducing the same story over and over, like the never-changing pattern of “light fall[ing] under and through the boughs to strike always in the same pattern. You notice how it falls that way year after year, changing only with the seasons […]” (25). Tom’s life has become sacred in the sense given to the term by Mircea Eliade in his study of myths, as it is taken for “exemplary and significant,” belonging to a “sacred tradition, primordial revelation, exemplary model” (11). The hero displays the “supernatural” qualities of mythical beings, capable of extraordinary feats and providing “exemplary models” (17-19).

8 Yet the pattern conceals as much as it reveals, for new perspectives about Tom radically alter the ideal figure the narrator would like to see secure and unchanging atop a pedestal. What he is after is the construction and perpetuation of a masculinity that nears perfection in Southern terms for it has always refused to yield to the demands of the feminine4 and embodies all the exceptional values the South felt its men should have; men who were “strong on kinship” (27), “out of the ordinary” (31), their spirit tempered by “moral compunction” (30) who nevertheless do not have any qualms about keeping a “little Mexican girl in one of those houses across the tracks” (29) as any Southern gentleman would, who does not think twice about sexual promiscuity with a second-class citizen and finally, a race and class-conscious displaced aristocrat confident in the belief that “a negro knows somebody’s going to take care of him” (37).5 The setting and characterization painstakingly detailed by the narrator fall into the category of stereotypical representations and myths not only of the West but also of the Southern character. Besides, the story reads much like a play performed for the entertainment of an audience so tickled by the character of Tom that it “starts” with “half pleasure, half pride” (25) when his name is spoken and joyfully seeks to “keep up the illusion, with a name here, a name there. Seeking to make the scene more complete […]” (25). Yet the scene has been exited forever by the hero, who chose exile and eventual disappearance rather than the enclosure and confinement of Southern mores and values.

9 Southern women were no strangers to issues of captivity in their experience of gender, race, community, and constructions of history. Historically, as Anne Firor Scott has demonstrated, they were quite confined by a tenaciously held myth of womanhood within a patriarchal family structure where “any tendency on the part of any of the members of the system to assert themselves against the master threatened the whole” (16). The weightiness of such conventions must have fueled Gordon’s admiration for frontierswomen, as she made it obvious in a letter to fellow writer Katherine Anne Porter,6 insisting that “the exploits of some of those pioneer women are things that usually occur on battlefields” (qtd. in Boyle 81). She praised the character of Jennie Wiley, the protagonist of “The Captive” and “the state of mind of this pioneer woman,

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her life and her experience, [as] the spiritual foundations of thousands of Americans” (qtd. in Jonza 111).

Female Heroics and the Art of Crossing Boundaries

10 Writing “The Captive” may thus have been paradoxically liberating, an impression strengthened by the original title of the short story. A close reading of the working notes for the story by Rebecca Harrison sheds lights on the fact that at the time of writing, Gordon lived very close to the Cumberland River situated near the family estate of Benfolly. She originally titled the story after that river, which partly explains the dedicatory tone of the original title “To Cumberland.”7 Yet because she was most probably feeling like a captive at Benfolly, she must have considered that the land was weighing her down, that she was caught in a pattern of mundane activities and domestic work detrimental to her artistic endeavors. So who was the real captive of the creative act: the character or its author? Harrison notes that Gordon made a pun upon this in a letter to Ford Maddox Ford, separating the two words “Cumber Land,” indicating that the land literally hindered her, the home place in the South acting like a burden upon her creative faculties. Thus, renaming the story “The Captive” takes on added significance: the South was indeed a trap and this story of a captive pioneer woman could be read as symbolic of Gordon’s own creative subjugation and of her attempts to unshackle herself, as she resented catering to the Agrarians’ meetings and demands and not writing as much and as freely as she wanted to.

11 Gordon had found the idea for this story when reading William Connelley’s historical account of the abduction of pioneer Jenny Wiley; she had been so struck by it that she remembered the day of discovery quite clearly, as she told interviewers: I was in the stacks in the Vanderbilt library, and I took this book down idly […] and looked at it, and I got very excited about it. […] I read it at first just because I found it so interesting. And then the idea of finishing the story came to me. It seemed to me that the story was there. I don’t think I thought about it much at the time. I just knew I had to write that story. (Interview with Baum 449)

12 Spurred on by the ellipses, by what remained silent in the narrative, Gordon “got the notion that [I] could finish it” (interview with Baum 448). An interview reveals that Gordon also felt deep identification with Wiley and an interest in using the genre of the captivity narrative to comment upon the plight of women. First, the act of writing the story, embodying Jennie’s voice, caused great turmoil as she insisted that she “suffered more writing it than any story [she] ever wrote.” She also claimed that the process of writing left her feeling as if “[she] had been living in the wilderness for weeks from jerky. […] And I was exhausted” (interview with Baum 449).

13 As Christopher Castiglia asserts in his study of the trope of captivity and boundary- crossing: “Captive white women have shown […] that while they are never free, they have nevertheless developed voices with which to denaturalize and revise their home cultures’ scripts of identity and to rearticulate American genres, popular rhetoric, and mythology so as to speak the experiences of those marginalized by the dominant national language” (12).8 This subversive potential afforded by the captive and/or redeemed woman may explain why the historical Jennie Wiley’s documented pregnancy at the moment of her capture, her delivery among the Indians, and her infant’s initiation test, though all in Connelly, are omitted in Gordon’s fictional

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revision; besides, her brother’s death alongside that of her children at the time of the initial attack is also omitted. Those deletions of some of the historical account’s aspects suggest that the writer’s interest lay in Jennie’s experience as a woman more than a sister, a focus on the way she copes with the changes in her maternal identity and her wrenching away from domesticity, as well as her ability to transcend the cultural limitations she was bound by. Gordon also radically departs from previous Southern captivity narratives which, according to Karen Weyler, “fervently reject the possibility of transculturation and emphasize the ardent longings of their subjects to return to their white families and friends” (27). Free from culturally established frontiers, the experience of captivity becomes a destabilizing agent that, ironically, allows for reflection, accomplishment and creative authorial voice. First Gordon’s Jinny finds the means of her liberation in acculturation and second, it is the heroine who escapes by her own means: she is never rescued and restored by men to civilized society, thereby manifesting her own resilience and ingenuity.

14 From the outset of her narrative, Jinny takes an unconcealed pride in having crossed gender role boundaries; determined not to appear contrite, she also sustains a remarkable refusal to indulge in sentiment. She comes across from the start as a headstrong and “brash” woman, the only one “in the settlements who would have undertaken to stay on that place all day with nothing but a parcel of children” (177). She will not take no for an answer, even from her spouse, as she prods him along to make him undertake a trip for salt and reveals her power in decision-making: “I knew if he got to studying about it he wouldn’t go […] I’d as soon be scalped now and have it done with it as keep on thinking about it all the time” (175). Likewise, she never indulges in self-pity when she loses three of her four children, killed during the Indian raid on her cabin. She coldly states, after ascertaining their deaths, that she “won’t be getting any more help” from her slaughtered oldest boy, a strangely utilitarian comment displacing emotion onto the need for action. The surprisingly detached tone never underlines the effect the children’s deaths have on her but rather the rapidity of the attack and the aspect of the aggressors. She is more thorough in her description of the Indians’ “rings and trinkets” and adamant in her refusal of sentiment “I looked away quick [from the] scalps of my children” (179), even relying on generic articles rather than personal pronouns to refer to her now deceased offspring “Sadie was the oldest girl” (182, my emphasis). Not once does she break speed in her narrative to bemoan the loss of her identity as a mother, but instead portrays herself as always on the lookout for signs allowing her to cope with her bewildering environment. Grief is duly repressed and only gushes forth twice: once in a long wail she lets out during her sleep, and the second time when she experiences sheer human empathy with her captor, when the latter tells her of the loss of his own child. The tears shed on that occasion signal her now complete imperviousness to the racial stigmatization the pioneers resorted to against Indians.

15 Historical captivity narratives often depict Native American captors as a threat to white sexual purity, thus justifying seizure and control of Indian lands and the attempted extermination of the racial Other. Gordon reverses this aspect of the genre to reveal the more realistically likely sexual tainting of the white female body by a white man rather than by a savage captor. Gordon’s Jinny recounts a memory about Lance Rayburn, a trapper who appears to have attempted to rape her when she rejected his presents and advances:

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He come toward me, and before I knowed what he was up to he was on me and trying to bear me to the ground. He was a strong man but I was stout, too, and I stood up to him. We was rassling around in the bushes quite some time before he got me down, and then he had to keep both his hands on my chest. I laid there right still, looking up at him. (191)

16 Jinny invokes her “pappy” as a protective force as she resists the attack; yet, this has no effect on Rayburn’s violence, as he scorns all the other men on the settlement. She quickly acknowledges the impotence of white male protection and bests Rayburn by denying him any rights to her even if he goes as far as ravishing her. Her brave claim that “it ain’t going to do you no good. I ain’t going to have none of you no matter what happens” (191) clearly implies that because she denies him the power of restoring her honor by proposing marriage after he has violated her, she makes Rayburn powerless to act, and thereby bests, even “hurts” him. Thus, only Jinny’s faith in her own voice and freedom to choose the outcome of her fate save her. It is not reliance on white male protection or codes of sexual virtue which decide her fate. Ultimately, she would rather exist as a tainted woman than as the wife of her rapist made respectable by the institution of marriage and she does not shrink from the evocation of sexuality. Textual evidence suggests that Jinny is attracted to a Native American man, Mad Dog: she observes him the night following her abduction and describes his physical appeal in unambiguous terms, without hiding behind the facade of a demure and proper “lady,” as she bluntly describes his nakedness: “When he moved, you could see the muscles moving, too, in his big chest and up and down his naked legs. An Indian woman would have thought him a fine-looking man, tall and well formed in every way” (181).

17 She further crosses identity and sexual borders in addition to speaking their language. Jinny adapts to Indian ways: she learns to work like an Indian, and even accepts the Indian party’s leader Crowmocker as “a father” (194).9 Jinny does not hesitate to adopt the physical appearance of an Indian female, including face painting. She notes that the elder chief: “Fixed me up some of the red root mixed with bear’s grease, and after I’d been putting it on my face for a while you couldn’t told me from an Indian woman, except for my light eyes” (194). She does not lament the loss of her former identity when Crowmocker tells her that her white blood will be cleansed from her when she is formally adopted, making her feel Indian and embrace all the tribe’s ways. In fact, the actual adoption rite is all that stands between her and total assimilation: Jinny looks Indian, speaks the language, and has become so comfortable that “the Indian way of doing things seemed natural to me. I thought nothing of seeing dark faces around me all the time” (195). Her transculturation seems complete at the end of the story, when a white woman outside the fort she eventually rallies mistakes her for an Indian and runs “inside the fort, the children after her” (208).

18 Far from producing sheer bewilderment and dismay, her solitary and meditative work in the wilderness allows her personal space to think, dream and even create. In nature, she exercises her imaginative faculties and becomes a creator able to transform the most rudimentary material; when faced with a pile of buffalo bones weathered by the elements, she works on giving them meaning: I couldn’t keep my eyes off the bones. I would take them up in my hand and turn them over and over, wondering what manner of beasts they had belonged to. Once I made myself a little beast, laying all the bones out on some lacy moss, the front feet stiff like it was galloping off in the woods, the hind legs drawn up under him. A hare it might have been or a little fawn. Or maybe a beast that nobody ever heard of before. (193)

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19 Jinny thus symbolically uses the land to create in contradiction to male impulses to clear and colonize it. She puts the bones together, gives them shape, and imagines them free in the wilderness, a stretch of the imagination that the narrator of “Tom Rivers” is incapable of performing; this freedom gives her the potential to discover something original: “that nobody ever heard of before” (193). The affinity between the wilderness and creation is further supported through the type of memories she conjures up, an important impulse according to Gordon who stressed the fact that “one way of asserting your individuality is through your memories” (qtd. in Rodenberger 32). Even the dream of escape that shows her the way to the fort is a product of her own creative power fostered through her spiritual connection to the forest and the native culture she has embraced. Her mind produces a dream vision and provides her own map for rescue, an occurrence possible only in the wilderness where, according to Native American beliefs, spiritual power connects human beings and the natural world that surrounds them, allowing individuals to cross into different states of consciousness. This connection between the internal and the external was embodied in native culture through dream visions, which served an important and central part in the spiritual lives of most North American tribes.

Conclusion

20 Gordon’s experience with rewriting frontier stories sparked her broader interest in the exploits of pioneer women and their contact with Native Americans; short-story writing was obviously a testing-ground leading to longer forms, as she later wrote a full-length novel set in the pioneer period, Green Centuries (1941), which required extensive research on the Cherokee. Writing “The Captive” involved painstaking work on form, as Gordon faced the crucial problem of condensation of the original narrative: divided up into six numbered sections of unequal length, each part ends with the protagonist’s slumber and the following one with an awakening into a new identity or state of awareness. Stressing her protagonist’s ability to interpret nature and the wilderness without attempting to tame it, her willingness to engage in creative work, Gordon underlines the degree of irony there is in the very notion of captivity for women. Such feminist perspective was taken up more recently by Angela Carter in “Our Lady of the Massacre” (1985), a revisionist captivity narrative set in 17th century colonial America, in which Carter explores the many forms of subjugation and control devised by a so-called civilized English society. The only path to selfhood and expression is found in the transgression of social and cultural constraints, from indentured servitude, sexual coercion and criminalization to equality and identity among the Iroquois.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Points Seuil, 1957. Print.

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Bayley, Isabel, ed. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. Print.

Boyle, Ann. Strange and Lurid Bloom: A Study of the Fiction of Caroline Gordon. Fairleigh: Dickinson UP, 2002. Print.

Brinkmeyer, Robert. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. Print.

____. “New Caroline Gordon Books.” The Southern Literary Journal 14. 2 (Spring 1982): 62-68. Print.

Busby, Mark. “Texas and the Great Southwest.” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America. Ed. Charles Crow. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 432-56. Print.

Castiglia Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

Connelley, William Elsey. The Founding of Harman’s Station and the Wiley Captivity. 1910. Painstville, KY: Harman Station, 1966. Print.

Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. London: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Eliade, Mircea. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Print.

Firor Scott, Ann. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995. Print.

Goodwyn, Larry. “The Frontier Myth and Southwestern Literature.” Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America’s Literary Heritage. Ed. John Gordon Burke. Chicago: ALA, 1973. 175-206. Print.

Gordon, Caroline. “Caroline Gordon and ‘The Captive’: An Interview.” Interview with Catherine B. Baum and Floyd Watkins. Southern Review 7 (1971): 447-62. Print.

____. How To Read a Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1964. Print.

____. The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981. Print.

Harrison, Rebecca. “Captive Women, Cunning Texts: Confederate Daughters and the ‘Trick- Tongue’ of Captivity.” English Dissertations, Georgia State U, 2007. Print.

Jonza, Nancylee Novell. The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. Print.

Kreyling, Michael. Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being: Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.

Rodenberger, Lou. “Folk Narrative in Caroline Gordon’s Frontier Fiction.” Women, Women Writers and the West. Eds. L.L. Lee and Merrill Lewis. Troy, NY: Whitston, 1979. 32-40. Print.

Slotkin Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History. London: Yale UP, 2000. Print.

Tate, Allen. Memoirs and Opinions, 1926-74. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1975. Print.

Twelve Southerners. I’ll Take my Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. 1930. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. Print.

Wallace, Melanie. Blue Horse Dreaming. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1983. Print.

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Weyler, Karen A. “Captivity Narratives.” The History of Southern Women’s Literature. Eds. Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 25-31. Print.

NOTES

1. Mythology is to be understood as Barthes defined it: a discourse conveying a message and materialized by representations of various sorts (194-95). 2. Tate emphasized the fact that myth constituted their common identity: the Agrarians were “an intensive and historical group as opposed to the eclectic and cosmopolitan groups that flourished in the East. There was a sort of unity of feeling, of which we were not then very much aware, which came out of—to give it a big name—a common historical myth” (33). 3. At the end of the twenties Gordon began collecting bits and pieces that she could use on her fiction and gathered from “the talk on the porch” and her uncle Rob the story of a distant relative, Tom Rivers, who was a cowboy in Texas in the 1890s. According to her uncle, he was “utterly fearless, took people’s guns out of their hands by the barrel and then handed them back but first, like a lady handing somebody a tea spoon” (qtd. in Jonza 119). 4. Tom was asked by his fiancée to stop drinking and as he would not abide, he left the South and never married. 5. The “qualities” exhibited by Tom and his relatives read like an illustration of the southern civilization’s admirable features as defined by the Agrarian manifesto: “a fair balance of aristocratic and democratic elements,” “diversity within unity,” “leisureliness, devotion to family and neighborhood, local self-sufficiency and self-government,” and of course “the South was agrarian, and agrarian it still remains very largely” (52-54). 6. Katherine Anne Porter sent the story and a commentary about it in a letter to her father in early 1933. She is somewhat critical of her counterpart’s work, as she was more preoccupied with the initial version of the captivity narrative, the male point of view expressed in it and her own relative’s role in Jennie Wiley’s redemption: “Caroline says that this Henry Skaggs was an old man about eighty years old at the time he rescued Jinny, and that it happened around 1780. So the old fellow would possibly be the father of your grandfather, I should think […] Caroline didn’t make him out such a hero as the actual story has it, but that was because she wished to make the woman the chief figure […]. But I said to her, that she should either make up her stories out of her own imagination, or if she must re-writer history, not to libel my relations when she does it […]. She didn’t exactly libel Henry, and she didn’t mention his name, but I don’t see why she couldn’t have stuck a little closer to the facts just the same” (qtd. in Bayley 91). 7. Robert Brinkmeyer’s analysis of her situation sustains this argument; he notes that in the early thirties, “central to her personal conflicts was a deep love for the South and its rural ways on the one hand, and on the other hand a realization that Southern life had little relevance in the modern industrial—and artistic—world. Unlike her husband Allen Tate, Gordon was never ardently caught up in the Agrarian movement. When she and Tate returned from Paris in 1930 to make a stab at being Southerners again by living on a Tennessee farm, Gordon, despite enjoying the solitude and quiet, quickly became bored and restless. To her friend Sally Wood, she wrote (31 July 1930): ‘It will be a godsend to have somebody to talk to beside the kin. I am getting tired of them. There is no amusement here except driving around to various creeks to go swimming’” (New 65-66). 8. To Castiglia, the primary function of the genre is to maintain the established interlocking hierarchies of race and gender in the New World. 9. He becomes a mentor to Jennie, showing her how to scrape and cure animal pelts, make deer thread, and even call deer out of the brush. He tells her that once she is formally adopted, he will teach her the art of native medicine by revealing ancient secrets.

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ABSTRACTS

Comme sa consœur Eudora Welty a pu le faire dans le recueil The Golden Apples, Caroline Gordon a puisé dans les mythes grecs, tout comme dans le temps mythique de l’histoire du Sud, une abondante source d’inspiration. Cet article s’attache à l’étude de deux nouvelles (« Tom Rivers » et « The Captive ») pour montrer que le mythe chez cette auteure fait question sur deux plans. Tout d’abord au niveau de la production, dès lors qu’il s’agit de concilier répétition et création ; un processus de destruction et de métamorphose est à l’œuvre. De plus, le rapport de Gordon aux mythes du Sud, qu’ils soient familiaux ou historiques, dans leurs dimensions thématique et spirituelle, semble également indiquer que leur réécriture est non seulement aux sources d’une fiction de retour aux origines mais aussi une manière de s’émanciper des postulats des Agrariens par un déplacement vers la Frontière et ses propres mythes.

AUTHORS

ELISABETH LAMOTHE Elisabeth Lamothe is Associate Professor of American Studies at Le Mans Université. Her research focuses on women’s studies as well as writings and visual arts by women: she published on Southern women’s fiction and autobiographical works (Welty, Glasgow, Porter) but also on the works of Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood before turning to diaspora and exile literatures. She is currently working on a book-length study of Vietnamese-American life-writings and short stories while contributing to developing the study of young adult literature in France.

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William Faulkner's "My Grandmother Millard" (1943) and Caroline Gordon's "The Forest of the South" (1944): Comic and Tragic Versions of the Southern Belle Myth

Françoise Buisson

1 In The Mad Woman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note that the female writer who wants to achieve literary autonomy has to dispose of “those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face” (17). Not only are women writers compelled to wear these “mythic masks,” but the phrase can also apply to Southern belles. The latter are often referred to as archetypes (original patterns in Greek), stereotypes (fixed images or clichés) or myths. The distinctions between these categories are all the more blurred as the word “myth” itself is quite polysemous. A myth is usually defined as a traditional narrative involving supernatural people or a set of popular ideas on natural or social phenomena, such as the moonlight-and-magnolias myth for example; the representations it can thus conjure up often prove fallacious. The etymology of the word reveals its close association with fable and fiction, that is to say story-telling, the purpose of which is to account for creation or origins. Mircea Eliade underlines the fact that mythical time is the time of origins, creation and foundation. As such, it deals with what actually happened in the beginning, when Chaos was transformed into Cosmos: therefore, myth testifies to man’s “ontological obsession” (84). In the South of the United States, this obsession is more ideological than ontological, and the Civil War definitely triggers off a return to Chaos.

2 Myths are thus similar to parables or allegories and take on religious, philosophical or even ideological dimensions. As Roland Barthes suggests in Mythologies, when he refers to bourgeois myths as myths of Order, the role of myths consists in depriving events of reality (253) and History (262), which is also the purpose of Southern mythology. If we think of the “mythic masks” that were imposed upon the Southern belles’ faces by a

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mythmaking patriarchal system, we can easily understand that Southern white women, required to be Southern belles and then Southern ladies once they were married, contributed to the preservation of the Southern plantation and ideological order, as so many historians and literary critics have asserted: “A traditional southern—and uniquely American—character, the belle figure has been a perfect vehicle with which to represent the flowering of the Old South in antebellum times, the ‘rape’ of the South during and after the Civil War, and the decay of the South in the glare of modernism in the twentieth century” (Seidel 164).

3 Myths, as narratives, are also close to the short story and can have the same symbolical density. Gilbert Durand highlights the “semantic density” of myth (413), which is described as a “dynamic system of symbols” (64). One might be tempted to say that like myth, a short story relies on some minimal narrative space but achieves a kind of maximal signifying power: Pierre Tibi compares short fiction to guerrilla war and novels to traditional warfare (43). This comparison proves quite relevant in studying two Southern authors: William Faulkner (1897-1962) and Caroline Gordon (1895-1981) who were both short story writers and novelists. Some of their short stories can be read as parables or illustrations of truths, but quite often, on account of their epiphanic dimension and of their ironical potential, they question and repudiate myths as fabrications of truth and as fallacious representations of an ideal. Myth, indeed, is sometimes defined as an unfounded or false notion (Merriam-Webster). Pierre Tibi reminds us that according to Valerie Shaw, the specific mode of the short story is neither comic, nor tragic, but ironical (33). The purpose of this article is thus to pay attention to the comic and tragic versions of the Southern belle myth in two stories which were published at approximately the same time. It is also quite challenging to realize that the male and female writers eventually give us the same ironical insight into the Southern mythmaking of women in stories that are more mythoclastic than mythopoeic. This article will first shed light on the ways Faulkner and Gordon “do or write Southern” by exploiting Southern topoi, plots and stock characters from plantation novels or romances, within the frame of the short story. Yet, their rewriting, whether comic or tragic, testifies to a demythologizing process and takes on an iconoclastic dimension, which leads the reader to ponder over the writers’ intentions and their ambiguous stance towards their legacy, for the boundaries between mythmaking and fiction appear quite fluid and elusive. Myths tend to be reassuring and comforting, at least so in the eyes of people in general, and like stereotypes, they seem to provide a stable frame to comprehend reality, whereas short stories can be perceived as a destabilizing and even upsetting genre.

Southern Topoi, Plots and Stocks Characters: Gone with the War

4 Caroline Gordon’s story, “The Forest of the South” (1944) reads like a revenge tragedy. William Faulkner’s “My Grandmother Millard” (1943) was published after The Unvanquished, a short story cycle on the Civil War, in which the eponymous heroine, the Southern Lady turned warrior, dies because of the transgression of her own code. Faulkner’s short story, a joke or a tall tale, has a comic dimension and sounds like a parody of romance or a personal and historical farce. Gordon’s short story is devoid of any comic dimension and is tinged with bitterness and dark irony. The short stories are

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close-ups on women who may be perceived as representations of the Southern belle as defined in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: “Southern lore has it that the belle is a privileged white girl at the glamorous and exciting period between being a daughter and becoming a wife” (1527). She is both vulnerable and sexually innocent and embodies opposites such as brightness and shallowness, beauty and physical remoteness. She appears to have much in common with the British Victorian lady. The Southern belle was an icon who also had an ideological function: she justified slavery and the patriarchal system aimed at ensuring women’s protection: “As Prenshaw and many others have shown, the image of the southern white woman as frail and weak has long been used to justify, first, the institution of slavery and, second, violence against black men as a means of protecting and serving her” (Bennett 109) and “the belle was placed on a pedestal because men made her the objective correlative for the ideals of the South” (Bennett 110): she thus became a symbol of stability and order and embodied sacrifice for honor, pride and courage. She had an ornamental function in society and epitomized the woman “‘killed’ into art” (Gilbert and Gubar 17). Traditionally, according to Peggy Prenshaw, “The Southern writer repeatedly ‘divides’ the heroine in a doppelgänger motif to create a parade of Scarletts and Melanies, or variants of the pair” (81). Scarlett stands for the rebellious Southern Belle, a kind of contradiction in terms, whereas Melanie is the prototype of the Southern lady.

5 No female character really matches the definition in the two stories that are built around quite a simple plot, that is to say a courtship—or “the process of husband- getting” (Seidel 6)—which takes place during the Civil War and ends successfully in both stories, but whose success is undermined by the ironical tone of the story. “My Grandmother Millard” has mock heroic overtones. The boys hide the family silver in the outhouse and have Melisandre sit on the chest. Armed with a log pole, the Yankees launch an attack on the backhouse which then breaks apart, exposing the outraged Southern belle, thereby debunking the myth. According to Noel Polk, “Perhaps ‘battle’ is too grandiose a name for what actually happened. ‘Skirmish’ might be more apt […]. She is of course not doing anything we should not be privy to, but she is humiliated nevertheless” (138). She is rescued by a Southern lieutenant whose name is unfortunately “Backhouse.” He falls in love with the young woman in the backhouse, but she is unwilling to marry him because of his name, an obsession with naming that conveys the South’s manipulation of language aimed at “gilding” reality. Rosa Millard and General Nathan B. Forrest then resort to a ploy so as to change the lieutenant’s name: “Granny writes out and Forrest signs a citation that notes simultaneously the death in battle of Lieutenant Philip St Just Backhouse and the appointment of Philip St Just Backus to the rank of Lieutenant” (Polk 139). They invent a Civil War battle, the battle of Harrykin Creek. Onomastics allows decorum to be preserved; as a result the Southern Belle can marry the Southern Cavalier. The success story is all the more tinged with irony as its full title is “My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek,” which may convey the idea that the actual story is also a “duel” or a form of gender war between the old lady and the general. Besides, Backus can also remind the reader of Bacchus and bacchanalia, sexuality and lechery, and such an onomastic choice is all the more ironical as it is hardly reassuring for an uptight Southern Belle.

6 Gordon’s story could also be interpreted as a success story, for Eugénie Mazereau, the Southern belle, accepts the marriage proposal of lieutenant Munford, a Northerner. Yet

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the latter finally finds out that he is mired in murky waters, because of the strong and ambiguous relationship she had with her cousin Frank Macrae, whom she surrenders to her fiancé. She leads Munford to the Macrae place where Frank, a Confederate officer, is hiding, ambiguously wearing a Federal uniform. Ironically, Frank asks Munford if he can marry her before being probably sentenced to death. Although Frank is now Munford’s prisoner, the Northerner realizes that he is actually doomed to be Eugénie’s prisoner. Far from being the traditional tale of sectional reconciliation, the story sounds like a revenge tragedy and the Southern belle may be retaliating against the Southern male figures— including her father who was slaughtered under her very eyes —who failed to protect her as well as “the garden of the South,” a well-known Southern topos that sends us back to the pastoral tradition: “Southern woman, even before the romantic idealizations in the historical novels of Reconstruction authors, was fantasized as a Southern Eve in ‘the highly stylized garden in the wilderness,’ the plantation” (Seidel 120). The Southern belle turns out to be “a mad woman in the attic,” like her own mother, and a seductress who ensnares both Northerners and Southerners. Their “reconciliation” is ironically brought about by a southern Medusa, a freak and a monster. To some extent, structurally, the end of the revenge story testifies to the Southern belle’s subversive power but the price of this power is madness and suffering. Thus, the story-line of each narrative shows the writer’s intertextual play with the clichés and structure of Southern plantation literature and Reconstruction reconciliation narratives, through a more condensed form than the novel, the short story, which sometimes verges on allegory. However, allegory is usually closely associated with truth and authority. In the two short stories, authority and truthfulness are undermined by narration and focalization.

7 In these initiation stories, which are based on more or less explicit epiphanies, the male point of view is unreliable. “The Forest of the South” is told by a heterodiegetic narrator, through the prism of a Northerner, lieutenant Munford, the main focalizer who projects a naive perspective onto the Civil War and women; the homodiegetic narrator of “My Grandmother Millard,” a portrayal of the Confederate woman who is both a lady and a warrior, is a child, Bayard Sartoris. What is quite original from an historiographic point of view is that the Civil War, in Faulkner’s short story, is viewed through the eyes of children or women (we are, indeed, sometimes given insight into the women’s minds). Both stories are based on pairings of women. Gordon’s story focuses on Eugénie Mazereau, “loonier than the old lady” (155), her mother, the traditional neurasthenic mother figure. In counterpoint, Faulkner’s story is built around Rosa Millard, John Sartoris’s mother-in-law and Cousin Melisandre, the stereotyped Southern belle. Gordon’s story is also based on a pairing of men: Major Reilly, indeed, has more experience than Lieutenant Munford and adopts a more cynical and pragmatic approach to Southern history. Thus, these initiation stories are based on traditional contrapuntal techniques which efficiently add to the conciseness required by the genre.

8 In the rewriting of Southern topoi and plots, the traditional setting, the plantation, is more comprehensively described in “The Forest of the South” whose symbolism is suggested by the title itself, the forest being opposed to the Garden of Eden. The reference to the forest thus conveys a return to postlapsarian chaos and wildness, as well as a return to unbridled femininity. The Clifton Gardens symbolize the taming of the wilderness by the Old South’s aristocrats but they are arbitrarily destroyed by the Yankees, for a Northern engineer was not invited to dinner by their owner: “The

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flowers and the fountains he had seen two days before, the camellias, the Cape Jessamines, the late roses, the marble of the grottoes and the pavilions—all those shining, rose-colored things had vanished in that plume of dull smoke!” (FS 151).1 The desecration of the Southern garden, a simulacrum of tamed Nature with its fake “grottoes,” can be blamed on the Yankee invasion which had already started before the war when Eugenie’s cousin, Franck Macrae, had already triggered off the demythologizing process by dressing up the statue as a Southern belle in the middle of the fountain. The Southern garden is actually both silent and barren and has turned into a kind of dantesque universe, characterized by an excess of blinding light: “But the stillness was oppressive and the landscape, he thought suddenly, too bright. This shining air held a menace” (FS 152). The treacherous landscape is described as if it were a maze, a labyrinth, and the Macrae place is the place of some inner exile for Eugénie, for it reminds her of her childhood and of her ambiguous relationship with her cousin: “‘That is the Macrae place.’ It was the tone that might have been used by a traveller returning to his old haunts after years of absence” (FS 156). Munford, the Northerner, also feels estranged in the heart of the Southern landscape, and is implicitly compared to Robinson Crusoe; the landscape is as ambiguous and silent as the female character: He fell to pacing again and as he went was conscious of greenery pressing in there beyond the gravelled walks, of sunshine on the gravel, of pink and white blossoms. And yet it was a hushed landscape. Moving about these grounds he had sometimes the feeling that he imagined a man might have on a desert island. Here in this smiling land he was lonely. (FS 156-57)

9 The treacherous landscape is definitely an objective correlative for the Southern woman who also appeals to him because of her enigmatic dimension.

10 Faulkner’s short story borrows many ingredients from the Civil War novel and the romance, yet dialogues and characterization take precedence over the setting which is not extensively described. As regards the plot, Faulkner definitely plays with the reader’s expectations by re-using codified episodes: the ritual consisting in burying the family’s silver; the Yankees’ arrival, the Southern soldier who is a daredevil and a romantic hero embodying the chivalric tradition. One can easily draw a parallel between Cousin Philip and Lieutenant Munford who want to save Southern belles. The use of stock characters and codified episodes enables each short story writer to gain in narrative efficiency. Such narrative condensation can also be found in myths.

11 The short story as a genre draws heavily on economy and compression, which often compels authors to create flat characters, or to play with the reader’s horizon d’attente due to some form of shared mythology. As Eudora Welty puts it, in the short story, characters do not have “the size and importance and capacity for development they have in a novel” (112). This explains the predictability of some characters who have turned into myths, such as the Confederate Woman and the Southern belle. Onomastics also enhances the reader’s ability to decipher the implicit meanings of the text—the use of French names can send us back to the Middle Ages and feudal society. Melisandre is the chatelaine rescued by Philip, the Knight endowed with a regal name, just as Bayard refers to the Cavalier myth. Some characters then prove to be “overeadable” whereas others are “unreadable,” such as Eugénie, whose madness her fiancé fails to understand. These stock characters are in fact just pre-texts as we are presented with different versions of the Southern belle who can be quite ambivalent.

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The Avatars of the Southern Belle

12 The representation of the Southern belle wavers between caricature, ambivalence and sheer mystery. In Faulkner’s story, Melisandre is taken off the pedestal and literally put into the backhouse so as to hide the family’s silverware under her hoop skirt; the comic situation is not devoid of scatological humour, especially when the Yankees decide to launch an attack onto the outhouse, which is also a kind of metaphorical rape suggesting that the patriarchal system was based on the illusion of protecting the white Southern belle. Melisandre, who is thus portrayed in 1943, is an anachronistic figure fabricated by the plantation class. She is represented with her dulcimer and her skirts swaying like balloons. Yet the use of the name “Melisandre” may be ambiguous, for it contrasts with the heroine’s womanliness: “Melisandre”, as an avatar of Melusine, calls to mind a woman with a snake’s tail, a hybrid creature; moreover, the suffix “andre” may also hint at manhood and some potential androgyny. Giving such a name to a so- called vulnerable young woman is both upsetting and ironical. She is definitely a foil to Granny Millard, the Southern Lady, who embodies courage and daring: patriotism also needs myths.

13 Eugénie Mazereau is no innocent Southern belle either. The short story is based on an epiphany, for Munford’s perspective, though rather limited, makes it possible to remove her “mythic mask” and to discover an evil-meaning woman. This kind of metamorphosis, or even anamorphosis, is a major feature of myths the contents of which can be potentially violent and threatening, and Eugénie proves to be dangerous and manipulative. She uses a Yankee soldier to betray the Southern cousin who had desecrated the myth of the Southern belle imposed upon women: “‘He put Cousin Maria’s crinoline on that statue there and he put a bonnet on it and painted its face with pokeberry juice and put a prayer book in its hand. He said she was going to church’” (FS 162). She is forever faced with the trauma of having witnessed her father’s death. Like the statue in the garden, she is an unreadable petrified mad woman; her petrifying gaze—“[…] those large strange-colored eyes fixed on his” (FS 158)—turns her into a Medusa figure by which the young Yankee is increasingly enthralled: She looked up. Her eyes were blue! He had thought them brown. That was because of the stain of light brown about the iris but the eye itself was blue. Blue, that is, if you stood there and looked into her eyes but if you stepped back a few paces you would say, ‘The girl’s eyes are brown, pale brown,’ and you would say, too, ‘She looks at me but she never sees me.’ Why should an eye look out and not see? Does it look within? Has it something it cannot look away from? (FS 161)

14 Munford’s attitude also testifies to the North’s inability to read and understand the South, the vacant stare standing for a kind of hermeneutic deadlock. Eugénie shows no concern for the Confederate Cause; far from being the Confederate woman, she has no ideological stance and experiences the collapse of the South as a personal tragedy: “The word ‘Yankee’ was never on Eugénie Mazereau’s lips. She seemed to have no concern for the Confederate Cause, and yet, he thought, she might be patriotic, and proud too, in other circumstances […]” (FS 160). She does not match the myth of the sexually pure Southern Belle, for she behaves in a most unladylike manner. Just as the garden turns into the forest, the tamed girl turns into a wild woman: “And yet when they had stopped there in the woods a moment ago she had yielded herself to his embraces more freely than at any time yesterday. She had even put up her arm up about his neck to draw his head down to hers” (FS 164). The myth is entirely debunked when Macrae

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declares he wants to marry her, the duel over the woman being a mirror image of the duel between North and South, which finally ends with the mad woman’s laughter. The end of the story is rich in structural irony, for, unexpectedly, the prisoner who is going to die is the winner, as conveyed by his “hard, victorious glance” (FS 166): Munford then realizes that he is engaged with a hysterical woman obsessed with her father’s bleeding and symbolical castration, a metaphor for her own defloration, and the defloration of the South. The debunking of the Southern belle myth is thus far more bitter than in Faulkner’s story and is actually representative of its evolution: “The metamorphosis began abruptly, about 1914, and continued until 1939. It was during this period that the southern belle as a character in fiction discarded her cloak of gentility and purity to reveal depravity, destructiveness, rebellion, or neurosis” (Seidel xi).

15 In Faulkner’s “My Grandmother Millard,” the representation is not that subversive. According to Peggy Prenshaw, Rosa Millard is among those “strong matriarchs who gain their strength at the expense of submissiveness and innocence” (82). Diane Roberts rather focuses on her duality, since she owns children and slaves, like any planter, and she tries to preserve feminine standards of behaviour and religion, like any Southern lady (15-17). For example, she orders the two children, Bayard and Ringo, to wash their mouths with soap when they use coarse language. The grandmother figure as “a protector, an upholder of virtues, of past values” (Petry 230) is also a prototype in Faulkner’s work. Alice Hall Petry, in her article, refers to Noel Polk’s analysis of the grandmother figure: “[…] Polk notes further that ‘the gray-haired bespectacled old lady’ was a ubiquitous character in Faulkner’s writings of 1927 to 1931 —a character who often functioned as the conscience of another individual” (225). Yet, the fact that she is short-sighted or that she needs spectacles may suggest her inability to see beyond the Old South and her lack of insight into Yankees’ possible lack of respect towards Southern belles: “She said she would rather have Yankees [instead of Ab Snopes] in the house any day because at least Yankees could have more delicacy” (MGM 674). Moreover, one may wonder if her very strength does not deprive her of her womanhood, to some extent; the tomboy heroine was also a Southern stereotype (and Drusilla Hawks provides a version of the tomboy in The Unvanquished: she dresses like a man, rides horseback and fights with men). Rosa Millard’s fall results from her misunderstanding of male behaviour. Indeed, she trusts any Southern man, whatever his ethic: “Her belief that the chivalric code will protect her proves to be her downfall; a gang leader who is rumoured to have served in the Confederate army kills her” (Seidel 51). And she is not killed into an art object, but into a heap of little sticks: “all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor” (“Riposte in Tertio,” The Unvanquished, 107). The image can be construed as both the reification and disintegration of the myth of the Southern belle and lady, that is to say the fall of a monument.

The Two Facets of Myth: Monumentalism and Fictionalization

16 In his article “The Unvanquished: Faulkner’s Nietschean Skirmish with the Civil War,” John Lowe applies the concept of monumentalism to the South’s cult of remembrance and underlines the dangers of the monumental concepts of history. “My Grandmother

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Millard” can be construed as a mise en abyme of the rewriting of the history of the South. This history is but a collection of myths which are actually fictions, as the invention of the battle of Harrykin Creek suggests. Southern history is literally rewritten by Granny Millard and Nathan B. Forrest, who invent a battle so as to meet bureaucratic requirements.

17 The fabrication of the battle can be perceived as a secondary short story framed within the short story itself and as a fragment of “historiographic metafiction.” Still, the story also has a didactic purpose in a country at war in 1943, as Faulkner suggests in a letter sent to Harold Ober in March 1942. The story could provide American readers with courage in time of war: “Faulkner thought it had not only humor but a message: ‘a willingness to pull up the pants and carry on, no matter with whom, let alone what’” (qts. in Blotner 436). Therefore, the international context at the time of the publication can explain why the debunking of war has its own limits and why the message of the short story is ambiguous, Rosa Millard winning a fictitious victory through a fictional device. As for “The Forest of the South,” it is a mise en abyme of the chaos generated by the Civil War and, more precisely in Gordon’s story, the destruction of a Southern monument, the Clifton gardens. The short story form, an apparently “minimal” form, is thus as efficient as the novel, a “maximal” form, to debunk Southern monumentalism and memorialization.

18 The fallacy—or myth—of sectional reconciliation is exemplified by the false relationship between Eugénie Mazereau and Lieutenant Munford, who empathizes with the victims and proves to be manipulated as a tool of revenge against her cousin Franck Macrae. Eugénie could be perceived as the winner, but what does she actually win? She falls a prey to neurosis as a result of the Yankees’ occupation. Paradoxically Gordon is often said to be conservative and to cling to the Agrarian ideal, but she is amazingly subversive in her treatment of the Southern belle. In her story she underlines the elusiveness of myths and the disintegration of values; the South cannot overcome the trauma; but she also may blame her female protagonist for her inner rebellion and her betrayal of two soldiers: during the Reconstruction, Southern ladies devoted themselves to what LeeAnn Whites calls “the reconstruction of their men’s self-image” (90). Eugénie Mazereau deconstructs men’s self-image and deconstructs herself in the process; either she remains the Southern belle or “angel in the house” (Gilbert and Gubar 17) or she loses her identity and integrity. She thus has the illusion of power, and finally, no more power than the Southern belle who is respectful of codes. Although she vanquishes the two men, the limitations of this “victory in defeat” are thus tangible.

19 Myths are also narratives dealing with creation and origins. What is questioned in these two stories is also the very origin of the war, and especially the myth of the Lost Cause. One may wonder whether Cousin Melisandre is worth the Southern soldiers’ sacrifice. Melisandre disappears from the narrative once she is married. She thus has only one function in the plot as well as in life. Eugenie Mazereau loses her mind; she is both petrifying and petrified into madness. Rosa Millard is given masculine features and has unladylike language or attitudes. For example, she refers to Melisandre as “that damn bride” (MGM 697). She plays an active part in the war and proves to be indomitable; the comic overtones are not detrimental to the myth of the Confederate woman, according to Jean Rouberol who thinks that the comic dimension is but a counterpoint to mythic exaltation (195). Rosa Millard definitely has some power, but she fails to control time and is also faced with slippage. Her lack of control over time is

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conveyed in several sentences: “And when the time came to really bury the silver, it was too late” (MGM 672); “It just all happened at once” (MGM 675); “And that shows how things were then: we just never had time for anything” (MGM 675). The war seems also all the more absurd as one of its origins, the so-called protection of the ideology embodied by the Southern belle, is itself an absurd entity: Melisandre is a maudlin and excessively fragile woman devoid of any psychological depth. The war is compared to fireworks or associated with entertainment: “a feeble popping of pistol-shots from down along the creek that didn’t sound any more like war than a boy with firecrackers” (MGM 677). The portrayal of Nathan B. Forrest as a bureaucrat obsessed with law is also all the more ironical as the real Forrest was rather famous for “his disregard of traditional rules of warfare” (Polk 139): “‘Confound it, Miss Rosa, can’t you understand either that I’m just a fallible mortal man trying to run a military command according to certain fixed and inviolable rules, no matter how foolish the business looks to superior outside folks?’” (MGM 696). In The Unvanquished, Rosa Millard is murdered and vanquished because she has stepped down from her pedestal; she lies and steals, thus violating her own code; yet, she has obeyed a feudal ethic so as to protect her kith and kin. She is all the more the victim of her own code as she expects the “Grumpy’s Independents” to regard her as a Southern lady. Her flaws are her ignorance of the Old South’s decline and her allegiance to Southern mythology, which is but a fiction. Actually, all the women in the two short stories seem to be the victims of the myth—or fiction—of Southern womanhood. Like Madame Bovary, they are the victims of such fictionalizing.

***

20 The reader who is faced with ambiguous versions of the Southern belle myth, is led to conclude that “The ‘lady’ is no more nor less a human fiction than is the past itself” (Prenshaw 87) and the myth is once again an apocryphal story, a well-known story that is not true. Both stories show that women can step down from the pedestals on which they were required to stay and have an iconoclastic potential towards male mythmaking. The authors’ attitudes towards their heroines can prove quite ambiguous as well; and a short story can be all the more ambiguous as it is short, leaving no room for detailed introspection or analysis.

21 The debunking of the Southern belle myth by women themselves is also a form of self- sacrifice. Eugenie, who rebels against a male order that fails to protect her, is not redeemed and her madness is a form of retribution. As John Lowe puts it, “Revenge, however, is the curse of the South, for its endless repetitions have led to physical devastations, personal corruption, racial catastrophe, and breakdown of the law” (431). Eugénie violates her own code: by betraying a member of her family, she also betrays the South. When Granny dies, she is totally reified into a heap of little sticks, as if she were but a puppet. This desecration of the Southern warrior leads Anne Goodwyn Jones to conclude: “Faulkner writes out his resisting women with great empathy. But it seems impossible for him to imagine a conclusion that is not, however agonizing it may be, tragic for these women who resist the Southern patriarchal sex-gender system” (71). To some extent, Faulkner wavers between monumentalism and demythologizing: Faulkner’s qualifying, destabilizing, of the figure on the pedestal marks his struggle with a past he sometimes finds attractive and frequently finds appalling. The carefully constructed Confederate Woman is readily visible in Faulkner’s fictions:

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she is also deconstructed, demystified, and exposed as Faulkner contests and debates the history he inherits. (Roberts 10)

22 Michel Gresset shares the same point of view as Anne Goodwyn Jones about the dangers involved in crossing gender boundaries, for an energetic and creative woman is often compelled to deny her femininity (151). This can account for Gavin Blount’s nostalgic stance in “A Return” (1938), another short story written by William Faulkner: “‘Do you know why I have never married? It’s because I was born too late. All the ladies are dead since 1865. There’s nothing left now but women’” (567). Or there’s nothing left but old stories―myths. Both Faulkner and Gordon use Southern mythology as a springboard for the writing of their two stories, the better to denounce its fictional dimension. The short story, which often presents readers with blind or short-sighted characters, like Eugénie Mazereau or Rosa Millard, paradoxically explodes myths as fallacies, through the same weapons as myths, diegesis or story-telling which relies on efficient structures and/or heavy symbolism. Yet, the short story, which undermines the patriarchal ideological authority of myth, also leaves room for ambiguity because of its very conciseness and allusiveness. The Janus-faced Southern belle portrayed by Caroline Gordon also embodies the elusive nature of the relationships between myth and fiction: myth nourishes fiction but fiction nourishes myth and creates new “mythic masks.” Kathryn Seidel underlines the fact that the Southern belle as an ambivalent figure created by writers or filmmakers has also become another version of the myth: “In fact, the fallen belle, an astonishing development in the 1920s, has become a new stereotype, a cliché that only the best writer can handle with freshness” (165). Fiction can thus be both mythoclastic and mythopoeic, and the shorter it is, the more challenging it proves by facing readers with the ethical or ideological ambiguities entailed by its aesthetic density. Such ambiguities result from the elusiveness of the genre that hovers on the borderline between myth and fiction, as well as over the limits between conciseness and expansion, closure and openness, at the crossroads of wholeness and fragmentariness: As we read, we can sense the precarious nature of any literary construction, its barely containable excitation of words which mimics our own suffusion in experience, and whose eventual style, like a ballerina’s line, is an expression of the manner by which chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay. (Ford xvii)

23 What Richard Ford writes in his introduction to The Book of the American Short Story, actually applies to our reading experience of Faulkner and Gordon’s short stories: both authors give a frame, however fallacious it may be perceived as a literary construction, to the chaos brought about by the Civil War.

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Lowe, John. “The Unvanquished: Faulkner’s Nietzschean Skirmish with the Civil War.” Mississippi Quarterly 46.3 (Summer 1993): 407-36. Print.

Manning, Carol S. The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Urbana and Chicago: The U of Illinois P, 1993. Print.

Petry, Alice Hall. “The Women of Faulkner’s ‘Elly’.” Faulkner and Women. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986. 220-34. Print.

Prenshaw, Peggy W. “Southern Ladies and the Southern Literary Renaissance.” The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Ed. Carol S. Manning. Urbana and Chicago: The U of Illinois P, 1993. 73-88. Print.

Polk, Noel. “Scar.” Faulkner and War. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Eds. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 138-59. Print.

Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1994. Print.

Rouberol, Jean. L’Esprit du Sud dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner. Paris: Didier Erudition, 1982. Print.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Tampa: U of South Florida P, 1985. Print.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983. Print.

Tibi, Pierre. “La Nouvelle: Essai de compréhension d’un genre.” Aspects de la Nouvelle, Cahiers de l’université de Perpignan 18 (premier semestre 1995): 9-76. Print.

Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story. 1942. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

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Whites, LeeAnn. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Making of the New South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Wilson, Charles Reagan and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989. Print.

NOTES

1. Throughout the article, the abbreviations FS and MGM respectively refer to “The Forest of the South” and to “My Grandmother Millard.”

ABSTRACTS

Les deux récits étudiés ici sont des Civil War stories au sein desquelles les femmes sont finalement amenées à jouer un rôle qui semble indiquer la faillite du mythe de la Belle du Sud. Néanmoins, alors que la nouvelle de Faulkner revêt une dimension comique et tourne à la farce aussi bien historique que personnelle, le ton de la nouvelle de Gordon, au message plus oblique et ambivalent, s’avère profondément amer et tragique. En fait, c’est l’ironie qui domine dans ces deux récits qui tournent en dérision le mythe de la Belle du Sud, en jouant avec les codes de la romance et du roman de la Plantation. L’utilisation de topoï, d’épisodes traditionnels et de personnages stéréotypés permet de gagner de l’espace narratif. D’où la dimension symbolique, voire allégorique du genre qui le rapproche du mythe. Néanmoins, les deux nouvelles se nourrissent de la mythologie sudiste pour mieux dénoncer sa dimension fictionnelle.

AUTHORS

FRANÇOISE BUISSON Françoise Buisson is Associate Professor at the University of Pau (France) where she teaches translation and US history and literature. A member of AFEA (Association Française d’Etudes Américaines), she has written a PhD dissertation on “Faulkner as a short story writer: tradition and modernity” and published critical essays on William Faulkner, Mark Twain and contemporary writers such as Kaye Gibbons, TC Boyle or Bret Easton Ellis.

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Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me)

Ben Forkner

(for Nadine)

1 It might seem odd to find me turning to Eudora Welty’s story “The Wide Net” the day I learned I had been invited to respond to the theme of Southern myth (the all-purpose, made-to-order, sempiternel Southern myth). It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. “The Wide Net” has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. I had no memory that Welty had tried to dramatize or imply a single overreaching southern identity, cultural, historical, or otherwise. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to “The Wide Net.”

2 On rereading the story I soon realized that my instincts had not failed me completely. There is no great central Southern myth in “The Wide Net.” But I must have half- remembered that the potency of the mythic, including a few old southern folktales or legends, does play a key role in the story, especially by pounding the pedal throughout on the truth that no myth, potent or not, can ever measure up to one man’s solitary predicament. The pounding is musical, given that Eudora Welty is playing the instrument, but it can be felt all through the story, from the ironic chord of the first three words all the way to the final throb of the last line. But more than anything, in rereading the story I realized that my own fading or forgotten memories about growing

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up in the South had somehow dictated my choice, and that the mythic failures, or inadequacies, of “The Wide Net” to match the intractable selfhood of the living individual clearly harmonized with my own experience.

3 Though I have spent much of my professional life reading and thinking about southern identity and the historical versions of the Old and New South, I really did not encounter anything resembling a theory of the South as a land of myth and mythmaking before I began my graduate studies at Chapel Hill. There I was shocked to learn I may have been born into a myth, despite myself. Ignorant as I was, I had no doubt I was southern, born and bred. I loved the music, the food, the voices, the family stories, and to this day I cannot imagine life without them. Geographically, I had lived outside as a boy in the steamy heat of southern Florida. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in “The Wide Net.” The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. Once every now and then I rode my horse to school where there was a rail fence and where the teachers allowed us to eat our lunch sitting down by the horses. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. The town was neatly divided into black and white neighborhoods, but my grandfather’s house had been deliberately chosen because it was right on the border between the two and my cousins and I played and talked with black children every day. My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university.

4 Rereading “The Wide Net” brought many of these memories back to mind, and it brought back to mind too my dismay in Chapel Hill at fitting them into a theory of myth, or even at weaving them into a common pattern of southern identity. More important to my purpose here, however, they did help me throw some light on the pluralities of myth and legend that had confused me when I had first read “The Wide Net.” I realize this is a self-indulgent proposition, but to be honest, I no longer have much faith in finding the definitive myth of the collective South. What interests me more as the years go on is the life story of the individual southerner. And if my commentaries, such as they are, do make me vulnerable to all sorts of criticism, especially when judged by the principles of pure scholarship (principles I would be the first to preach), at least I cannot be faulted on what I say about my own autobiography. After all, where else can I look for a better source?

5 I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. For one thing, I think I would have trouble arguing to myself, or to my wife and family, that I never existed, even as a boy, yet Eudora Welty is writing in the tradition of the modern folk tale. For much of the story at least, William Wallace and the other characters are closer to the simple stock figures of song and legend than they are to men and women in the real world. At least this is true of the first half of “The Wide Net.” The second half is a different matter entirely and herein lies one of the genial transformations that “The Wide Net” performs as naturally and as completely as one season turns into another. Beginning as a folktale of the barely possible innocence of a perennial boy with a cow-lick, at a loss and turning in circles, the story right in the

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middle changes skin, and the boy and the narrative miraculously transform themselves into a one-of-a-kind human triumph.

6 It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in “The Wide Net.” It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. And, to tell the truth, the details are daunting, especially as we are led down the old Natchez Trace towards the Pearl River, deeper and deeper into southern river country, a vast cradle of natural wonder that teems with vitality and mystery. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, “The Wide Net” is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize.

7 William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river.

8 The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. They all belong together in the Mississippi chorus line, until William Wallace finally breaks away on his own. There is Virgil of course, living up to his name (but only in the mind of the reader, we need to remember) in that he is there to guide William on his quest, to keep him “on the track,” as he says. There is Old Doc, the local wise man who owns the net. Old Doc lives on a hill and can usually be found in his rocking chair. He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. He possesses an old man’s horde of lifelong certitudes. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: “We’re walking along in the changing-time. […] Any day now the change will come. It’s going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that’s ripe and have fresh meat to eat. […] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow. […] Magnolia and live-oak never die. Remember that” (Welty, Collected Stories 176). Old Doc reminds me of the old men in another great modern folk story, “The Weaver’s Grave,” by the Irish writer Seumas O’Kelly. Knowing Eudora Welty’s love of Ireland and the Irish, the echo is surely deliberate.

9 Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. The fact that William Wallace allows them to come even though they are too young to be of much help may imply that the value of his own fatherhood is

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beginning to dawn on him. The father of the white boys is rumored to have drowned in the Pearl River, and the father of the black boys had been struck by lightning and, as Robbie cries out during a storm, “was dead three days, dead as that-there axe” (Welty, Collected Stories 183). Robbie worries about lightning. Both his grandfather and his father were struck by lightning. It “runs in our family,” Robbie says (Welty, Collected Stories 183).1 This is fatalism raised, or lowered, to farce, but points to a fear of being victimized by mysterious forces (without and within) that William Wallace himself must struggle against, and defeat. Then there are the other adult members of the search party, the six Doyle brothers and their dogs, and the eight Malone brothers, “eight giants with great long black eyelashes” (Welty, Collected Stories 173). They stamped the ground and pawed each other, more like horses than men.

10 The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. Later in the story a violent storm with a “blast of wind” covers the entire search party with wet leaves. “Now us got scales,” Sam cried out. “Us is the fishes” (Welty, Collected Stories 183). The shifting from one realm to another is a constant possibility. Even the trees have “bones” that crack when lightning strikes. At the beginning of the story William Wallace catches a small rabbit and acts as “if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it” (Welty, Collected Stories 172). He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: “Anybody can freeze a rabbit, that wants to” he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: “Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife?” (Welty, Collected Stories 172). William Wallace will soon demonstrate a stronger will in a more heroic gesture than catching a rabbit. But the shifting, or loss of identity, is a constant threat. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. At least the small boys have names that set them apart. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. But they remain children, and act their age. When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. “Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them” (Welty, Collected Stories 179). They are just playing out a role for the simple joy of pretending, and will soon return to themselves. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever.

11 The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. The Pearl River is the prime example in “The Wide Net” and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: “The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers” (Welty, Collected Stories 178). Still, as Old Doc exclaims to William: “Everybody knows Pearl River is named the Pearl River” (Welty, Collected Stories 176).

12 Once William and Virgil have gathered everyone together, they take the wide net and all set out walking down the Old Natchez Trace. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: “today, in October sun, it’s all gold—sky and tree and water. Everything just before it changes looks to be made of gold.” Immediately William Wallace “looked down, as though he thought of

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Hazel with the shining eyes, sitting at home and looking straight before her, like a piece of pure gold, too precious to touch” (Welty, Collected Stories 176). Of course the well- trained reader races through the possibilities and may stop on his way to consider the myth of the golden bough in the Aeneid. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. We may remember his prayer: “If only the golden bough/Might shine for us in such a wilderness!” (Vergil 166). When William dives into the river, and emerges transformed, the myth-minded reader may then think once more of the Aeneid, and of the river Lethe which the original Virgil tells us must be imbibed by dead souls in order for them to be reborn. At this point the mythic and symbolic allusions begin to overwhelm, but I believe, as you know by now, that their very proliferation throws into high relief the singular nature of one man’s all too human crisis.

13 There is certainly no question that William’s dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. The narration speculates on what he experiences in the solitude of the river bottom: “So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak…” Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. The narration continues to speculate “how (who knew?) she had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered, like their own secret, the elation that comes of great hopes and changes…” (Welty, Collected Stories 180). William’s dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. It is a plunge into the inner depths that strains every fibre of his being, and tests his spirit to the limit. When he surfaces he is still in shock: “And when William Wallace came up it was in an agony from submersion, which seemed an agony of the blood and of the very heart, so woeful he looked” (Welty, Collected Stories 180). The shock will take a little time to absorb, but he has now found himself, and is beginning to embrace his new role as a father. He is “holding fast to a little green ribbon of plant, root and all” (Welty, Collected Stories 181). He lets the little infant plant fall free, and from now on the search is over. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house.

***

14 The second half of the story is rich in events, but the outcome is never in doubt. Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. When he wakes up he affirms his new sense of power and potency by tying a catfish to his belt and launching into a wild Dionysian dance. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the “King of Snakes,” William Wallace stares him down. When Mother Nature, with majestic abandon, unleashes a storm for the ages (or the makers of myths) to show who will always rule the roost, William Wallace is not deterred or disturbed. Carrying his great string of fish, he enters at the head of the party into Dover which now “looked somehow like new” after the rain (Welty, Collected Stories 184). He no longer fears Hazel’s mother, and turns away without a flinch when she appears. Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: “They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far

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below.” When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, “a rainbow at night” (Welty, Collected Stories 187).

15 The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. When she allows William his ritual role of thinking himself the man of the house by letting him tamely slap and spank her, the reconciliation is complete. William Wallace knows now that Hazel holds the secret mystery that will continue to make him more of his own man, and he is willing to follow her lead as long as it takes: “He climbed to his feet too and stood beside her… trying to look where she looked. And after a few minutes she took him by the hand and led him into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him” (Welty, Collected Stories 188).

16 What is missing in my account of rereading the story is my misremembering the total absence of southern history, a conspicuous absence. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably “First Love,” and “A Still Moment,” to name the most powerful. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Welty’s initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a “Mississippi book”: There are some things about a state that nobody could even know about who has not lived there a long time, and those things should determine the whole approach, don’t you think?... and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief… Think of all the people who would be in my book—wonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of them—and Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits… and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. (qtd. in Marrs 67-68)

17 She also asks Russell: “Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? The thing about this part of the country in the great days is that people like Aaron Burr, J.J. Audubon, Lorenzo Dow, and goodness knows who, were as thick as blackbirds in the pie, and once the pie is opened, they are going to begin to sing” (qtd. in Marrs 70-71).

18 Since William Wallace cannot be contained in any single myth, or even in a multitude of myths, it should not have surprised me that he is able to exist untouched by history, or at least untouched by a southern identity usually defined and distinguished as being overwhelmed and overdetermined by history. The absence of history serves the same purpose, I believe, as the excessive abundance of symbol and myth the reader must negotiate before setting his sights on the inner spirit William Wallace possesses to exist all by himself. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were “about as human as a fish.” Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to

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Diarmuid Russell: “I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the south—but nobody else had better say I am unhuman” (qtd. in Marrs 103).

19 Her reaction is more than understandable. She had just published a masterpiece of modern realism in which dream and the inner world are as vividly brought to life as the outside, but this is an affirmation of the living human mind, not an evasion. Eudora Welty is a master of subjective impressionism, but there is not an escapist reflex in all her work. The Wide Net and Other Stories deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: “He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. He walked on. He saw that the bodies of the frozen birds had fallen out of the trees, and he fell down and wept for his father and mother, to whom he had not said good-bye” (Welty, “First Love,” Collected Stories 168). And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine.

20 Still, going back to William Wallace, I can hear someone somewhere asking about his name. Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story.

21 His full name is William Wallace Jamieson. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. Jamieson takes a bit more twisting to unravel a historical connection. In keeping with the Scottish link, it might be reversed to be read the son of James. One of the most famous sons of a James was Bonnie Prince Charles, son of James Stuart, grandson of King James II, and leader of the final Jacobite Rebellion in the middle of the eighteenth century to restore the Scottish Stuarts to the throne of England and Scotland. The Rebellion failed, and Bonnie Prince Charles escaped to become another legend of Scottish resistance. Failed rebellions are choice makers of myths, as another failed rebellion was to prove a century later. Scottish heroes and William Wallace Jamieson of “The Wide Net,” surely, we might be tempted to think, the combination brings southern history into the story despite all evidence to the contrary.

22 There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twain’s theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Welty’s favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: “It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also,

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that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations… Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible…” (266). We may take this with a grain of salt, but the fascination with Scottish heroes in the South would have made the name of William Wallace a common choice. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration.

23 Think of another name in “The Wide Net,” Edna Earle. She is one of Hazel’s cousins. When William Wallace praises Hazel’s intelligence, Virgil agrees: “She’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah… Edna Earle… never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign” (Welty, Collected Stories 171). The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, St Elmo by Augusta Jane Evans. It was a huge success, a romantic tome so overwritten and full of adjectives that Eudora Welty in her autobiography says her mother told her it used to be recommended to take it out with a chair when watering the roses. The roses needed a lot of water. Welty’s mother refused to have a copy in her house. As Welty adds in her autobiography, there were Edna Earles all over the South. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Welty’s novella The Ponder Heart. Finding an Edna Earle in “The Wide Net” is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid.

24 But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in “The Wide Net.” Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and “The Wide Net” insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. William must will himself into a new man, and as a Jamieson, he must cease being a perpetual son, and affirm his status as a father. Once again, however, we cannot escape the fact that names are chosen for us. In “The Wide Net,” William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines.

***

25 I began this paper with a confession. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Welty’s “The Wide Net,” came to my mind in a flash. I believe my shock at having to account to myself as a southerner when I arrived in my early twenties in Chapel Hill, and faced the impressive body of scholarship on southern myth then in fashion, helps explain why. Saying so, I freely admit my pirouetting into “The Wide Net” does take some special pleading.

26 I am ready to plead, however. Now that I have tried to do justice to my rereading of the story, which was, and is, my main purpose throughout these reflections, there should be no objection if I back up a bit and mention a few of the memories I carried with me when I entered the new world of the Old South at the university.

27 Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in

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Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. It was, however, filled with southerners. The white families, like my own, had migrated there from their farms in South Georgia in the hope of improving their prospects. The black families had moved in the same direction to escape their hard lives as sharecroppers and a harsher form of racial discrimination. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. What I remember most about growing up was the joy of being outside for most of the day in a sort of tropical paradise. It did not cost much to have a horse and a small motor boat. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. If all this seems too good to be true, it’s only because I choose to stop. I could easily call to mind other memories that would deepen and darken the story. This is the advantage of relying on memory rather than myth when digging back for the truth.

28 What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. It had blossomed overnight during the boom years of the twenties. It was the county seat, so there were a few imposing public buildings. But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. A more distant past was hidden behind the Spanish place names and the faces of the Seminole Indians who worked as cowboys on the ranches. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. All of these stories were about life around the old family farms and houses back in Homerville, Georgia, not far from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp.

29 A few of these stories were comic, but most of them dwelled on hardship and tragedy. I learned that several young ancestors had been killed fighting for the Confederacy or had died soon after the war from disease. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. One day on a summer trip to Homerville, my mother took me to a field in the countryside and showed me two old tombstones under a tree. Engraved in large letters beneath the names was the single word: “Murdered.” These were the graves of her maternal grandparents who had been viciously axed to death by two men looking for easy prey and a few dollars. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. Instead of one of the more conventional pieties, here was a crying out to both God and man against injustice. Later on I was told that the killers were black men, and that members of our family had made sure they were given a fair trial. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus.

30 But these Georgia tales were of the kind that Eudora Welty describes as “old and complete” in “Asphodel,” one of the short stories in The Wide Net. What touched me more, and what I remember best now, were the lives around me while growing up.

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They were even stronger reasons to question the myths of the South I later encountered. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories.

31 He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side.

***

32 But I digress, drifting with the memory. What I want to single out is not his place in the community, which was central, but his difference from most of the adult white men I knew and observed. I said earlier that the town was segregated, but with little visible racial tension. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. We bought ice cream at the same shop even though there were white and colored water fountains outside on opposite sides of the shop. We saw the same films at the same movie theater, even though the whites sat downstairs and the blacks up in the balcony. And we fished for the same fish from the same piers in the inlet. As far as living space was concerned, however, the town was strictly divided into white and black, and though the blacks were often seen in the white district, there were few whites who ventured into colored town. This was not because it was dangerous, or unseemly; it was simply against the code.

33 In this respect, my grandfather was a rare exception. He walked through the streets of colored town as naturally as he walked to work. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by defying convention, but I do not think his prestige in the white community was ever at risk. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. When we went to the movies on Saturday night, we would never hesitate to stop outside the county jail across the street from the Sunrise Theater. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. It was a far better show than the movie.

34 I think my grandfather’s reputation helped me too in an experience that will stay with me as long as I live. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. They talked sometimes about a black giant named Foots. He had earned the name by winning a juke joint contest for having the biggest feet in Florida. That was only part of the legend. He hated fighting, but he had never lost a fight, and all his rivals had given up trying.

35 I met Foots the first day I was hired to work in a local fertilizer plant for the summer. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. Foots was in charge. Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. He towered over the others, who were all big and tough. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with

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each hand. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. The workers filed in, one by one with their lunch bags, and sat down on a wooden bench. Foots waited until they were all inside. He made a sign for me to follow him in what was now a blind tunnel steaming with sweat and humidity. He took me in and introduced me to each worker by name. Then he announced “Boys, look right here, the Judge is his granddaddy. Me and Ben’z tight as a pair of shoes.” The whole shed shook with laughter, given the reference to his feet, and from that day on I was home free and part of the gang. When later on I read Faulkner’s praise of “natural courtesy” I thought of Foots at once.

36 There is one more story about my grandfather that I need to relate. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. My mother had met her and gave me the names of several people who had been her friends. One was the Florida artist A.E. Backus, locally known as Beanie. Like my grandfather, Beanie was color blind as far as race was concerned. I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. When Alice Walker wrote her essay about finding Hurston’s unmarked grave, and lamented the lack of a headstone, she was writing only part of the story. Given her love of Hurston, a spell had been cast, and the promise of a new myth stopped her in her tracks. She could have easily searched out one of the old Backus crowd willing to share the memory of Beanie’s role in the funeral and the missing headstone. He himself would have been too modest to mention it.

37 Beanie deserves his own story. The one I want to tell about my grandfather concerns another man involved in the Zora Neale Hurston saga. His name was Patrick Duval. He was a black deputy who had saved Hurston’s letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. They were later given to the University of Florida. He had never been given much credit for his act, though in the recent biography of Hurston, by Valerie Boyd, written long after my visit home, he is singled out for praise (436). I wanted to talk to him, so my mother invited him over to the house. He was a big man, steady and straight despite his age, and must have been a formidable force in making an arrest. After politely answering my questions about the Hurston papers, he turned to me and spoke for a good thirty minutes about my grandfather. I learned my grandfather had been instrumental in having him named the first black deputy in the county. He told me that my grandfather had told him he had left Georgia to come to Florida because he hated the way blacks were treated. He was on a mission. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. As Mr Duval finished, and stood up to leave, he reached out to me and shook my hand: “Your granddaddy was the only white man I ever loved.”

38 I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. As a matter of fact, he was a pillar of the community. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. He surely died the poorest judge in all of Florida, but he did leave me his gold Hamilton

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watch which had been given him when he retired from working on the railroad as a young man in Georgia. Walker Percy has written somewhere that a boy who has a Hamilton from his grandfather is a true son of the South, and I still have mine.

39 These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. I should make it clear it was not the quality of the scholarship in what I read that puzzled me, but my consternation in not finding anything of my own life in the popular myths contained in the books. I realized that the origins of these myths had to be traced and analyzed, not least of all to better understand their impact on American culture and history. I benefited from these books as much as anyone. After all, there were some brilliant minds at work on the subject, minds who could spot a stereotype or a caricature a hundred miles away, and there was much to learn. Still, the shock of my initial consternation never left me, thus my impulse to turn back to Eudora Welty and my memory of “The Wide Net” and its mysteries when I was invited to talk about the great myths of the South.

40 I have tried to explain, to myself more than to anyone else, that the multiplication of myth and legend in “The Wide Net” is there, in all its rich jumbling, to nudge the reader elsewhere. Eudora Welty could use myth otherwise, as she does in such works as her masterpiece The Golden Apples. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. In “The Wide Net” there are too many myths to make a whole. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. It is enough to make Virgil sigh with despair: “when you go looking for what is lost, everything is a sign” (Welty, Collected Stories 179). Of course these signs and symbols enrich the story at the same time they divert William Wallace from his search. References to babies, for example, can be found everywhere, from the little man on the toy-like train, to the baby alligator, all the way to the corn shuck doll waiting by itself on the bench back in Dover.

***

41 Just as William Wallace is beset on all sides by a welter of signs, until he forgets the name of the Pearl River and takes his dive to the bottom, the reader is mystified by the dazzling parade of mythical allusions until he too reaches the same place. Myths and legends and symbols are filled with wisdom, but it is the human spirit which has done the filling, and not the other way around. This is the truth that William Wallace discovers by himself, and somehow memory, lost and found, is crucial to the discovery. Myths are necessary to our lives and imagination, especially as children. Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor.

42 Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and “The Wide Net.” Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. He has recovered his memory too, and with it, we know now, a new power of self-direction, decision, and acceptance.

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It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself.

43 When I finished rereading “The Wide Net” I reread Eudora Welty’s autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings. It was written forty years after “The Wide Net” but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. She begins by describing a milestone in her childhood, a gift of the ten- volume Our Wonder World on her sixth or seventh birthday: There were the fairy tales—Grimm, Andersen, the English, the French, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrim’s Progress and a long piece of Gulliver. They all carried their classic illustrations. I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories and pictures I loved… (Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings 8)

44 Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in “The Wide Net.” They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. The never forgetting is another gift of becoming oneself, the power of memory.

45 Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. She ends One Writer’s Beginnings with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: “Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost” (Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings 90). She continues several pages later: “It is our inward journey that leads us through time—forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge” (Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings 102). And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: “Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory—the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead” (Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings 104).

46 I have talked about William Wallace and “The Wide Net,” but I have said little about the assigned subject, the myth of the South. Neither does Eudora Welty in her autobiography, and she is one of the most southern writers who ever existed. Still, if I should apologize, I do. In leaving you now, I am reminded of an old story out of Georgia. It was told by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy. Apparently, there was one male survivor of the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. When he escaped he went back to his native state of Georgia and lived to a ripe old age. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were

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true that he had run away from the fight. “Boys,” he said, “I didn’t run, but I did some mighty high walking.” I hope I have not run away from the myth of the South, but I admit I may have done some “high walking.” Thank you for the indulgence, and the invitation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: A Lisa Drew Book, 2004. Print.

Marrs, Suzanne. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Orlando: A Harvest Book, 2006. Print.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. Print.

Vergil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1990. Print.

Welty, Eudora. The Wide Net and Other Stories. 1943. The Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1980. Print.

NOTES

1. Robbie is right to be frightened. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, “Lightnin’ drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappy’s cheek, stayed till he died” (Welty, Collected Stories 183). Nature is the wide-open playground of both good and evil, and it is best to be wary when the thunder roars. The storm in “The Wide Net” seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charm—“a wind touched each man on the forehead” (Welty, Collected Stories 182)—reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. 2. Virgil of course is Dante’s guide in The Divine Comedy through the Inferno and most of Purgatory. It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of “The Wide Net” roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. Hazel’s name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. Hazel wands were traditionally used as dowsing rods.

AUTHORS

BEN FORKNER Ben Forkner was a Professor of English at the University of Angers where he taught Southern and Irish literature, directed the English Department, and founded the Journal of the Short Story in

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English. A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He has written many essays on writers from Ireland and the American South, and has edited a dozen anthologies, including Modern Irish Short Stories (Penguin), A New Book of Dubliners (Methuen), Georgia Stories (Peachtree) and Louisiana Stories (Pelican). His edition of Alexander Stephens prison diary, Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, was published by L.S.U. Press in the Library of Southern Civilization series. Recollections contains a fifty-page biographical essay by Forkner. He has coedited (with Patrick Samway) four anthologies of Southern literature : Stories of the Modern South (Penguin), Stories of the Old South (Penguin), A Modern Southern Reader (Peachtree) and A New Reader of the Old South (Peachtree). Forkner has also published three books on John James Audubon : Journals and Selected Writings in the Penguin Nature Classics series, with an introduction and editorial commentary; and two in Europe: the two-volume Journaux et Récits (Atalante and the City of Nantes), a comprehensive collection of Audubon’s writings in French, newly translated, with a full biographical introduction and editorial commentary, and the John James Audubon Portfolio (Edition de la Main Fleurie) which includes an introduction, a selection of Audubon’s letters, and forty-eight reproductions of Audubon’s original watercolors printed on hand-made paper designed to replicate the paper used in the early nineteenth century.

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Violent Fragility: The Mythical, the Iconic and Tennessee Williams' Politics of Gender in "One Arm"

Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 Most Tennessee Williams stories are concerned with inner lives. Although “One Arm”1 deals with the private drama of a youth’s belated awakening, it contrasts with the others as it is also a story of social critique. The private facet of the narrative focuses on the ways Oliver Winemiller’s exceptional, then mutilated beauty affects his behavior at various stages of his existence. The protagonist is a farm-boy from “the cotton fields of Arkansas” (197) who breaks off an affair with a planter’s wife to join the Navy, become a boxer, lose his arm in a car accident and start a career as a hustler. The public facet is triggered off when he kills a wealthy patron in a yacht at Palm Beach and is sentenced to death. In his death-cell Oliver opens himself to otherness by answering letters from former (male) clients who recognized his picture in newspapers. The letters produce a sense of unpaid emotional debt with him, which Oliver attempts to pay back when, a few days before his execution, a young minister, in whom he senses repressed homosexual feelings, pays him a visit. The view of the youth’s naked body parts, however, makes the minister fly in panic. Oliver is eventually executed, still clutching his lovers’ letters. His body is turned over to medical students, who feel embarrassed by its beauty.

2 “One Arm” has been discussed2 in the light of gender studies notably by Brian M. Peters who argues that in it “Williams presents the homosexual as a modern monster, ostracized from society and destined to destruction or consumption” (32). In the present paper I contend that the reading of the story through the prism of myth makes the above representation more nuanced. The homosexual is presented as the victim of a ritualistic rending which leads to knowledge and inclusion. Besides, Oliver’s story goes beyond a mere representation of the homosexual. “One Arm” is an almost overtly committed narrative, descending from Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763), Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829), Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1897) and Albert Camus’ The Outsider (1942),3 all of which side against the death

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penalty. So does “One Arm” in which, however, capital punishment is combined with a socially constructed structure of gender and a symbolic illustration of the South. Williams’ Southern marginal hero stems from autobiographical, local and classical substance. Specific aspects and identity principles relating to Apollonian and Dionysian myths find their way into Williams’ hero whose flaw—the missing arm—makes of him an epitome of the myth of the South. As an antinomian figure dominated by the Nietzschean conflict between apollonian form and Dionysian matter, Oliver discovers that his flaw is also a weapon. The effect of his paradoxical identity is then translated into similes and visual metaphors which draw on Iacchus’ myth, as revisited by D.H. Lawrence, in order to transform Oliver into a forceful icon that serves gender oriented politics and makes the story operate at a high ideological level. Williams’ bisexual character transcends the strictures of morality of the time of writing and baffles the borders of the story pleading for individual completion and social inclusiveness. Hovering between fragility and violence, the icon seems eventually to stand for Williams’ oeuvre whose politics of gender are promoted by drawing on myth.

***

3 The story of abjection “One Arm” opens up is not clearly foreseen on reading the title, a synecdoche in which metonymically the “one arm” stands for Oliver’s character as a whole. On the grounds that an arm is a human limb but can also be a weapon,4 the horizon of expectation the title creates in the readers’ minds is shaped like a “Y.” We are invited to infer either an epic-like plot, relating the deeds of a daring hero, or a pathetic narrative recounting the misfortunes of a cripple. We can also assume both; in which case the horizon of expectation is twofold, opening out over a double set of paths which the readers may follow in turns.

4 This is in keeping with Oliver’s two-fold character, both extreme and sympathetic, wavering as he does between arrogance and servitude, kindness and cruelty, worship and abjection, order and trouble, criminality and dejection, fragility and violence. Williams’ characterization of Oliver seems to echo Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872) in which the apparent sense of order of the Greeks is based “on a tension between the Apollonian stress on order and individuality and the Dionysian rapture, violence and destruction of individuality that underlies it” (Macey 274). Oliver’s features can, indeed, be sorted out into two opposite paradigms of behavior, Apollonian and Dionysian.

5 Apollo, the god of light, sciences and arts who embodies a youthful but mature male beauty and moral superiority, “is the most characteristically Greek of all the gods” (Howatson and Chilvers 45). Oliver, who is endowed with exceptional beauty and thereupon explicitly compared to Apollo in the opening and closing paragraphs of the story (196, 211), displays an apollonian concern for moral integrity on several occasions, notably through a “wholesome propriety” within him which made him leave home when the planter’s wife “had introduced him to acts of unnatural ardor” (197). However, Oliver’s most notable apollonian feature is his concern with the self which, paradoxically, is revealed through his genuine “lack of concern” (184) for the other. This lack of concern indicates a separatist ego, one which counts on its natural qualities of excellence, and therefore constitutes a typical aristocratic feature (aristos being the Greek word for excellent). In order to translate to politics the principles arising from Apollo’s myths, Camille Paglia quotes Plutarch:

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Plutarch calls Apollo the One, denying the many and abjuring multiplicity. The Apollonian is aristocratic … the western personality, the glamorous, striving, separatist ego. The Apollonian “One,” strict, rigid and contained is Western personality as work of art. (Paglia 97, 31, 97)

6 Oliver is systematically compared to a work of art but what Plutarch calls the Apollonian “one” is also quoted in the story’s title, “One Arm” (my emphasis). Thus, by synecdochical effectiveness, the wording of the title has the character’s Apollonian quality govern the whole narrative.

7 As Oliver himself seems half-aware of his Apollonian slant, his interest in the self is highlighted by the poetics of the narrative whose playful associations of place and character through naming are reason enough to stop and consider with more attention. The names of the towns that map out Oliver’s short-lived Odyssey are bound up with meaning. Before committing his crime, “He lived in Miami a while” (198). If “My,” “am,” and “me” are taken phonetically out of Miami, they are each indicative of Oliver’s self-concern at that moment.

8 As the leader of the Muses, Apollo is also the patron god of the arts. When Oliver is sentenced to death and his picture circulates around the country, the men who had hired him write to him kind letters to which Oliver makes it a point of honor to answer. Letter writing makes of him an embodiment of the writer, the more so as, progressively, his writing becomes authentic, at the same time Southern, universal and unique. Soon the sentences gathered momentum as springs that clear out a channel and they began to flow out almost expressively after a while and to ring with the crudely eloquent backwoods speech of the South, to which had been added the idioms of the underworld he had moved in, and the road, and the sea. Into them went the warm and vivid talk that liquor and generous dealing had brought from his lips on certain occasions, the chansons de geste which American tongues throw away so casually in bars and hotel bedrooms. (201)

9 The letters also include “a sketch of the chair he was condemned to sit in” (202). Thus Oliver is also a creator of images. The sketch draws upon Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Chair” (1888) in which, however, Oliver/Williams replaces the pipe on the side of the seat by a “tack in the middle” (202). Oliver’s Apollonian qualities are not flaunted; they stand in the dark being a sign of the character’s unawareness.

10 Oliver’s character is also marked by Dionysian features. Dionysus is an agrarian and chthonian deity, the god of wine, of revelry, of ecstasy and of theatre, represented as a long-haired adolescent who is both compassionate and cruel. Oliver’s connection with Dionysus is suggested by his family name, Wine/miller, which associates wine with grinding, liberation with “creative destruction”. Winemiller’s career as a hustler starts by his being cast as Mellors in a condensed Southern version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928): [Oliver] had known … hard work in the sun and such emotional adventures as farm boys have … a tentative knowledge of girls that suddenly exploded into a coarse and startling affair with a married woman whose husband he had hauled lumber for. She was the first to make him aware of the uncommon excitement he was able to stir. (197)

11 Like Mellors, Winemiller is also called Oliver. According to Camille Paglia, Dionysus is Apollo’s antagonist and rival. He is god of theatre and … free love but also of anarchy and mass murder. Dionysus expands identity but crushes individuals. The violent principle of [his] cult is sparagmos, which in Greek means “a

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rending, tearing, mangling” … The body of the god … or a[n] animal substitute is torn to pieces which are eaten or scattered like seed. (Paglia 88, 95, 97, 98)

12 Oliver’s features are not at variance with the principles arising from Dionysus’ myth. His revelry and debauchery are part of the Dionysian paradigm; so is the loss of his right arm which conjures up the ripping of Dionysus to pieces by the Titans (Howatson and Chilvers 184), a tentative enactment of the protagonist’s final rending in a medical laboratory classroom. Thus, if the term “one” in “One Arm” sides with the apollonian paradigm, the torn apart body part is Dionysian.

13 Oliver’s ties to theatricals are established through his performing in a blue movie while drunk—that is, under the aegis of Dionysus. No wonder if the performance results in murder and Oliver’s flight by diving in the middle of Palm Harbor. The episode parallels Dionysus descent to the underworld by diving. In the narrator’s terms, the flight by diving ends “the more affluent chapter of Oliver’s existence” (198); it consequently opens up a new one: Oliver’s arrest, trial, conviction, death sentence and awaiting execution in a death cell; which is no less a descent into hell. According to myth, Dionysus was rowed by Polymnos or Prosymnos—both names signify the phallus cult celebrated with songs (Kerényi 311)—, to a secret passage in the middle of a lake where from the god dived through to the Underworld. For showing him the way Prosymnus asked Dionysus to make love to him in return. However, when the god returned to pay back his debt, Prosymnus had died. The god went then to the man’s tomb and fulfilled his promise using a simulacrum made of fig-wood (Callimach 125). The belated fulfillment of Dionysus’ promise finds also an echo in the episode with the young minister who comes to see Oliver in prison the day before his execution. The young clerical sees in the convict the human substitute of a golden panther he had long observed behind the bars of a zoo cage, when adolescent, and been fascinated by. At his first swift glance the minister’s mind shot back to an obsession of his childhood when he had gone all of one summer daily to the zoo to look at a golden panther... Then he would cry himself to sleep for pity of the animal’s imprisonment and unfathomable longing that moved through all of his body. (206)

14 As Walter Friedrich Otto points out, The panther… appears in descriptions … as the favorite animal of Dionysus and is found with him in countless works of art. … Of all the cats devoted to Dionysus it was not only the most graceful and fascinating but also the most savage and bloodthirsty. The lightning-fast agility and perfect elegance of its movements, whose purpose is murder, exhibit the same union of beauty and fatal danger found in the mad women who accompany Dionysus. (111-12)

15 Oliver’ response to the minister’s belated visit parallels Dionysus’ acknowledgement of his debt to Prosymnus. For when he senses the minister’s repressed homosexual feelings he attempts to offer him his body; a way for him to pay back his emotional debt to his correspondents. The minister, however, panics, runs away and the experiment fizzles out.

16 Oliver’s Christian name alludes to the olive tree, an emblematically transatlantic Southern symbol of peace. Indeed, the character embodies Southern culture in various ways. On one hand his apollonian affiliation endows him with the pride, haughtiness, indeed the arrogance of a Southern cavalier. On the other, his loitering “in his skivvy shirt” (196) while waiting to be addressed by a prospective client, is a Dionysian attitude of free love which, nevertheless, shows his situation haunted by a sense of slavery; a feature in keeping with Oliver’s Southern and agrarian origins. The syncretic

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intertwining of Apollonian and Dionysian in connection with Southern historical and cultural features in the shaping of the character opens up a new paradigm of features centered on the figure of Christ, closer to Southern sensibility than either of the above gods.

17 Thus, to some of his correspondents, Oliver “became the archetype of the Savior upon the Cross” (200). However, “Letters of this sort enraged the imprisoned boy” (200). Oliver’s disavowing response to the Christ-like aura bequeathed to him by his correspondents suggests that Christ’s impact on the narrative cannot be religious. It is rather aesthetic and political. Williams’ strategy consists in Christianizing pagan principles in order to accommodate their claims within the contemporary ideological context. Thus, although Oliver’s final rending is a reenactment of Dionysian sparagmos, Williams compares Oliver’s body to Apollo’s (211). In addition, the ideological dimension with which this episode is endowed draws on Heine’s description of Apollo’s impaling in Gods in Exile (1853) as revisited by Walter Pater in his Renaissance (1873), that is in such a way as to evoke Christ. Heine shows Apollo living as a shepherd in Lower Austria. His beauty and form aroused suspicion and, being recognized by a monk, he was delivered over to the court, confessed that he was Apollo and was consequently executed. “Sometime afterwards people wished to drag him from the grave again that a stake might be driven through his body … but they found the grave empty” (Pater 32). In Pater’s version, Apollo’s vanishment stealthily brings to mind the resurrection of Christ. Although in “One Arm” Williams does not have Oliver’s body disappear from the laboratory, his account of the prospective rendering appeals to the readers’ Christian feelings or it may even outrage them. The suggested sparagmos and subsequent maiming of the body’s beauty go against the principles of fitting humane behavior.

18 In a second phase, Williams’ strategy consists in locating Oliver within a univocally Southern context by making use of standard cultural patterns such as Southern agrarianism vs. Northern corruption. By so doing, he nuances the character’s guilt. Oliver’s flaws and crime stem out of an age old “natural” order, the “physical world [Oliver] grew into” (197); to this order, Williams opposes the corrupt values of modern society. Thus, although a criminal, Oliver appears less guilty than the society which sentenced him to death. According to this scheme, Oliver’s Southernness opposes the corrupting values of the Northern big city through short statements that go unnoticed. Thus when the narrator announces that in New York Oliver learns “the ropes of what became his calling” and becomes “fully inured to the practices and culture of the underworld” without feeling “any shame that green soap and water did not remove” (198), he ingenuously drops in the same breath “…[he] joined the southern migration” (198). As the story starts “in the winter of 39” (196) with Oliver already being a hustler, the reader is given enough chronological information to locate the character’s departure from New York in 1937 and therefore, because of the sentence’s wording, connect Oliver with the croppers of the “okie” migration. Besides his individual fate, Oliver, then, also shares a collective Southern lot; his corrupted flesh is nonetheless part of a brave social body representing uncorrupted agrarian virtues as opposed to “the crowded industrialized materialistic Northern city with its unhappy mass of wage- slaves” (Forkner and Samway, Introduction xvi). This conflict “between the fatal flaws of the old order and the corrupt values of the new” one which “accounts for the stress Southern art places on the tragic on one hand, and on the satiric and the grotesque on the other” (Forkner and Samway, New South xvi) is fully in action in “One Arm” in

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which Oliver, the handsome cripple sentenced to death, redeems himself by comprehending otherness and thus becoming complete only to be electrocuted and his body torn to pieces.

19 The sense of loss Oliver harbors for his physical integrity is still another feature which makes of him an epitome of the South. [Oliver] new that he had lost his right arm but didn’t consciously know that with it had gone the center of his being. … He never said to himself, I’m lost, But the speechless self knew it and in submission to its unthinking control, the youth had begun … to look for destruction. (197)

20 Oliver’s sense of loss stems from specific time and place evidence. As Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway put it, “From the beginning of the nineteenth century the Southern plantation had become a legend imbued with a haunting sense of loss and falling away” (Introduction xvii). It is this sense of loss that Williams recycles within Oliver’s character. Like The Glass Menagerie which Williams was composing in parallel, “One Arm” is about beauty and brokenness. The appeal of Oliver’s picture in the papers over the men who had known him—and by extension the impact of the character to the readers—originates in the combination he offers of brokenness, loss and (in)completion. Brokenness and loss are injected into Oliver’s characterization as combined, attractive, exceptional and precious qualities. What they were alluding to was the charm of the defeated which Oliver had possessed, a quality which acts as a poultice upon the inflamed nerves of those who are still in active contention. This quality is seldom linked with youth and physical charm, but in Oliver’s case it had been, and it was this rear combination which had made him a person impossible to forget. (188)

21 “Charm” is the secularized reading of “divine grace,” a characteristic assigned to Christian icons. It is harbored by Oliver as a result of his loss and bestows on his icon (not on himself) the property of working miracles. In turn, recycling converts the character’s fragility into an effective dramatic item. We are moved by Oliver not because he is good, but because he is fragile and because his fragility translates the abjection about him into art. In Daniel Mendelsohn’s terms, the South had created a great romance out of a great defeat, a civilization that had been able to endure loss … because it believed in its own myth of lost beauty the possession of which, however brief and however long ago, elevated the lovely and effete vanquished far above the crass, practical victors. (Mendelsohn, Elusive Embrace 16-17)

22 The parallel between Oliver’s lost arm and the South’s lost cause promotes a politics of fragility and loss. As with Southern culture, so with Oliver, loss and defeat are commanding factors which endow fragility with power.

***

23 Oliver’s power is mainly represented through images both textual and visual which draw on the mythological paradigms of Apollonian, Dionysian, Christ-centered and South-centered politics already addressed. These politics, as we shall see, are gender oriented.

24 When Dionysus is associated with initiation mysteries he is evoked under the epithet Iacchus; but it was also thought by some that the “lusty Iacchus” (Graves I, 89), was a different deity (Grimal 221), Demeter’s son, the light bearer of the Eleusinian mysteries.

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Iacchus’ name is onomatopoeia for boisterous laughter and shouts (Graves II, 396, Grimal 221, Howatson 283). Given that Oliver’s Odyssey starts with a three-line-long digest version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Williams cannot have missed Connie’s association of Iacchus with the phallus in one of her reveries. Ah yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods, to call on Iacchos, the bright phallos that had no independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallos, her own. (Lawrence 219)

25 Iacchus’ function at the Eleusinian mysteries was to “scatter the darkness” with the light of his torch, and is therefore called “Day star of our secret rite” (Aristophanes 170-71). Through Williams’ creative syncretism, the phallic symbolism and thus the omnipresence of potential, energy and force related to the representation of Iacchus, find their way in the poetics of the images created by Williams to represent Oliver and of those created by Oliver/Williams to represent the character’s death-chair.

26 “One Arm” is peppered with images either relating to Oliver’s looks by way of similes, metaphors and allegories, or “drawn” by Oliver himself in a cartoon-like mode. Those relating to Oliver afford the impressions of the narrator and the men who had known Oliver. The protagonist is consecutively compared to a “stone figure” (184), a sculpture (184), a statue of Apollo (184, 198) and a portrait of “a juvenile saint by a painter of the Renaissance” (193). These images range from age old figurative representations (stone figure) to photography (Oliver’s picture in the newspapers) thus showing Oliver’s image as a subject of worship which stands the test of time. In addition, when the press gives space “all over the country” to Oliver’s picture, the men who had known him think of him as an image (rather than a person): “None of these men who had known him had found his image one that faded readily out of mind” (201). There is something uncanny, one might say, with this image which, like the picture of Dorian Gray resists time and has as an effect on those who look at it. The effect is “shown” through a new visual combination of simile and metaphor representing Oliver bathing in light: “[the youth] stood like a planet among the moons of their longing” (202). This representation of Oliver/Iacchus/phallus surrounded by the longing of his worshipers which bathes him in a moon-light halo is built around Connie’s portrayal of Iacchus as “the bright phallus” and Aristophanes’ comparison of him to a star.

27 The textual picture is topped by a visual on the same page (202) imitating a comic strip panel in which Oliver tries out his cartoonist’s skills by sketching an electric chair. The picture is supposed to be humorous improved as it is by “The cartoon symbol of laughter … that heavily drawn HA-HA with its tail of exclamatory punctuation, its stars and spirals” (202). Hereupon we may notice that if we replace the chair with Oliver/ Iacchus, the image offers a visual version of the previous combination of simile and metaphor in the self-reflexive light of a mise en abyme. The self-reflexivity of the image is the more conspicuous as the cartoonist’s chair draws on Van Gogh’s 1888 painting (which, as we know, represents his own chair with his pipe as if drawn by a child), and as the painter of the painter’s chair is obviously Williams himself. Thus, to sum up, Oliver/Iacchus compared to a planet is here replaced by Van Gogh’s chair while the cartoon-like drawn HA-HA, the exclamatory punctuation and the stars and spirals replace the moons of the worshippers’ longing. The reference to Iacchus is explicit not only through the phallic connotations of the tack in the middle but also on account of the boisterous laughter in the origin of his name which is part of the drawing. The

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equation between the victim and the death-tool (Oliver/Iacchus/phallus and the chair) cannot be missed.

28 The surface vivacity of the sketch competes with anxiety and sorrow in an almost postmodern combination of high and mass culture underpinning Oliver’s ironical “caption”: ”You probably didn’t know that I was an artist” (203). However there is a shift in the scope and target of the irony; for, there is no doubt, that the sketched chair is art. The irony lies, rather, in that at the literal level of the story, Oliver is unaware of his artistic drive which lies in his indisputably Apollonian (i.e. formal) approach to art and creation (how could it be otherwise since the drawing is Williams’ own); as he is also unaware of the ambiguous symbolic value of the chair. Indeed, the chair points to a different direction from what is both stated and depicted. Surrounded as it is with stars and spirals and in keeping with Oliver’s planet-like halo, the chair is also surrounded by rays, a principle which, according to Alberto Manguel, derives from the representation of Apollo, the sun god. Apollo’s head was crowned by the rays of the sun in the later Roman Empire. This fiery image became the emblem first of the emperor Constantine the first Christian emperor, and then of Christ Himself. After Christ, the Lamb of God, the angels and the saints all inherited this particular sign of divinity. (Manguel 52)

29 In its symbolism the chair then brings together items that belong to Dionysus (rapture, violence destruction, sexuality), Iacchus (light, phallic symbolism), Apollo (light, formal artistic achievement) and Christ (fatality, suffering, martyrdom as connected with the myth of the South) and therefore propose a synthetic representation of all not only within the character’s identity but also in Oliver’s artistic accomplishments; and, through the self-reflexivity, in Williams’ own. In other terms, the depicted chair is metonymical for both Oliver’s body and Williams’ creative work. Besides, in the light of what has been mentioned and also with a view to the sense the term “chair” has in common language, the sketch is as much that of an electric chair as of the celestial throne, a death-tool as well as a symbol of eternal glory. This, of course, is also ironical, bordered as it were on the miraculous. It is given textual evidence through Williams’ oblique use of the phoenix. The symbolism of forthcoming regeneration or resurrection after death with Oliver is announced within the same episode which connects the character with Dionysus’ initiation to homosexual practices; that is Oliver’s diving in the middle of Palm Beach (198) before his symbolic descent into hell. In Greek, Palm is “phoenix.” Williams adopted the phoenix as a recurrent symbol from D. H. Lawrence’s work, in which it is emblematic; he systematically handles it covertly in his own by the agency of the “alternative” palm (Vernadakis 51).

30 Through irony, Oliver as image and the image by Oliver are therefore imbued with transcendent qualities—pregnant as they are with a meaning Oliver himself is not aware of. They are concerned with death and rebirth through completeness—one which Oliver achieves by “offering” himself to the young minister who stands for otherness. They are also impregnated with spiritual symbolism; like Byzantine icons. In Byzantium the term icon (an image) designates “a portable portrait of Christ, Mary or a saint perceived as matter imbued with divine grace” (Pencheva 631). As we have already seen, Oliver’s picture in the newspapers has a tremendous iconic effect on the men who recognized him. Like myths, icons are loaded with ideology which, in the present case, relates to what we now call the politics of gender. There is no doubt that the focus on male homosexuality through mythopoetics, which Williams combined

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with the death penalty, discloses the story’s concern with gender-oriented politics and aesthetics.

31 Williams has politics and aesthetics operate together for his hero, a homosexual icon and also a discursive construct confined into an isotope of reading and writing. All of Oliver’s actions are connected with books, pens, pencils, writing etc. down to the finest detail. For instance, Oliver’s crime “was perpetrated with a copper bookend” (199). His life is then compared to a pencil, “In the changeless enclosure of his cell the time that stood between the youth and his death wore away like the soft lead pencil that he wrote with until only a stub too small for his grasp was left him” (204). The comparison poetically echoes “the stump of the arm he had lost” (197). Oliver is a discursive artifact. His identity takes shape through myth rewriting and metafictional devices that blend a powerful image of fragility with a strong commitment against death penalty and the exclusion of the homosexual from modern society. If to the above aspects we add the self-reflexive quality of Oliver’s chair, which is metonymical for both Oliver’s fragile beauty and Williams’ work, needless to say that Oliver’s corpse is also Williams’ oeuvre.

***

32 In 1954, when the first trade edition of “One Arm” came out, the 1948 limited first edition of the story was compared to “privately circulated erotica” (Roth 86). At the time, Tennessee Williams—a homosexual—could not openly acknowledge what it was he thought to be beautiful, ethical or socially and politically appropriate; such issues had still to be accessed through back doors. Through the pseudo-historical prism of “One Arm” (which starts with a factual date, encloses a wealth of authentic contemporary details and is shaped like a piece of historical marginalia), Williams’ myth-rewriting surreptitiously “retrojects” new aesthetic, social and gender values, endowed with a distinguished pedigree so as to suggest their permanence for all time to come and be accepted as such by virtue of a “politics of discomfort” (to use an expression coined by Judith Butler). Williams’ choice of Apollo and Dionysus as mediators is justified by the role they play on the Greek stage in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in which Apollonian formalism checks Dionysian impulse into the well- balanced tragic form. In recycling Nietzsche’s gods, Williams aims at interacting not merely with the stage but with society, for a collective, more inclusive future. Thus he resorts to myth and icon not only for what they are but also for what they do. Because myth is endowed with a quality of permanence which binds past, present and future together, Williams turns to it in order to imprint new values and perspectives upon the minds of an audience to which these values may be alien, and perhaps contrary to their interests. According to Eric Csapo’s definition, one which stands behind all the pages of the present paper, “Myth is anything which is told, received and transmitted in the conviction of its social importance” (278).5 The values Williams transmits and hopes for them to be received as myths are concerned with gender politics. He addresses society as a complex and conflicting whole rather than simply exposing a personal gender- centered ideological stand. Thus, in Csapo’s words, “In appealing to the interests of opposed groups, a myth will incorporate within its structure the contradictions that arise from the opposed interests of the larger subgroups” (302). Williams’ claims are here introduced by means of an at least dual perspective (announced by the “Y” shaped synecdoche of the title) opening up several reading paths ranging from tragic to

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hilarious.6 Thus, “One Arm” can be read as a homoerotic fantasy; a story of beauty crashed and heroic failure; an autobiographical account of what homosexuality amounts to in an exclusive society; a self-referential reflection about completion which will always remain out of reach in literature and life... However, whatever our reading of the story may be, Williams is striving in it for a collective and more inclusive future.

33 Finally, if Oliver epitomizes Williams’ work, which he probably does, in the light of the double horizon of expectation the title opens up we are to understand that the boxer’s arm/weapon the title refers to is myth. As a consequence, if, in order to understand the whole we need to make up for the part, the missing part of Oliver’s body, his right arm, is the author’s own arm. Are we expected to understand that Williams envisages his work as a punch? If so, the aim is not to put the Other out of the ring but to awaken him or her to the adventures, pleasant or unpleasant, of the game. Violence is sometimes necessary, Williams seems to suggest, for some to awake into reality. As Oliver puts it to the young minister who came to see him: “All you need’s to be given a push on the head!” (210). But at the same time, Oliver and Williams are also well aware of the fragility of beauty and warn us how easily it can be broken.

34 Oliver is one and many at the same time, a torn-in-pieces victim of Dionysian Sparagmos and an Apollonian “One” thanks to his achievement as an artist who managed to bring together the many-sidedness of his Dionysian self into his art: a hustler, a victim/offender of social and gender codes, a homosexual icon, personification of the brokenness of beauty, an epitome of the South in its fragility and in its dramatic self-perception, a handsome corpse, a phoenix... His consumption and rebirth, however take place only after the curtain has fallen on the stage of Oliver’s drama. For as the character is also a self-reflexive representation of his author’s work, the Dionysian tearing of his body is occurring here and now. As the medical college students must have dissected Oliver’s corps to understand how the parts of a living body function together, we have deconstructed a part of Tennessee Williams’ corpus in pursuit of the same goal. Oliver is Williams’ representation of his own work, passionately Southern, affectingly violent and thoroughly fragile.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristophanes. The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print.

Callimach, Andrew. Lovers’ Legends. The Gay Greek Myths. New Rochelle: Haiduk Press, 2002. Print.

Csapo, Eric. Theories of Mythology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Print.

Forkner, Ben and Patrick Samway. “Introduction.” A New Reader of the Old South. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1991. i-xiv. Print.

Forkner, Ben and Patrick Samway, eds. Stories of the Old South. 1989. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

___. Stories of the Modern South. Eds. Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway. 1981. London: Penguin, 1995. Print.

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Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Print.

Grimal, Pierre. Dictionnaire de la Mythologie. 1951. Paris: PUF, 1986. Print.

Heine, Friedrich. “Dieux en Exil.” Revue des deux mondes, t.2, 1853. Print.

Howatson, M. C. and Ian Chilvers. Concise Companion to Classical Literature. Oxford: OUP, 1993. Print.

Kerényi, Kàroly. Dionysus. Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. New Jersey: Princeton U P, 1976. Print.

Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 1928. Wordsworth Editions. N.d. Print.

Manguel, Alberto. Reading Pictures. A History of Love and Hate. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Print.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1999. Print.

___. How Beautiful it is and how Easily it Can Be Broken. New York/ London: Harper, 2008. Print.

Macey, David. Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

Otto, Walter, Friedrich. Dionysus: Myth and Cult. 1960. Translated with an introduction by R.B. Palmer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965. Print.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.

Pater, Walter. “Pico Della Mirandola.” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. 1873. London: MacMillan, 1920. Print.

Pentcheva, Bissera V. “The Performative Icon.” The Art Bulletin 88.4 (December 2006): 631-655. Print.

Peters, Brian M. “Queer Semiotics of Expression: Gothic Language and Homosexual Destruction in Tennessee Williams’s ‘One Arm’ and ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’.” The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 8 (2006). Web. 04/04/2013.

Reber, Arthur S. Dictionary of Psychology. London: Penguin, 1985. Print.

Roth, Robert. “Tennessee Williams in Search of Form in One Arm and Other Stories.” Chicago Review 9.2 (Summer 1955): 86-94. Print.

Salih, Sarah, ed. The Judith Butler Reader. Oxford: Blackwell: 2008. Print.

Vernadakis, Emmanuel. “Migrations transatlantiques latentes dans ‘The Yellow Bird’ de Tennessee Williams.” Journal of the Short Story in English 61 (Autumn 2013): 49-61. Print.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by John Dryden, London: Penguin Classics, 1997. Print.

Williams, Tennessee. Collected Stories. New York: Ballantine, 1984. Print.

___. “One Arm.” One Arm. New York: New Directions, 1948–54. 7-29. Print.

___. A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.

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NOTES

1. Begun in 1942 and finished in 1945, “One Arm” is the title story of a collection first published in 1948 in a limited edition issued by New Directions. The collection was dedicated to Kip Kiernan, a Canadian dancer and Williams’ lover during the summer of 1940. 2. See Roth and Martin. 3. The Outsider was published the year Williams set out to write “One Arm.” 4. As in the opening line of The Aeneid, “Arms and the Man I sing” (Virgil, I, 1). 5. See also “Myth [is] a narrative which is considered socially important, and is told in such a way as to allow the entire social collective to share a sense of this importance. There can be myths about recent events, contemporary personalities, new inventions. This is a symptom of myths’ function which should not be confused with their essence. Myth is a function of social ideology” (9). 6. The dialogue between Oliver and the young minister takes on an hilarious dimension if the reader has already deciphered Oliver’s metafictional symbolism.

ABSTRACTS

Assortie d’un dessin de l’auteur, la nouvelle de Tennessee Williams “One Arm” (« Le Boxeur manchot », 1948), est un récit qui, comme le Traité sur la tolérance (1763) de Voltaire, Le Dernier jour d’un condamné (1829) de Victor Hugo, La Balade de la Geôle de Reading (1897) d’Oscar Wilde ou L’Etranger (1942) de Camus, s’engage ouvertement contre la peine de mort. La plaidoirie de Williams contre la peine capitale repose sur un canevas où les concepts nietzschéens de l’apollonien et du dionysiaque rencontrent l’œuvre de D.H. Laurence, le mythe de la descente aux enfers de Dionysos, le mythe d’Iacchos, la figure du Christ et, sur le plan de l’image, La Chaise (1888) de Van Gogh. Ce qui permet au texte d’associer le pouvoir idéologique du mythe à la question d’identités sexuelles et à la littérature du Sud. Cet article tente d’illustrer que la fragilité est ici présentée comme source de puissance. Le héros de la nouvelle, Oliver Winemiller, montre, d’une part, que le pouvoir de la littérature du Sud réside dans sa fragilité et, d’autre part, il personnifie aussi la fragilité performante du corpus littéraire de Williams.

AUTHORS

EMMANUEL VERNADAKIS Emmanuel Vernadakis is Professor of literature in English at the University of Angers, and the Advising Editor of the Journal of the Short Story in English, after having been its co-editor (with Linda Collinge) from 2001 to 2012. He has co-authored, with Marianne Drugeon, Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (Atlande 2014), with Graham Woodroffe, Portraits of the Artist in A Clockwork Orange (PUA 2004), and published articles on Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bowen, Claire Keegan, Tennessee Williams, Saul Bellow, Anthony Burgess and Cynthia Ozick, as well as on theoretical issues such as identity and otherness, theatricality, performativity, the poetics of proper names and myths.

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Black Image and Blackness: Rewriting Myth as Cultural Code in Ralph Ellison's "King of the Bingo Game"

Françoise Clary

1 “Short stories work well as tools for learning” (xiii), novelist Clarence Major writes in the introduction to Calling the Wind, his innovative collection of African American short stories. Indeed, whether it is seen as a paradigm of human experience or an artful play of language in what Edgar Allan Poe used to define as a prose narrative with a magnitude of its own serving a single effect, the American short story offers us workable metaphors for our lives while creating its own reality. African American writers have long practiced the short story form: rooted in the oral tradition, it tends toward an approach that would address differences. If we consider that all knowledge is perspectival, and therefore metaphoric, it is easy to understand why African American story-tellers have set out to test irony. Irony is a clue to understanding the African American experience; it is also a metaphor of opposites and has become the main device in the organization of texts that frame an inner story within the story. This can create disruption, deceptive talking and give way for the Othering process to emerge— it being understood that in Othering enunciation, the subject relinquishes the central position of conventional discourse, exchanging agency for some form of contact with the world. This exploration of the self’s multiple positions was established as early as 1899 with Charles Chesnutt’s short story “The Goophered Grapevine.” The text deviates from the model of subject-centered discourse since the white protagonist’s narrative voice in the framing story is overridden by the growing authority of the black hero— that is Uncle Julius’s voice—in the inner story.

2 In the present discussion, the starting-point will be Houston Baker’s assertion that the framing mind of the South “has been and remains a liminal zone, a middle passage of the imagination, a space of performance” (Turning South Again 36). Such an idea makes it possible to appraise the framing of blackness in Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo

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Game” and question whether the rewriting of myth as a cultural code can give birth to a new black image akin to Baker’s view of “blackness in motion toward modernity” (Blues 154).

Introducing the Language of Myth

3 There is a set pattern of rites and myths marking the African American experience that involve “the black person’s separation from a dominant, white society” (Baker, Blues 153). The symbolic content of African American culture demonstrates that the term carnival culture, as coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, would not be out of place in relation to the various definitions of African mythmaking. Indeed, these definitions introduce an intellectual perspective of the African Diaspora into African American literature and make of ethnical and cultural legacy the spiritual reservoir of ancient wisdom into which African Americans have sought inspiration. Myths are challenging concepts and make up an important part of the way African Americans have organized their lives, most particularly in the South. To a disengaged observer, African American mythmaking has grown into a cultural construct very much like Alice’s Looking-Glass— both difficult to break into, and difficult to break out of. The salient trend of the narrative pattern present in African American folk culture, with central trickster figures brought from Africa, is that the language of myth is illustrated by the power of the word to reinvent reality. There is even an argument that holds that an adaptive skill in deception was, originally, a fundamental basis of survival for Blacks in America (Blauner 352). This ability to move to transformation represents some sort of anticipatory self-defense generating the capacity to switch enacted roles when obliged to do so. Ralph Ellison, for his part, chooses to define the process of mythmaking as the art of concealment when he refers to Black people’s “long habit of deception and evasion” (Shadow and Act xxi).

4 The contradictory values of confrontation and assimilation inherent in America’s ethnic founding are, on the other hand, reflected in the language of myth that opens up on the mystery of a life not entirely under our control since “all societies have myths or stories that tell about who they are” (Christensen 116). Besides, mythmaking is clearly more than one culture’s attempt to “make sense in a senseless world” (117). It is also “a creative resource from which the larger cultural values are derivative” (Okpewho 25). In this light, the art of self-concealment can be said to have clearly contributed to advance myths serving behavioral survival strategies, such as the myth of the happy slave. In fact, African American myths may adopt the trappings of legends or magical stories with a Bakhtinian outlook, and borrow from fable a potentially subversive rather than ratifying form. This is notably the case in fables of the astute Brer Rabbit, Uncle Abrahams, or again John, the human trickster, who can outsmart his master again and again, make him look foolish, and thus expose the myth of white omniscience. For all the differences between the animal trickster that can replace the master, win great victories, and the human trickster whose exploits describe slaves’ patterns of behavior, the ultimate purpose of the mythic approach to reality is to offer black people a minimum of shared perspectives through inter-generational transmission. The ethno-cultural dimension of myth—notably emphasized by Ellison in Shadow and Act—is therefore to be seen as a way to keep black people from engaging in a pathological adjustment to the ethnocentric context of white American society

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thanks to the socialized ambivalence of a complex double vision. Not surprisingly then, African American social myths borrow from black folklore where the weak can outwit the oppressor, all the while taking distance from the world of the powerful. This is notably illustrated by the Blues lyric that runs: Got one mind for white folks to see, ‘nother for what I know is me; He don’t know, he don’t know my mind. (Oakley 15)

5 Clearly, by building on Signifying, the Blues, and Conjuring, in other words by sustaining “the disingenuously conciliatory habit, perfected by Blacks on these shores, of maintaining the critique oblique” (Cooke 15), myths, legends and rituals deeply rooted in the African American experience convey a sense of intimacy because they are cultural codes for the attitudes, beliefs and behavior of communal life. Being closely intertwined, social and cultural myths can thus be considered as the appropriate signs to represent the socialized ambivalence of African American life. Given the fact that the language of myths is rooted in the particularity of the black American experience, the awareness born of the intimate combination of Christian and social myths takes the form of a reaching out of the self, extending into the world with a final interaction of the self with the world.

6 The present work involves revisiting the rediscovery of myth by Ralph Ellison in a short story whose main protagonist is an ambivalent Southerner, living in the North, but still marked by the mental attitudes, habits of mind, and cultural paradigms of the South. Myths and rituals are part of these paradigms and constitute the connective tissue between art and audiences. But should a distinction be established between ancient myths characterized by their universality and residually oral African American myths that are both the product of a fundamentally collective African culture and the symbolic representation of meaningful life situations shared by a people? Myth, Roland Barthes writes in Mythologies, has the ability to transform the meaning of history. It must first be freed from its historical truth, and then be re-conceptualized to serve another purpose. That is the reason why, straddling the religious and political worlds, the myth of the suffering Black Christ righting the wrongs of the weak developed in opposition to, the myth of white omnipotence; it is also the reason why, with the rise of black militancy, it evolved into the myth of the Black Christ as an avenging deity. At a time when the social and intellectual life of black Americans centered on religion and was shaped by the churches, this racial Christianity represented, in the South at least, the basis of black intellectual consciousness. Numerous conceptual frameworks are involved in the definitions of myth, varying from the cosmogonic, value-laden discourse explaining the origin and nature of the human universe to Branislaw Malinowski’s functionalist approach to mythmaking as a charter for social action. The emphasis here will be on the importance of black folklore for African American novelists of the fifties, their rejection of the universality of Greco-Roman myths for the combination of Christian and social myths rooted in the particularity of African American experience. The myth of white supremacy can therefore be seen to offer symbolic resources to be used in juxtaposition to the social myths of black American folklore that are meant to counterbalance the Manichean black and white, evil and good dual structure of western mythology.

7 Consequently, it is not without significance that the universe of African American myths should sustain the signs of black cultural tradition and the art of Signifying, through a message naturally veiled. Taking Bakhtin’s point that culture is formed both

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out of consensus and dissent, we will turn first to American colonial discourse to view the complexities of early American attitudes on race in a master-slave dialectic before we focus on Ralph Ellison’s short story “King of the Bingo Game” where the story-teller proceeds to a rewriting of African American myths that refers to the shattering of reality as an eruption of the unconscious. This will open a new perspective on the inner reality of the black image, which Ellison links to the presupposed self-enclosure of the individual.

African American Mythmaking as a Way to Come to Terms with the Master-Slave Dialectic

8 The beginning of African American myth-making as a way to come to terms with the master-slave dialectic is to be found in the ethnic grounding of American culture in the years before 1800. Ethnic stereotypes in the framing of blackness are worth considering first, as they show how the colonists began shaping racist stories—that evolved into myths—in order to protect their social order and superior status by marginalizing transplanted Africans. The myth of the simpleton Sambo, for instance, was obviously a way for white Americans to assuage their guilt for enslaving Africans in so far as they conveyed the idea that Blacks were by nature inferior beings and simple wits. The myth of white supremacy, and the social rituals that have perpetuated this myth through the substitution of a color caste system to a social caste system account for the socialized ambivalence sentencing blackness to exclusion. An illustration of the psychological meanings of the myth of white supremacy is provided by Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. In 1786 this document gives reasons for believing that the black man is condemned by nature to an inferior status. Not only does Jefferson disparage the black image, arguing that the Negro is ugly, while the whites are of superior beauty, he also cites the mental and moral characteristics of Blacks as obvious proof of their inferiority, reaching the conclusion that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. The performativity of African Americans in their reaction to the disparagement of the black image is however to be found in the expressive move from the myth of white supremacy to the framing of a black Southern mind with the grins and lies of Sambo hiding behind a black mask.

9 Within the context of jest books and gallows narratives—that were two major genres of popular culture in early America—myths have come to provide a wide-ranging survey of ethnic representations, all of them aiming to protect white people’s superior status. In early rape narratives, such as The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, published in 1768, we notice at once that the rapist is a black slave. Not only is the narrative filled with ethnic prejudices, but it marginalizes Arthur, the rapist, for moral and sociological reasons. This character is meant to represent a lack of self-control, but also to stand as a threat to hierarchical authority and cause a disruption of the social order. The dramatization of the stereotype of the immoral black slave sets the foundation for the myth of the primitive nature of the black man whose inferiority is inherent in his black whole. In reaction to the stereotypical discourse on the black man’s primitiveness, the emergence of the framing of the black mind of the South and the expressivity of rhetorical masking are to be associated with a performative image of blackness linked to black and blue memory. To be more precise, it is related to black male subject formation as well as to the Blue Man, a nightmarish grotesque being who is both

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stealthy and ferocious. From a sociocultural standpoint, black Southern male subject formation is to be understood as a confrontation with the blue, scrutinizing eye of the Southern white. While the myth of white supremacy extolling white American values emanates from a providential vision of Caucasian Americans as a Chosen people, African American myths grounded on black American values reflect a tragicomic vision of life that illustrates African Americans’ resilience of spirit, and “figuration” (Baker, Turning South Again 7) as a mode of resistance. In this regard, myths often have the effect of presenting irony as the only plausible remedial option for expressing a symbolic double vision of blackness. Drawing on black American folklore and storytelling, African American myths are therefore clearly inherited from a residually oral culture relying on collective experiences and values with a hard grip on reality. But they also spring from moral and speculative stories (such as faith in the redemptive power of suffering and patience, the art of dissimulation, the gusto of life and an acute sense of humor). African American myths also capitalize on a subservient behavior pattern due to the unbridged gap between white ideology and black reality. They offer antinomies, embrace hybrid transformations and at the same time participate in the regeneration of cultural identity, they reflect an interactive ethnic mix evoked in Shadow and Act as “the group’s will to survive” (172).

10 The hero of “King of the Bingo Game” is clearly framed and indexed in the South. As such, he is made to behave in a way meant to symbolize a reaction to a dominant discourse while wearing a mask. In the context of black people’s experiences in the South, cultural codes have been associated with the symbolic representations of crucial life situations shared by all. Two moments are simultaneously operating. They are unambiguously for and against white supremacy. Hence, the speculative stories that make up African American myths are both archetypal in pattern and ethnic in cultural content. On the stage, blackface performers parade the idiocies of mythical black rustics: while morality, beauty, refinement and culture are restricted to Caucasians.

11 As far as African American storytelling is concerned, a blend of residually oral African American myths influenced by the impact of ideological racism can be found, together with a new system of shared symbols constitutive of a network of understanding that informs black consciousness. Just like writers of European descent, writers of African descent have practiced the short story form for capturing highly focused moments with a tragicomic vision of life symbolically inscribed in myths.

Deconstructing Myth or the Empowerment of the Black Figure in “King of the Bingo Game”

12 “King of the Bingo Game” is centered on the experience of a nameless black man who sits impatiently in a movie theatre in the North where he lives. He is watching a movie he has already seen three times and keeps waiting for a bingo game to begin. The scene takes place in the early 1940s when this sort of entertainment was very popular. As he has been unable to get a job because he lacks a birth certificate, the protagonist is playing the bingo game in the hope of winning enough money to pay for a doctor to save Laura, a woman he cares for. The bingo game begins and the nameless protagonist eventually achieves bingo. Called up on stage, he is to try his hand at winning the jackpot. For him to do so, the spinning wheel, whose button he has to press, must stop at the double zero after he releases it. But, as he stands on the stage the hero realizes

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that he is unable to release the button. And so, as long as he forces the wheel to continue spinning, he feels empowered to control his own destiny and Laura’s. While refusing to let go of the button, he forgets who he is and fancies he is the King of the Bingo Game. As a consequence of his refusal to leave the stage, people in the audience fly into a rage while the bingo caller is losing his temper. Eventually, as two policemen manage to wrest the button from the protagonist, the wheel spins to a stop on the double zero. Still unaware of what is brewing, and convinced that he has finally won the jackpot, the protagonist is beaming with happiness when he is violently hit in the head and collapses on the stage.

13 Adopting an original perspective, Ellison draws basically on the machinery of Southern myths, and skillfully combines the myth of the deceptively submissive black Sambo with that of John the human trickster, who knows how to cheat his master and fight back. Leaving aside the performance of black vernacular, what Henry Louis Gates calls Signifying, Ellison proceeds to a re-writing of Southern myths. While the nameless hero is faced with a battle between self-protection and self-sacrificial love for a woman whose life has to be saved, Ellison rhetorically negotiates new frames for blackness. The focus of the pseudo-allegorical story is on an individual—on stage under the lights— whose intense cultural, emotional, mental and physical isolation enables the writer to depict—in a parodic way—the war between reason and irrationality. As the initially naïve Southern character sheds the mask of innocence to acquire the self-assertive language of the one that masters his fate, the framing of blackness is made to progress toward modernity when the black protagonist demonstrates his power to reinvent reality, control the bingo wheel, so that something new and unexpected may arise. Basically, Ellison resorts to mythic realism, the particular sort of magic realism generated from inside the psyche—sometimes referred to as “psychic realism” (Delbaere-Garant 112). This process opens on a questioning of cultural hegemony. It also reflects the idea that culture has passed from Euro-Americans to African Americans. By relating the concept of race to the themes of rules and order, madness, fate and free will, Ellison develops appropriate strategies for overcoming the “hidden signs of racial superiority” (Powell 747) deeply woven in the canonical vision of African American subservience and white omnipotence.

14 It is first to be noted that the world of “King of the Bingo Game” is governed by a set of rules that somehow symbolize reason. From the beginning, when he chooses to play with five cards (which is not allowed), the nameless black protagonist attempts to break free of the rules and do away with reason. Facing him, the white bingo caller— with his tiresome chattering and excessive gesticulating—functions as a grotesque figure in the narrative. He clearly has a parodic function as in the tales of the African American oral tradition. He is the conceited white man who fails to recognize the black protagonist as a person and constantly refers to him as “boy.” The bingo caller embodies the disguised creature of African American myths bloated with his own power and importance. Cracking jokes and smiling at the crowd, the pomaded man with the microphone can be seen as some kind of freak meant to comment on the war between reason—symbolized by the rules he is expected to enforce—and the irrational, the fantastic that is integrated into the story when the protagonist feels he is being controlled by the bingo wheel. The intrusion of the fantastic corresponds to the depersonification of the black hero haunted and dramatically fractured by his inner conflicts. In Ellison’s re-writing of Southern myths, the black protagonist functions as

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the eternal thwarter. He stands as the symbol of the irrational twists of circumstance. But, in so doing, he serves as an agent of the world’s irrationality and a reminder of man’s fundamental helplessness.

15 The way Ellison’s short story revisits black Southern myths with a philosophical approach outlines the transformative power of black Southerners. This brings a new perception of the black image: the bingo rules serve indeed as a proxy for the rules of a white-dominated society, which is the reason why the black protagonist’s determination to break free creates a universe of fictional meanings where blackness no longer connotes the passivity evoked by the stereotype of the acculturated African American or the acceptance linked to the myth of the dim-wit Sambo. Instead, it stands for the resilience, the astuteness and the will-power of another mythical character: John the human trickster. Thus, by refusing to let go of the button on the spinning wheel, the black protagonist is not just trying to subvert the game. He is symbolically breaking one of the rules governing the society he lives in, convinced as he is that he alone can be in control of his fate. Interestingly, his obstacle-ridden mission to win the jackpot parodies the quest novel since the protagonist’s selfhood—his blackness—which should normally be a central element in the story, is constantly subverted by the projection of people’s desires in the audience. In this context, the protagonist’s liberated subconscious can itself become a new tyranny. Each detail is significant in the short span of the story. For instance, as he is sitting in the movie theater waiting for the bingo game to begin, the black protagonist falls asleep briefly. The dream he has is meant to stand for the racial oppression that he has been experiencing as an African American from the South; it is also an embodiment of the submissive black figure in the Sambo myth. In fact, the choice of breaking free of the bingo rules can be read as a deconstruction of the myth of the slow-minded Southern black. Indeed, when he shakes the man with the microphone away, telling him to simply watch because he wants to show the whole world how to win, the black protagonist is then able to momentarily escape his past and his situation of submission by becoming “King.” As his subconscious erupts through his conscious self, he somehow reaches a transcendent perspective: that of superior knowledge.

16 When the protagonist yells out to the audience that he wants to show them all how to win the jackpot, he does not just question the validity of the myth of the dim-wit slave but enforces signs of the black man’s artful alternatives to resignation. Ellison’s description of the black protagonist’s discovery of what it is like to feel in control of his own destiny for the first time is part of a quest-for-identity structure. It is as though, when breaking free of the rules, the black protagonist were discovering the meaning of life. In fact, the nameless hero firmly believes that the wheel will control his entire life. The allegorical framing of blackness can be said to progress toward black modernism when the narrator sharply alters perspectives and shifts to a life-enhancing project in resistance, a “stride toward freedom” (Baker, Turning South Again 34). Symbolically speaking, the hero is the only one that has acquired superior representational capabilities. What is suggested here is that although to the outsider all of it looks insane, there is something about the extreme nature of insanity that allows for insights otherwise hidden from view. In fact, by resorting to rhetorical, or dramatic irony as appropriate strategies for questioning the hidden signs of cultural hegemony, Ellison proceeds not merely to a deconstruction of the myth of the subservient black man but to a decentering of the white logos and a rebuilding of the center with a black logos. The emphasis is put on the protagonist, a downtrodden African American from the

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South who feels as though he had finally been given the opportunity to shape his own destiny. He is no longer in the margin; he himself is the center in a story that raises the issue of how well a man who has been doomed as a descendant of the “sons of Ham” can succeed in controlling his fate in an unfair system.

17 The process of deconstruction of the myth of “blackness as a negative essence” (Gates, Signifying Monkey 237) is paralleled by the rebuilding of blackness as a presence in a mythic quest of transcendence. Ellison’s short story suggests a possible logocentric reading with a black logos while simultaneously subverting it through the evocation of a moment of transcendence rising from self-discovery. This way of writing is at the core of the central debates in current African American literary theory, more particularly if we confront Timothy Powell’s view of blackness as metaphysical essentialism with Henry Louis Gates’s opposition to “the idea of a transcendent signified, a belief in an essence called blackness” (Figures 53).

18 The significance of Ellison’s attempt to empower the character of the naïve, Sambo-like Southern protagonist with the authority of a black logos when he achieves bingo can be understood through the understatement that all knowledge concerning mythmaking is metaphoric. Ellison finds strategies for imposing the Black Figure on the page of white myths and overcoming their hidden signs of racial superiority. The choice he makes of dialectical irony operating as a metaphor of opposites is here particularly suited for illuminating the sociological and philosophical issues at stake in his rephrasing of myths. For instance, as the black hero is on stage refusing to release the button that forces the wheel to continue spinning, the reader’s attention is drawn to the exposition of the myth of white omnipotence along with a de-centering of the white bingo caller and a sudden focus on the black protagonist who ignores the angry crowd and yells back at them: “This is God” (130). The clash of challenging images, like the one of the once assertive white man with the microphone, bowing to a black figure that stands for affirmation, highlights the reversal of opposites. The white bingo caller, who was used to making a fool of the black protagonist as of a simpleton Sambo, is overwhelmed by the black contestant’s sudden empowerment. This contributes to deconstructing a myth where blackness used to connote absence and negativity. Numerous race quotes could be made on this subject, but the hint at the negativity of blackness is undoubtedly introduced by the black protagonist’s remark revealing how much he empathizes with the other African Americans in the audience for experiencing the same sense of self-loathing as he does, and sharing the same shame of being black: “All the Negroes down there were just ashamed because he was black like them. He smiled inwardly, knowing how it was. Most of the time he was ashamed of what the Negroes did himself” (132). However, this quote also reflects the protagonist’s detachment from African Americans’ self-loathing since he admits knowing “how it was,” and his “smiling inwardly” reveals that he is now in a new mindset. The reversal of opposites occurs when the black protagonist rises to a superior status, and looks patronizingly at the white bingo caller, relegating him to the margin: “And because he understood, he smiled again to let the man know that he held nothing against him for being white and impatient” (131-32). The hero’s body language, when gripping the button, brushing the white bingo caller’s hand away and facing the crowd with defiance, indicates that he has mentally transcended racial boundaries. This accounts for the mixture of fascination and fear aroused in the hero who nearly falls fainting into the footlights.

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19 One way to shed light on Ellison’s posture toward myths and stereotypes is to observe how he deals both with memory and the subversion of personal identity. As a matter of fact, the nameless hero is indirectly sent on a quest for transcendence whose final outcome involves penetrating the very kernel of his being. And yet there is a gap separating the original formulation of the myth and the way Ellison’s remakes it. Irony has a special value for sociological thought in the text. In fact, Ellison’s main strategy aims at doing away with the hidden signs of racial superiority through the use of dialectical irony, “a master trope in the discovery and description of ‘the truth” (Burke 503), which does not consist in having one character opposed to another character, but in having one character become his very opposite. This crisscrossing has a subversive effect in the story by gradually blurring the line of distinction between the assertive white bingo caller and the submissive black protagonist who eventually has the upper hand by ignoring the white man’s orders. The story-teller offers a confrontational vision of two myths through a shift from the naïve, subservient Sambo to the astute, resilient John, the human trickster. By so doing, Ellison deconstructs the canonical concept of the white logos to reconstruct a mythic appraisal of blackness in a self- discovering act.

Interpreting Ellison’s Rewriting of Myths in Reference to Slavoj Zizek’s Logic of Internalization of Negativity

20 According to William Bell, the myth of the Negro past is a myth that contributes to relegate Black people to a debased social status. This is due to an underlying assumption, derived from the sociological theories of Gunnar Myrdal and E. Franklin Frazier, that culture passes from Euro-Americans to African-Americans whose own cultural values and identity have been negated. If we shift perspectives and read “King of the Bingo Game” from the ideological point of view adopted by Slavoj Zizek in his essay on the paradox of the impossible choice, paying attention to his claim that “the only subversive thing to do when confronted with a power discourse is simply to take it at its word” (237), we may consider that Ellison is aiming at a philosophical rewriting of the myth of the Negro past that corresponds to what Zizek calls “a necessary ‘step back’ from actuality into possibility” (2). Ellison’s remaking of the myth wears the guise of a philosophical and somewhat artificial detachment from the human condition. He does this by grappling with the issues of isolation, fate and freedom and their interplay with the question of race.

21 The context of American society in the 1940s can be grasped in the broad point Ellison makes about race by opting for a nameless protagonist. It operates like a code conditioning African American cultural signifying. This is a way of illustrating the depersonification of the black man since the protagonist could be any one of the millions of African-Americans who travelled north during the Great Migration out of the South. While it is true that Ellison is telling a story about an African American individual, this man is meant to represent a broader collective. The reality of white dominance in the South is to be understood through dreams, metaphors, or occasional comments from the protagonist whose cultural notion of identity is subverted by the theme of isolation. This intellectual construct is outlined during the episode of the protagonist’s dream. The hero dreams he is a young boy walking on railroad tracks down South. Such a dream is not anecdotal. It is based on an incident in the

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protagonist’s childhood—he used to run in front of trains on the tracks before jumping off to the side. However, in the dream he is having now, it is with terror that he sees the train leaving the track and pursuing him right down the middle of the street with all the white people laughing at him as he is running for his life. The protagonist’s emotion is so intense that he is screaming in real life as well as in his dream—so much so that the men sitting next to him complain. The nameless hero undoubtedly experiences intense isolation as he feels apart from the other participants. And yet, through his dream, he is able to incorporate some elements of shared history into his sense of the present where the train he has just dreamt of stands as a metaphor of the oppressive system he is trying to escape. As the story progresses, the protagonist steps back from what is real, and feels drawn to what is possible. The narrator notes that as soon as the nameless hero (acting as John the human trickster) steps on the stage, “he felt a profound sense of promise, as though he were about to be repaid for all the things he’d suffered all his life” (129). Symbolically speaking, the hero’s move from sitting in the darkness of the hall to standing in the glaring light of the stage corresponds to his mental shift from negativity and “radical decenteredness” (Zizek 68) to self- consciousness and transcendence.

22 Now, if we connect the mention of the hero’s suffering to his being black, we realize that the bingo wheel represents the symbol of what is possible. It is the means for the protagonist to transcend the real, rise above his past and be reborn since he can then discard his old name—a name originally bestowed on his grandfather by a white slave owner. In opposition to it, the name he chooses for himself—“The-man-who-pressed- the-button-who-held-the-prize-who-was-the-King-of-Bingo” (133)—is predicated on the bingo wheel that is a stand-in for fate. The choice of this inventive name entails awareness of the philosophical nature of the elements that refigure the myth of black consciousness, intertextually related to the Hegelian notion of simple force, considering that “force driven back into itself must express itself” (136). Rhetorically speaking, symbols, imagery, and allegory combine in the text to give evidence of the modernization of the black hero. Thus, the emphasis is put on the growth of the black protagonist’s individual powers. As he becomes the man who can control the wheel of fortune, he acquires the elements of the extended man, in other words the man endowed with extensive powers mastering Fate: “He was running the show, by God! They had to react to him, for he was their luck” (132). He does not merely take the form of the self-contained hero who violates the stereotyped role of the subservient individual as it is set aside for black people in the white society of the South. He turns into the superman who is a central figure in modern America. In addition to changing the original perspective of the myth of the Negro Past, Ellison calls attention to some aspects of the trickster in the protagonist’s performance and unpredictability while he is on stage. The hero’s astuteness and body language as he pushes the white official away and keeps pressing the button nervously while yelling at the raging crowd are significant. A double of the trickster John, he can all of a sudden manifest super powers and be turned into a superblackman through his rejection of the real and his choice for the possible. Ellison borrows from mythic realism to reconstruct a vision where the African American individual is close to the universe of the possible with the revelation about the powers over life and death he thinks he has but is unable to share. He is undoubtedly close to Kant’s view of the transcendental subject that is known only through the concept of an immanent and unfolding order in nature.

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23 The underlying quest-for-identity structure that fits within the remake of the myth of the Negro Past is served by several literary devices. The most prominent is the use of a jazzy style whose irregular beats, improvisation and syncopation connect with the inconsistencies in the behavior of the nameless protagonist of the story, a young man from the South whose social status is key to understanding he is the product of larger forces. There is a meta-narrative at play that draws on different styles, reflecting the musical form of jazz, to express the protagonist’s beaten-down, suffering self, his isolation as he is misunderstood by the audience, his attempt to alter his destiny, his hope to forgo his African American identity, give himself a new name “King of the Bingo Game” so as to reach a sense of self, his descent into madness, and eventually his final collapse. Thus, using a complex mix of voice pitch, intonation contours and glides, word—and phrase—rhythm, Ellison first depicts the protagonist as fully isolated in the midst of the crowd. He is a poor, hungry man sitting miserably in a movie theatre, craving desperately for a handful of his neighbors’ peanuts but nobody pays attention to him. People just see through him. He is the void, an invisible man to them. His destitution can be seen as an echo to the deprivation of the acculturated African American of the Southern myth. The rhythm is slow, illustrating the difficulty of attempting to break free of the rules of a white-dominated society. Then a shift occurs through the move from realism to surrealism with successive repeats of the main theme of isolation / destitution with some variations as we are left to probe into the protagonist’s consciousness. We are not only led to share his dream sequence, but also allowed to sense the interaction between the hero and the spinning wheel, and made to react at the rhythmic and vivid descriptions of how “the whole audience had somehow entered him and was stamping its feet in his stomach” (133).

24 What marks the break in the perception of a symbolic rewriting of the myth of the Negro Past is that Ellison’s short story deals with a subverted personal identity. The protagonist is sent on a quest whose final outcome involves discovering that he himself is, from the beginning, implicated in the object of his quest. This self-discovering act is complicated and inconclusive in so far as the lack of collective memory involves the fabrication of characters in the crowd that could be considered as ‘replicants’ (borrowing the word and the image from fantasy films, such as Ridley Scott’s), that is to say as beings virtually identical to surrounding people but differing from them because of their naivety and altered emotional responses. In so far as these characters are not their true selves, they are unaware of their status as ‘replicants,’ even though there are other African Americans in the audience. When we read about all the Negroes in the audience being ashamed because the man on stage was black like them, and of how it was for him, most of the time ashamed too of what Negroes did, we are to understand that if the protagonist empathizes with the African Americans in the bingo hall it is because he is experiencing the same self-loathing for “the encounter with a zero image” (Baker, Blues 158). The other African Americans in the crowd are clearly used as doubles to mirror the protagonist’s feeling of shame at being black and they amplify it by turning this self-loathing into a communal attitude. In the tradition of African American storytelling, indications are given of acculturation to a Euro-American ethos. Although the writer invites the reader to diagnose the position of an African American individual in a society under white dominance, he shifts the emphasis away from race by endowing his nameless hero with universality. None of his features is really his own; even his fantasies are artificially planted. What characterizes the protagonist’s move as philosophical is always his step back from what is real in order to find what is possible.

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It involves, first, the power to abstract from his starting point—exemplified by his attempt to break free of the bingo rules—then his determination to gather all the transcendental conditions of possibility. The question is: how far can a downtrodden African American individual control his own destiny? At this point, it is important to note that, in the text, the perception of transcendence accompanies the representation of a transcendental object. This object is the bingo wheel. For the protagonist, it is “God” and makes him feel like a “King.” As he presses the button controlling the spinning wheel, he gets hold of a positive phenomenal entity, res cogitans, the Thing which thinks. In other words, as the protagonist believes he can control his destiny by controlling the wheel of fortune—that is to say as long as he refuses to let go—an interaction occurs between the spinning wheel and the protagonist. In short, he renders self-present the wheel of fortune that is the thing in him which thinks.

25 The hero exorcizes the dark demons of the past when he is on the stage under the lights, after going through a symbolic interplay of light and darkness. The glaring light of the stage constitutes a space where the black protagonist is able to experience revelation, where a literal shift occurs from entrapment in the myth of the subservient black man deprived of cultural heritage, to the expression of transcendence as he controls the spinning of the wheel of fortune. When seen from the perspective of the rites of the black Southern mind, the protagonist no longer knows who he is because he does not possess the imaginative version of himself—a feeling the protagonist of Michelle Cliff’s “Screen Memory” also experiences. It is at this very moment when he thinks he fully controls the wheel of fortune and feels most powerful that Ellison’s hero realizes he has no idea of who he is. This accounts for his asking the crowd desperately: “Who am I?” (133). In fact, Ellison capitalizes on this sudden amnesia to question and rewrite the myth of the Negro Past. When he writes “It was a sad, lost feeling to lose your name, and a crazy thing to do” (132), Ellison represents the protagonist’s rejection of his old identity as a refusal of the construct of white culture whose transmission he objects to, not merely for himself but for the other African Americans in the audience. Indeed, when he calls them “poor nameless bastards” (133), it is not a feeling of acculturation that predominates but the expression of a total loss of the hero’s symbolic identity.

Conclusion

26 The different levels of consciousness within a myth cannot be separated out by the native mind. It is rather that everything happens as if the levels were provided with different codes, each being used according to the needs of the moment, and according to its particular capacity, to transmit the same message, as Claude Lévi-Strauss argues (27). What is crucial in Ellison’s rewriting of African American myths in “King of the Bingo Game” is indeed the choice he makes of new philosophical codes to grasp deeper levels of consciousness. He emphasizes the moment of externalization, with the protagonist’s jump into the unknown when he passes to the act, and shifts from subservience to transcendence as he feels empowered to control the rules of the game.

27 The black protagonist everybody had been ignoring becomes visible the moment he traverses the path from individual subject to “He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks” (Zizek 35) and is forced to assume that he is not what he thought himself to be, but “somebody-something else” (Zizek 29). The inherent logic of the story is that the

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protagonist seems to exist only as a ‘replicant,’ that is to say as a clone, an estranged self deprived of his identity. The text provides a brief survey of his personal mythologies. It is as though he went through a total recall of his life experience and discovered the meaning of life represented by hunger, depression, and liquor-induced mental experience. The black protagonist wants to share his great secret with the world—how to win, how to escape his past and his situation by becoming “King”—but his perception of reality including the actuality of his innermost self has been blurred by a society where white dominance is to be understood through dreams. Being nameless, the black hero represents a broader collective, although he stands as the symbol of an unfortunate individual. The paradox here is that the subversive effect creates the blurring of the line of distinction between humans and symbols that hinges on the perception of reality—including the protagonist, the audience, the wheel of fortune spun by Fate. “King of the Bingo Game” alternates between the protagonist’s madness and the surrounding reality. However, Ellison takes the position that one can find truth in madness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, Houston A. Turning South Again. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

____. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Ed. M. Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Selected and translated by Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Print.

Blauner, Robert. “Black Culture: Myth or Reality?” Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Norman E. Whitten, Jr. and John F. Szwed. New York: The Free Press, 1970. Print.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print.

Chesnutt, Charles. “The Goophered Grapevine.” 1899. Calling the Wind. Ed. Clarence Major. New York: Harper, 1993. Print.

Christensen, Jeanne. “A Language of Myth.” Caribbean Culture. Ed. Annie Paul. Jamaica: UWI Press, 2007, 113-23. Print.

Cliff, Michelle. “Screen Memory.” 1990. Calling the Wind. Ed. Clarence Major. New York: Harper, 1993. Print.

Cooke, Michael. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Print.

Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne. “Psychic Realism, Mythic Realism, Grotesque Realism: Variations on Magical Realism in Contemporary Literature in English.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds. Zamora, Lois and Wendy Harris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995, 101-19. Print.

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Ellison, Ralph. “King of the Bingo Game.” 1944. Flying Home and Other Stories. Ed. John Callahan. New York: Vintage International, 2012. Print.

____. Shadow and Act. 1964. New York: Signet Book, 1966. Print.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.

____. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Print.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Print.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963. Print.

Major, Clarence, ed. Calling the Wind. New York: Harper, 1993. Print.

Oakley, Giles. The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues. New York: Harvest, 1976. Print.

Okpewho, Isidore. “Rethinking Myth.” African Literature Today 11 (1980): 5-23. Print.

Powell, Timothy B. “Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 747-60. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

ABSTRACTS

Partant du postulat que les nouvelles afro-américaines instruisent leur lecteur, cet article s’attache à la réinterprétation du mythe inscrit dans le contexte du vécu afro-américain que propose Ellison. L’écrivain tente de déterminer si la réécriture du mythe comme code culturel donne naissance à une nouvelle image du Noir proche de la vision, chère à Houston Baker, de la négrité en marche vers la modernité. Ce but est atteint en variant les perspectives, en repositionnant le centre et la marge, en liant l’accès à la transcendance à la possibilité d’une découverte identitaire et en associant la construction de l’essentialité noire à la modernisation de l’image du héros noir. La dimension ethnoculturelle du mythe mise en exergue par Ellison doit dès lors être comprise comme un mode d’évitement, grâce à l’ambivalence d’un double-jeu, des contraintes imposées aux Noirs par le contexte ethnocentrique de la société blanche américaine. On argumente, sans surprise, que dans la nouvelle d’Ellison, les mythes sociaux afro-américains sont issus du folklore noir où le faible se joue de l’oppresseur, parvient à échapper au système et à marquer une distance vis à vis du monde des puissants.

AUTHORS

FRANÇOISE CLARY Françoise Clary is Professor emeritus of American literature and civilization at Rouen University. On the roster of American Literary Scholarship, Duke University, she is the author of the prize winner Violence et sexualité dans le roman afro-américain de Chester Himes à Hal Bennett (Peter Lang, 1989, Prix de l’Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer), as well as of various works on African- American literature and mass media. She has more recently published “Percival Everett’s

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Watershed and The Body of Martin Aguilera: The Representation of a Mixed People” (CRAFT, no4, 2007), “Myth and Irony in the Aftermath of the Civil Rights: the Undercurrents of Black Experience in Hal Bennett’s Lord of Dark Places” (CRAFT, no5, 2007). Her latest publications include articles concerned with American studies in Dictionnaire des États-Unis (Larousse, 2010), Ben Okri (Atlande, 2013), “Sonia Sanchez’s Political Writing,” An Anthology of Sonia Sanchez, ed. Jamie Walker, University of Michigan Press, Temple United Press, Indiana Press, 2014; “Media Framing of Political Violence and Communication,” Nigerian Journal of Communication, ed. Jonathan Aliede, Lagos, Lagos University Press, 2014.

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Good Country People Between Old South and New South in Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction

Ruth Fialho

1 As a post-war Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor needs to be read with the history of the South in mind: a traumatic history of denial, destruction and loss. The ante-bellum South, as represented in plantation fiction, seemed to be an agrarian idyll of easy living, with no toil nor labor, despite “the historical reality of a patriarchal culture which relied on the extensive use of slave labor” (Castillo 487). Southerners saw their region as a Garden of Eden of which they were the guardians. From this fantasy derived the popular images that are associated with the Old South, with its Southern Belles, hospitable landowners, Southern gentility, leisureliness, religion and immutable social classes. While in the North, an urban world was emerging where industriousness led to social, financial and cultural improvement, in the South, the stress lay on agrarianism, stability, religious fervor and family values. The Civil War ended the Pastoral dream, and engendered an identity crisis that would bolster the Southern Renaissance literature. After the Second World War, the South went through a period of industrial and economic growth that would lead to the expansion of such urban areas as Atlanta, several times mentioned in O’Connor’s fiction as a city of perdition. It is in this ambivalent environment that Flannery O’Connor was born and raised. The rise of industrialization was viewed as a threat to the Southern sense of order, something that would eventually ruin its agrarian culture and chase them from their Garden of Eden.

2 The clashes between old and new world order gave birth to a new set of myths that in turn clashed with reality. This tension has been best represented in short fiction, with its ability to “dramatize a moment of revelation which brings a character to full consciousness for the first time in his life” (Shaw 8). Only in a short story can the characters’ fight gain that particular urgency as they manage (or more typically do not manage) to defend their position from an all-invading modernity and a painful reality check.

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3 O’Connor made ample use of stereotyped characters who saw the South as a Land of Abundance and Fertility needing to be protected from devouring outsiders. The short stories I have chosen to focus on, namely “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf” and “A View of the Woods,” share a worried vision of the pastoral world threatened by the modern world. This was a recurring theme in plantation fiction, ante- and post-bellum (Grammer 62). Yet, O’Connor uses this usual pattern of fear and resistance as a canvas to weave a different tale. They were all written within a two-year-span (1954-1956) which might explain why one story seems to take up an underlying allegory where the preceding one left it.

4 In “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Cope is visited by three boys from the new developments in Atlanta. After she has told them not to do anything that might endanger their lives, but more importantly her property (her greatest fear is to see her woods catch fire under the summer sun), they eventually decide to set fire to her woods themselves. The last sentence of the short story introduces us to a hermeneutic reading of the text, as we are made to hear, in the distance, the boys’ “high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them” (193). These clashing images of salvation and destruction recur throughout all three short stories.

5 In “Greenleaf,” Mrs. May is annoyed by a bull that keeps coming to her cow pastures. She asks her tenant, Mr. Greenleaf, to get rid of it. But it turns out the bull belongs to the latter’s sons, who own a state-of-the-art, half-automated dairy farm a few miles from her own. When it appears that they will not do anything to solve the problem, she runs out of patience with the Greenleafs (not that she ever had much of it, as the narrator obligingly informs the reader). Her decision to take things into her own hands will lead to her being killed by the bull. Again, the scene of destruction (of a human life this time) is given a symbolic dimension through a description combining contradictory feelings: “she had the look of a person whose sight has been restored but who finds the light unbearable” (333).

6 In “A View of the Woods,” the roles of landowner (here Mr. Fortune) and invader (his son-in-law Mr. Pitts) are somewhat reversed. Mr. Fortune, 79 years of age, has decided he would sell his land plot after plot to make way for Progress, this time in the shape of a gas-station. He later dies of a stroke after Mary Fortune Pitts, his nine-year-old granddaughter and the only Pitts for whom he has any consideration, violently assaults him for selling the woods in front of her parents’ house. She also dies during the fight, and their bodies lay in the clay, alongside the machine that is tearing at the earth, as a last, darkly ironic comment from the narrator.

7 From these summaries some sense of continuity already emerges as well as a few (apparent) contradictions. This should come as no surprise, as short fiction favors contrast as an operating principle (Shaw 154). Land as a preserved Garden of Eden threatened by evil city strangers, is central to “A Circle in the Fire,” although the boys seem to have some religion. “Greenleaf” seems to stress how the social improvement of the lower classes will bring disorder and death, but they’re ultimately caused by a symbol of uncontrollable animality and fertility comically crowned with a wreath of thorns. Religious and pagan symbols are sometimes combined in a grotesque fashion in O’Connor’s fiction. In “A View of the Woods,” order and stability are ideals that had to be relinquished to allow for the coming of a new Age, albeit destruction being here brought about by the due owner of the place. This will bring him to his own end in a

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fatal confrontation with his grand-daughter that started, of all things, with biblical quotations. If nature, social changes and industrialization also appear, the importance they are given in each text shows a drift from one to the other, ending in destruction for all, while the contradictions we have mentioned seem to question the respective roles of the protagonists and destabilize traditional views of their environment and values.

The End of the Pastoral

8 In “A Circle in the Fire,” we have descriptions of Mrs. Cope’s land that explicitly identify it as a preserved place where the characters “have everything,” “rich pastures and hills heavy with timber” (177), for which “‘every day you should say a prayer of thanksgiving’,” Mrs. Cope reminds Mrs. Pritchard, her tenant. The boys will add to that mythical quality of Mrs. Cope’s land when the narrator describes Powell, a boy who used to live on her farm, “examining the house and the white water tower behind it and the chicken houses and the pastures that rolled away on either side until they met the first line of woods” (179). The metaphorical description of Mrs. Cope’s land, her repeatedly declared gratefulness to God, the long paratactic sentence, both a mimetic transcription of Powell’s panoramic vision and a figuration of Mrs. Cope’s accumulation of wealth, all combine to offer the reader an Edenic view of the place.

9 Around this Land of Plenty, as the end of the quote shows, the trees are walls that turn the Garden into a fortress: “Sometimes the last line of trees was a solid grey-blue wall” (175), and behind it, “the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against a fortress wall, trying to break through” (178). Almost closing the story, much as the woods enclose the landscape, the metaphor is again used when Mrs. Cope’s daughter takes a walk in the woods: “The fortress line of trees was a hard granite blue” (190). The reader is presented with a strong sense of a limited space which gives the narrative its efficiency and unity (Grojnowski 84). The child and Mrs. Cope clearly see themselves as the Guardians of the Sanctuary that the South thought itself to be, with Mrs. Cope as the Matriarch defending her place and her child’s virginity. However, the last metaphor of the fortress appears before the boys set the woods on fire, revealing that this particular sign has been misinterpreted by the main characters. The woods’ function is not only to serve their personal interests by protecting them from the outside world. The place over which Mrs. Cope claims complete control, will eventually be lost. The end of the enclosed world might lead to the dis-closure of the text’s true intention.

10 Although the fire that destroys Mrs. Cope’s world is a recurring occurrence in Southern fiction, the subtext that the metaphors seem to weave (as well as the gender of the landowner) shows the author’s intention to depart from traditional tales. The other stories each add a new vision of the land that dramatically set O’Connor’s fiction apart from Southern folklore. In “Greenleaf,” the text opens on a scene of intrusion and the first representation we have of the main character’s environment is not a metaphorical fortress but a simple hedge, a vegetal delimitation that the bull that will kill Mrs. May is literally eating away: “in the dark he began to tear at the hedge” (311). In addition, the landscape is composed of open fields which later in the story we see Mrs. May go to inspect, walking “through a wooded path that separated two pastures” (216). In this sentence, the woods appear only as qualifier. They have lost their function as signifier in the text and their status as fortress in the narration. It seems as if the metaphorical

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dimension of the text has transferred to the intruder, whose “prickly crown” (312) makes us think of Christ despite it being “menacing” (as in “A Circle in the Fire,” religious figures are associated with disaster rather than salvation), and that acts “like some patient god come to woo her” (311), “chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor” (312). The interweaving of religious images and a typology of courtship to describe a scrub bull seems to show that, if Mrs. Cope fears the outside world, Mrs. May misreads its inner workings to such an extent that much more pressing intrusions will be required for the truth to be revealed.

11 Contrary to Mrs. Cope’s, Mrs. May’s land is represented in a flat, factual manner that lacks the Pastoral dimension of the former. It is composed of pastures and fields, where the rye grows and the cows graze, and no metaphor, or hyperbole, or any other stylistic figure is used to represent it, but for the one and telling exception of a dream that Mrs. May has. She sees herself walking over “beautiful rolling hills” (329), but the dream soon turns into a nightmare of dispossession from which she wakes up almost screaming. This drift away from a pastoral vision of the countryside, along with its connection to the idea of pending disaster, goes one step further in “A View of the Woods.”

12 The first paragraph shows us Mary Fortune and the old man who have come to visit a construction site next to a “red corrugated lake” where “they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically ate a square red hole in what had been a cow pasture,” “the big disembodied gullet gorg[ing] itself on the clay, then, with the sound of a deep sustained nausea and a slow mechanical revulsion, turn and spit it up” (335). The hypallages and alliterations blur the limit between the living and the inanimate, bringing the transformation of the landscape from fortress to open space to a Gothic scene of horror where all boundaries have collapsed. The Eden-like nature of the land that was constructed in the first of these three short stories here becomes a vision from Hell, the machine having dug what is repeatedly labelled “the pit.” These dis-figuring metaphors underscore the senseless destruction that is taking place, embodying the abstract violence that modernity is submitting the South to (Pothier 37).

13 To add insult to injury, the piece of land that is still preserved in front of the Pittses’ house1 goes by the name of the “lawn,” trivializing, dwindling the plantation out of recognition. We have come a long way from Mrs. Cope’s “rich pastures and hills heavy with timber.” It is thus possible to consider the three stories as a whole, telling one tale of destruction, and to follow that thread from one to the other. If each of them seems to represent a new stage in the Fall from Eden into the Christian Pit, a closer look at the invading outsiders may give us further insight into how the author uses former fictional universes to make manifest her own vision.

The Assailants

14 In “A Circle in the Fire,” the three boys from Atlanta are dropped off by a pick-up truck on the dirt road that leads to Mrs. Cope’s property. The “faded destroyer printed” on one of the boys’ shirts, his gaze that “seemed to be coming from two directions at once as if it had them surrounded” (179) are two elements that identify the boys as invaders. Their approach of the farm is shown almost in stop-motion, from the moment they walk up the dirt road to their setting down their suitcase in front of Mrs. Cope. They come towards Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard “as if they were going to walk through the

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side of the house” (178), and “one of Powell’s eyes seemed to be making a circle of the place” (179). Again the figures in the text reveal the possibility of an “added dimension,” invoked by the repetition of “as ifs” or other similes. Having managed to penetrate the fortress, the boys are now ready to take possession of it.

15 After figuratively circling the house, they will loot the place, threaten to build a parking lot (a sacrilegious act if ever there was one) and pelt stones at Mrs. Cope’s mailbox until they “‘done already about knocked it off its stand’” (this is Mrs. Pritchard breaking the news to Mrs. Cope, the latter “coming to almost military attention” (188)). The Garden has come under siege, and the Matriarch is bracing herself for her fight against the enemy. However, she has already, albeit symbolically, been dispossessed of her land through the destruction of the mailbox, on which her name must now be barely legible (Bleikasten 55). After repeating her ownership over the land (“‘in my woods’” (183), “‘this is my place’” (186)), the answer she (indirectly) gets from the boys is: “‘Gawd owns them woods and her too’” (186), “‘It don’t belong to nobody’.” “‘It’s ours’” (192). Two Southern stereotypes come into play here. Mrs. Cope displays a strong sense of ownership that reminds us of plantation fiction, a genre that, as previously mentioned, also builds a sense of pending disaster. However, it is not as common to find the “assailants” showing such religious faith. When Mrs. Cope sees the land as an extension of herself, for the boys, it is a place to be enjoyed, where they can give free rein to their youthful, almost feral energy. What seems to be progressively put into place here is an opposition between social order and vital force, both parties claiming to have God on their sides.

16 The passage where Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard chase after the boys, described from the child’s vantage point at an upstairs window, as if in a bird (or God)’s eye view, comically debunks the image that Mrs. Cope has been trying so hard to build. She is so mercilessly ridiculed that the boys’ status in the story starts to shift: (...) in a few minutes [Sally Virginia] saw the stiff green hat catching the glint of the sun as her mother crossed the road toward the calf barn. The three faces immediately disappeared from the opening, and in a second the large boy dashed across the lot, followed an instant later by the other two. Mrs. Pritchard came out and the two women started for the grove of trees the boys had vanished into. Presently the two sunhats disappeared in the woods and the three boys came out at the left side of it and ambled across the fields and into another patch of woods. By the time Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard reached the field, it was empty and there was nothing for them to do but come home again. (187-88)

17 So much for Mrs. Cope as aristocratic army general. The woods now protect the boys and the open fields work as a stage where Mrs. Cope’s failure is played out. The Garden of Eden has become the setting for a tragic-comic war the issue of which leaves no doubt. The grotesque in this scene unsettles the reader’s sense of imminent tragedy, although it doesn’t quite lift it. Too many details have pointed to the destructive nature of the boys for the reader to forget about it in the short span of the story. Their personalities and psychological motives are secondary, and this alone highlights the allegorical dimension of O’Connor’s short fiction (Shaw 118). The destroyer on Powell’s T-shirt was a first indication of their role in the story. Their arrival by truck, their coming from the new development in Atlanta “‘four stories high and there’s ten of them, one behind the other’” (182), and the fact that Powell’s mother works in a factory, all confirm them as agents of the destruction that both urban life and the lower

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classes are bringing to the rural, socially stable (static?) Southern world of Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard.

18 However, the destruction they cause is figured through biblical references, as previously mentioned, to “the prophets […] dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them” (193). This final sentence calls for a complete reassessment of the boys’ function. The circle in the fire echoes the circle formed by the woods around Mrs. Cope’s property, and seems to define a space that the “assailants” have opened and where something new might emerge. The destruction of the plantation that the boys’ arrival announced may turn into an act of re-creation. The look on Mrs. Cope’s face as she sees the smoke rising up from “her” woods is to be read as a sign on the surface that will guide us to the deeper meaning of the text: “It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself” (193). The people that Mrs. Cope is now compared to all share a history of loss and tragedy and the simple fact of comparing her to them reveals the inadequacy of Southerners’ fierce individualism and insistence on their separateness.

19 Although the story seems to pay tribute to a Southern literary model (the Fall from the innocence of the ante-bellum South and the loss of an Edenic environment), the connection here made between Powell and Mrs. Cope, between landowner and intruder shows that Mrs. Cope’s world had to be destroyed for her to realize what her true place in the world is. The devilish boys from the city were in fact on a mission for God and the intrusion of elements from the modern world eventually forced Mrs. Cope to open her eyes to the realities of life. What will happen to Mrs. Cope and her child is now anyone’s guess, but the burning down of the protective walls of the woods has actually set them free. The open-ended story rejects closure and offers a new perspective for Mrs. Cope, well beyond the limits of the text and the epiphany that prevails in many a short story (Shaw 49), drawing attention to its mythical and biblical intertext.

20 Such references will gradually become less ubiquitous, and in “Greenleaf,” the danger seems more explicitly to stem from the social changes that are unstoppably reshaping the South. Mrs. May considers the Greenleafs a menace for her social standing. She persistently describes the family as “trash,” “the yard around [Mrs. Greenleaf’s] house looked like a dump and her five girls were always filthy” (315). As for the sons, everything they have achieved is by way of sheer luck or mischief – including their being wounded during the war and getting government grants in compensation (“disguised in their uniforms” […]; “They had married nice girls who naturally couldn’t tell that […] the Greenleafs were who they were”; “They had both managed to get wounded”; “They took advantage of all the benefits and went to the school of agriculture at the university […]” (318). This deprecatory description of the Greenleafs’ social improvement underscores their dealings with the outside world, and their (for Mrs. May) treacherous use of unfairly granted advantages. Where Mrs. Cope revealed her rejection of life’s hardships by rebuking Mrs. Pritchard every time she indulged in a gruesome story of disease or violent death, Mrs. May just plain discounts them as fraud. Her visit to the Greenleafs’ property confronts her with the reality of what they have actually achieved, and with the real nature of the threat they represent.

21 Her first sight of their house is an almost point-to-point negation of the mythical Southern landscape: “The house, a new red-brick, low-to-the-ground building that looked like a warehouse with windows, was on top of a treeless hill” (323). Its similarity

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with an industrial building rather than the Southern mansion of old, and the absence of trees around it all point to the elaboration of a new paradigm, from which references to the old colonial past and American pastoral have been erased. Southern individualism is another extinct feature as the narrative voice remarks: “It was the kind of house everybody built now” (323). However, “A Circle in the Fire” has taught us to be wary of Southern individualism.

22 The fact that the Greenleafs’ sons’ house and later farm are described in such minute detail silently tells a story of defeat that spells the end of the Old Southern Eden imagery. As Poe advised in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, the writer’s “pre- established design” justifies every word, detail or incident. “The spotless white concrete room [...] filled with sunlight,” “the metal stanchions [that] gleamed ferociously” (325), not to mention the absence of cows in the milking room show the apparent eradication of anything human or even living in the farm. The hypallage figuratively underlines the momentous change in the order of things that is taking place. That this farm threatens Mrs. May’s world is made even more explicit with the final sentence of the paragraph: “The sun was directly on top of her head, like a silver bullet ready to drop into her brain” (325). The “silver bullet” here could be the realization that the Greenleaf sons are not what she thought them to be, and that the threat they represent is much more critical than she thought. And yet, the omnipresence of the sun, which symbolizes God in Christianity as well as in a number of other mythologies, adds a religious dimension to this industrial site, as if this place was a means for God to open Mrs. May’s eyes and force her to see the world as it is, not as she fantasizes it, with everybody, her own sons including, living off the fat of her land.

23 Where “A Circle in the Fire” told a tale of foreign invasion through the three boys that come to raid, loot and destroy Mrs. Cope’s world, “Greenleaf” reveals how the Old South is being changed from the inside, with only a few quaint fragments left here and there to remind one of the old myths: a Negro worker Mrs. May meets at the Greenleafs’ farm and who incidentally contradicts her opinion of the Greenleaf sons; the stray bull that will contradict every one of her rules just before its horn pins her to her car. The fact that the worker is wearing the brothers’ old military clothes draws a connection between them. Both have been confronted to Evil, contrary to Mrs. May. The Negro worker is a reminder of the Segregation that prevailed in the South. The brothers have fought in Europe against the Nazis. Mrs. May is only fighting a stray bull. The threat it nevertheless represents for Mrs. May is constructed alongside the figuration of the animal as her divine “suitor,” a Christ-like figure trying to break into her world, and have her accept the social, material and spiritual truths, and associated distress, that she rejects.

24 We may draw a parallel between the boys in “A Circle in the Fire” and the bull insofar as the text refuses to figure them as a solely negative destroying force, but also as an unrestrained living force. The virility of the bull sharply contrasts with Mrs. May’s world. In addition, the narrator’s irony invalidates her opinion of the Greenleaf sons, by outlining them as good parents, good Christians and efficient business men who respect each other and their workers, favoring the use of machinery to the exploitation of human force. Again, the invading outsiders, although they spell the end of the main characters’ world, also represent the possibility of a new start in a fertile environment. The Greenleafs’ rise in society is distinctly part of this on-going mutation.

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25 References to social classes and social tension combined with religious symbolism in O’Connor’s stories participate in the representation of a world clinging to its fantasized past. The landowners here refuse to acknowledge reality and accept change and otherness, until loss or death makes it impossible for them to go on living the dream of the Plantation myth, with all its hypocrisies. Mrs. May’s recurring nightmares of dispossession and Mrs. Cope’s fear of fire underscore their morally and socially unsustainable position.

26 To these recurring themes, “A View of the Woods” brings a new perspective with its inversion of the figures of protecting guardian and devouring outsider. The Christian symbolism that we have come across in the previous stories, though less explicitly insistent here, may be a key to understanding O’Connor’s fiction. In “A View of the Woods,” the landowner chooses Industry whereas the Pittses, Mr. Fortune’s tenants and in-law family, whom Mr. Fortune persistently describes as a good-for-nothing, backward family, try to preserve the agrarian world around them. Mr. Fortune is convinced that his granddaughter shares his enthusiasm for Progress, that she is more Fortune than Pitts. He ignores or misreads her reactions when she sees the machine drawing nearer the stobs that mark out the land still belonging to Mr. Fortune. When Mary Fortune violently turns against him after he sells the lot in front of her father’s farm, the so-called lawn, only he is surprised.

27 Although she seems to side first with her grand-father then her father, Mary Fortune manages to emerge as an independent character from both males of her family. There is a clear difference between the way she sees the lawn and the way, not only Mr. Fortune but her father as well, see it. She sees the lawn as a place to play and a place from which she can see the woods. For her father, the lawn is cow pasture, land to be exploited, and for her grandfather it is an obstacle to the March of Progress. Neither sees the land as something sacred to be preserved. These visions of nature in turn question our vision of the landowners in the other two short stories.

28 What are Mrs. Cope and Mrs. May actually trying to preserve? Does their vision of the world embrace the Pastoral ideals that underlie the Old Southern mythology? Are they truly the Guardians of an Eden-like nature?

The Guardians

29 We have noticed that despite Mrs. Cope’s idealistic vision of her land, the way she describes it defines it primarily as the source of her wealth (“rich pastures and hills heavy with timber”). Her protection of nature is very selective as we see her pulling out the weeds and nut grass from around her house, “as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place” (175). Here, the narrative voice indicates that her face when dealing with the boys and with the nut grass is the same.

30 Mrs. May is no different in her approach to nature. Like Mrs. Cope, she sees the fields only as pastures or in terms of future crops, and one cause of dissatisfaction she has with Mr. Greenleaf is when he sows the wrong kind of seeds in one of her fields (clover that enriches the soil instead of rye that you can use to make bread with). Both landowners have a materialistic, utilitarian view of life. Just like the boys who were banished from Mrs. Cope’s land for not abiding by her rules, the bull is sentenced to death for threatening her breeding schedule. Her getting killed by it seems to be “a

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fortunate fall which destroys [her] complacent materialism” (Westling 158). Outsiders put the little, limited world of O’Connor’s landladies in danger by disrupting the order they have managed to build. They threaten the sense of empowerment the landladies get from owning the land, thereby uncovering their worst failure: self-knowledge. Mrs. May’s “last discovery” (334) might be a revelation of her true place in the world, not as Southern landowner but as mediocre human being.

31 Mr. Fortune also dies a violent and unexpected death. He, too, considers nature as an obstacle to the improvement of his wealth and social status: “There was talk of an eventual town. He thought this should be called Fortune, Georgia” (338). His dream of self-aggrandizement makes him fall prey to Mr. Tilman, whose name and trade “a combination country store, filling station, scrap-metal dump, used-car lot and dance hall” (345) are logically complemented by his physical description: “He sat […] his significant head weaving snake-fashion above them. He had a triangular-shaped face […]. His eyes were green and very narrow and his tongue was always exposed in his partly opened mouth” (352). Mr. Tilman could not be more clearly identified with the Devil as tempter, the Snake in the Garden, with Mr. Fortune cutting a grotesque figure as the new Eve. In a few lines, both the Bible and the old Southern fears of modernity are invoked, showing O’Connor paying due tribute to short fiction’s “demands [for] highly charged detail” (Orvell 127). Mr. Fortune’s decision will ruin the only family he has, destroying his close-knit relationship with Mary Fortune. Family values are definitely discarded when grandfather and granddaughter spit biblical quotes at each other, the latter even calling the former “the Whore of Babylon.”

32 Who then would be the true guardian of the Old South in “A View of the Woods” if not Mary Fortune? She risks falling into the pit when she sees the machines shaking the stobs, she opposes her grandfather’s decision to sell the plot of land in front of her house, and even assaults him after he has carried out the sale. Protecting the land at her life’s expense is worthy of a Confederate general, yet the narrative voice allows for no such simile. The main reason for opposing her grandfather’s decision is not the land per se. Her first reaction is to protest against the loss of the place “where we play” (342), but what seems to affect her most is that she will lose her “view of the woods” (she repeats it three times, another reference to the biblical text that signals betrayal and pardon). Only when Mr. Fortune fails to understand her does she mention a more pragmatic reason: “My daddy grazes his calves on this lot” (342). Surprised by the violence of her reaction, he looks at the woods to try and make some sense of Mary Fortune’s attitude: The third time he got up to look at the woods, it was almost six o’clock and the gaunt trunks appeared to be raised in a pool of red light that gushed from the almost hidden sun setting behind them. The old man stared for some time as if for prolonged instant he was caught up out of the rattle of everything that led to the future and were held in the midst of an uncomfortable mystery that he had not apprehended before. He saw it, in his hallucination, as if someone were wounded behind the woods and the trees were bathed in blood. (348)

33 In this passage it becomes apparent that the view of the woods is in fact a vision. Christ’s bleeding heart remains invisible to Mr. Fortune although the metaphorical dimension of the passage is clear to any reader. The elements that support a religious interpretation are the different reasons Mary Fortune gives for not letting her grandfather sell the lawn: from a place of innocence where children play, to a sacred place where Christ can be contemplated and finally to a cow pasture (or calf pasture,

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the difference is noteworthy, given the religious overtones of the passage). Mary Fortune is seen here gradually losing her innocence as she refers to her family’s material interests as a last effort to talk her grand-father out of selling the lawn. Just as she asserts her difference with the old man does she come to resemble him most “‘and I’m PURE Pitts’” (355).

34 The fight to the death between grandfather and granddaughter is fraught with mirroring effects: “Pale identical eye looked into pale identical eye”; “The old man looked up at his own image”; “looking down into the face that was his own”; and after the little girl has died, “he continued to stare at his conquered image” (355). Their fight over the land has become a fight between egos, their names symbolizing two opposite stances: asserting one’s power over the land for the purposes of self-aggrandizement and to defy death on the one hand, and an awareness that only Christ can save human beings from the Pit. The last sentence identifies the old man with the yellow machine he had watched with Mary Fortune at the beginning of the story, the text hence going full circle (Tissut 165). Their mutual killing can be read as their common failure to accept that the world has a different agenda from their own. Not accepting loss and death as part of human life can only lead to betraying all of one’s values. This is what Southerners had done in O’Connor’s eyes, hiding their vacuity behind old myths and superficial religiosity.

35 In all three stories, the text weaves threads between the earth and the characters, thus underscoring their interest in power, control and earthly matters, despite Mrs. Cope’s insistence on how grateful everyone should be to God, Mrs. May’s insistence on how everyone should be grateful to her, Mr. Fortune’s speeches about Progress and Mary Fortune’s overriding obsession with her view of the woods. It seems that they all have lost sight of the true meaning of their lives.

The Sanctuary

36 The only space on which none of these characters seem to have any control is the woods. It is in the woods that the boys are free to enjoy country life, and where they escape Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard when they try to chase them, in a way that is reminiscent of slapstick comedy chases (the bull does the same in “Greenleaf”). It is in the woods that Mrs. Cope’s daughter tries to mimic her mother’s authoritarian attitude, and orders the trees to “line up,” revealing both her and her mother’s failed attempts at being/remaining the masters of their destiny and surroundings. It is in the woods again that Mrs. May discovers Mrs. Greenleaf exercising her healing prayers, something she finds repulsive and a sign of the family’s backwardness: “Every day [Mrs. Greenleaf] cut all the morbid stories out of the newspaper […]. She took these to the woods and dug a hole and buried them and then she fell on the ground over them and mumbled and groaned for an hour or so […]” (315-16). The sentence contains a few more “ands” that reflect Mrs. May’s incomprehension of the ritual that Mrs. Greenleaf is performing, turning her prayer into a chain of actions with no logic or sense. What the reader understands is the regenerating power of the woods. If Mr. Pitts takes his daughter to the woods to whip her, it is as an attempt to purify himself from the humiliation his father-in-law inflicts upon him.

37 This religious value attributed to the woods also explains the fact the boys both love the woods as much as Mrs. Cope, but still set them on fire. The arson becomes a

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purifying fire (Bleikasten 55). It also explains why Mary Fortune turns against her grandfather when he tells her she will lose her view of them. When at the beginning and at the end of “A View of the Woods” the narrative voice tells us they seemed to be walking “across the water” (and it is interesting to note that Mr. Fortune’s vision of the bleeding sun takes place almost exactly half-way through the story), it completes the Christic dimension the woods have been progressively endowed with. The landowners are happy just exploiting, merely crossing, or downright destroying the Sanctuary, which ultimately comes down to rejecting what is literally staring them in the face, as the typology of sight and blindness underscores.

38 Whether we interpret them as a religious motif in O’Connor fiction or as a traditional symbol of the wilderness, the woods are that liminal space between Old and New South where neither of their Laws rule, and from which truth emerges. Mrs. Cope’s refusal to let the boys sleep there reveals her fake hospitality. The bull that comes out of the woods to kill Mrs. May reveals the unbearable truth of her egotism and inadequacy. If Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune kill each other because of the woods, the fact that they die on a mound of clay reveals their shared materialism as well as a deep criticism of the Southern Myth. The most explicit criticism of what the Southern myth represents for O’Connor is her characters’ hypocritical religiosity that can only faintly hide their fear of loss and death. Theirs is a misguided fight to preserve a life that was never what they believed it was. For O’Connor, death and/or disaster are acts of grace that reveal the characters’ mortal nature. Here the clay can be read both as a sign of their attachment to earthly matters and as a reference to the creation of Adam by God. However, for the atheistic reader, it is the moment when Southern reality is unveiled: exclusion of the other, denial of one’s self, of one’s egotist motives, of one’s shortcomings.

***

39 In Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction, if the Old South fears any change that might question its social order, the modern South has lost its soul in a rat race that leads nowhere: “and beyond that [line of black pine woods] nothing but the sky, entirely blank except for one or two threadbare clouds” (347). O’Connor’s “good country people,” once faced with their own hypocrisy, self-interest and mortality, can only find peace in that pre-plantation space from which O’Connor looks on the Old Southern lies and offers an alternative myth that can be theirs to live but not own. Although these two visions might seem irreconcilable, the Greenleaf sons (and Mary Fortune Pitts up to a point) might give the reader an indication of a possible resolution. They have faced the modern South and its promises, have endured pain and loss, and yet have accepted their world as it is, in all its spiritual, social and material dimensions.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bleikasten, André. Flannery O’Connor: In Extremis. Paris: Belin, 2004. Print.

Castillo, Susan. “Flannery O’Connor.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South. Ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 487-501. Print.

Grammer, John, M. “Plantation Fiction.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South. Ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 58-75. Print.

Grojnowski, Daniel. Lire la Nouvelle. Paris: Armand Colin, 2005. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. 1971. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print.

Orvell, Miles. Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.” Web. 23.10.2013.

Pothier, Jacques. Les Nouvelles de Flannery O’Connor. Nantes: Editions du Temps, 2004. Print.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman Group, 1986. Print.

Tissut, Anne-Laure. “Flannery O’Connor et la Séduction du Lecteur.” Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories. Ed. Marie-Claude Perrin-Chenour. Nantes: Editions du Temps, 2004. 163-79. Print.

Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1985. Print.

NOTES

1. Their very name connects the preservation of the land with something more sinister.

ABSTRACTS

Tout lecteur, devant une fiction située dans le Sud des Etats-Unis, s’attend à se voir proposer une vision pastorale de l’Amérique. Mais c’est ignorer la croissance des villes du Sud depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Les « braves gens de la campagne » que le lecteur rencontre dans les trois nouvelles de Flannery O’Connor choisies ici (“A Circle in the Fire”, “Greenleaf”, “A View of the Woods”) se trouvent ainsi pris entre deux perspectives : la continuité assurée par leurs liens à la terre et une inébranlable foi dans l’assentiment de Dieu ou la rupture qu’implique la modernité. Mais l’auteur choisit de mettre à bas ces discours et offre au lecteur une rencontre avec un nouveau mythe dont le sens et le but se dévoileront entre tensions sociales, jeux textuels et renouveau religieux.

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AUTHORS

RUTH FIALHO Ruth Fialho has written a PhD dissertation entitled On the Edge of Chaos: Breakaways, Detours and Passages in Jerome Charyn’s Fiction, which she defended in 2003 at Bordeaux III University. An English "Agrégation" holder, she is currently teaching at Gustave Eiffel high school (pre- and post-baccalaureate). She also regularly participates in conferences about contemporary American authors, mainly writing from the margins of mainstream literature. She has published several articles about Jerome Charyn, Cormac McCarthy, Chester Himes and Flannery O’Connor.

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Revisiting the Universal Significance of Mythologies: Barbara Kingsolver's Syncretic and Mythopoeic Short Story "Jump-Up Day"

Bénédicte Meillon

1 While placing Barbara Kingsolver’s work within the Southern tradition, Lynn Marie Houston and Jennifer Warren argue: “Typically, Southern literature upholds the Christian tradition, renewing its meaning and importance in the contemporary lives of its characters, and depicts the standard white/black tensions that have plagued the South through the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. In contrast, Kingsolver’s characters and plots often undermine the tenets of Christianity (although she continues the tradition of Southern writing by depicting the burden of this region’s religiosity) and explore a larger global dimension to racial tension” (3). Focusing on Barbara Kingsolver’s short story “Jump-Up Day,” published in the 1989 collection Homeland and Other Stories, this paper shows how Barbara Kingsolver’s multicultural rewriting of myths is indeed typically Southern in its concern for class and race divisions, as well as Christian religion. Kingsolver’s dialogic story does on the one hand “undermine the tenets of Christianity,” while on the other hand it offers a syncretic vision that reveals a different reading of Christian myths, made newly compatible with a global, transcultural and postmodernist perspective. Consequently, this paper sheds light on the mythopoeic dimension of Kingsolver’s art of the short story, debunking creation stories as first and foremost, created stories, while paradoxically re-instilling new faith in the healing and creative powers of story-telling.

2 Set on the Island of St Lucia, “Jump-Up Day” tells the story of a lonely, semi-orphan little girl named Jericha, who struggles to make sense of the conflicting cultures and myths she is exposed to. As a white, Christian doctor’s daughter partly raised by nuns, she at first embodies the racial prejudice and ideology which have historically upheld

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white supremacy and colonization. Her progress throughout the story however confronts her with Otherness, as she learns from a black Obeah Man about Obeah religion. In the end, Jericha is guided by the Obeah Man through a kind of initiation rite which reads as a highly mythopoeic passage. Eventually, the narrative suggests that Jericha’s epiphany might be dual. The revelation scene first points to the resurfacing of Jericha’s traumatic loss of her mother, which, in turn, brings about images and actions obliquely suggesting healing. The symbolism in the ending may indeed read as a resolution of Jericha’s problematical in-betweenness, reconciling myths previously perceived as antagonistic.

3 This essay establishes the dual demythologizing and re-mythologizing process at work in Kingsolver’s fiction. I intend to demonstrate that under the pen of writers such as Kingsolver, the contemporary short story has evolved so as to reconnect with its roots in mythology.1 Kingsolver’s short stories in many ways perform what myths used to do, serving the four functions of mythology as laid down by American mythographer Joseph Campbell, i.e. its mystical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological functions (Thou 103). With these four functions in mind, I will first look at the magical and religious elements in Kingsolver’s story “Jump-Up Day” in the light of magical realism. I will then venture a metatextual and psychoanalytical reading of the story, staging a return of the repressed leading to the final, enchanting revelation. Finally, I will focus on the role of the Obeah Man as a Caribbean Janus, whose voice functions, like the Roman God of passages, as mediator between black and white, life and death, Christianity and Obeah, magic and reality, dream and waking life, or myth and short story.

“Jump-Up Day” in the Light of Magical Realism

4 In her book dedicated to magical realism, Wendy Farris posits five defining features of the mode, which prove helpful in interpreting Kingsolver’s story. Farris first insists on the “irreducible element of magic” inherent to the mode, requiring suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader (7). As Amaryll Chanady underlines in her earlier study of magical realism and the fantastic, the narrative voice in a magical realist text “abolishes the antinomy between the natural and the supernatural on the level of textual representation, and the reader, who recognizes the two conflicting logical codes on the semantic level, suspends his judgment of what is rational and what is irrational in the fictitious world” (25-26).

5 The reader’s first encounter with magic in Kingsolver’s text comes in direct speech, through the voice of the Obeah Man, a local medicine man: “‘Do you know the thing they call a jumby? […] A jumby is a jump-up. Somebody called up from the dead. You call her up to do a job, and then you put her down again. But sometimes she is humbugging you and she won’t go down again’” (190). Later, the Obeah Man brings in more preternatural phenomena. Endowed with attributes of both sorcerer and shaman, he explains to Jericha that he has used the jump-up to make her father fall sick with bilharzia. He claims the woman was easy to call back from the dead because she was “a troubled soul” wishing for revenge upon a white man, as a result of having been used and abandoned by a white soldier (197). He explains that the jump-up has previously bled to death after ingesting a potion meant to provoke an abortion. But the Obeah Man also flaunts healing powers. He sums up Obeah for Jericha: “This is what people

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call working science. […] When they are sick, or the business is going bad. Or if a man wants some woman to look at him. […] They come to me” (189).

6 Throughout the short story, the narrative voice refrains from interpreting or commenting upon the magic involved, neither clearly dismissing nor corroborating the Obeah Man’s claims. Disbelief is embodied by the absent white doctor, whose disparaging words toward the locals are relayed first by the narrator (“her father called [Sebastian] an insufferably superstitious black” 185), then by the Obeah Man (“‘Telling people not to trust in my medicine. He said Black man’s foolishness’” 189).2 As the guiding voice through the story is a heterodiegetic narrator using either zero or internal focalization through Jericha, the point of view shifts back and forth between omniscient and subjective. Thus, it is not quite clear what the narrative stance is as regards the gri-gris, magical powders, spells, and potions used by the Obeah Man. However, the story of the jumby and the Obeah Man’s powers are corroborated by the latter’s mother. In addition, the magic in the text reaches a summit in the initiation rite experienced by Jericha, by a moonless night in the middle of a jungle forest: “Light came into the clearing: stars, she thought at first, or silvery pieces of falling cloud, but the light was falling down from the tree into a white carpet that floated just above the ground. It moved like water, slowly. She felt it roll over her feet” (200). The synaesthesia at play moves the reader along this occult, shamanic trance-like ceremony which veers to an initiation flight, the floating white carpet metamorphosing into a form of flying carpet. The scene is described by the narrator in a matter-of-fact, detached style which seems to present the extraordinary as entirely ordinary which, according to Amaryll Chanady, is precisely what distinguishes magical realism from the fantastic: “She stooped at the base of the tree among its white, thorned wings and laid the egg in a nest of roots. The silk cotton under her feet was a cloud. There were mountains and harbors, women down there loading boats” (201).

7 This merging of sacred and profane, of life and death, and of the quotidian and magic, actually corresponds to a second characteristic of magical realism according to Farris, i.e. the merging of different realms. Besides, the narrative conflates moments of fancy with dreaming, and with the diegetic reality. Indeed Jericha first “[stands] on the low wall meant to prevent children from falling to their deaths, and […spreads] her arms and [lets] herself fill with the belief that she [can] fly” (184). Jericha then at one point dreams of flying with the Obeah Man over the boats and women in the harbor, a scene which is thus repeated in the later ceremony under the kapok tree: “There were worlds under her feet, and over her head too—when they flew over the Pitons she had forgotten to look up” (201). Consequently, the borders between fancy, dreaming and reality are blurred, making it hard to delineate one from the other.

8 As Farris notes “a third quality of magical realism is that before categorizing the irreducible elements as irreducible, the reader may hesitate between two contradictory understandings of events, and hence experience some unsettling doubts” (17). In Kingsolver’s story, the echoes between scenes with various relationships to the diegetic reality may open the door to several interpretations as regards the magic involved in the initiation. Does Jericha enter a different, liminal and sacred space, flying between worlds above and below, or is she merely experiencing some sort of hallucination, prompted by her fear, her sense of loss and alienation, and the ritual set up by the Obeah Man? The skeptical mind will surely lean toward an uncanny resolution of the apparent magic, pointing to the alcohol the child has drunk, and to the anamorphic

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quality of the child’s perception from the beginning.3 Moreover, the brilliant falling pieces of silvery cloud can in fact be explained by the reality of the majestic silk-cotton tree. Once ripe, the kapok fruit opens up and sheds a cotton-like, fluffy substance that falls to the ground. There is no doubt that Barbara Kingsolver the biologist, having herself spent part of her childhood on the island of St Lucia, has experienced the wonder induced by this otherworldly, yet natural phenomenon and has drawn on it when writing this story. This is one of the many instances in which the magic of story is yet grounded in realism. As Farris has pointed out, this is a fourth characteristic of the oxymoronic mode of magical realism, with its accumulation of material details and a strong presence of the phenomenal world. Pointedly, the issue of the shamanic powers of the Obeah Man is left unresolved in Kingsolver’s story, open to various interpretations, which, once again, is typical of magical realism.

9 Finally, this story illustrates Farris’s fifth observation, in that magical realism disrupts habitual notions of time, space and identity. In addition to the world of the jungle opening onto a different, cosmic dimension, the story activates a system of echoes and repetitions that engender a certain amount of confusion in terms of identities. The Obeah Man, for example, bears several appellations: the Jump-up, Benedict Jett, and the Obeah Man. He first appears on Jump-Up Day, taking part in the Carnival dances and is then “painted entirely white, his feet, body, hair, and eyelids all cracked and seamed with the thickness of whitewash” (186). On his second apparition, his face is “silver- black” and the dialogue between Jericha and Benedict evokes another jump-up, this time understood as a kind of zombie. To make matters more confusing, this jumby is not without similarities with Jericha’s dead mother, buried in the child’s early infancy. As a result, when the ceremony involving Jericha culminates in her expressing her lack of interest in the jumby, but, instead, her longing for her dead mother, a possible reading lies in seeing Benedict as a healer, helping the child confront the buried trauma of losing her mother.

Epiphany and Rebirth

10 Before delving further into the mythopoeic fabric of the short story at hand, I would like to cast light on a paradigmatic reading corroborated by the many, more or less oblique allusions to a form of revelation. First, the dormant volcano on the island of St Lucia provides a metaphor for the psyche, its “black water [boiling] up” pointing to the dark regions of the unconscious, and the sulfurous odor emanating from “something deep inside the earth and enormously important” reading as a symptom of repressed contents (183). The underground magma may be linked to the initial reference to Jericha’s mother, “in the ground by the time she could walk on it” (182), an alienating dark spot in Jericha’s background: “About the dead one who was her mother, Jericha knew nothing” (185). Furthermore, the jumby serves as an embodiment of the absent mother’s latent presence, and significantly, Jericha’s mission consists in “[putting] her down” to “rest” (199). Agreeing with Paula Gunn Allen’s far-reaching conception of motherhood, the story depicts Jericha’s plight as going much further than not being able to remember her mother: Failure to know your mother, that is, your position and its attendant traditions, history, and place in the scheme of things, is a failure to remember your significance, your reality, your right relationship to earth and society. It is the same

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as being lost, isolated, abandoned, self-estranged, and alienated from your own life. (Allen 209-10)

11 Throughout the story, the deeply buried trauma of losing her mother resurfaces, first projected onto the landscape through Jericha’s gaze: “At any time, without expecting it, she might round a bend, and come onto the view of a pair of pointed mountains, the Pitons, plunging straight down like suicides into the aquamarine bay” (184). Jericha’s sense of longing is here suggested by the image of a suicidal motherly breast, dysphorically plunging into oceanic depths. It triggers in Jericha the desire to fly towards the semiotically charged Pitons. This she does in her dreams where “the Jump- up did come back, always appearing in the sky and commanding her to take hold of the white-feathered streamers that trailed from his wings. They flew across the bay towards the Pitons, and whatever lay beyond them, toward a feeling of home” (187).

12 Another system of significant repetitions and echoes worked into the text draws an analogy between women and ants in Jericha’s mind, suggesting her bitter repression of the severed link to her mother. Her anamorphic imagination transforms the black women she sees from afar, loading bananas in the harbor boats, so as to reveal a destructive impulse: “[They flew] so high over the harbor that there were no people below, no dark women loading boats, only columns of ants filing into the split skins of mangos that floated at the shoreline. Not people but ants, a thing you could step on and smash” (187). The ant leitmotif emerges again and is finally pulverized during the ceremony, suggesting Jericha’s confrontation with her shadow: “Ants swarmed up out of the ground and covered her shoes and white legs. […] When she touched them they turned to handful of black mud. It was only mud” (200). On top of suggesting Jericha’s reconciliation with the Great Mother archetype, the revelation flight corrects her earlier visions in both waking life and dreams in a way erasing her previous color distinction. When the women working in the harbor were first described as “brown” (185), and then as “dark” (187), they finally appear to Jericha as essentially women: “There were mountains and harbors, women down there loading boats, women and not ants” (201).4

13 The text moreover contains a number of metatextual allusions, starting with the architextual reference to the epiphany which the modern short story tends to climax in: “She had seen the Jump-up on nearly every Epiphany holiday, but never at this time of evening […]. In this light it seemed something else” (186). References to light and darkness are legion throughout the text, the most conspicuous one lying in the setting, thus implicitly referring to St Lucia, the patron saint of light. This imagery moreover works together with a network of symbols pointing to gestation and rebirth. Nine weeks elapse between the moment when Benedict first comes to Jericha and the moment when he appears again, starting the process of revealing Jericha to her shadow, gradually guiding her through her individuation process, to put it in Jungian terms. The symbolical value of number nine, potentially pointing to gestation time, is associated at the end of those nine weeks to additional images foreshadowing regeneration and pregnancy: “A rising moon hung over the mountains, higher already than the sun settling down like a roosting hen onto the sea” (187). Jericha meets the Obeah Man in the town of Laborie three times, until they depart from there for the final ceremony, in the jungle clearing. Conveniently, the town name, Laborie, may suggest birth labor via onomastics.

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14 As hinted at before, Jericha’s initiation rite superimposes multiple mother figures. First comes Benedict’s mother, whose warm voice and laugh feel to Jericha “like arms around her;” then comes the jumby, who is textually present in the character’s words, but whose character is never actualized in presentia, thus again in that sense a double for Jericha’s missing mother; and finally, Jericha’s long-dead mother herself resurfaces when the girl finally lets out her bottled up suffering, verbalizing her longing and “[choking] on childish sobs in her throat” (201). Moreover, Benedict points to a snake in the kapok tree and introduces the child to this African cosmic goddess: “‘You see the snake in the branches? That is Gro Maman. She lives there, in the branch. […] Gro Maman isn’t a snake. She’s like a man, but stronger. She watches you all the time’” (199). Thus replete with conflated maternal figures, the ceremony furthermore involves a rather suggestive hen’s egg, offered Gro Maman as a “Good Friday egg.” For the ceremony takes place on Good Friday, quite obviously calling onto the myth of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Moreover, as Jericha takes the egg to the tree, the syntax becomes somewhat equivocal and destabilizing, because of pronominal shifting that potentially conflates Gro Maman with the jumby or Jericha’s absent mother: “The hand on her shoulder moved her toward the tree, gently, and then let her go. With mud in her mouth, she looked up into the branches to find her shape, her eyes” (201).5 On closer reading, the parataxis at play in this oxymoronic passage implies that this symbolical offering is what triggers Jericha’s initiation flight, liberating her from her buried trauma and allowing her to hatch anew: “She stooped at the base of the tree among its white, thorned wings and laid the egg in a nest of roots. The silk cotton under her feet was a cloud” (201). The ensuing cathartic effect of this healing ceremony is contained in the kinesics and proxemics at work in the description of Jericha and her companions returning from the jungle: “On the seat of the truck, she sat between Benedict and his maman, holding her sharp knees to her chest and crying without tears. She leaned on the bouncing softness of a shoulder, and then there was a soft arm around her, and then a lap” (201).

15 Kingsolver’s short story thus relies on universal archetypes, as a result it lends itself to a Jungian reading, with Benedict acting as Jericha’s animus, bringing her shadow into the light, and thus triggering a healing individuation process.6 For in spite of Jericha’s initial resistance to the Obeah Man, insisting that she is “not sick” (189), Kingsolver’s text suggests otherwise. Jericha’s progression acquires universal significance as it depicts a postmodern affliction Joseph Campbell calls a “pathology of the symbol” (Myths 88). This pathology arises, Campbell claims, when literal interpretations of myths deprive archetypes from their releasing energy, or as Jung before him argued, turning archetypes into dead, fixed images no longer retaining any of their essential numinosity (167). This may well be the meaning hinted at by the local children’s nickname for Jericha, whom they dub “Anansi the Spider.” The protean nature of the Obeah Man endows his character with the attributes of the trickster, as suggested by the aposiopesis in Jericha’s song, prolonged by the sudden apparition of Benedict: “Anansi he is a spider/Anansi he is a man/Anansi he…” (188). The truncated sentence is continued by the Obeah Man’s character. Like the spider in the Ashanti folktale brought to the Caribbean from West Africa, with the hero of the legend celebrated for bringing God’s stories to the earth, Benedict’s character serves as mediator between the sacred and the profane.7 Interestingly, in some of the variants of Anansi the Spider stories, the hero desires to safeguard all the world’s wisdom which he has acquired through God’s stories. He therefore keeps all this universal wisdom in a pot, or

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calabash, which he then attempts to hide at the top of a thorny silk cotton tree. Yet, Anansi fails and, breaking the pot, he lets out all the wisdom at the bottom of the tree.

Mythopoeia and the Modern Short Story: Benedict as Ferryman between Different Realms and Cultures

16 Resting on a multicultural setting and mythopoeic writing, the story in “Jump-Up Day” can only acquire its full significance when studied in the light of its intertextual network of references to myths from historically antagonized cultures. Setting the story on the island of St Lucia indeed proves a perfect medium to work a syncretic vision into the text, for the local Obeah tradition itself exists in the Caribbean islands as an alloy of various mythèmes–to borrow the French word coined by Levi-Strauss—and practices from Christian, African, Islamic, and even Hindu traditions. The multiculturalism of the island is first reflected in the hybrid language of the story, mixing English, French, Latin and Kwéyol—the local patois. The religious calendar moreover points to the dialogism encapsulated within the very title of the story, with the Jump-up Day carnival coalescing with the Catholic Epiphany holiday. Jericha’s character thus develops in between the local culture of former slaves brought to the island over time by French and English colonists, and her British, Christian upbringing. Her thoughts and actions initially invest her character with the legacy of a colonial ideology, deeming her culture superior to that of the locals. She indeed perpetuates scornful, racist stereotypes betrayed for instance by the way she at first rejects local customs and values, associating them with laziness, stupidity, and evil.8

17 Antagonized by her black peers at the orphanage run by English nuns, Jericha is brought into contact with the Obeah Man, whose character is constructed as a patchwork of signifiers drawn from a multiplicity of traditions. His Christian name, Benedict—meaning “he who is blessed”—, relates him to the Roman Church. He might even in that context evoke Pope Benedict XV, known for his pacifying influence worldwide at the end of the Great War and thus remembered as an emblem of reconciliation. Moreover, the objects associated with his character function as stage props forming an occult melting pot: eau bénite, gri-gris, powders, crushed leaves, alcohol, an egg, incense, Kwéyol and Latin incantations, and his staff, half-way between a cross and a fork.

18 Benedict’s last name, Jett, obviously underlines his skin color via antonomasia, as in “jet black.” As mentioned above, this complex character first appears painted white from head to toe, and then in his every day Obeah man dress: “In the near darkness, his face was silver black and Jericha now saw the two faces at once, white-painted and black” (188). Standing as a Caribbean version of two-headed Janus, Benedict Jett indeed plays the part of the mediator, just like the Roman God of passages. Often represented holding an emblematic staff and key, Janus is God of all doors and keys. Calling on the jumby, Benedict precisely acts as ferryman between the worlds of the living and the dead. His shamanic role moreover significantly endows him with the power to guide Jericha through an initiation rite at the crucial time between childhood and puberty. In addition, with Jericha first trying to pass for a boy in the Obeah Man’s eyes, the latter becomes a mediator between the feminine and masculine aspects of her character, or, as I have hinted at earlier, between her animus and herself. Let us note the striking echoes between Kingsolver’s Obeah man and the magi in Jung’s analysis of one of his

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patient’s dreams. Jung’s patient dreams that he has become the disciple of a white magus dressed in black. As the latter has completed his teachings, he instructs his follower to look for the black magus who can help him progress further into his initiation. When the black magus appears, he is like the Obeah Man in Kingsolver’s story dressed in white. He claims to have found the key to heaven, but wants the white magus’ magic so he can use the key. According to Jung, this dream contains the problem of opposites, which, he underlines, has been solved in Tao philosophy in a different way than in Western concepts. Jung reads the characters appearing in this dream as collective, impersonal images, corresponding to the impersonal nature of religious issues. Contrary to the Christian perspective, both the dream and Kingsolver’s story emphasize the relative notions of good and evil (Jung 131). Benedict is also in that sense the mediator between Jericha’s consciousness and her unconscious, casting light on repressed contents of her psyche. Mostly, he plays the role of a transcultural mediator between black and white, between European and non-European philosophies, medicines, and myths, and between colonial and postcolonial ideologies.

19 Kingsolver’s highly feminine writing furthermore stages the Obeah Man as a ferryman between the realms of the symbolic and the semiotic, as defined by Julia Kristeva. This move is suggested for instance by Jericha’s shifting relationship to snakes throughout the story. Until the initiation scene, there are numerous fearful visions of snakes perceived through Jericha’s eyes, which betray an internalized, Judeo-Christian symbol of the chtonian snake (188, 190, 196). A dialogue with Benedict however offers a different set of associations with the animal, endowing the snake with positive attributes. Gro Maman, the African Snake Goddess, no longer symbolizes the enticing animal responsible for Man’s fall from the Garden of Eden, but cosmic energy in perpetual regeneration, offering access to the tree of life. Often living in the jungle, this potentially dangerous snake is quite heretically compared to Jesus for its ubiquity and omniscience (199), and for its capacity to grant redemption and peace. Thus, the ceremony under the silk-cotton tree reads as a syncretic re-writing of the Garden of Eden myth, cross-fertilizing Judeo-Christian and African mythologies.

20 Jericha at first embodies a Manichean outlook onto the world, inherited from her upbringing. Symptoms of her dualistic vision are strewn throughout the text, opposing black and white, good and bad, above and below. In line with Jungian theory—which is a recurrent and at times overt influence over Kingsolver’s work—the snake here comes to represent not the tempting animal willing Eve to taste the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, but a state of primeval fusion with the Great Mother archetype. What Jericha’s initiation flight indeed reveals has to do with reconciling opposites, endorsing an ecofeminist perspective of complementary entities rather than binary opposites: “There were worlds under her feet, and over her head too—when they flew over the Pitons, she had forgotten to look up. There is always something over your head and you’re never on top nor on the bottom either, you’re in the center” (201). Jericha’s access to the Self, in Jungian terms, or the totality of being, and to her place at the heart of the world, embraces the myth of the expulsion from the garden. Kingsolver’s story thus exposes how, taken literally, the myth of Genesis separates man from nature and, ultimately, from his own nature.

21 Furthermore, Jericha’s name may read as an intertextual reference to the doomed city of Jericho in the Bible (Jos 6). The enwalled city indeed provides a metaphor for Jericha’s alienation from her peers and from the nature around her, walled within what

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Alan Watts refers to as the hallucination of the Ego, or the illusion of existing as a separate self “making contact through senses with a universe both alien and strange” (8). The protagonist’s name thus adumbrates the crumbling of the fortress of the Ego as represented by Jericha. Her final gesture intimates Jericha’s new awareness of her participation in nature. On Easter morning, before dawn, Jericha steals into the garden and secretly unties the goat meant for the feast, letting it run back into the jungle, and thus quite ironically turning the scape-goat into the goat that escapes. Whereas until then, she treated animals with crushing ruthlessness, she seems cured in the end from her previous incapacity to relate to any living entity. Consequently, this symbolical ending points to a newly acquired humility and compassion for the Other, but also to her liberation from an alienating mythology of domination and sin understood too literally.

22 The kapok tree then sheds on Jericha a numinous, semiotic light coming from the silk- cotton fruit, a knowledge which no longer brings the fall of man from the garden, but opens the doors to paradise here on earth. This earthly paradise may well be the meaning of the “nest of roots” at the bottom of the kapok tree. Literally brought down to earth, this nest reverses the traditional symbol of the nest as ultimate paradise, up high in the highest branches and thus held out of reach (Chevalier 689). For the story obliquely refers to the etymologies of the words Eden and Paradise as underlined by Joseph Campbell: “Eden, signifies in Hebrew ‘delight, a place of delight,’ and our own English word, Paradise, which is from the Persian, pairi-, ‘around’, daeza, ‘a wall’ means properly ‘a walled enclosure’” (Myths 26). Hence the double entendre at play in the clausula at the end of the section devoted to the ceremony, possibly referring to Jericha’s awakening to the garden within her: “She awakened when she was lifted out of the truck and carried […] through the stone gate into the garden” (201).9 Therefore, the convent where Jericha is brought up by the Catholic nuns, separated from the surrounding jungle by a walled enclosure becomes a metaphor for the Western logos, which opposes and separates. Jericha’s epiphany thus goes far beyond confronting her personal shadow and her mother’s death. Bridging the gaps between a number of different realms, Kingsolver’s story paves the way for symbols to regain their transcending power, opening up the inward landscape of the soul, and beyond, opening the doors to a renewed awareness of one’s participation in the world.

23 Of course, some might express concern for Kingsolver’s appropriation of myths and practices belonging to subaltern cultures. Kingsolver might indeed be accused by some of ventriloquism, and her story “Jump-Up Day” as a matter of fact strikingly echoes what Michael Taussig deplores in his study of shamanism in relationship to colonialism: “The colonist’s relation to the shaman is not to give voice to the pinta [the magical healing picture] that the shaman passes on, but to use the shaman himself as an image and, in a way that merges the literal with the metaphoric, climb to heaven on his back” (Faris 156-57). I would here argue that not only Kingsolver’s transcultural text does give voice to the pinta passed on by the shaman, it moreover points in the process to how much more alive the mythologies of non-Western cultures are compared with those from a Judeo-Christian tradition. Meanwhile, trying to reconcile these myths with our own Western concepts and stories, her ecofeminist short story draws vanishing points into a truly post-colonial thought-system, no longer conceived in terms of dualisms and antagonisms but in terms of interrelatedness and complementarities. In addition, as underlined in many of the notes to this article, Kingsolver’s carnivalesque narrative, like most of her work, provides a rather clear

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indictment of cultural imperialism, and may very well in many ways read as a postcolonial piece of fiction. 10

24 Furthermore, the syncretic initiation rite at the heart of Kingsolver’s story can be read in the light of the notion of liminality, in other words of a “transition between” different states or modes of being (Gennep 15). The concept was first introduced by ethnologist Arnold van Gennep in The Rites of Passage and later taken up by Victor Turner’s anthropological studies, focusing on the universality of rites of passage across cultures. Bearing in mind the many crossings of boundaries encountered in Kingsolver’s “Jump-Up Day,” it appears that this short story substantiates Wendy Faris’s approach of magical realism precisely as “a liminal mode”: “Because magical and realistic narrative modes frequently come from different cultural traditions, their amalgamation makes magical realism a liminal mode, in the sense of Victor Turner’s ‘liminal entities,’ which ‘are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.’ […] Thus, magical realism partially reverses the process of cultural colonization” (29).

***

25 In this paper, I argued that Kingsolver’s use of magical realism helps destabilize and challenge ordinary perceptions of the world. I went on to establish the epiphanic content of the story, having to do first, on the character’s level, with an individual revelation and second, on a universal level, with a mythopoeic journey into the ever- shifting forms and power of symbols and archetypes. In her interview with David Gergen, Kingsolver explains: “I love what Joseph Campbell said about mythology. He said that our stories are what holds us together as a culture, and as long as they’re true for us, they–we thrive. And when they cease to become true, we fall apart, and we have to reconstruct them or revitalize them. We have to come up with new myths.” As Jung and Campbell have argued, today’s disenchanted societies must pay a high price for their demythologizing. Having stripped the world of its mysticism, these writers claim, modern societies have simultaneously repressed deeply ingrained archetypes which help relate to the mysteries of existence.

26 Strengthening the underwater part of her icebergs–to take up Hemmingway’s metaphor for the implicitness of the short story11–Kingsolver very often uses mythopoeia in her short stories as keys to potential, paradigmatic readings. According to Campbell, the first function of traditional mythology is mystical; it consists in awakening the quotidian mind to the infinite mysteries of existence, or, in “aligning waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum of this universe” ( Thou 2-3). In “Jump-Up Day” as in most of her writing, one of Kingsolver’s achievements lies in her reinstilling new life in archetypes and myths of various origins, reopening the doors of perception to the mysteries of the world. Whether resorting to magical realism, to a form of mystical realism,12 or to a poetization of quotidian and scientific discourses, Kingsolver’s work reactivates man’s capacity for wonder and resacralizes or re- enchants our relationship to the outside world. In line with what Lyotard has claimed of postmodernism, her multicultural, oxymoronic writing “wages war on totality” (82); weaving mythical threads in her transcultural narratives, her short stories recreate images endowed with new potency, within a postmodernist, postcolonial, polyvocal and global society. To quote Campbell again:

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These images must point past all the meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows the marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. (Thou 8-9)

27 The second, cosmological function of mythology, Campbell argues, is to help interpret the world, “to present a consistent image of the order of the cosmos” (Thou 3). This Kingsolver achieves by bringing scientific as well as mythical, and psychoanalytical as well as historical discourses into her ecofeminist fiction. As a result, most of her stories point to the world perceived as a web of interrelated, complementary, and interdependent beings driven by a common, creative life force. Third, Campbell adds, a mythology strives “to validate and support a specific moral order, that order of the society out of which that mythology arose” (Thou 5). Writing in ways that affiliate her work with both postcolonial and ecofeminist trends, her work does serve this sociological function, promoting ethics respectful of Otherness, whether the Other might take the form of ethnic, class, or gender minorities, or of Nature. And, finally, Campbell establishes the fourth function of mythology as a psychological one, “[carrying] the individual through the various stages of life” (Thou 5). This clearly suits Kingsolver’s “Jump-Up Day” as well as all of her short stories, slicing crucial moments of change in the lives of her characters. For indeed, it seems that what Mircea Eliade observed about folktales and fairy tales has become true of short fiction like Kingsolver’s, which is both “readerly” and “writerly”:13 Folktales and fairy tales reiterate the exemplary initiation scenario with different means and on a different plane. It takes up and prolongs “the initiation” on an imaginary level. If it can entertain or provide escape, that is only for trivialized conscience, and mostly so for modern man’s conscience; at a deeper level, initiation scenarios retain their gravity and continue to transmit their message, triggering mutations in the psyche. Without realizing it, and while believing one is having fun or escaping, humankind in modern societies benefits from this imaginary initiation the tale brings about. (247 translation mine)

28 Calling on universal symbols and archetypes, Kingsolver’s mythopoeic and symbolically-laden short narrative, like most of her stories, becomes an athanor for an alchemical enterprise, aiming at revealing the quintessence of Being, as well as the infinite number of forms and meanings that can come forth from it. Fulfilling the functions partly of fairy tales, partly of mythology, her stories derive their moral value from their exemplary dimension: they cast ordinary people undergoing, for a great part, banal experiences; and yet, the visions and choices of these characters can eventually offer precious parables of how to makes sense of one’s existence in postmodern times.

29 Out of all of Kingsolver’s stories, “Jump-Up Day” offers one of the best examples of the “spaces between” which Kingsolver’s fiction explores. In an essay where she dwells on her attraction to cultural difference, Kingsolver writes: “This is the dilemma upon whose horns I’ve built my house: I want to know, and to write, about the places where disparate points of view rub together—the spaces between. Not just between man and woman but also North and South; white and non-white; communal and individual; spiritual and carnal” (Spaces 154). Constantly crossing boundaries, Kingsolver’s short fiction destabilizes received ideas and conventional grids that tend to serve as lenses in our perception of the world. Making many of our rigid concepts seem as “meaningless

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as locks on an open door,” Kingsolver’s short stories place most of her characters at a threshold, inviting her readers to envision “those doors not just open but gone, lying in the dirt, thrown off their hinges by the forces of accord in a house of open passage” (Spaces 156). Whether this liminality might be specific to the genre of the short story, as Clare Drewery argues in her study of the modernist short story, remains to be proved when dealing with multicultural writers such as Kingsolver. I can think of aspects of novels such as Animal Dreams, The Poisonwood Bible or the Lacuna which might question such a thesis, or magical realist novels by Linda Hogan such as Solar Storms or People of the Whale which also deserve to be studied from that angle. And yet, because Kingsolver’s short stories definitely focus more closely on crucial thresholds, unusual modes of perception, and transitional moments in time, space and identity, it may very well be that Clare Drewery’s thesis should indeed apply to Kingsolver’s short fiction.

30 Finally, I believe that stories like Barbara Kingsolver’s merit close attention, not only for how artfully they are crafted, but also for what they have to offer in terms of awareness. In twenty-first century societies that tend to be disenchanted with history, religion, and discourse altogether, which have consecrated the effacement of reality behind the hyperreal, and the fragmentation of the self, short stories of this kind still seek to make sense of the world and of one’s existence within it. It still paves the way for a literature of hope. Story-telling, Kingsolver’s transcultural work implies, offers liminal spaces and ever new territories in which to write and rewrite the discourses that we, as humans, have used since the dawn of civilization and throughout the world, to create and recreate ourselves as well as our environment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 1986. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print.

____. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1984. Print.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970. Print.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1986. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Penguin “Arkana,” 1972. Print.

____. Thou Art That. Novato, California: New World Library, 2001. Print.

Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved vs. Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Print.

Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant, eds. Dictionnaire des symboles. 1969. Paris: R. Laffont et Jupiter, 1993. Print.

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Drewery, Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

Eliade, Mircea. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Essais,” 1963. Print.

Faris, Wendy, B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Vanderbilt University Press: Nashville, 2004. Print.

Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. 1909. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Print.

Gergen, David. “Barbara Kingsolver.” Interview 24/11/1995. Web. 15/10/2012.

Houston, Lynn Mary and Jennifer Warren. Reading Barbara Kingsolver. Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009. Print.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Essai d’exploration de l’inconscient. Trad. Laure Deutschmeister. Paris: Robert Laffont, “Folio Essais,” 1964. Print.

____. Dialectique du Moi et de l’Inconscient. Trad. Dr Roland Cahen Paris: Gallimard “Folio Essais,” 1964. Print.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Homeland and Other Stories. 1989. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

____. “The Spaces Between.” High Tide in Tucson. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. 146-57. Print.

May, Charles E, ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1994. Print.

Meillon, Bénédicte. “Aimé Césaire’s A Season in Congo and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible in the light of Postcolonialism.” Anglophonia 21: Divergences & Convergences. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2007. 197-211. Print.

____. “Literary Resistance in Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Homeland.’” Le travail de la résistance. Ed. Yves- Charles Grandjeat. Pessac: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, 2008. 85-98. Print.

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NOTES

1. The origins of the short story genre in myth is one of the aspects of the genre studied by short story specialist Charles E. May, who contends that “[in] their very shortness, short stories have remained close to the original source of narrative in myth, folktale, fable, and fairy tale” (xxvi). 2. Overruling these racist stereotypes, the sometimes intrusive and sarcastic narrative voice recurrently seems to side with the characters in the subaltern position. A first critique of British imperialism and arrogance is indeed perceived from the opening paragraph: “Also, [the nuns] reasoned, the father was not actually dead but only gone home to convalesce in England, where the hospitals were superior. (They called it ‘the mainland,’ though surely aware that England, too, is an island.) The good doctor had come here in the first place […] to coax the disease out of the reluctant St. Lucians, and for his trouble he fell down trembling with it himself. In the opinion of informed observers, it was the cruel irony of God’s will.” (182) Counterbalancing the doctor’s condescension as regards Obeah beliefs and practices, the narrative turns the tables on Catholic beliefs and rituals with quite a wry sense of irony: “[The evening service on Good Friday] was not an actual mass, she’d learned from Sister Armande, since Jesus was in Limbo until the resurrection on Sunday and therefore could not be called upon” (196). Read through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, the heteroglossia worked into the text thus participates in

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the carnivalesque mode Kingsolver resorts to in order to invert the imperialist hierarchy between colonizers and colonized. 3. Indeed, Jericha drinks from a flask containing some mysterious alcoholic beverage, after which “[she feels] dizzy” (196). Subsequently, Jericha’s anamorphic eye once again defamiliarizes the world around her: “Ahead of them a small clearing was lit by the headlamps. When he turned them off, the distant trees jumped close and crowded around the truck like beggars” (197-98). 4. The first descriptions of the women in St Lucia contain an implicit indictment of colonialism. Indeed, the women’s activities, their physical descriptions and the verticality of their locations, from top to bottom, brushes a metonymical, impressionistic painting reflecting the hierarchy of colonial society and the exploitation by the colonists of both former slaves and natural resources: “There were the brightly-dressed foreign women, who moved through town with half-closed eyes and purses hung over their arms like bracelets, buying baskets woven with shells, or egrets carved from goats’ horns. White women, whose assured, honey-lazy voices revealed a kinship with the white mistresses of the hilltop villas, who snapped their fingers at servants and held ice in their mouths and watched their children on wide green lawns like cricket fields. [...] These rich ones and their opposites, the lean-armed brown women who loaded boats in the harbor, their hips swinging in wide arcs as the bananas piled high on their heads moved in a perfect straight line up the gang plank toward the ship’s dark, refrigerated hold.” (185) The images of the “gangplanks” and “the ship’s dark, refrigerated hold” quite suggestively call to mind the actual history of the island of St Lucia as a former British and French colony, resting on triangular slave trade. 5. Pronominal shifting or “scrambling” is one of the many aspects of magical realist texts that Wendy Farris elaborates on in her analyses of various works, such as Julio Cortazar’s “Axolotlt,” Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or That Voice by Robert Pinget. 6. I am here using Jung’s theory of the individuation process as exposed in Dialectique du Moi et de l’Inconscient. 7. There are many variants of Anansi tales, yet the most well-known recounts how the spider Anansi managed to obtain the first stories ever told from the Sky-God, Nyame. In Caribbean culture, Anansi’s cunning strategies to defeat animals stronger than him symbolize slaves’ strategies of resistance and survival during and after the colonial era. Thus, Kingsolver’s recycling of this trickster character again provides another dimension to her story affiliating it with postcolonial literature. 8. Kingsolver’s narrative provides suggestive descriptions reversing those racist stereotypes, such as that of the white women with “honey-lazy” voices doing their shopping and engaged in leisurely activities, while the black women are being exploited as servants or as workers in the banana trade. The same division obliquely emerges from the paratactic description of the banana plantations juxtaposed with the recreational activities of plantation owners: “It was Sunday, but still there were men and women standing ankle-deep in the ditches between the banana rows, working for someone, hacking with their machetes. Beyond them the ocean glittered, dotted with boats” (192). 9. My reading here follows Joseph Campbell’s analysis of the Garden of Eden myth in Myths We Live By: “Taken as referring not to any geographical scene, but to a landscape of the soul, that Garden of Eden would have to be within us. Yet our conscious minds are unable to enter it and enjoy there the taste of eternal life, since we have already tasted of the knowledge of good and evil. That, in fact, must be the knowledge that has thrown us out of the garden, pitched us away from our own center, so that we now judge things in those terms and experience only good and evil instead of eternal life–which, since the enclosed garden is within us, must already be ours, even though unknown to our conscious personalities. That would seem to be the meaning of the myth when read not as prehistory but as referring to man’s inward spiritual state” (Myths 27).

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10. I am aware that including Barbara Kingsolver’s work into postcolonial literature may seem problematical. For more on the subject, see my comparative article on the representation of colonial Congo in Aimé Césaire and Barbara Kingsolver’s work: “Aimé Césaire’s A Season in Congo and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible in the light of Postcolonialism.” 11. Ernest Hemingway has formulated a theory of the short story based on the metaphor of the iceberg: “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show” (quoted in Bruccoli 125). 12. I might prefer to use the term “mystical realism” which not only seems more accurate when discussing Kingsolver’s fiction, but is moreover less likely to sound Eurocentric when dealing with non-Western beliefs. For “mystical realism” addresses the representation of the mysteries of life in a way that may seem realistic to some, and unrealistic, or “magical” to others. With “mystical realism,” the point is to represent and find sense in mystery, which therefore casts rational realism as something quite beside the point. I have already tackled related issues in an article dealing with Kingsolver’s title story. “Homeland,” reclaiming Cherokee stories, vision and beliefs (See Meillon, Literary Resistance). 13. In S/Z Roland Barthes coins the terms “readerly” ( lisible) and “writerly” (scriptible) to differentiate respectively between books which are easy to read and to understand from those which require great reader participation (9-12).

ABSTRACTS

Cet article vise à démontrer comment la nouvelle transculturelle “Jump-Up Day” de Barbara Kingsolver renoue avec les origines mythiques du genre de la nouvelle. La nouvelle dialogique de Kingsolver donne à voir un syncrétisme à la lumière duquel se révèle une relecture des mythes Chrétiens, rendus compatibles avec d’autres cultures et d’autres mythes. Je défends ici l’idée que l’écriture de Kingsolver articule un double mouvement, à la fois de démythologisation et, paradoxalement, de re-mythologisation. Dans un premier temps sont abordés les éléments magiques et religieux qui se prêtent à des lectures fantastique, étrange ou réaliste magique. C’est ensuite une interprétation psychanalytique qui est proposée, la nouvelle étant régie par un retour du refoulé qui culmine dans un moment de révélation enchanteur. Enfin, l’attention est portée au rôle joué par l’Obeah Man, véritable Janus Antillais, dont le personnage fonctionne, tel le dieu romain des passages, comme médiateur entre le blanc et le noir, la vie et la mort, le Christianisme et l’Obeah, la magie et le réel, le rêve et la vie consciente, le mythe et la nouvelle. La nouvelle de Kingsolver est donc un récit de l’entre-deux, marqué par la liminalité. On peut en proposer une lecture éco-féministe, ou postcoloniale ; finalement cette nouvelle de Barbara Kingsolver fait poindre une révélation numineuse et anti-dualiste, pouvant revêtir une dimension universelle.

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AUTHORS

BÉNÉDICTE MEILLON Bénédicte Meillon is Associate Professor at the University of Perpignan, where she teaches translation and literature. She is a member of the VECT (Voyages, Echanges, Confrontations, Transformations) in Perpignan. She wrote her PhD on Barbara Kingsolver’s short stories. She has published articles on Barbara Kingsolver’s work, Roald Dahl’s short stories, Paul Auster’s, and Annie Proulx’s works. She has specialized in the short story genre and in North American literature, with a deep interest in the postmodernist rewriting of myths, folk and fairy tales, in the representation of minorities, Nature, and rurality.

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Appalachian Myths and Stereotypes in Chris Offutt's "Sawdust" and "Melungeons"

Marcel Arbeit

1 Appalachia is a territory rife with myths, an area that even in the twenty-first century is often seen at a distance as being a net of backward pockets of poverty that might look very similar to an outsider but which, on closer inspection, provide a very rich texture of communities that keep up their traditions and oral histories. Appalachian narratives are often true to the numerous stereotypes the rest of the United States created about the region and its inhabitants and which, occasionally, Appalachian people themselves have fed and continue feeding even now, when they do their best to step out from the unfavorable imagery and show that their lives cannot be reduced to a set of clichés.

2 Narratives from the poorest parts of Appalachia in eastern Kentucky or West Virginia, especially if related by locals, show that the border between myth and stereotype is very thin, as the two have much in common and partly overlap. At the beginning of each there is a true story that becomes well known and shared; new additions to the story and its distortions make it impossible to tell which part is true and which not; and the story is used as a pattern into which other, more recent stories from the region, no matter whether they lionize or ridicule it, are made to fit.

3 The basis for the analysis that follows is the concept of myth introduced by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies (1957). Barthes takes myth as “a type of speech” (109, Barthes’s italics), which “is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message” (109). According to him, “everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse” (109), and, what is extremely important, the myth, which is, among other things, always temporary, “hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear” (121, Barthes’s italics). Barthes’s definition is extremely broad: in fact, as he himself confirms, any story shared by a certain number of people can become a myth, no matter how short-lived and insubstantial. A crucial feature of myth, according to Barthes, is its simplicity: “[Myth] abolishes the complexity of human acts […], it

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organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves” (143).

4 The link between myths and stereotypes has lately been explored by historians, psychologists, and sociologists. Larry J. Griffin, exploring some major Southern myths and stereotypes, does not subscribe to such a broad definition of myths as Barthes’s, but strictly refutes the school of thinking that defines myths “as erroneous beliefs or delusional understandings” (19).1 For him, myths are “both analytical devices that help us understand what something is and, implicitly, evaluative and exhortative devices that allow us to judge the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the mythological subject” (19). Stereotypes, “formed through selected emphasis, simplification, and generalization” (19), are, according to Griffin, degenerate myths, “even exaggerated caricatures of the mythic entity that can mislead and misinform, even as they motivate and justify human action” (19).

5 In the light of Barthes’s definition, however, the three above-mentioned formative features of stereotypes (selected emphasis, simplification, and generalization), together with the distortion that Griffin considers a close companion to degeneration, are properties of every myth. Accordingly, some scholars point out that stereotypes do not necessarily play a negative role and do not automatically support prejudices, oppression, and discrimination. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, in their book on social hierarchy and oppression, rank stereotypes, together with attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies, among specific kinds of myths they call “legitimizing myths,” that is, the myths that “provide moral and intellectual justification for the social practices that distribute social value within the social system” (49). For them, the emergence of social stereotypes is, as in the case of other legitimizing myths, “the result of basic and entirely normal information processing” (11).

6 From this point of view, all stereotypes are myths (of the legitimizing kind), but, logically, not every myth is a stereotype (for example, myths exploring the origin of an ethnic group or a nation). Sometimes even negative stereotypes can have a positive outcome—to raise positive emotions or, at least, to stimulate interest.2 This is the case of many Appalachian stereotypes: it is the negative image of this area that made it better known and more popular.

7 Both myths that are stereotypes (henceforth “stereotypes”) and those that are not (henceforth “myths”) are originally transmitted through spontaneous oral narratives. Therefore, the best genre for their translation into a written form is the short story, a genre that also tends to immediacy. The obvious advantage of short stories is that they can be read at one sitting, within a time space close to that needed by a folk narrator delivering a tale in front of an audience. While novels and autobiographies are able to show the intricate network of interconnected myths and stereotypes in their working complexity, short stories can spotlight one myth or stereotype and present it in a naked, immediate shape at a particular point in time of its development.

8 Such a presentation of myths and stereotypes corresponds to a large extent to the opinion of Sarah Hardy, who examined the relationship between oral narratives and short stories and emphasized the potential of short stories to relate what she calls the “poetics of immediacy,” which stems from the model of oral narratives. In Hardy’s opinion, the short story is close to an “oral-epic episode” (352) which is “highly formulaic” and deals with topics and ideas that are “common and reusable” (353). The

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oral-epic episodes are able to convey both myths and stereotypes that, through spontaneous proliferation, make their claim to universality.

9 This might be one of the reasons why Chris Offutt, a native of the vanishing eastern Kentucky community of Haldeman (in the mid-1990s, it had approximately two hundred inhabitants),3 refuses to be called a spokesman for his region. Spokesmen, whether for a region or a cause, cannot tell stories that transcend their settings and aim at a universal appeal. In a 2002 radio interview, Offutt said: I’m not a historian or a sociologist or ethnographer or anything like that. […] I can use eastern Kentucky as a landscape to paint my pictures on because I know it; it’s easier for me. I know it extremely well. (Interview with Inskeep)

10 Unlike other Appalachian writers, Offutt focuses not only on the features that make his native part of the mountains different from any other region but also on the similarities to other hill cultures and the rest of the rural South. At the time when attempts are being made to isolate Appalachian literature from Southern, he admits that Appalachia shares with other parts of the South “similarities in terms of food, accents, attitudes toward family, attitudes toward the land, attitudes toward old- fashioned traditions” (interview with Harmon A2:4).

11 This analysis of two of Offutt’s short stories from his two collections, Kentucky Straight (1992) and Out of the Woods (1997), will point out how Appalachian myths and stereotypes aim much further than the places where they were conceived or, in the case of stereotypes, at which they were targeted.

12 The two stories, “Sawdust” and “Melungeons,”4 focus on two stereotypes connected with Appalachian people, namely their contempt for formal education, and their violent and vengeful nature. As every stereotype tends to universality, even these two are not unique to Appalachia but to a large extent true for every poor mountain region in the world. Some scholars extend the validity of these stereotypes even beyond mountain areas. For example, J. W. Williamson claims that the derogatory but popular term “hillbilly” currently means “rough, rural, poor but fruitful, blatantly antiurban, and often dangerous, but not necessarily hailing from the Southern Appalachians or even from any mountains” (16).

***

13 In “Sawdust,” a short story from his first collection, Offutt explores the stereotypes related to education and its role in Appalachia and links it with the theme of the exodus from the area. The main protagonist is a nameless young Appalachian boy who decides to take a GED test at a local test center in Rocksalt in eastern Kentucky, even though he knows that education is more often ridiculed than valued in the hills where he lives. The center is operated by a non-Appalachian VISTA volunteer5 who, according to the boy, had never heard Standard English, “talked fast and didn’t always say her words right” (KS 7).

14 The boy, whose father, a violent and depressive man, committed suicide, wants to try the test in reading, writing, and mathematics to prove to himself and others that he does not necessarily have to live the same life as his father, whose desire was to become a horse doctor but who had to “quit sixth grade on account of not having nothing to wear” (KS 5). The boy’s struggle against the stereotypical but real image of an illiterate mountain resident is even more futile in the light of the fact that, unlike the boy, most

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young Appalachian people who get some education decide to leave their home region, keeping the level of illiteracy in Appalachia unchanged.6 The education of individuals cannot improve the undesirable situation of the people in a region with no industry, where people grow their own food and live on unemployment benefits. As the narrator says, “This is a place people move away from” (KS 6). An anecdote that even the locals tell about themselves says that “the only things taught in mountain schools after World War II were the three Rs—reading, writing, and Route 23,” that is, the highway leading from the mountains to the North (Eller 22).

15 The community of Clay Creek, which is not even on the map of Kentucky the boy inherited from his father, is extremely poor. The only meeting places are the local church and the post office, where people regularly come to collect their government checks and pay their money orders. As the narrator says in the very first sentence of the story, no one “on this hillside finished high school” (KS 1). As the only available book is the King James Bible, the boy orders, as his reading material, complimentary copies of various magazines, even though he knows that he does not have enough money to subscribe to any of them.

16 When the boy visits the test center for the first time, the clerk thinks that he is looking for the barbershop next door. Later, when the news that someone from the community is striving for a better education is spread, he is perpetually scolded and ridiculed. Instead of encouragement, his mother reproaches him for putting himself forward: “They say you’re fixing to get learned up on us. […] You might read the Bible while you’re at it” (KS 8). The boy readily replies that he has read the Bible twice, but it is only the beginning of the problems he has with his relatives and the locals. His older brother Warren, who works in a car factory in Lexington and thinks that GED stands for “Get Even Dumber” (KS 10), approaches him in a similar way: “Hear you’re eat up with the smart bug” (KS 9). When the local preacher consoles the boy’s mother by promising her “a sweet place in heaven” (KS 10) for having to suffer such a foolhardy son, the boy realizes that it is the first time a member of his family has been stubborn over something he wants to accomplish. When Warren, for whom the emblems of progress are a microwave and a VCR, answers his younger brother’s question “What for?” about the purpose of his latest purchase, a battery-operated portable TV set, with “To sit and look at” (KS 14), the boy, referring to his prospective high school degree, echoes: “Same with me, Warren. Same with me” (KS 14).

17 The title of the story ironically addresses the opinion that formal education would not be of much use to the poor Appalachian people, who rather need to employ common sense. In one of the mathematical tasks the boy is supposed to calculate how much stove wood you can get from a tree but the authors of the task do not consider the sawdust.7

18 The skeptical approach to school education is usually complemented with a positive stereotype of the residents of the mountains being equipped with all the skills they need for their life in nature. Offutt presents this stereotype, a favorite with folk narrators, in his autobiography The Same River Twice (1993): “We can spot fleas hopping from dog to dog at a hundred yards; we can track a week-old snake trail across bare rock” (19). In “Sawdust,” the boy realizes a negative aspect of this stereotype when he almost steps on a snake and they “watch each other for a spell” (KS 7). Common sense advises to “run from a snake without ever knowing if it was poison or just alive” (KS 7) and local people apply the same instincts to education.

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19 In spite of the obstacles and ridicule, the boy proves at least once that knowledge can be useful for mountain people. He read in a magazine that the government had banned the killing of alligators, which makes it possible for him to tell his brother that the expensive “alligator-hide boots” he bought in a mall must be fake (KS 9). Still, under the circumstances, obtaining a high school degree is a gratuitous act for the boy, and he knows he should not go further, even though the certificate also means a qualification for a better future. It is obvious that he instinctively understands what Richard B. Drake writes in A History of Appalachia: “that schooling lifted […] mountaineer students from their culture and ran the risk of making such a student unfit to return to the life he came from” (227).

20 In this story Offutt does not deny the true core of the stereotype of the contempt of Appalachian people for formal education. In his second autobiographical book, No Heroes (2002), he describes himself as the first kid who stepped inside the Rowan County Public Library, opened in 1967, circumventing the limit of four books per person by getting cards not only “for all his siblings” but also “in the name of a family dog” (67). As a student at Morehead State University, the first “full-fledged university” (19) in that part of Kentucky, he was aware that an educated person had a tough life among people who signed legal documents with three x’s and according to whom “B.A. stood for ‘Big Asshole,’ B.S. stood for ‘Bull Shit,’ and Ph.D. stood for ‘Piled High and Deep’” (25).

21 The fact that Offutt deliberately composed his autobiographies to resemble long and episodic oral narratives makes visible both the affinities and differences between his fictional and non-fictional renderings of the same aspects of Appalachian life. “Sawdust,” being a concise short story focused primarily on the theme of education, creates an impression of universality: a folk narrator could set such a story in any poor region of the world and tell it to listeners anywhere. Compared with it, Offutt’s non- fictional descriptions of his own experience with education are only glimpses in the stream of his autobiographical narratives, which considerably limits their universal appeal. They are so firmly rooted in the Appalachia of his youth that they could hardly be transferred elsewhere. In Sarah Hardy’s opinion, oral storytelling abounds with “flashbacks, parallels, and digressions” (354), which is why “the spinning out of a theme or idea is never strictly linear,” while a short story relates to a “single oral episode, a kind of well-developed theme,” even though it stays open (355). The openness lies in the ability of the central theme to spread “energies in several directions at once: it pulls in the direction of its own self-contained narrative line, towards other similar and parallel stories, and towards certain patterns of language or a particular set of symbols” (355).

22 In “Sawdust,” we can find germs of such parallel stories that lead in other directions and at the same time elucidate the central narrative line. In an interview Offutt said: “Writing a short story is like stepping into the entrance of a cave,” while “doing a novel is like going all the way in, into the darkness” (qtd. in Koeppel G2). The first-person narrator of “Sawdust” is standing in the liminal space, alternately looking inside the cave and far away from it. Figuratively speaking, it is in the darkness of the cave that he finds two episodes, both of them only loosely related to the main theme of education, or rather the lack thereof, but serving as gates to the worlds of another Appalachian stereotype, that of violent mountain people. The first episode describes the gradual decline of the narrator’s father into violence and insanity, culminating in

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his suicide, the second one the obvious ease with which, at least hypothetically, a feud could start in the Appalachian hills even near the end of the 20th century. The unfulfilled dream of becoming a veterinarian makes the boy’s father a bitter and cruel man who is able to shoot his favorite dog under the porch just because he made a mistake and chased a skunk instead of a coon. Later, when he joins the church, he believes that his faith will help him heal a puppy with a broken leg. While his wife erroneously considers his helpless crying over his failure to cure the dog to be “a sign that both his oars are back in the water” (KS 5), the boy’s father makes another attempt at fixing the puppy’s leg but instead he breaks the poor animal’s remaining three legs and then hangs himself (KS 6).

23 The second episode stems from the first one. The innocent jokes of locals directed at the narrator’s desire for education culminate in a rude remark about the incompetence of his father: “I got a sick pup at the house, Doctor. You as good on them as your daddy was?” (KS 13). The boy is immediately aware that he must act up to the mountain code of honor, even though he does not feel like fighting. He is also aware that a marginal skirmish can result in long-time animosity between whole families: “Way it is around here, I had to do more than just fight. Sometimes a man will lay back a year before shooting somebody’s dog to get back at its owner, but with everyone watching, I couldn’t just leave” (KS 13). The boy kicks out one of the headlights of the teaser’s pickup, gets into a fistfight, and finally runs away. On the following day his brother beats the offenders, saying to the narrator: “I’ll fight for you, Junior. And for Daddy, too. But I never could figure what either of you ever was up to” (KS 13). The freshly introduced stereotype of the large-scale violence that can spark from a petty problem if family pride is threatened opens up space for other narratives in Offutt’s collections.

***

24 In No Heroes, Offutt confirms that even people from Appalachian towns are not exempt from the consequences of breaking the code of honor. While in big cities it is considered impolite to stare at strangers, here it is “common because you must try to figure out who the person is related to, if you know the family, and if you are perhaps distant kin. One of the scenarios holds true, because there are no strangers in the hills” (109). If you do not recognize neighbors, they can feel offended: “Lives are ruined by a chance encounter in a grocery parking lot, during which one person didn’t notice a neighbor, who felt hurt by the slight” (32).

25 The short story “Melungeons,” from Offutt’s second collection, Out of the Woods (1997), brings into prominence the stereotype that played a secondary role in “Sawdust”—that of the violent streak in Appalachian people that occasionally culminates in feuds. The story deals with the stereotype within a broader perspective of the various myths concerning the very origin of the residents of Appalachia from the eastern Kentucky hills.

26 In 2006, in his provocative book on the origins of Southern literature, James P. Cantrell claimed that the Appalachian people were mostly of Scots-Irish origin, going back to the Celts.8 But some of the inhabitants of Appalachia, called the Melungeons, closer to the ancient Native American population of the region, seem to have a more complex ancestry, which remains undisclosed up to the present day. The uncertain origin of these people, with their wavy hair, olive skin, and blue eyes, who could not be ranked

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among the white, Indian, or black populations, made them a rewarding subject of myths.

27 Richard B. Drake, in his historical book, devotes exactly two sentences to them: And a remarkable and puzzling minority called “Melungeons,” never precisely enumerated in East Tennessee and neighboring states, has been a mysterious dark- skinned group subject to much prejudice for many years. The Melungeons are just now beginning to put together their own story in a fairly convincing way. (189)

28 The tone of the second sentence of the quotation, together with Drake’s hesitation as to whether he should put the Melungeons in quotation marks or not, suggests that until recently scholars could not decide how much truth there is in the myth of the strange ethnic group whose members bear Old Testament names and have a skin color similar to that of Native Americans but not exactly like them.

29 Offutt was one of the first Appalachian writers to be interested in the identity of the Melungeons but is far from isolated in this effort. In 2007, one decade after Out of the Woods, the novelist and short story writer Lisa Alther published a book about her search for her Melungeon ancestors in which she gave, apart from personal memories, an overview of various theories about their origin. In the introduction, she enumerates a few conclusions, some of them contradictory,9 from researchers of many fields of study: They’re said to be descended from Indians who mated with early Spanish explorers, or from the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony on Roanoke Island, or from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast, or from African slaves who escaped into the mountains. (Kinfolks xii)

30 With the exception of “Melungeons,” the myths concerning the origin of this mysterious ethnic group enter Offutt’s stories only marginally. For example, the narrator of “Sawdust” notes that while strangers are white or black, people here are “mostly brown” (KS 6). As he does not know anything about history or ethnography, he is not able to search for the roots of his kin, even though he is very keen on meeting people from outside his ethnically homogeneous environment: “I wouldn’t mind talking to somebody of another color but they don’t ever come around these parts. Nobody does” (KS 6).

31 “Melungeons” is set in Rocksalt, the town where the narrator of “Sawdust” took his exam. The main protagonist of this third-person narrative is the sixty-three-year-old deputy and jailer, Ephraim Goins, who left the hills because of the feud raging there between the Mullinses and the Gipsons; his relatives married both sides and he did not want to see them killed. The feud started sixty years earlier with a minor incident (a falling oak dropped on the land of the neighbors, killing a black bear, and the logging family ate some of the meat) and has cost the lives of twenty-eight people so far. The names of the clans are recognized as Melungeon in most of the ethnographers’ lists Alther mentions in her book.10 The name Goins refers, in her opinion, probably to “Goa, the Portuguese colony in India” (Kinfolks 179).

32 The presence of Deputy Goins is tolerated in Rocksalt because he is the only local Korean War hero, decorated with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Still, where he lives parents and teachers threaten naughty children that if they do not behave, the Melungeons will get them (OOW 39).11 His life is a story of exclusion and ostracism. In the army, he was assigned to an all-black company because an army dentist noticed the bluish tinge of his gums: “Black soldiers treated him with open scorn. The whites refused to acknowledge him at all” (OOW 39).

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33 Deputy Goins, an expatriate by choice, romanticizes the hills he left: He missed living with the land most in autumn, when the trees seemed suddenly splashed in color, and rutting deer snorted in the hollows. There were walnuts to gather, bees to rob. Turkeys big as dogs jumped from ridgelines to extend their flight. (OOW 46)

34 The pastoral idyll connected with the ethnic group that the Shawnee Indians called “white Indians” and claimed “that they’d always lived there” (OOW 39) is, according to Ronald D. Eller, shared mostly by expatriates and people outside the region. In his book on Appalachia after 1945, he points out that among those who admired the “romantic simplicity and honesty” (134) of the mountain population most were the VISTA volunteers. Such idealization balanced the prevailing stereotypical image of the poor area as “a problem region” (67) inhabited by “yesterday’s people” (102). When Goins occasionally walks in the hills, he feels “awkward and foreign, as if the land was mocking him” (OOW 41). The closer he is to his native hills, the faster the pastoral idyll fades, even though his homesickness increases.

35 Goins reads a newspaper article about the Melungeons as a mythical “vanishing race,” and from all the theories of their possible origin he chooses the one that makes them descendants of “one of Israel’s lost tribes” (OOW 47). The preference for Jewish origin partly stems from his isolated life in the Army where the only man who became his friend was “a New Yorker named Abe, whom no one liked because he was Jewish” (OOW 39). But for Goins, this theory, unlike the ones labeling the Melungeons “as shipwrecked Portuguese, Phoenicians [or] Turks” (OOW 47), can also be supported by their names: he is Ephraim, in Genesis “the leader of a lost tribe who never made it to the land of milk and honey” (OOW 49), and he “knowed a Nimrod once. Got a cousin Zephaniah married a Ruth” (OOW 48).

36 Even though this theory of the origin of the Melungeons seems to exclude the hypothesis that the Goinses came from Portuguese India, it can be found in Alther’s book as well: the Jews could be the 16th-century “Sephardic refugees in Amsterdam who fled the Spanish Inquisition” (Kinfolks 104). Following the research of Beth Hirschman and Donald Panther-Yates, who claim that “the original Melungeons were crypto-Jews and Moors,” she occasionally discovered “stars of David on Appalachian headstones” or “menorahs used as candlesticks on Appalachian dinner tables” (Kinfolks 218-19). Hezekiah Gipson, an old man with a Jewish Old Testament name, comes to the Rocksalt prison and insists on being jailed overnight without having committed an offense. Soon it becomes obvious that he suffers from homesickness: “Missed every wedding and funeral my family had” (OOW 41). He is the last surviving member of the old Gipsons, who spent decades in exile, but when he returned he found that one of the old Mullinses, Beulah, is still alive. While the grandchildren of the families “have got a game” of the feud, “play-acting” (OOW 42), which signifies that it will continue its life in a benign, playful, and more creative form, for the last two old survivors it is still a deadly matter. The murder of Hezekiah Gipson by Beulah Mullins in the Rocksalt jail ends, after sixty years, the story of the family feud, but the stereotype of feuding Appalachians lives on. Myths, including stereotypes, always survive the real events, as more details are added later, and more versions, often incompatible, of the narratives appear.

37 The story suggests that stereotypes validate personal tragic stories better than non- legitimizing myths such as that of the origin of the Melungeons. Before Hezekiah

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Gipson is murdered, Goins talks to him about his experience with his Melungeon identity outside the Appalachian hills. Gipson confirms that all his life he had to pass for someone else, depending on who was around: “Italian mostly. Couple times a Puerto Rican till they heard me talk. Sometimes it never mattered” (OOW 41). Still, he is not interested in his origin: “It don’t matter where we upped from. It’s who we are now that matters” (OOW 48). On the other hand, the feud he tried to run from and the stereotype related to it give Gipson his identity back. With buckshot from Beulah’s shotgun in his body, he finally becomes a true part of the hills he always loved but had to leave.

38 In the history of eastern Kentucky (as well as West Virginia and eastern Tennessee) there were many similar feuds, the most prominent being the one between the clans of the Hatfields and the McCoys, whose story was recently retold by Lisa Alther even twice: once in a novel and once in a book of non-fiction. Alther is aware of the existence of many different or downright contradictory versions of all the crucial events related to the feud and what she writes about the Hatfield-McCoy animosity is valid for all the similar episodes from the life of isolated communities in poor hill regions worldwide: So like other histories, the various versions […] have been embellished, pruned, and honed, like rocks roiled to smoothness in a creek bed, by generations of tellers, some creating myths, other righting wrongs, most trying to explain or justify the bad behavior of their ancestors or relatives. Chronologies are scrambled. Hearsay appears as evidence, anecdotes as facts. (Alther, Blood Feud xvi)

39 When Offutt introduces the character of Beulah Mullins into the story, he also brings in a narrative strategy which is able to change focus from stereotypes into myths, in this case from the stereotype concerning the violent and vengeful nature of Appalachian people into the myth of the ancient violence present in the region from times immemorial. As a stereotype is always a legitimizing myth, the author needs to remove from the story those social practices of its characters that ask for a moral or intellectual evaluation. One of the possible ways is to create a character that is a personification of an event, an era, an area, or a combination of the three.

40 The 84-year-old Beulah Mullins is stripped of all personal characteristics. Not only does she embody the whole history of these hills; she is at the same time an ancient Indian trapper, an animal, the hills themselves, and a female Grim Reaper who must have the last word in the feud. Beulah “had never voted or paid taxes” (OOW 43) and visited Rocksalt only once in her life, decades ago, to buy nails for a hogpen. Still, she has no problem finding the way: she can scent the town and when she gets there, she is stalking it “from the shade” (OOW 45), avoiding a neon sign. Guessing rightly that nobody will provide shelter to a member of one of the old feuding families, she aims directly for the town jail: “Beulah moved downwind of a police car. She couldn’t read but knew that an automobile with writing on its side was like a tied dog. Whoever held the leash controlled it” (OOW 45). Although she never met the deputy, she immediately recognizes his origin: “You look a Goins” (OOW 49).

41 Goins surrenders to everything that she represents almost immediately, as he is aware of her power, which, for him, acquires supernatural qualities: Goins didn’t know her, but he knew her. It was as if the mountain itself had entered the tiny room, filling it with earth and rain, the steady wind along the ridge. She gazed at him, one eye dark, the other yellow-flecked. Between the lines of her face ran many smaller lines like rain gulleys running to creeks. She’d been old when he was young. […] He could smell the mountain on her. (OOW 49)

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42 Goins answers her query about Gipson, tastes her squirrel stew and, lulling himself into the belief that “she wasn’t here for trouble” (OOW 50), he gives her privacy with Gipson. When he arrested her after she had shot Gipson dead, it was like taming a wild animal that wants to be tamed.

43 The myths of the Melungeon origin of the eastern Kentucky Appalachian people and the ferocity that is literally present in the air of this area, together with the stereotype of the violent nature of the residents of the mountains, create one of the “changeable groups of themes relating to each other” that, in Sarah Hardy’s opinion, account “for the flexibility of oral narrative” and relate to the genre of the short story “in that it is necessarily episodic, forming shorter thematic clusters rather than a long continuous narrative” (354). Like an oral narrative, a short story is able to present myths and stereotypes simultaneously with naked facts (for example, information about how the feud started and which families were involved, the setting and length of the conflict), or, in Hardy’s words, to “serve a double function of encyclopedic and mythic space for the community” (355). This works neither against the openness of the short story, which provides “important cultural information while remaining sketchy enough to fit into numerous variations” (355), nor against the tendency of myths and stereotypes to become universal.

***

44 From the scholarly discourses about Appalachia, as well as its image in popular culture, it becomes obvious that if Appalachia did not exist, Americans would have to create it as an antipode to the long-cherished concept of progress, as a scarecrow used to frighten away the sacrilegious idea that the American consumer society might be too pragmatic and commodity-oriented to bring something good to culture. Eller, in the introduction to his book, honestly admits: We know Appalachia exists because we need it to exist in order to define what we are not. It is the “other America” because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives. The notion of Appalachia as a separate place, a region set off from mainstream culture and history, has allowed us to distance ourselves from the uncomfortable dilemmas that the story of Appalachia raises about our own lives and about the larger society. (3)

45 As Raphael Patai emphasizes in his book Myth and Modern Man (1972), a crucial element of every myth is truth, not the factual one, “but rather the truth that dawns upon us as we gain an understanding of the ‘true meaning’ of the myth” (3). To look for a ‘true meaning’ of a myth that keeps adding new, sometimes contradictory elements to its core or, as viewers of TV series would say, pilot story, is next to impossible, and that is why people are inclined to take as truth what is regularly repeated, either literally or in variants; even Patai admits that a myth “requires repetition before it can have a full impact on its audience” (3).

46 Offutt is well aware of the mythological ramifications of his stories and does not succumb to the illusion that a true meaning can be derived from them. For him, the repetitive use of myths is primarily a defense against simplification. For him, mythology is strongly connected with oral history: I was reading mythology. I was reading legends and lore and folk stories and borrowing from them because I grew up hearing that sort of things, and I was trying, in many ways, to create my own stories. But what you’re talking about is

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really related to that time. I just can’t describe the intensity of my feelings of being a part of an otherworldly experience […]. (Interview with Trucks 165)

47 For the blend of the mythological and the present-day (one does not eliminate the other), the short story is an ideal form, even though extremely difficult.12 If a myth is presented as a theme for a short story, its journey to the readership becomes as easy as if they were listening to a story told by an accomplished folk narrator. In this way, as Hardy points out, “the theme in a story can resonate beyond the text in which it appears and into the realm of the reader” (357).

48 According to Offutt, this can be accomplished if short story writers can handle the beginnings and endings of their short stories. To write a good beginning, it is necessary to lay aside one’s self-consciousness and stop “wondering if your idea is sufficient enough” (interview with Dezen 121). The recipe for a good ending is to overcome the “reluctance to leave [their] imaginary world” (121). Offutt says: To me, a story has three endings. There’s the ending for the protagonist, his or her emotional ending. There’s the ending to the events of the story. Then there’s the structural ending to the story itself. It’s hard to try to fit those in. I think ending with an image is always a strong idea. An image that’s related to the protagonist. (Interview with Dezen 121)

49 In “Sawdust” and “Melungeons” the three endings overlap. “Sawdust” ends with a conversation between the main protagonist and the VISTA volunteer in the test center. After the boy, who received a certificate with a gold seal and the governor’s signature, refuses to take a job application, the woman, with resignation in her voice, says: “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing here” (KS 15). The boy’s gloomy response —“None of us do. Most people around here are just waiting to die”—transforms into a joke. The woman’s reaction to the boy’s “but what’s funny is, everybody gets up awful early anyhow,” is “I like to sleep late” (KS 15). In that moment, the woman’s perspective changes: she finally tunes into his wavelength and stops being a stranger, which she proves with her smile. The boy’s perspective changes, too: while his father tried to avoid the town, for the boy it is now another part of the mountains, “just a bunch of people living together in the only wide place between the hills” (KS 15). The episode is accompanied with the concluding image of the boy looking for empty bottles to pay the $15 fee for taking the test, even though the clerk told him that for poor Appalachian young people it is free.

50 Both the anecdote and the powerful image connected with the protagonist return the reader’s attention to the stereotype central to the story. The author presents the boy’s decision not to benefit from his education as a choice of identity, which helps us see the truth behind the often trivialized stereotype of illiterate mountain people. In addition to that, the boy’s unwillingness to take the test as a gift from the government and his insistence on paying for it links it with another stereotype, that of the pride and honor of the residents of Appalachia. At the end of “Melungeons,” Deputy Goins writes down the names of both Gipson and Mullins into his book of prisoners, but before doing it, he puts away the Bible where he was looking for the origins of the Melungeon first names. The first names are missing even in the log, because one of them belonged to a man who “was down to a body now” and the other to a natural element that does not need a name. Later, when he opens the door to step out, people duck “for cover until they recognized him” (OOW 53). Goins, like the boy from “Sawdust,” is more a part of the town than he thinks himself to be, even though he claims that he had known the townspeople “for thirty years, but never really knew [them]” (OOW 53). On the personal

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level, the final incident means liberation for Goins: now, when the feud seems to be over, he can return to his native hills. As the narrator says, there “was nothing he needed to take” (OOW 53).

51 It might seem that the evil streak of the mountain people, as well as, figuratively, the area itself, is safely locked up in jail, but you cannot keep in a cage either a myth or a stereotype whose main characteristics are their ability to travel, proliferate, and be shared. To emphasize the difference between the stereotype and the closely related myth, the author juxtaposes the literal and the symbolic, as well as the natural and the supernatural, which, again, is a distinctive feature of oral narratives. Although Offutt disagrees with the widely shared opinion that “an ending must reverberate back through the story” and “be something that’s inevitable but also unpredictable” (interview with Dezen 121), both “Sawdust” and “Melungeons” meet these demands. Even if Offutt refuses to “worry about all that” (interview with Dezen 121) the closeness of his writings to oral narratives does the job without obvious strain, keeping both the universal and the particular well balanced, as can be expected from a good story with mythical appeal.

52 Returning to Offutt’s characterization of a short story as a look from the entrance of a cave, the best look at myths and stereotypes comes from the liminal space the cave entrance represents: the author can alternately look outside and inside, connect myths and stereotypes with the lives of individuals, and efficiently link the ancient with the present-day. The universality of the stereotypes and the myths makes the stories understandable outside the region where they are set and, at the same time, mediates the flair of the times and places to readers who never set foot on Appalachian soil.13

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alther, Lisa. Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys; The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance. Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2012. Print.

____. Kinfolks: Falling Off the Family Tree; The Search for my Melungeon Ancestors. New York: Arcade, 2007. Print.

Bailey, Thomas A. “The Mythmakers of American History.” Journal of American History 55.1 (June 1968): 5-21. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. Frogmore: Paladin, 1973. Print.

Cantrell, James P. How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, 2006. Print.

Chappell, Fred. “Fred Chappell.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. 4. Ed. Adele Sarkissian. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. 113-26. Print.

Drake, Richard B. A History of Appalachia. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. Print.

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2008. Print.

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Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Novels 1930–1935. Eds. Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. New York: Library of America, 1985. 1-178. Print.

Griffin, Larry J. “Why Was the South a Problem to America?” The South as an American Problem. Ed. Larry J. Griffin and Don H. Doyle. Lexington: U of Georgia P, 1996. 10-32. Print.

Hardy, Sarah. “A Poetics of Immediacy: Oral Narrative and the Short Story.” Style 27.3 (Fall 1993): 352-68. Print.

Hodson, Gordon. “Stereotypes as Legitimizing Myths.” Psychology Today. Blog: Without Prejudice. 22 Dec 2012 Web.

Koeppel, Fredric. “Chris Offutt Hits Area to Promote New Novel.” Commercial Appeal, 6 July 1997: G2. Print.

Offutt, Chris. “A Conversation with Chris Offutt.” Interview with Rob Trucks. The Pleasure of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue U P, 2002. 153-74. Print.

____. “Interview: Chris Offutt Discusses Returning to the Kentucky Hills and His Memoir ‘No Heroes.’” Interview with Steve Inskeep. Weekend Edition Saturday. National Public Radio. Washington, D.C. 17 Aug. 2002. Transcript. ProQuest. Web. 26 June 2012.

____. Kentucky Straight. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.

____. No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Print.

____. Out of the Woods. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Print.

____. “Q & A: Chris Offutt, 39.” Interview with John Harmon. Atlanta Journal-Constitution 5 July 1997: A2. Print.

____. The Same River Twice: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Print.

____. “Sex, Rocks, and Taxidermy: A Conversation with Chris Offutt.” Interview with Alex Dezen. Iowa Review 41.3 (Winter 2011-12): 117-27. Print.

Patai, Raphael. Myth and Modern Man. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Print.

Sidanius, Jim and Felicia Pratto. Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999. Print.

Williamson, J. W. Hillbillyland: What the Movies did to the Mountains and What the Mountains did to the Movies. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. Print.

NOTES

1. Thomas A. Bailey, for example, defined myth as “an account or belief that is demonstrably untrue, in whole or a substantial part” (5). 2. Gordon Hodson, in his Psychology Today blog article (2012), claims that stereotypes “are not strongly related” to other forms of bias, for example, prejudice or discrimination. In his opinion, it is because stereotypes “can often exist independently from our emotions and behaviors.” That is why a negative stereotype can initiate positive emotions and behavioral responses, and vice versa. 3. All biographical data come from two Offutt’s autobiographies: The Same River Twice (1993) and No Heroes (2002).

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4. Both stories are henceforth cited parenthetically in the text: “Sawdust,” included in Kentucky Straight, as KS and “Melungeons” from Out of the Woods as OOW. The stereotype of the violent nature of Appalachian people appears as a subsidiary motif in several other stories from both collections, most prominently in “Smokehouse” from Kentucky Straight, which also touches on the theme of feuds. In addition to it, it introduces a vengeful Melungeon character and the main protagonist of the story has a Melungeon wife. The story’s main focus is nevertheless on alcoholism and gambling. 5. VISTA (The Volunteers in Service to America) has been operating in Appalachia since the program’s establishment in 1965, with the task of participating, like everywhere else, in anti- poverty programs. The GED (General Education Development) test was introduced in the 1940s for soldiers or other people who for various reasons could not complete their high school education, and gave them an opportunity to obtain a substitute for a secondary school degree. See, for example, Eller 108. 6. The exodus is a historical fact: for example, in the 1950s “more than a million people left the region” (Eller 28). In the 1960s “one in three Appalachian adults remained functionally illiterate, compared with 20 percent of all Americans” (Eller 204). 7. Frédérique Spill kindly brought to my attention Offutt’s reference to the scene in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which Anse Bundren, the head of a rural Mississippi clan who is carrying out the last wish of his wife to be buried in Jefferson, gets from Snopes by way of exchange a team of mules that, as one of his sons ironically remarks, must have been fed on sawdust (132). An even more obvious influence of As I Lay Dying can be found in Offutt’s story “Out of the Woods,” in which the main protagonist is illegally transporting, in the trunk of his car, the dead body of his wife’s brother from Nebraska to eastern Kentucky. 8. Following William Gilmore Simms, even though not completely sharing his identification of this region primarily with Native Americans, Cantrell calls Appalachia the “geographical backbone” of the South. Like David Noel Doyle and David Hackett Fischer, Cantrell claims that “the culturally Celtic immigrants settled primarily in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions of the South and then spread westward” (97). 9. Later, Alther adds several even more interesting and, in the light of recent discoveries, also more probable hypotheses. See Kinfolks 45, 95, 104, 137-38, 170. 10. Instead of Gipson, lists occasionally contain the surname Gibson. See, for example, Alther, Kinfolks 45. 11. Alther also remembers her babysitter scaring her with the Melungeons: “The Melungeons have got six fingers on each hand. They grab mean little chillun and carry them off to their caves in the cliffs outside of town” (Kinfolks 1). Even though the physical anomaly of having six fingers on a hand or a foot was found in a number of the Melungeons, Offutt does not mention it in his short stories. 12. Fred Chappell, another Appalachian writer known for short stories, novels, essays, and poetry, more than once admitted: “Of all the forms I have attempted, the short story is the most difficult” (123). 13. This article was written within the project IGA_FF_2016_058, financed from the budget provided in 2016 by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic to Palacký University in Olomouc to support specific research activities at the university.

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ABSTRACTS

Cet article étudie deux nouvelles de Chris Offutt, “Sawdust” et “Melungeons”, qui portent sur deux mythes métamorphosés en stéréotypes et en rapport avec les Appalachiens : leur aversion pour l’éducation et leur nature violente et vengeresse — des traits qui sont à l’origine de diverses querelles. Il analyse la relation entre mythe et stéréotype en s’appuyant sur des recherches récentes en psychologie et sociologie qui définissent comme une catégorie particulière de « mythes légitimisés ». L’analyse a pour toile de fond le mythe des origines des Appalachiens. Les travaux de Sarah Hardy quant aux affinités entre la nouvelle et l’oralité sont ici pris en compte, tout comme les recherches de Lisa Alther sur les racines des Melungeons et les remarques théoriques de Chris Offutt sur le racontage, de manière à mettre en évidence le lien intime qui unit la nouvelle aux folk-tales et donne à ce genre littéraire une capacité particulière pour décrire à la fois les mythes et les stéréotypes.

AUTHORS

MARCEL ARBEIT Marcel Arbeit is Professor in the Department of English and American Studies, Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. His main fields of research are contemporary Southern literature and Canadian cinema. He is the author of a monograph on the novels of Fred Chappell and Cormac McCarthy published in 2006 (in Czech) and the main editor of the three-volume Bibliography of American Literature in Czech Translation (2000). His recent publications focus on Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Harry Crews, Richard Ford, Lewis Nordan, Flannery O’Connor, Chris Offutt, and Elizabeth Spencer. He co-edited The Mississippi Quarterly special issue on Lewis Nordan (2007, with Thomas Ærvold Bjerre) and The (Un)Popular South (2011, with M. Thomas Inge). Between 2005 and 2013 he was the President of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies.

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Bobbie Ann Mason Challenges the Myth of Southernness: Postmodern Identities, Blurring Borders and Literary Labels

Candela Delgado Marin

The Blurring South of Postmodernity

1 Bobbie Ann Mason sets most of her short fiction in the southern state of Kentucky. She is considered as a southern writer. In fact, she was added this year to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame (“KY Writers Hall of Fame”), as a sign of her regional recognition. Even when her fiction departs from the South, her homeland still performs a defining role in her language and characters. However, place and identity have become mythical notions in postmodern times. The self is built upon stories; and the location of the self in a cultural space is understood through stories as well. The stories ingrained in the myths of the South resist being fully erased by the flow of globalized communications, but they have, nevertheless, been affected by the chaotic nature of the postmodern psyche. Southerners, hence, still perceive the effects of their border culture but southern stories of postmodern regional identity and landscape contain interferences. These alien elements have been greeted with both satisfaction and suspicion. The image of a South that is no longer isolated has found its way into the stories, or myths of these states, providing their social, political and cultural tales with ingredients from identities and places from the other side of the border.

2 Text-makers interpret those around them and the land as stories. Contemporary southern writers, like Bobbie Ann Mason, report on the metamorphosis of the region, working on the dividing line between North and South as a fictitious space that has been partially devoid of all the meanings it had been instilled with. The southerners of postmodernity can act as revisionists of the mythical load carried by the region—and part of that weight is put on by the concept of demarcation lines. Stanley J. Grenz, in a

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study of postmodernism in literature, explains the current fragility of uniformity: “The demise of the ground narrative means that we no longer search for the one system of myths that can unite human beings into one people or the globe into one world” (45). Similarly, the South is no longer a cultural block, and neither is the North. Border culture has changed and it is now a complex myth of ever-changing symbols. However, I want to emphasize the intrinsic trait of “borderland” of Kentucky in particular. From the Civil War to the present, Kentucky has been considered a border state.1 This region, as a source of inspiration, facilitates the blurring of absolutes. And these concepts of liminality and fluidity between sides of a barrier are the foundation of my discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason’s questioning of southern identity, of the regionalist short story genre and of literary labels such as postmodernism and dirty realism.

3 It is a struggle to define the concept of “southernness” because this regional identity has undergone drastic changes, but is still tethered to its original cultural uniqueness. This part of the country has developed, maintaining a tension between frantic constant changes and an ingrained attachment to their cultural differentiators. The South has changed in tangible matters, for instance with the alteration of the landscape, with industrialization; and, as well, in impalpable aspects that are, nevertheless, extremely perceptible—to name a few: the drastic reframing of social conscience, the gradual integration of globalized cultural references, or the modulation of strong local accents towards the more standard. The pre-bellum cruelty and the damage left by the war have unavoidably complicated the organic establishment of a unified southern identity. Literary texts have tried to either construct collective definitions of what being from the South means or, conversely, to underline the elusive nature of southerners as a cultural type. In both cases, however, the arguments are built based on the opposition with the North. Nevertheless, attempting to provide a final definition of this opposition would be a shallow sociological consideration, because as Scott Romine explains: “rarely […] does space acquire coherence or integration” (177). Borders are unfixable beyond maps.

4 In an interview in 1995, Chicano scholar Gloria Anzaldúa describes how the fluidity of borders may produce wounded subjects: “[w]hen you are in this transition space, […] there’s nothing firm that you can grasp, not even your past memories because you are re-interpreting them and in re-interpreting them you are changing the past” (Urch 78). The flux of alien cultural artifacts, tales, and words triggers a fear of depersonalization and creates a complex relation with nostalgia because the past becomes unseizable and yet extremely necessary. David Anderson in his study of southern nostalgia accounts for the effect memory has on perception: “Rather than remembering precisely what was, we tend to make the past comprehensible in relation to the present conditions of the here and now” (107). Thus, if southerners organize their consciousness of past and present based on a mutable reality, the resulting literature will reflect this state of confusion and scatteration.

5 Consequently, the evolution of the narratives of the South is an example of stories that grow along with changes in cartography. That is, the complexity of southern myths reflects the modifications of the political and historical borders of the region. But, as Louis D. Rubin Jr. explained in his 1991 study of southernness: “[W]hatever the complexity of the ingredients that go to make it [a shared identity] up, it works in direct and palpable ways to cause its members to identify their concerns with those of a particular social and cultural allegiance” (17). Thus, southernness might be a

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mythology, but it becomes physical, perceptible, in the intricacies and contradictions of southern language and stories, where people can find a sense of belonging.

6 Therefore, even from a skeptical perspective, the southern myths may still be employed as a soothing element, providing common ground for members of the disintegrated South. In fact, Bobbie Ann Mason’s characters are aware of the myths of the South, but they have a complicated relationship with them; that is why some want to leave the South behind, and others fight to stay but even the latter tend to be restless. In her story “Residents and Transients,” Stephen tries to convince his wife Mary of leaving her family’s farmhouse in rural Kentucky but she resists. However, she had previously lived in the North for a long time and only came back to take care of her sick parents. Now she is strongly attached to the land, mentioning her need to be able to see those “cornfields”. And yet, Mary is herself a stranger in her homeland: “I’m very much an outsider myself, though I’ve tried to fit in since I’ve been back” (118-19). This complicated conceptualization of nostalgia and regional identity sources many of the plots of Mason’s stories. In fact, the writer herself reflects in the following way on the sense of place: “I think dislocation is a dizzying reality, full of possibility […]. If the writer can use his or her craft and imagination to pull off the illusions of a place we can believe is real, then we feel like we’ve really been somewhere” (“Sense of Place” 224). That is, by drawing characters that struggle with the sense of belonging, and choosing settings that are in constant change, she actually depicts more believable southern places that reflect the multifaceted and permutable postmodern southern myths. Furthermore, her stories depict the myths while acknowledging that her literature is in itself also a myth because it is a narrative of a “dislocated” region. However, the South remains Mason’s creative stimulus, because, nevertheless, and regardless of its artifice nature, it is still useful to create an “illusion” of southernness as a tool to achieve the aforementioned sense of place.

7 Thus, Bobbie Ann Mason’s characters acknowledge the crumbling state of any inherited imagery. In the South she portrays, where culture leaks into and permeates North and South and vice versa, characters perceive southernness as a fabrication. That is why her insight into local identity, notwithstanding her life experience in the North, eventually turned into her main inspiration, an inspiration to fabricate, to write fiction: “writing has been a response to a world that is rich in material even though bounded by farm fences” (“Reading Between the Lines” 2014). Myth is associated with fictitious and false representations, which are useful literary triggers. That is, Mason recognizes the limits of the South and its suffocating effect, together with the South’s potential to be a fruitful seed of creativity. This is in itself a paradox: the South as a place that simultaneously puts limits, “fences”, to inspiration, while feeding the imagination with its “rich material”. In postmodernism, realism struggles with incoherence, paradoxes and delusion.

8 The South where Mason’s characters evolve is involved in constant reproductions: recreations of nostalgia, products of popular culture and copies of original folklore. Mark S. Graybill in an analysis of Mason’s postmodern fictional identities states that the writer immerses her characters in “the pervasive simulacra of American society” (243). This is the essence of postmodernity according to Fredric Jameson and his analysis of such a context and the corresponding consumerist society, where “the emergence of new formal features in culture” correlates with “a new type of social life and a new economic order” (3). That is, a postmodern society moves from mass-

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production and compulsive consumption of products to a mass production of culture, resulting in an induced necessity to consume new reproductions of cultural identities.

9 The globalized Kentucky that concerns Mason forces her characters to face altered places (big malls, smoky factories, shrinking farms, or expanding subdivisions) that unsettle previous learnt interactions with the world. Change is both exciting and threatening in her stories and the following image from “New Ground” (1983) conveys this: “[Ivaline, an elderly farmer, works the land around the family home and looks beyond their lake and fields:] Beyond the pastures, a smokestack from the industrial park is making a curlicue of smoke in the sky” (31). Mason describes pollution as a decorative curl to emphasize the apparent inoffensive nature of the fumes, but the spiral shape proceeds aimlessly and as a hazard, approaching their farm. The factory seems to appear out of smoke, as if it were the result of magic tricks—a sudden presence, instead of a gradual change–, portraying a sense of the unreal. In this manner, Mason inserts within the postmodern context of transformation of the rural South, the stereotype of the southern farmer passive in the face of invasive progress.

10 Consequently, past and present are in constant dialogue in the postmodern South, incapable of being able to disentangle themselves completely from each other. The landscapes, or stages evoked by Mason, depict a South where silhouettes from the fading South and the emerging South come into contact and, at times, merge. For instance, in the story “Spence + Lila,” Spence burns trash in the fields of his farm, behind the building that used to be their milkhouse, now long gone: “The cloud of black smoke blows south, toward the smokestack of the industrial park. Spence likes that […] he’s sending the park a message” (95). Again, the symbol of the smoke links the old and the new South in a cloud of postmodernity—a blurry space where tradition and progress collide. The acceptance of the semantic complexity of a South in permanent transition entails constant rumination on memory and history. But, “[i]f a subjective, sensory event in the past can be recaptured, by dint of being reinvoked by a similar experience in the present, two separate moments in time are joined. The individual consciousness is thereby liberated from chronology and, however briefly, can exist free of its limitations” (Rubin, Southern Cross 19). Spence can see the cloud of smoke, smell the materials in flames, and feel the heat of the fire. This is an action that he has probably performed before the cornfields were taken over by factories. Thus, through his body and senses, past and present fuse in his mind. Inherited furniture has a similar effect on Sandra in the story “The Funeral Side”: “Sandra studied the furniture, … Was there a time in life when one’s forebears suddenly insisted on being acknowledged?” (138). The pieces of furniture impersonate the materialization of her family tree, imposing the presence of ancestry in the immediate. This is the permanent coexistence of past and present, of claustrophobia caused by the ever-present local color, which is simultaneously and paradoxically also appreciated. Another illustration of this would be crafts for the narrator and character Bill in “Window Lights.” This man, after his separation from his wife, takes on quilting, acting out the skills of his deceased mother. He presents a male interpretation of one of the main symbols of the traditional South. The artistic project leads him to the following conclusion: “I sit in my easy chair in front of the television and write in my journal. My insight of the Day: To avoid the trap of history, you’ve got to knowingly reenact it, go with it right up to the edge, then pull back” (148). This man embraces the myth of the quilt but reconstructs it because he is inverting gender roles. In this story, the man sews the pieces of the family inheritance together in this quilt, adapting the myth in order to make it functional within the

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current reality. And yet, he reenacts his mother, by speaking like her, remembering her, and sewing like her. Bill’s mother is just a memory now, but he brings her back to the present, converging the old and the new South.

11 In these temporal intersections Mason chooses for her story plots, characters who experience a permanent sense of tug-of-war with the South. As an illustration, Nancy in the story “The Prelude” says that: “Kentucky wouldn’t release her. She wouldn’t let it. She fought Jack [her husband] on this, and he always accused her of being held back by her culture” (217). Thus, characters may feel trapped by the South, but, at the same time, like Nancy, they can trap the South within them. The inability to forever leave the South behind forces the characters to often restrict their journeys to individual reveries, which would represent the only option to undergo a rite of passage that may free them from the southern frontier burden, without actually having to cross it; because “[m]aybe you can’t get to the South from here-and-now ever again, ‘here’ being the postsouthern position of infinite (or almost infinite) simulacra” (Kreyling 194). The myth of the South is being rapidly and constantly reconstructed on a base of representations that are weak as referents due to their distance from the original sources. Barbara in the “The Secret of the Pyramids” drives at night and sees how: “Paducah’s first mall, now called the ‘price-down mall,’ seemed forlorn, like an abandoned movie set” (70). That is, a pure scenario with props to perform the regionalism of a South that has melted away.

12 Consequently, the characters become either metaphor projectors or tropes in themselves—actors that perform the South or just an element on the “set” of southernness. In one of Mason’s latest stories, “The Horsehair Ball Gown” (2013), two elderly sisters refuse to accept the changes undergone by Kentucky. They enjoy the “old-time atmosphere” of their regular coffee stop, as if it were a scene in a cinematic production from past times. The pervading mood of this space imports a fake sense of stability. However, the café is nothing but a metaphor, a symbol of the South they refuse to forget. Similarly, the two sisters themselves become in the story carriers of the ambiance of the old South that does not longer exist around them. Nevertheless, one of the them, Isabella, wants to be forward thinking and liberate herself from constrains of an old South that represents hatred, fear and racism, but Maud, the eldest, simply cannot process the new. Not letting go of the old myths is distancing these two women, who only have each other: “Now Isabella thought about her sister’s hairnets wadded up in her drawer like little bundles of spiderwebs. They were too gossamery to wash.” In this metonymy, the overused nets substitute Maud, representing the frailty of the old myths, which cannot be “washed,” cleaned away from sins, nor recycled. And yet, there is love in Isabella’s thought. The words chosen to describe the nets do not only carry negative connotations. There is delicacy and delight in the description. This combination of rejection of and attraction towards the South, and the duality of disintegration and perdurability of southern myths characterizes Mason’s South blurring in postmodernity.

Blurring Literary Myths

13 Regardless of the fact that postmodernity, postmodernism, and southern literature are all terms that have already been mentioned in the previous section, the present argument does not entertain absolute literary categorizations in the case of Bobbie Ann

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Mason. Jean Baudrillard claimed: “America is neither a dream nor a reality. It is hyperreality. It is a hyperreality because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though it were already achieved” (28). This postmodern America does not fully work as a theoretical starting point for Mason’s short stories, even though simulation and consumption are present in her books; however, her characters are still able to differentiate those from reality. Even if Mason writes about the confusion of postmodernity, her characters do not completely lose touch with their environment. Neither do these characters believe in an American utopia because they question its values even if they need reassurance. In the humorous piece “Tweeting War and Peace,” written in the form of a conversation in collaboration with the writer Meg Pokrass, the two authors ironically play with the concepts of literary canon and the inclusion of technology. Mason writes “Nobody is reading anything long. That’s why there is no twittering chez Hemingway.” To what Pokrass answers: “Someday all will see so clearly how great novels like War and Peace could have been accomplished in tweets.” The significance of their amusing portrayal of the social network Twitter encapsulates the cynicism with which some of Mason’s characters process established ideas or timelessness in general. Sarcastically, the two writers question whether Tolstoy’s or Hemingway’s novels can be posted on the Internet in the form of 140-character messages. Similarly, the postmodern South leaves room for skepticism but in Mason’s stories there is a limit to satire and incongruity.

14 Overall, Baudrillard’s postmodern “hyperreality” does not collocate with Mason’s lyrical approach to the crudities of the South. Her poetic prose comes closer to other styles. Thus, regardless of Mason’s interest in postmodernity as subject matter and her acceptance of the postmodern identity crisis, I would like to consider imagism2 as a writing influence. It makes emotions visible for the reader, using a direct narrative. Imagists represented a subject without distorting it with complicated language. However, the sensorial connotations of the words chosen are important in order to ensure an aftertaste; that is, a post-reading reverberation of the image portrayed. Additionally, and in connection with imagism, I want to now contemplate the relevance in Mason of minimalism,3 which is a subgenre of postmodernism. In minimalism, all subjects are accepted, regardless of their place within the canon of beauty. Additionally, sparse language coexists with microscopic descriptions and banal details in order to build an accurate environment. Finally, a branch of minimalism, dirty realism4, also called K-mart realism, is also relevant in Mason. Here characters come mainly from working class sectors of the population, absorbed by consumerism and popular culture. Modernism, imagism, postmodernism or minimalism are all absolute labels that, in my view, escape the liminal reality of Bobbie Ann Mason’s characters and yet all, in some aspects, emerge in her stories.

15 Mason’s recent interest in flash-fiction or micro-fiction is very useful to illustrate this combination of styles. In the fall of 2015, she published two brief pieces in Frederick Barthelme’s online journal New World Writing. One of them, entitled “Falling”, is written in short phrases and sentences, at times in paragraphs of only one sentence. It is the “synopsis” of a day in the life of the narrator, whose husband, George, has fallen from a ladder in the porch of their farmhouse and broken a leg. She is now in charge of chores and a full-time care-provider: “Dulled by oxycodone, George lolled in his easeful new electric chair, so far away from me, strung up like a man on a rack. Rain, rain today. Momentary hail. Going out to look for the dead tree, to see if it has surrendered to the

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earth.” This wife is overwhelmed and scared, but these feelings are not explicitly mentioned. Real objects and elements of the landscape are juxtaposed to create an emotive image through the concrete. The interrelation between the robotic movements of the electronic recliner, the drugs, the hail and the dead trees is not explained. However, the falling dead trunks in the nearby forest, George’s immobile limb and the hurling frozen rain convey her sense of entrapment: symbols of strength are falling— her husband and her trees—and the weather keeps her indoors. Like William Carlos Williams in Paterson, Mason in not talking to the reader using abstract ideas but objective reality: “–Say it, no ideas but in things–” (6). Thus, Mason approaches imagism and minimalism, while introducing elements of K-mart realism, in this case, the reference to morphine, creating a stylistic combination that more accurately represents the multidimensional southernness of her characters.

16 For this reason, I would not attach a single label to Bobbie Ann Mason, instead I read her stories from the perspective of combined styles, which could be called “K-Mart imagism,” because her minimalistic tales approach imagism as they do not “tell” but “show.” Her lyrical realism of “less is more” contains intense imagery that transforms material spaces into metaphorical spaces. Objects are described with precision, the land is mapped out on the page in detail, but the writer integrates simple tropes within the literal to suggest symbols to the reader. Thus, so far, not only the North and South opposition and the concept of southernness have become a myth in Mason, but, literary labels also, become uncertain, like misconceptions, and so, myths. She writes from a realistic prism, trying not to lose readers in a labyrinth of linguistic puzzles and abstract metaphors. Her characters are down to earth, they struggle with change but not chaos, and the narrative arch remains coherent. However, using Maver Igor’s conception of contemporary southern literature—which is close to Mason’s in structure, style and themes—these texts can be labeled as postmodern due to their “intergenre” nature, in this case, and from my point of view, “K-mart imagism”, mixing postmodern writing with traits of traditional southern novels, “preoccupied [still] with old myths, stereotypes, history and, above all, the locale” (43). Therefore, even though Mason’s tropes and language resemble the ordinary lives of contemporary Kentucky, the lyrical beauty and attention to the presence of memory, introspection and imagination prove that postmodernism (like other labels) as Gerhard Hoffmann explains “is not a stable entity but changes in time” (35). In the same way myths change, transmitted orally by storytellers.

17 The myths of this South in transition, as seen through the eyes of postmodernity, influence Bobbie Ann Mason’s fictional context and technique, and, more importantly, favor the short story form. This is what the author says about her characters and the plots in an interview with Mervyn Rothstein: I feel that my characters are on the threshold of possibility […]. Their lives are being changed, and they’re very excited by it. They’re getting a chance maybe for the first time in their lives to get somewhere and to prove something and to do something. Many of my characters are caught up in the myth of progress; from their point of view it means liberation, the promise of a better life.

18 The “myth of progress” that forever equally threatens and excites the South can function as a useful base for short stories. The intensity of the postsouthern can only be maintained for a certain period of time when used as setting. Within this pool of strong emotions, the writer needs to integrate moments of clarity. This passionate component is thus combined, and so contained, with the simplicity of unrefined realism. In her

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short piece “The Missing Plane,” the narrator is enjoying the excitement of TV news reports: “How thrilling, exhilarating. We do love a mystery. […] All the reenactments and the simulations.” These sentences and clauses are short, the links between them are not explicit and the language is plain. In this way, Mason portrays the narrators yearning for stimulation and change. The rhythm is fast like short breaths, emulating action, while, actually, the narrator is a mere spectator wanting, she says, “dopamine hits,” while sitting on a sofa. In this South of postmodernity there is not only the aforementioned constant re-productions, but also a permanent desire of transformation, and, simultaneously, there is an underlying paralysis and Mason’s use of rhythm in her short stories reflects this combination.

19 This awareness of permanent change makes characters feel the need to be prepared for immediate reaction, being able to rely only on the present moment. The postsouthern temporal uncertainty is then solved by writing in terms of opposites: details and gaps, noise and silences, which are all interspersed rapidly. In this manner, Bobbie Ann Mason faithfully transmits the exhilaration of postmodern metamorphosis and also emphasizes, with this rhythm, the insecurity of her characters. The key for this cadence is popular culture, and not only the most commonly used forms such as pop and rock, advertisement or television. Mason has kept up with the times, including l the current digital world, like in the previous example of Twitter, and experimenting with flash fiction. In the latter, she takes the brevity of the short story to the extreme to reflect the post-postmodern issue of attention deficit, caused by the digital invasion. In her piece “Ready,” published in November 2014, Bobbie Ann Mason depicts a chain conversation on the online social platform Facebook. The writer imitates the format of social media dialogues, including the time the comments were posted, and the number of times someone has clicked the icon “like” to demonstrate approval or support. Two women and a man discuss the skills of the actor Hugh Laurie. They disagree. The discussion starts when one of the women shares a quote by the actor. One of the women explains the meaning of the actor’s words: “It was a parody of indecisiveness.” So the microfiction piece is a parody within parody of postmodern difficulty with settling conversations, establishing meanings, and creating absolutes. The dialogue itself is made of quotes—isolated speeches left alone until a lagged answer is posted— but there is no conclusion.

20 This piece brings up the absurdity of instant messaging and of the constant flow of virtual information the characters are subjected to in Mason’s latest publications. Digital texting takes minimalism as the norm as the words of the “speaker-typer,” so to say, are limited to a number or else will not be posted, and hence, will not exist. Thus, identity in the digital South depends on others’ employment of one’s posted words. Hence, being reposted or shared, liked or ignored determines the relevance of one’s speech. This reactive and rapid pace of digital popular culture and communication favors the short story form, not only for its focus on concision, but also because an attempt to save words without losing part of the meaning requires careful linguistic and poetic modulation. Viorica Patea calls this trait of the short story “the aesthetics of economy.” She explains that “with its elliptical, metaphoric and metonymic discourse, the short story’s brevity generates a heightened sense of concentration, compression and intensity, […] leading to an increased emphasis on aesthetic stylization” (13). The concision imposed by the aforementioned social media creates fragmented dialogues of

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high intensity that prove useful mimicries of the broken communication present in the digital world, which, in turn, serves the stylistic purpose of short fiction.

21 Ultimately, Mason’s latest publications are a sign of her adaptation to the South beyond postmodernity. This digital South perpetuates the anesthetic effect of the intermittent presence of postmodern media, advertising and popular culture that has always been part of her short stories. The interaction of the characters with the visual and aural distractions of postmodernity numbs their sense of disconnection. The resulting cognitive overload is captured effectively in microfiction as it works on the principle of what Marc Botha calls “sublime intensity.” That is, literature that portrays the current social “need for simultaneous intensification and acceleration” (216). Bobbie Ann Mason depicts a South that is experienced in fragments, with constant interruptions that make difficult for characters to produce a continuous train of thought. Their ideas jump rapidly between concepts, concerns, emotions and perceptions. This is an effect of postmodern imposed speed, and postmodern reveries need to occur in these conditions.

22 Hence, the fanciful moments found both in Mason’s conventional short stories and her most recent flash fiction accept the permutable character of this reality; as Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman states in postmodernity “ambivalence is endemic and incurable” (xiv). Mason reflects this instability in her writing letting her characters’ fantasy demonstrate the fusion between people and popular culture, as well as the speed with which humans are capable of processing the interruptions of the outer world and integrate them into their thoughts. In her piece of microfiction “The Girl in Purple,” published in The New Flash Fiction Review in 2014, the character Denis Moore 5 sits at a café and observes a lady dressed in purple. He would like to approach her and introduce himself but his thoughts unstoppably wonder and his stream of consciousness, almost illogical, gets in the way of action: The Auguste Macke poster of “Promenade 1913” above his mantel. Andy Kaufman wrestling women in the videos he had watched. Lisbeth Salander with the dragon tattoo. The nutrition facts on the back of the granola bar in his pocket. The girl in purple was coughing. She paused on the Promenade and coughed repeatedly. Something had gone down the wrong way. He knew the feeling.

23 The digressions of the character illustrate Mason’s awareness both of postmodern reveries, as well as of the literary experimentations required to stylistically portray with realism the accelerated and unstructured rhythm of a sensitive observer in a scene of postmodernity. His mind is capable of equally reflecting on highbrow knowledge, in the case of the 1913 painting of the German Expressionist, as well as the 2005 bestselling crime novel by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. Additionally, his fancy contemplates the current dietary concerns encouraged by science, education and advertising. This multiplicity of sources of curiosity for the character elaborate on the myth of postmodernity and the myth of the short story form. Fragmentation is at the core of both myths, and Mason is adapting them to the reality she is nowadays observing around her, projecting, in this case, on Denis Moore’s imagination the complex postmodern paradigm.

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Solace amidst the Myth of Postmodernity

24 At this point in the discussion, it can be concluded that Bobbie Ann Mason is not postmodern in every sense, but she definitely writes about postmodernity, in this case the “postsouthern.”6; her characters are not cynics but neither romantics, and her language is minimalistic but marked by images. And, in fact, the power of her imagery brings coherence in style and theme to her resistance to absolutes and labels. This visually descriptive language provides a key for understanding Mason’s relation to the postsouthern. The frequent laconism of her characters makes room for the narrator to give an account of where the gaze and bodies of these characters are placed. The contemplative passages and their strong sensorial accuracy result in a quiet and thoughtful survey of the surroundings that soothes the overwhelming effect of postmodern stimulants. “There is no room for silence and inactivity in the postmodern world. Commercialism prods us to always be in motion […]. We yearn (often unconsciously) for transcendence amidst the malaise and fragmentation of postmodern life” (Davis and Womack 163). Thus, through the sensorial, Mason is providing a silent shelter from postmodernity.

25 That is, in fact, how she has always perceived the world; in her memoir Clear Springs, Mason explains that growing up, sounds “had shapes”; she “assigned a visual language to the sounds” she heard before she could read (38). The lasting impression of sounds in young Mason testifies to her acute sensory interaction with the South. In fact, for her, her narrators and characters, this close connection with surroundings often activates synaesthesia, when senses stimulate each other, which in turn provides Mason’s stories with perceptual accuracy. And she admits that even now, as a writer, the written word is a “subtitle” to the image (38); that is, in her fiction, the image is the most relevant aspect to portray, as well as accents, and any other aspect of language that may add physicality, flavor or color to the words.

26 In her story “The Face Lady” (2014), a Kentucky aspiring actress living in L.A, Melanie, is offered a role in a reality show in China. Her best friend Susan has cancer but Melanie, who is also the narrator, cannot confront the situation and visit her. This avoidance makes Melanie feel guilty and she imagines a possible chat with Susan in her head while she walks on the beach before leaving for a radical life change. “Do the line again. Say it like you meant it”—she says to herself as if it were a script. Then, reality comes to the forefront of the story: “There are lizards at my feet, slithering into a tangle of seaweed. I am silent, a flood of memories shoving me down like the approaching surf.” All the senses of the reader are activated in these brief lines, where movement, textures, sounds or their absence, colors, smells, are all contained in the selection of words. There is juxtaposition—the tide and her memories with Susan. Her guilt, and the power of her recollections are felt because they are associated with the waves in the shore. Her fear to leave L.A can be linked to the sticky seaweed entangled in her toes. She stops the fantasy dialogue to feel, and in her silence, the descriptions of the setting help the reader experience the narrator’s sensorial perception. This becomes a more effective translation of emotions onto the page, rather than complicated tropes and complex sentence structures. The forms or shapes created by the sensorial terminology provide the story with a deeper meaning that goes beyond the literal minute detail. The objects that bring focus to these images accumulate meaning through the action of reading. As the story unfolds, the writer creates a

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referential chain that links images throughout, so that when the final projection is created, the reader perceives the underlying message of the story, sawed together like a quilt—which is, paradoxically, a southern myth.

27 This sensorial strategy, which can bring meaning in a life of fragmentation, is the one followed by the character Scott in Mason’s story “The Caretakers,” published in 2016 in The Iowa Review. Scott and his wife Donna are on the verge of divorce amid repeated discussions and even physical aggression. However, they have been offered a summer job as caretakers of a wealthy couple’s hacienda in California. The Southwest in this story is a frontier that seems as distant from the characters’ home in Kentucky as the border with the North. Surrounded by luxury, momentarily, Scott and Donna act as if they could still be happy together, but the traumatic experience of their last violent fight comes to the surface: “In the sun, Scott could see clearly the place on her scalp where he had hit her with her vanity mirror two months ago. He hadn’t meant to do it, but after that, something was gone between them.” Communication is broken between them and the horror of the aggression is omnipresent, literally in the form of a scar, and metaphorically in their unspoken pain. In this scene they are in the garden of the hacienda and they have found old cat prints on a square of concrete. The mark on the floor leads the character and the reader to the mark in Donna’s scalp. Scott cannot articulate his guilt and fear so he resorts to the senses: “He touched the spot, but she did not flinch. She was still running her fingers over the grooves of the cat tracks.” Donna does not react to his touch. She seems passive when reminded of the trauma. But the action of feeling the cat tracks soothes her sense of broken identity, either through quiet distraction or silent contemplation.

28 The strong imagery, as a constituent of Mason’s literary strategy, functions as a materialization of the narrators’ and characters’ fancy. For instance, in the aforementioned “The Face Lady,” after looking at the lizards in the sand, the narrator fantasizes with music and animals: “No doubt the dolphins out there are singing ‘Home Sweet Home’.” Her sick friend, Susan, was from Kentucky like her; they explored the West and the big city together. The dolphins are melodramatic reminders of her failure to support her friend during this terrible illness, but it also reminds her of where she started from, just in a moment when she is about to cross new frontiers and escape even further away from her original South. This lack of stable identity, swinging back and forth from the South, becomes apparent in Mason’s characters’ disassociation between their prolific imaginative productions and their intermittent paralysis when life requires determination and acceptance of mutation. In the case of the actress in “The Face Lady,” she is unable to talk to her friend, but her imagination is constantly fruitful, capable of creating fictional dialogues in her head. In these enduring contemplative states of apparent paralysis, which is such in terms of action but not mentally, these individuals long for independence and for experiences freed from the folkloric burden of the South, the looming myth. The “singing” dolphins, for instance, chase the actress, reminding her of home, while she prepares to leave for Asia; and the quiet shore loudly reminds her of present solitude and isolation.

29 Graham Clarke studies Raymond Carver’s ability to combine the skills of introspection and empathy in his characters by means of “an absolute precision of attention: of the eye registering the minutest details in order to sense the terms of another’s existence” (104-05). The parallelism with the observant silences found in Mason’s stories is clear, as she uses them to rescue southerners from the postmodern blurring line between

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individuality and lack of connection. In this liminal space, the writer needs more than a verbal device to portray a realistic bond between characters in a postmodern scenario, because, as T.E. Hulme7 said: “Language […] only expresses the lowest common denominator of the emotions of one kind. It leaves out all the individuality of an emotion as it really exists and substitutes for it a kind of stock or type emotion” (Gage 27). Quietness and fancy bring solace to the characters in this postmodern limbo where people struggle to feel unique among mass culture and globalization, while constantly attempting to establish relationships, build alliances, and experience a sense of belonging. The latter is further complicated in the hectic rhythms of postmodernity. Nancy in the story “Nancy Culpepper,” “searche[s] the murky sky, feeling that the two of them [her husband and herself] were lone travellers on the edge of some outer-space adventure. At the same time, she kept thinking of her parents at home” (176). She enjoys the fulfilling sense of independence having escaped her hometown. Nevertheless, these anchoring recollections prevent her from an actual detachment. The outer-space, the freedom away from the borderland and the myths of the South, is close and yet unreachable. This elaborate identity crisis cannot be articulated in dialogue or explicitly; instead, a simile is needed for the sensorial to transmit the message in the name of the character. The couple can be pictured in the infinite gloom of the universe, as a symbol of elation and freedom. However, the anchor of the South pops up in her mind, interrupting her illusion.

30 In Bobbie Ann Mason’s stories, these simple tropes bring physicality to the abstract. The southerners in these tales feel isolated in the liminal space of postsouthern uncertainty. A recurrent metaphor in Mason’s stories is hence the indivisible bound with the South and the unfeasible freedom from it. In the story “The Rookers,” the characters try to understand the nature of photons: “‘If you try to separate them, they disappear. They don’t exist except in a group. Bob says this is one of the most important discoveries in the history of the world’” (28). The explanation can very well function as an allegory of Mason’s employment of the concept of nostalgia, counterposed to the eagerness to overcome the southern border. That is, if the selfhood of a southerner is extrapolated to an isolated environment, away from its roots, out of reach from the familiar, recollections and local history, it will, most likely, disintegrate, like photons.

31 Hence, Mason’s characters at times feel stationed in the center of the floating signifier of southern postmodernity, lonely, confused and overstimulated. Here they struggle to compose a sense of identity through the available blurred social and cultural projections formed in the threshold between North and South. Stylistically, this equally becomes apparent as “Mason’s use of the present tense in the majority of her stories serves as the expression of this trapped condition […]; the moment stilled and isolated from the past and future is yet emblematic of them both, of the gray ongoingness of things” (Moore). Even though the focus of this article is placed on short stories, I would like to briefly comment on Mason’s novel In Country, where the teenager protagonist’s mood is described in the following manner as she leaves her hometown: ‘’Sam likes the feeling of strangeness. They are at a crossroads: the interstate with traffic heading east and west, and the state road with north-south traffic. She’s in limbo, stationed right in the center of this enormous amount of energy” (17). Being an alien is rendered positively and yet, at the frontier, the inbetweener resides in a limbo, where her background becomes oblivious to her existence, whilst the synergy created by the encounter of possibility blocks her ability to act.

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32 Like Nancy in the previous example, Sam turns away from the South, but the South pulls her back. This liminal space, however, where the North, the South of Postmodernity, roots and dreams all conflate, does not only trigger confusion; it equally excites the characters. The border, the crossroads, the intersection, these are all icons of the uncertainty of the postsouthern context. Therefore, the unsettling qualities of the unknown are equal to its soothing effect. This is because Mason’s characters always have desires. They might be stagnant due to a lack of action, but their aspirations continue. In the story “Clubbing,” a widow, Joyce, is hosting her young niece and a friend. The girls are getting ready for a night out, and jokingly comment on Joyce’s passé customs, obviously bringing a taste of the old South to the scene. Joyce recalls driving her latest husband Bob to treatment sessions to the hospital when he got cancer: “he was so stoic, so quiet, as if speaking would be impolite.” Back then, language was an unsuccessful tool to relate to the world. In the present moment, in front of the energy of youth and the girls’ condescending comments on her old- fashioned lifestyle, she shifts from traumatic memories to a daydream state. At that moment, the character is quiet and her mind projects imaginary scenes where the senses take over. And so, Joyce switches from the memory of her cremated husband to the following illusory picture of her young niece Cassandra in a night out: Cassandra told me that at a club the young people are packed so closely together they are almost swimming. There is no talking, just squealing and shouting. I visualize them like desperate fish in a tank, swimming in circles. I’m imagining the young bodies, dripping with sex, barely clothed, moving all against each other in a rapid rhythm, like a large group making a toast, raising the glass and then everybody touching everybody’s glass. Maybe that is how they are dancing, all swimming, slippery together in the water. It is a thought too delicious to bear.

33 Skin, perspiration, movement, smells, sounds, but no words, create a scene of arousal. Joyce realizes about the lack of excitement in her daily life, and so, she awakens her senses using the presence of the new South brought by Cassandra. This is the fanciful creation that soothes Joyce in her unprocessed trauma. Trauma for Joyce lies in nostalgia, while excitement is found in the future generations of southerners. But she stands in the middle.

34 The fact that accepting their existence in the border and in permanent change eventually contain positive connotations is not surprising, because Mason’s characters will vanquish the trapping myth of their cultural artifacts and southern identity by disentangling themselves from the fixation with the border. Because: “The dynamics of mythmaking suggest that resolution of the nation’s dilemmas cannot be accomplished by clinging doggedly to its old myths–but also that rediscovery of their core of nobility could yet result from the contemporary turbulence caused by pressures from without and revolt from within” (Gaston 246). These are the revolts performed by Bobbie Ann Mason’s characters; even if these are brief, or fail to work as climax in the stories. They will still pursue all objections to limitations, without being defeated by postmodern apathy.

35 Notwithstanding the struggles caused by the fragmented and rushed identities of the South growing in postmodernity, the upcoming conclusion reached by Bobbie Ann Mason’s character and first person narrator in the story “Underground”, Donna, summarizes why her characters will continue to challenge myths, embracing courage to overcome the postsouthern uncertainties, in a quest to regain the ownership of her cultural identity, which is simple and yet rich. Donna is taking anti-depressants. Her

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husband has left her and her two teenage children have moved to California with their father. She has stayed behind in Kentucky. Now she is testing herself, experimenting through simple gestures and also significant adjustments, from a new recipe or a new tan, to new bars and a new boyfriend. Towards the end of the story, she ponders her changes, connecting her body to the present moment, and creating a metaphor in her mind: “I breathe deeply, as if to reach my buried feelings. Some strange woman has been superimposed on me, like a beauty mask that has to be peeled off. But it occurs to me that underneath there may be something beautiful.” Southernness is diversity, development, tradition and stories. Myths are masks for communities and cultures, while beauty, identity and originality resides underneath. Bobbie Ann Mason finds aesthetics on both sides of the myth, and both sides of the border. The anxieties and the excitement of postmodernity are capable of being sources of inspiration for the writer and the characters, as long as the myth is reconquered in the awareness found through the senses and in silence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, David. “Down Memory Lane: Nostalgia for the Old South in Post-Civil War Plantation Reminiscences.” The Journal of Southern History 71. 1 (Feb. 2005): 105-36. Print.

“Antebellum Kentucky.” Kentucky Great River Road. Web. 15 Jan. 2016.

Ashley, Scott. “Imagism.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Volume 1. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. 259-66. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. C. Turner. London: Verso, 1986. Print.

Bauman, Zygmunt. “Foreword: On Anthony Elliott’s Subject to Ourselves.” Anthony Elliott. Subject to Ourselves: Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Postmodernity. Second Edition. London: Routledge, 2016. xi-xiv. Print.

Botha, Marc. “Microfiction.” The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story. Ed. Ann-Marie Einhaus. New York: Cambridge UP, 2016. 201-220. Print.

Buford, Bill. “Editorial. Dirty Realism: New Writing in America.” Granta: The Magazine of New Writing 8 (Summer 1983). Web. 20 Aug. 2016.

Clark, Robert C. American Literary Minimalism. Tuscaloosa: The U of Alabama P, 2014. Print.

Clarke, Graham. “Investing the Glimpse: Raymond Carver and the Syntax of Silence.” The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature Since 1970. Ed. Graham Clarke. London: Vision, 1990. 99-122. Print.

Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. Postmodern Humanism and Contemporary Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Gaston, Paul M. The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Print.

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Gage, John T. In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981. Print.

Graybill Mark S. “Reconstructing/Deconstructing Genre and Gender: Postmodern Identity in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country and Josephine Humphreys’s Rich in Love.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.3 (2002): 239-59. Print.

Grenz, Stanley J. A Primer on Postmodernism. Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996. Print.

Hoffmann, Gerhard. From Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

“KY Writers Hall of Fame.” Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Lexington, Kentucky. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Kreyling, Michael. The South That Wasn’t There: Postsouthern Memory and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Print.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Bobbie Ann Mason by Craig Gholson.” Interview with Craig Gholson. BOMB: New Art, Writing, Theater and Film On-Line (Summer 1989). Web. 16 Dec. 2014.

___. Clear Springs: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1999. Print.

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___. “Falling.” New World Writing. Fall 2015. Web. 10 Jan. 2016.

___. In Country. London: Flamingo, 1985. Print.

___. “Nancy Culpepper.” Shiloh & Other Stories. New York: The Modern Library, 1982. 174-90. Print.

___. “New Ground.” The North American Review 268.2 (Jun. 1983): 30-32. Web. 28 April. 2015.

___. “Reading Between the Lines.” The Virginia Quarterly Review On-Line (Spring 2014): Web. 3 Mar. 2015.

___.“Ready.” The Nervous Breakdown Nov. 2014. Web. 28 Nov. 2014.

___.“Residents and Transients.” Shiloh & Other Stories. New York: The Modern Library, 1982. 118-27. Print.

___.“Sense of Place.” 3 Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers. From the Archives of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000. 223-24. Print.

___. “Spence + Lila.” Nancy Culpepper: Stories. New York: Random House, 2006. 53-162. Print.

___. “The Caretakers.” The Iowa Review 46.1 (2016): Web. 10 Aug. 2016.

___. “The Face Lady.” New World Writing (Winter 2014): Web. 28 April. 2015.

___. “The Funeral Side.” Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. New York: Random House, 2001. 114-38. Print.

___.“The Horsehair Ball Gown.” The Virginia Quarterly Review On-Line (Spring 2013): Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

___.“The Girl in Purple.” New Flash Fiction Review. 10 Dec. 2014. Web. 20 Sept. 2015.

___. “The Missing Plane.” New World Writing (Spring 2014): Web. 10 Aug. 2016.

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___. “The Prelude.” Nancy Culpepper: Stories. New York: Random House, 2006. 205-24. Print.

___.“The Rookers.” Shiloh & Other Stories. New York: The Modern Library, 1982. 18-34. Print.

___. “The Secret of the Pyramids.” Love Life: Stories. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. 68-81. Print.

___. and Meg Pokrass, “Tweeting War and Peace.” The Nervous Breakdown (October 2012): Web. 15 Aug. 2016.

___.“Underground.” The Virginia Quarterly Review On-Line (Spring 1982): Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

___. “Window Lights.” Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. New York: Random House, 2001. 139-51. Print.

Maver, Igor. “Recent Southern Writing in a Postmodern Context.” REDEN 6 (1993): 37-44. Print.

Moore, Lorrie. “What Li’l Abner Said.” The New York Times 12 March 1989. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

Patea, Viorica. “The Short Story: An Overview.” Short Story Theories: A Twentieth-First-Century Perspective. Ed. Viorica Patea. New York: Rodopi, 2012. 1-24. Print.

Rothstein, Mervyn. “Bobbie Ann Mason’s Border States.” The New York Times 15 May 1988. Web. 14 Mar. 2015.

Romine, Scott. “Where is Southern Literature?: The Practice of Place in a Postsouthern Age.” Critical Survey 12. 1 “South to a New Place” (2000): 5-27. Print.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr.. Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers and Writing. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. Print.

___. “The American South: The Continuity of Self-Definition.” The American South: Portrait of a Culture. Ed. Louis D. Rubin Jr. Washington D.C.: United States Information Agency, 1991. 3-22. Print.

Urch, Kakie; Dorn, Michael L.; and Abraham, J. “Working the Borderlands, Becoming Mestiza: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa.” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory 4 (1995): 75-96. Print.

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. Revised Edition Prepared by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Direction Books, 1992. Print.

NOTES

1. “Kentuckians had ties to both the North and South. The tobacco, whiskey, snuff, and flour produced in the state were shipped to Southern and European markets via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and to the Northern cities by rail. Losing either of these markets because of war would be a blow to Kentucky’s economy. Politically, Kentucky was proud of its role in preserving the Union […] Kentucky was a source of slaves for the cotton plantations in the lower South, and the slave trade was a very profitable business for many Kentuckians. However, most Kentuckians did not own slaves. Those who did were wealthy plantation owners who stood to lose a lot if slavery were abolished” (“Antebellum Kentucky”). 2. Scott Ashley explains in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature that the term “imagist” was seemingly coined by poet Ezra Pound in 1922. Ashley explains that imagists avoided superfluous words, abstractions and artificial rhythms (261). 3. Robert C. Clark defines this literary trend as follows: “The core idea that differentiates American minimalism from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative. […] Because authors tend to use few words, each is invested with a heightened sense of interpretive significance. Allusion and implication by omission are

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often employed as a means to compensate for limited exposition, to add depth to stories that on the surface may seem superficial or incomplete” (1). 4. In the 1983 issue of the literary magazine Granta, writer and editor Bill Buford described this particular style: “It is] devoted to the local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture—and it is entirely appropriate that its primary form is the short story and that it is so conspicuously part of the American short story revival. But these are strange stories: unadorned, unfurnished, low-rent tragedies about people who watch day-time television, read cheap romances or listen to country and western music. They are waitresses in roadside cafés, cashiers in supermarkets, construction workers, secretaries and unemployed cowboys. They play bingo, eat cheeseburgers, hunt deer and stay in cheap hotels. They drink a lot and are often in trouble: for stealing a car, breaking a window, pickpocketing a wallet. They are from Kentucky or Alabama or Oregon, but, mainly, they could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk food and the oppressive details of modern consumerism. 5. The name Denis Moore could be a reference to a character created by one of the BBC series of the British comedy group Monty Python. Their productions tended to play with language and nonsensical and surreal sketches. This connection would emphasize the story’s interest on a mind that cannot settle and an environment filled with stimuli. 6. The term was coined by Lewis P. Simpson in 1980, delineating the beginning of the unavoidable self-awareness undergone by the southern individual submerged in cultural and social artifacts in the ever-changing postmodern reality. In an interview with Craig Gholson in 1989, Mason emphasizes the relevance of these postsouthern features: “I write about how people are dealing with their relationships in the face of the phenomenal swirl of change going on in this world […] I feel that there’s a lot of energy emanating from these characters, because they’re not jaded. They’re not really disillusioned yet. A lot of them are holding onto the tag end of the American Dream.” 7. English Imagist poet and critic (1883-1917).

ABSTRACTS

Bobbie Ann Mason dépeint un Sud qui s’articule encore autour de la division Nord/Sud, tout en étant entouré d’espaces de liminaux postmodernes. Le concept de « sudité » devient dans ce contexte un mythe qui ne parvient pas à inclure les complexités des personnages du Kentucky de Mason. Cette article tente d’illustrer la manière dont le passé se manifeste dans les localités, la langue et les identités du Sud qui s’inscrivent également dans des contextes post-sudistes. Mason crée des histoires qui confrontent les mythes culturels et formels afin de représenter avec précision la nature contrastée du Sud qu’elle décrit avec une profonde de fierté et un certain optimisme sans pour autant en idéaliser les racines.

AUTHORS

CANDELA DELGADO MARIN Candela Delgado Marín is a Doctor in American Literature, specializing on southern writers and the short story form. She is a member of the Research Group of American Studies of the

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University of Seville and she is currently working on a monograph, based on her dissertation, discussing the communicative power of silence in the fiction of contemporary Kentucky writer Bobbie Ann Mason. After having been a lecturer at the University of Seville, she moved to London to pursue her research as a fellow of the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library. In London, she taught English for academic purposes at The University of Surrey and has also delivered workshops on communicative strategies for the London business consultancy The Storytellers. She has published articles and book chapters with topics ranging from Sandra Cisneros’s border identities, the north/south American divide in literature, or American visual artist Tamar Stone and the representation of female bodies. Her previous book was a co-edited volume on American cultural diversity published by Javier Coy Series.

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Ron Rash's Burning Bright (2010): Rewriting the Debacle of the South in the Present

Frédérique Spill

The song was wistful as the ballads Slidell and the Clayton brothers played, except words weren’t needed to feel the yearning. That made the music all the more sorrowful, because this song wasn’t about one lost love or one dead child or parent. It was as if the music was about every loss that had ever been. (Ron Rash, The Cove 21)

1 Published in 2010, Burning Bright is the fourth collection of short stories written by American novelist, short-story writer and poet Ron Rash, whose work exclusively stages Appalachia. A 2010 Frank O’Connor award winner, Burning Bright collects twelve short stories about the South. The stories range from autodiegetic narration to third- person narration, usually focusing on a single character. The collection is made up of tales of bleak realism (“Hard Times”) and cold violence (“Lincolnites”), poetic sketches (“Return”), and burlesque farces (“Dead Confederates” or “Waiting for the End of the World”). Though not organized chronologically, the stories cover a long time span— nearly a century-and-a-half—from the Civil War to the twenty-first century. Burning Bright thus evokes a plurality of conflicting emotions from a great variety of perspectives.

2 Despite their surface distinctiveness and diversity, the stories in Burning Bright are all intimately connected by a series of recurring topics and motifs ensuring the gripping consistency of the collection: Civil War reminiscences; the characteristic remoteness, let alone backwardness, of the Appalachian mountains. This can be felt in the evocation of the overwhelming presence of nature; the unfailing importance of ancestry and family bonds; an all-enduring sense of honor and an innate sense of hospitality. These are but a few of the themes that contribute to making Rash’s South very recognizable

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and familiar to the reader of American Southern literature. What emerges is yet another set of literary representations of what W. J. Cash once described as “the mind of the South”: a fairly definite mental pattern, associated with a fairly definite social pattern—a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards and values, and associations of ideas, which, if it is not common strictly to every group of white people in the South, is still common in one appreciable measure or another, and in some part or another, to all but relatively negligible ones. (viii)

3 As suggested by Cash himself (we can remark his own cautious insistence on the modifying adverb “fairly” and his endeavors to qualify the simplifying impact of his words), this definition of “the mind of the South” should undoubtedly be taken with a grain of salt. The very combination of conflicting, if not irreconcilable, approaches— social constructs and fleeting impressions—should make one wary of such plain generalizations. Yet it seems that the very definition of a geographic and cultural region in terms of mind, or myth, inevitably involves or generates such oversimplifications.1 In Outside The Southern Myth, Noel Polk vehemently criticizes the harmful consequences of the elaboration of such Southern myths. A Mississippian, Polk devoted a whole book to the denunciation of how such constructions tend to imprison Southerners into caricature-like definitions in which they can hardly recognize themselves: “The radical difference between my experience of the South and what my reading and all the culture have told me ‘The South’ was—and which has therefore defined me as a Southerner—has over the past several years provided the grist for my intellectual and personal mills” (xii). Yet, though Rash similarly fights against the nefarious consequences of this kind of pigeonholing, unwittingly fostered by long- lasting stereotypes about Southerners and their culture,2 there is such a thing as a Southern flair in his work which brings us to ask the question—how does a twenty-first century (Southern) writer deal with Southern myths?

4 In most cases, Rash’s stories are brief and the time of action is quite short: most plots develop over the course of a few hours (usually in a single day), at most a few days, building up toward a climactic moment of revelation or reversal. This ascending motion, which generally precedes or announces an inexorable sense of collapse, is metaphorically encapsulated in the title of the story “The Ascent,” which was selected for the 2010 volume of The Best American Short Stories. Temporal condensation certainly contributes to the dramatic impact of the collection; so does the fact that most plots in Burning Bright revolve around a crucial decision which is either the cause or the consequence of the critical experience made by the characters at the moment Rash chooses to shed light on them.

5 Focusing on Rash’s approach to Southern myths in light of the traumatic experience of the American Civil War, this paper will demonstrate how Appalachia, as depicted in Burning Bright, appears to be the most fertile ground for the rewriting of the South’s essential trauma. It will finally show how figures of loss pervade Rash’s work.

Mythmaking, or the Indigenous Trauma of the South

6 In their wide-ranging variety, Rash’s stories are undeniably Southern. They share what Faulkner defined in one of his famous “Introduction[s]” to The Sound and the Fury as “the indigenous dream of any given collection of men having something in common, be

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it only geography and climate, which shape their economic and spiritual aspirations into cities, into a pattern of house or behavior” (229). Rash certainly confirms the assertive power of “the indigenous dream,”—or nightmare for that matter—of the South. At the same time, he makes light of the expectations and stereotypes traditionally associated with the South by suggesting that what is known as the South is made of several particular Souths. His notion of what is the South is mainly located in the mountains of western North Carolina which was certainly shaped, as in the case of most ex-members of the Confederacy, by the Civil War.3 However what makes Rash’s South remarkable lies in the fact it experienced small-scale, yet equally dramatic, divisions within the larger conflict. In his 2007 interview, “The Natural World is the most universal language,” Thomas Bjerre asked Rash why, about 150 years after the war, “Southern fiction [was] still haunted by that war” (218). This is Rash’s very enlightening answer: [A]lmost all the battles were fought in the South, so I think that had something to do with it. And the losers tend to remember longer than the winners. […] For me, one of the interesting things about writing that book was that I could show a side of that war that is not as well known: the fact that, particularly in the mountains, you had many Union sympathizers. A lot of times people think the South was monolithic as far as the Civil War goes, but that really wasn’t the case, particularly up there, and in my own family. A lot of my family fought the Union. (218-19)

7 Rash is referring to The World Made Straight, but his reflections about the divided sympathies of his specific region at the time of the war certainly apply to the other stories he has written about, or around, the Civil War. Those words also shed light on his writing choices from a more general perspective. Though the incomparable singularity of its history and identity encourages mythmaking, the South is not a monolith; there are cracks in the rock, and Rash’s creative inspiration, which highlights the perpetuity of Southern myths while insisting on their indigenous variations, is somehow rooted in such cracks.

8 Whether directly or obliquely, Rash’s stories evoke some of the traumatic repercussions the Civil War had on the South: failure, loss, an all-encompassing sense of debacle, the violence of everyday life, the estrangement caused by dramatic changes, the questions of trust and distrust, division and the awareness of irreconcilable choices and, more generally, the sometime terrible difficulty of making a decision. More specifically, they also illustrate the double trauma people experienced in the Appalachian Mountains— located far from the plantation South—, as trouble from without ricocheted much like trouble from within. While being at war in their own country, the people Rash describes were also at war with those who had been their neighbors and friends before they had to make the most dramatic choice and endure its consequences—joining the Confederacy, as most did, or flying off on a tangent and siding with the Union.4

9 Such existential considerations resonate throughout Rash’s writing; their very repetition through different time periods and circulation within his work5 certainly expose the signification of their traumatic impact, which is best exemplified by one of the recurring stylistic features in his short story collections. These are all built upon a similar principle: the continuity between past and present is sometimes so tight that, from one story to the next, it can be difficult for the reader to distinguish then from now.6 As they almost imperceptibly slip from one historical period to the next through incursions into a present that is hardly ever datable, Rash’s short stories (and this is somehow equally true of his poems) are indeed imbued with a sense of timelessness.

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Rash is quite eager to acknowledge the fact that this general sense of blurring is deliberate: “In the story collections, I want the reader to be, at times, uncertain of the era. That uncertainty creates an effect that I want” (interview with Spill). The overall impression of changelessness thus conveyed by Rash’s stories is ambivalently worrying and reassuring at the same time. It points to the radical seclusion of Appalachia, which somehow appears to be permanently enmeshed in the repetition of the same patterns; yet, it also conveys the comforting feeling that in the forever quickening pace of the world, some things may resist change and remain true to themselves. Meanwhile, repetition and unadulteratedness certainly are two aspects Rash’s stories share with myths.

10 Structurally, Burning Bright splits into two sections, each of which contains six stories.7 While the first section opens with a story set during the Great Depression—“Hard Times”—, the second section opens with the “Return” home of a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific. In between, though set in what is, just this once, a clearly identifiable present time, “Dead Confederates” takes the reader back to the Civil War: ‘Lieutenant Gerald Ross Witherspoon. North Carolina Twenty-fifth. Born November 12, 1820. Died January 20, 1890.’ ‘Dug up October 23, 2007,’ Wesley adds, and gives a good snort. (54)

11 While the gothic motif of digging up corpses—which keeps reappearing in Rash’s writing in various forms and circumstances—, reasserts, if humorously, the continuity between present and past and the long-lasting effects of past events upon the present, “Dead Confederates” definitely conveys the most provocative subversion of the myth of the noble cause, the lost cause, of the South in Rash’s work.8 As small-time grave robbers dig up the graves of Civil War Generals, satire is particularly palpable when chuckling Wesley strives to justify his greedy transgression by evoking the respect owed to his Confederate ancestors: “He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. ‘I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great- great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause” (62). The devotees of Civil War nostalgia—“that Confederate stuff” (46)—are clearly ridiculed in this burlesque vignette and black humor reaches a peak in the description of Wesley’s demise, the sudden victim of a heart attack while digging up a grave that is about to become his own. While contemplating his inert body, the cemetery keeper—who allowed the sacrilegious pillage because “[his] folks sided Union” (62)—coolly remarks: “I don’t reckon he’ll be strutting around and playing Johnny Reb with his sword and belt buckle” (68). As the cemetery keeper derides Wesley’s mock-heroic death, his resorting to a stereotypical representation of the common Confederate soldier further suggests that the antagonism between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank is a long-lasting one, indeed.

12 Somehow reversing time, the collection concludes with the only actual Civil War story it contains: “Lincolnites”9 evokes the painful, iconoclastic fate of Unionists in the South through the description of nineteen-year-old Lily’s killing of a prowling Confederate—a previous acquaintance of her family10—who threatens to rob her of her horse. Deeply rooted in the intricacies of history, the conclusive story sheds an ambivalent light on the whole collection. As Lang suggests, “Lincolnites” is “among the book’s best stories” (115) and certainly draws the portrait of an extremely effective woman, who retrospectively outshines the other female characters in the collection; a young mother suddenly empowered with great ingenuity to protect her children, Lily probably is the one that burns the brighter. Yet, “touch[ing] again upon the hostility that can pit

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neighbor against neighbor in wartime” (Lang 115), “Lincolnites” is also an extremely violent story: therefore, Burning Bright concludes with the complex idea that in extreme cases no compromise can be reached and that violence may be inevitable when one’s security is at stake. Another myth, which is more American than typically Southern, thus burns through Lily’s example. In his introduction to The Ron Rash Reader, Randall Wilhelm remarks: “In ‘Lincolnites’ […], Rash rewrites this ‘lost cause’ response to life’s vicissitudes by ironically using a ‘Lost Cause’ character to stage a scene of violence and victory” (21). With Lily’s story in mind, it suddenly appears that most characters in Burning Bright somehow adopt similar survival strategies against an overwhelming sense of loss—strategies that often, if not always, entail one form of violence or another.

Rash’s Topography of Appalachia: The “Back of Beyond”

13 The stories making up Burning Bright are peppered with names of actual communities like “Tuckasegee” (26) and “Marshall” (53), of towns—“Boone”11 (9, 127, 194, 197), “Asheville” (51), “Bryson City” (76), “Sylva” (37)—and faraway cities like “Charlotte” (93, 127) and “Atlanta” (91, 94), which merely loom in the background of the deeply rural world evoked by Rash. Only two of the twelve stories making up the collection take place outside the western North Carolina mountains: both are set in Raleigh, the state capital of North Carolina. But strikingly (and paradoxically) enough, the titles of the two “urban” stories revolve around the evocation of wild animals: the jaguar in “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars” is emblematic of species that are imperiled by extensive urbanization; the eponymous bird in “The Corpse Bird” points to the obsoleteness of traditional beliefs. City life is therefore intimately associated with a sense of loss.

14 This device imbues the collection with verisimilitude and allows the reader to draw, imaginatively at least, the map of Rash’s South, which is rooted in “Western Carolina” (189). It is a rocky region, where mountains, coves and creeks are given proper names like “Goshen Mountain” (128), “Brushy Mountain” (26), “Bluff Mountain” (71), “Sawmill Ridge” (75), “Goshen Cove” (5), “Chestnut Cove” (26) and “Middlefork Creek” (195). While nature operates as an everyday landmark allowing characters to find their bearings, it somehow turns into an omnipresent, full-fledged character.12 Whether they are set in small towns or in the mountains, in the past or in the present, the short stories collected in Burning Bright all evoke isolated or forsaken places: “the truck disappeared back into the folds of the higher mountains, headed up into Chestnut Cove, what Parson’s father had called the back of beyond” (26). The expression “back of beyond” provides the collection’s second short story with its title, evoking the nooks and recesses of forlorn places, where nature literally engulfs those who venture there. This sense of remoteness from modern times is also materialized by the dirt roads that the characters travel as in the title story, “Burning Bright”: “As she drove down the half-mile dirt road, red dust rose in the car’s wake” (110). The presence of dirt instead of asphalt clearly marks the limits of civilization; the numerous occurrences of mountain dialect in dialogues reinforce this sense of seclusion. Many of Rash’s plots are actually set “where the map ends,” to borrow the title of a story to be found in his latest collection. Few families and individuals inhabit such remote places, sticking to

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traditional ways of life. In “Back of Beyond” their living conditions are described as rudimentary and miserable: Parson slowed as the road began a long curve around Brushy Mountain. The road soon forked and he went left. Another left and he was on a county road, poorly maintained because no wealthy Floridians had second homes on it. No guardrails. He met no other vehicle, because only a few people lived in the cove, had ever lived up here. (26-27)

15 The singular topographical environment of the cove (a sheltered recess in the side of a mountain) encapsulates utmost isolation.13 The remoteness of the place is marked by the exceptionality of cars, while an impending sense of danger is suggested by the absence of guardrails. The pace of the driver is, consequently, characterized by a constrained, metaphorical slowness. The area’s landlocked geographical situation takes the form of meandering roads that keep merging into still smaller, disaffected roads that even the Floridian vacationists, sarcastically characterized by their taste for adventure in a tamed wilderness, have failed to conquer. This idea reoccurs in “Burning Bright”: “Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight” (120).

16 Generating a sense of entrapment, the dead ends evoked also foreshadow the metaphorical traps more than a few characters in the collection are ushered into.14 In the course of his drive to the family homestead, which he willingly abandoned in order to live in town, Parson—who operates as the center of consciousness—takes stock of the desertion of such places: “Parson had never regretted leaving, and never more so than now as his gaze moved from the rusting tractor and bailer to the sagging fences that held nothing in, settled on the shambling farmhouse itself, then turned toward the land between the barn and house” (“Back of Beyond” 27). Parson’s panoramic vision reveals how seclusion goes hand in hand with dereliction: the succession of gerunds (rusting, sagging, shambling) evokes a dilapidating environment where objects, unused, are abandoned to their slow decay. This description takes the form of a striking moment of revelation:15 indeed, it seems that Parson actually sees the circumstances of his own upbringing for the very first time. At the same time, he becomes aware of the reasons for his own irrepressible urge to “leave.” But, ironically he did not go very far: he actually found the semblance of a community in Tuckasegee, a few dozen miles from home. In that place, he set up to exploit the neediness of his peers—a likely consequence of the seclusion of the place—in order to make a cynical living as a pawnbroker, the owner of “PARSON’S BUY AND SELL” (20). The underlying notion (and indictment) is, of course, that money can buy pretty much everything in modern capitalistic America.

17 The austerity of the Appalachian Mountains is reinforced by Rash’s aesthetic taste for extreme weather, the consequences of which the short stories register. While “Burning Bright” evokes the stifling heat of Southern summers: “She looked at the sky and nothing belied the prediction of more hot dry weather. The worst drought in a decade, the weatherman had said, showing a ten-year chart of August rainfalls” (107), “Back of Beyond” and “The Ascent” delineate frozen landscapes: “Even more snow in the higher mountains, enough to make many roads impassable” (19). The extremities of climate highlight the grim beauty of the most secluded places in Appalachia, while showing how natural elements combine their efforts to tighten the sense of isolation and make life up there exceptionally hard.

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18 Harsh life is captured by the title of the opening short story, “Hard Times,” which is contextually related to Serena. Its Dickensian title soon turns into a set phrase which, as it is repeated with variations from one narrative to the next—“hard as times were” (5), “times were rough everywhere” (6), “these troubled times” (23), “in these times” (196, 199)—relevantly sets the tone of the whole collection. The South sketched in Burning Bright is neither prosperous nor particularly healthy. Lang persuasively suggests that “[a]lthough set on a farm in the 1930s during the Great Depression, ‘Hard Time’ speaks powerfully to the economic problems of the Great Recession in the twenty-first century, especially those of unemployment, foreclosure, and hunger” (Lang 105). The very fact that several characters in Burning Bright should live in trailers (49, 183)16 testifies to a general state of precariousness, which is resourcefully exemplified by “Dead Confederates,” whose autodiegetic narrator ends up digging up the graves of dead confederates for valuables (antique swords and belts) that might be auctioned. The temptation to live off past splendors points to the limitations of the present; yet Rash the writer commenting on his work refuses to endorse the simplistic illusion of good old times: “There never was an Edenic time” (interview with Spill), he says. To a certain extent, Rash turns the very notion of nostalgia upside down. Indeed, “Dead Confederates” suggests that Civil War nostalgia is just another consumer fad, as some people are prone to spend fortunes in order to lay hands on a piece of wartime memorabilia: “It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece” (47), and others to take advantage of their gullibility. So goes the world. Yet, as often with Rash’s characters, things turn out to be a bit more complex than they first seemed. The character-narrator of “Dead Confederates” turns out to be less motivated by greed than by the pressing need to pay for his sick mother’s hospital bills: “I think about how Daddy worked himself to death before he was sixty and Momma hanging on long enough to be taught that fifty years of working first light to bedtime can’t get you enough ahead to afford an operation and a two-week stay in a hospital” (49). Such comments reveal the narrator’s awareness of a sense of self-generating absurdity. Rash’s stories convey the feeling that the sorry faces hardened by adversity that were immortalized by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration have outlived the 1930s and perpetuated themselves in 21st-century America.

19 “Hard Times” begins with an ominous saying which also introduces the privileged metaphor in The Cove: “This cove’s so damn dark a man about has to break light with a crowbar, his daddy used to say” (3). Darkness is overwhelming in the cradle formed by the mountains: it is both literal in the shade of the cliffs threateningly hanging above isolated lives and symbolic when synonymous both with backwardness and hopelessness. Viewed by the urbanites as “hillbillies” (130), the inhabitants of the mountains treasure beliefs which, setting great store by the powers of nature, verge on superstitions. While city life, the realm of educated people,17 is evoked as “a world where the sky did not matter” and where whatever nature has to say is considered “irrelevant and mute” (“The Corpse Bird” 169), backwoods Appalachia is both a sanctuary of folklore18 and a myth-generating environment: He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered, and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, and a life about to end. (“The Corpse Bird” 166)

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20 In the “Corpse Bird,” Boyd, a trueborn Appalachian who educated himself out of his milieu into suburban upper-middle class, embodies the unsolvable conflict between the irrationality of myth and lore and the pragmatic urges of modern life. The unexpected appearance of an owl in his everyday environment saturated with comfort and gadgets19 unwittingly brings forth the beliefs with which he was brought up and that his scientific education methodically stifled: “The owl called again from the scarlet oak behind the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die” (166). In this quote the character’s essential ambivalence is highlighted by the contrast between the assertive jargon of science and the irrational conclusion drawn from the bird’s third call, which—as typified by its portentous name—he believes heralds a corpse. For Boyd, the “bird’s low plaintive call” (165) thus operates as an eerie manifestation of the return of the repressed.

Burning Bright: An Inventory of Lost Things

21 The ability to read through nature and decipher its signs, this openness to a level of significance that is not strictly limited to the laws of cold rationalism, is the first of many things that numerous characters in Burning Bright have either lost or sacrificed as a result of the widening gap between their everyday lives and traditional Appalachia. The formula “Rational. Educated. Enlightened” (170), which Boyd was taught in college, clearly operates as the holy trinity of city life, at the cost of the ageless lore and beliefs that escape reason. It is tempting to believe that part of the singularity of Ron Rash’s writing emerges from that breach and to envision his fiction as an aesthetic reconciliation of two irreconcilables: myth and modern times. “What he had learned in the North Carolina mountains,” concludes Boyd in “The Corpse Bird,” “was untranslatable to the Colemans” (175). Somehow, Rash’s fiction strives to build bridges between two alien worlds that often have trouble finding a common ground, a common language.

22 Burning Bright actually develops in the form of a scattered inventory of lost things. Most stories appear to be built around essential losses: disappearing eggs and a lost truck in “Hard Times”; a lost plane (which turns out to be “a crashed airplane,” 77) in “The Ascent;” a deceased mother, a lost infant—that temporarily metamorphoses into “a missing child” (93)—and an extinct animal in “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars,” a story that mostly takes place in a zoo in the vicinity of a “lost-and-found booth” (98, 100), which metaphorically echoes one of the purposes of the book. Memory and a homestead are lost in “Into the Gorge”: His great-aunt had been born on this land, lived on it eight decades, and knew it as well as she knew her husband and children. That was what she’d always claimed, and could tell you to the week when the first dogwood blossom would brighten the ridge, the first blackberry darken and swell enough to harvest. Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk. (133; my emphasis)

23 As the verb to know is gradually, but inexorably, drained from its contents, Alzheimer’s conveys the ultimate, and probably most heart-rending, representation of loss in the collection. Some characters are losing their footing: “One night I dream I’m falling.

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There are tree branches all around me but I can’t grab hold of one. I just keep falling and falling for forever” (“Falling Star” 156), prey to nightmares that threaten to come true. Besides, getting lost is not an uncommon thing in the mountains: “People had gotten lost in this park. Children wandered off from family picnics, hikers strayed off trails” (“The Ascent” 75).

24 All in all, some characters have very little left. In “Hard Times” the Hartleys are made to appear as the epitome of loss: “With their ragged clothes hanging loose on bony frames, they looked like scarecrows en route to another cornfield, their possessions in tow” (6).20 The portrayal of the family actually highlights how little of them is left, their rags failing to conceal their emaciated, skeletal bodies. While, out of misery, Hartley seems to be on the verge of losing his voice: “It struck Jacob that even the man’s voice had been worn down to a bare-boned flatness” (7), the compelling impression of fleshlessness conveyed by the whole family is further confirmed by the comparison of his daughter with “a rag doll” (16). The Hartleys finally represent that against which others can measure and appreciate the fact that they have not fallen so low yet: “They hadn’t lost everything the way others had, but they’d lost enough” (5).

25 Burning Bright also depicts a widower in “Into the Gorge” and husbands estranged from their wives: “How each time a little less of her comes back” (“Falling Star” 153), “I look at her. I know I’ve lost her, known it for a while” (162), “I will not bore you with the details of lost teaching jobs, lost wife, lost child” (“Waiting for the End of the World” 184). Such examples reveal that the semantics of loss enjoys few, if any, variations in the collection: in its bare simplicity the verb to lose is repeated over and over again to signal deep holes and abyssal voids. “Burning Bright” portrays a wife who fears her youthful second husband will be taken from her. “The Ascent” and “Back of Beyond” are echoing stories respectively focusing on a son who is losing his parents and on parents who are losing their son to the irrepressible addiction of drugs. In one form or another, estranged families and broken bonds are countless in the collection.

26 Some characters have simply lost it all. In the opening short story the Hartleys merely introduce a prolonged gallery of the dispossessed, which actually expands far beyond the limits of the collection. A recurring feature in Burning Bright and Rash’s 2013 collection of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, is his modern time characters’ addiction to drugs, whether in the form of the unexceptional anxiolytics and sedatives21 which are eagerly dispensed to remedy the anxieties of modern life or, even more dramatically, in that of crystal meth. Indeed, Rash’s fiction evokes a twenty-first century America that is often impregnated with the nauseating odor of crystal meth: “The odor of it came in the door with them, in their hair, their clothes, a sour ammonia smell like cat piss” (“Back Beyond” 22)—an odor that immediately stigmatizes those that are ready to lose it all in order to get high.22

27 Methamphetamine is a psychoactive, highly addictive drug: “That stuff, whatever you call it, has done made my boy crazy. He don’t know nothing but a craving” (29). It is available in both powder and crystal form and can either be injected, snorted or inhaled in glass pipes, rituals that are alluded to in the collection, as in “The Ascent”: “Jared ate as his parents sat in the front room, passing the pipe back and forth. He looked out the window and saw the sky held nothing but blue, not even a few white clouds” (84). The addicts’ abandonment of the ordinary gestures of life is dramatically staged in this simple family scene, which depicts the only child eating an unelaborate meal—a bowl of cereal—on his own, while his forgetful parents indulge in their

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addiction. The immaculate blue sky observed by the child, who avoids looking at his parents, functions as an ironical foil to the bleakness of the household. Yet we should note that, through the use of negative syntactic patterns (nothing but, not even), even the cerulean sky is negatively described in terms of loss: it seems that the clouds are conspicuously missing in the picture. “The Ascent” can consequently be interpreted as an ironic title: a poetic metaphor for getting high, either up in the mountains or away in toxic fumes, it is built upon a dramatic inversion insofar as the story narrates an irrevocable descent into darkness.

28 Because of the low cost and easy availability of crystal meth, the addicts clearly appear as a propagating species in Rash’s South, as noted by the Sheriff in “Back of Beyond”: “There’s too many of them to keep up with. This meth, it ain’t like other drugs. Even cocaine and crack, at least those were expensive and hard to get. But this stuff, it’s too easy” (25). When used as a recreational drug for its euphoric properties, the physical effects of meth include withdrawal, anorexia (all the meth addicts in Burning Bright have indeed renounced feeding themselves), dilated pupils and blurred vision, itchy skin and dry mouth or bruxism. The expression “meth mouth” designates an abnormal and quick loss of teeth, a gruesome symptom highlighted in the first of several portrayals of characters that are literally ruined by their toxic addiction.23 When the woman spoke Parson glimpsed the stubbed brown ruin inside her mouth. He could see her face clearly now, sunken cheeks and eyes, skin pale and furrowed. He saw where the bones, impatient, poked at her cheeks and chin. The eyes glossy but alive, restless and needful. (“Back of Beyond” 21)

29 In a way, Hartley’s earlier depiction in “Hard Times,” as a Great Depression embodiment of absolute misery, is repeated and aggravated in this portrait of a woman (who merely is a bit part in the collection). Death has clearly already taken hold of her cadaverous body: the only persisting sign of life appears in her craving eyes as the manifestation of her terrible need. Physical dereliction is a chronic motif in Burning Bright, whose beautiful title evokes—among many other things—the intensity of “needful” eyes expressing the dramatic urge to satisfy, at any cost, an uncontainable craving. In “Back of Beyond” Boyd contemplates the pathetic dilapidation of the family farm in which he grew up as a result of his nephew’s addiction, hence need for money: The room had been stripped of anything that could be sold, the only furnishing left a couch pulled up by the fireplace. Even wallpaper had been torn off a wall. The odor of meth infiltrated everything, coated the walls and floor. (32-33)

30 The syntax of this excerpt is dominated by the lexical fields of despoliation and pillage, as the place mirrors the dreadful physical condition of its inhabitants. The now vacant space is saturated with the smell of meth, whose ceremonials have taken over all forms of ordinary life. In that setting, Danny—Parson’s nephew—appears as a mere ghost of his old powerful self: “There had been a time the boy could have made that comment formidable, for he’d been broad-shouldered and stout, an all-country tight end, but he’d shucked off fifty pounds, the muscles melted away same as his teeth” (34). Jared’s parents in “The Ascent” are portrayed as gruesome walking dead: “His mother sat on the couch wrapped in a quilt, shivering. She hadn’t bathed since Friday and her hair was stringy and greasy. His father looked little better, his blue eyes receding deep into his skull, his lips chapped and bleeding” (85). Such signs and symptoms of renunciation and self-neglect abound in the collection. The drug addicts, who are also to be found in “These Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven” in Rash’s latest collection, constitute the

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epitome of loss. Their bodies, their bonds, their possessions have been sacrificed indifferently to the lost cause of their addiction.

***

31 What is particularly striking about Burning Bright is its treatment of the South’s one recurring obsession: the mythical debacle that lies at the heart of its very frailty and precariousness—features that still paradoxically contribute to making the South of the United States such an intriguing and humane place—is repeated over and over again. The repetition with variations engenders a plurality of poetic figures revolving around deteriorating situations that can all be considered remakes of the essential scenario, revealing how hard it is for Southerners to overcome their essential trauma and heal. At the same time, the permanence of trauma also rejuvenates the myth and perpetuates the South’s unquenchable thirst and talent for fiction. Rash’s writing thus voices the South’s persisting urge “to talk”: We need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage. We seem to try in the simple furious breathing (or writing) span of the individual to draw a savage indictment of the contemporary scene or to escape from it into a make believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed anywhere. Both of the courses are rooted in sentiment; perhaps the ones who write savagely and bitterly of the incest in clay floored cabins are the most sentimental. Anyway, each course is a matter of violent partisanship, in which the writer unconsciously writes into every line and phrase his violent despairs and rages and frustrations or his violent prophesies of still more violent hopes. (Faulkner 229)

32 Like Faulkner before him, Rash has clearly chosen his direction as a writer. In the characteristic sense of timelessness that envelops his short stories, where it is not always easy to distinguish between past(s) and present, the frontiers between time periods being voluntarily blurred, there is little place for magnolias, mockingbirds and sentimentality: profoundly wounded by its extremely violent history, Rash’s South is a place that lost, a place of loss, and eventually—the haunting conclusion of One Foot in Eden comes to mind—“a place for the lost” (214). The South has always been the part of the United States that’s the poorest, the least educated. The part of the upper South I focus on has certainly had its share of hardship, of a failure to achieve the prosperity of the rest of America, though that failure is in large part due to the fact that more has been taken from the region, from coal and timber to soldiers for our wars, than given back. (Interview with Spill)

33 While make-believe takes the extreme form of escapism in drug addiction, Rash’s stories develop their own violent course and the memory sustaining them is “blood- memory,” a form of memory that does not “[deny] the reality of that which was lost”24 and which Rash defines as follows: “part of my responsibility is to be true to lives that were often tragic and complex, to avoid sentimentalizing those lives” (interview with Brown 347).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alther, Lisa. Blood Feud. Guilford: Lyons Press, 2012. Print.

Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Print.

Bandry, Michel. Le Sud. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1992. Print.

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1941. Print.

Charney, Noah. “Ron Rash: How I Write.” The Daily Beast, 02.27.13. Web. 13/03/2016.

Csapo, Eric. Theories of Mythology. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Print.

Faulkner, William. “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury.” The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Ed. David Minter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994. Print.

Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997. Print.

Gautreaux, Tim. Same Place, Same Things. New York: Picador, 1996. Print.

Higgins, Anna Dunlap. “Anything but Surrender: Preserving Southern Appalachia in the Works of Ron Rash.” North Carolina Review 13 (2004): 49-58. Print.

Lang, John. Understanding Ron Rash. Columbia, U. of South Carolina P, 2014. Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.

Maslin, Janet. “Rural Pride and Poverty and a Hen’s Empty Nest.” The New York Times, 8 March 2010. Web. 13/03/2016.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; The Whale. 1851. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Offutt, Chris. Kentucky Straight. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.

Planchard de Cussac, Etienne de. Le Sud américain: Histoire, mythe et réalité. Paris: Ellipses, 2001. Print.

Polk, Noel. Outside The Southern Myth. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. Print.

Rash, Ron. Among the Believers. Oak Ridge: Iris Press, 2000. Print.

____. Burning Bright. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. Print.

____. The Cove. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012. Print.

____. “An Interview with Ron Rash.” Interview with Frédérique Spill. Transatlantica, 1 | 2014, July 9, 2014. Web. 13/03/2016.

____. “‘The Natural World Is the Most Universal Languages’: An Interview with Ron Rash.” Interview with Thomas Ærvold Bjerre. Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review 34.2 (2007): 216-27. Print.

____. The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth. Columbia: The Bench Tree Press, 1994. Print.

____. Nothing Gold Can Stay. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. Print.

____. One Foot in Eden. New York: Picador, 2002. Print.

____. Raising the Dead. Oak Ridge: Iris Press, 2002. Print.

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____. “Ron Rash: The Power of Blood-Memory.” Interview with Joyce Compton Brown. Appalachia and Beyond: Conversations with Writers from the Mountain South. Ed. John Lang. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2006. 335-53. Print.

____. Saints at the River. New York: Picador, 2004. Print.

____. Serena. 2008. London: Canongate, 2010. Print.

____. The World Made Straight. New York: Picador, 2006. Print.

____. “Twisting the Radio Dial. An Interview with Ron Rash.” Interview with Forrest Anderson. The Southeast Review 25.2 (2007): 104-17. Print.

Ricoeur, Paul. Philosophie de la volonté. Paris: Aubier, 1950. Print.

Russo, Richard, ed. The Best American Short Stories 2010. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Print.

Skidelsky, William. “Burning Bright by Ron Rash—Review.” The Observer 5 August 2012. Web. 13/03/2016.

Wilhelm, Randall. The Ron Rash Reader. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 2014. Print.

NOTES

1. It is also very revealing that the only dependable certainty in Cash’s definition should have to do with the whiteness of the myth. It is, indeed, quite meaningful that the myth of the South was constructed by whites—whose precursors were brought up to believe in the supremacy of their race. One of the most powerful literary statements about the many-folded fantasies attached to whiteness and its supposed supremacy is to be found in the 42nd chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The power of Melville’s underlying criticism of his own race’s unshakeable belief in its superiority is all the more compelling as those reflections take the form of an indirect, almost accidental, aside in the narrative of the prolonged chase of the white, emblematic whale. Similarly, the epigraph of Rash’s 2006 novel The World Made Straight, which is significantly drawn from that chapter, may be interpreted as a roundabout indictment of the supremacy of whiteness in the reconstructions of Southernness. 2. The interview by Noah Charney in the “How I Write” section of the 02.27.2013 issue of The Daily Beast offers a good example of Rash’s spontaneous dislike of the epithets that are likely to be associated with the word “writer”: “I have mixed feelings about any adjectives in front of the word ‘writer.’ Chekhov has talked about this, that any designation besides writer (Russian writer, whatever) was a diminishment. I’m proud to be from the region. But sometimes it seems to me that there’s an implication of ‘just’ an Appalachian writer or ‘just’ a Southern writer. That kind of diminishment is bothersome. If a writer is any good, he or she has to both evoke and transcend the region.” 3. In his 1992 book devoted to the South, Michel Bandry remarks that regardless of its causes, the defeat of the South and its subsequent sufferings left an indelible mark on the region and generated a form of patriotism feeding on myths, which contributed to the century-long isolation of the South from the main part of the American population (74). 4. Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain (1997) and, more recently, Lisa Alther in Blood Feud (2012), which centers on the Hatfield-McCoy feud, also evoke the singularity of the history of Appalachia during the Civil War and the long-lasting consequences of people’s political affiliation upon whole communities.

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5. Burning Bright illustrates the recycling process that is at work in Rash’s writing, as images that are haunting enough are likely to take different forms at different stages. For instance, the initial story, “Hard Times,” originated in an earlier poem published in Raising the Dead and entitled “Madison County: 1934,” in which the phrase “hard times” actually occurs. Likewise, “The Corpse Bird,”—the tenth story in the collection—also refers to a poem that appeared in Among the Believers. Furthermore, two stories in Burning Bright are related to an earlier or to a later novel, Saints at the River and The Cove. 6. This characteristic aspect of Rash’s short story collections is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of achronie, first developed in his Philosophie de la volonté (1950). Significantly, the readers of Chris Offutt’s short stories are likely to experience a similar sense of temporal disorientation. 7. In his presentation of Burning Bright in Understanding Ron Rash, John Lang suggests that that “symmetrical structure […] may owe something to the William Blake poem ‘The Tyger,’ from which Rash takes the book’s title” (104). 8. In that respect, the story is quite reminiscent of the much earlier story that provided Rash’s first collection with its title. In “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth,” the victim of such an iconoclastic treatment (literally) is Jesus Himself (See Rash, New Jesus 39). 9. “Lots of people don’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought Union as Confederate” (62-63). Lincolnites in the South—an almost forgotten tribe of men and women Rash is eager to pay tribute to—are recurring figures in his writing; they are also to be found in the story entitled “Where the Map Ends,” in The World Made Straight and in The Cove, as well as in his poetry. The juxtaposition of the titles of the two Civil War stories in Burning Bright is quite revealing of where Rash’s sympathies lie: while Confederates are obliquely presented as a dead species, “Lincolnites” / Unionists still appear to be pretty much alive in the writer’s heart and imagination. 10. The fact that Lily remembers Mr. Vaughn clerking at the store and giving her candy resonates as a timeless warning, while pointing to life’s fickleness: never trust a stranger offering candy. 11. Boone is the town characters in Burning Bright most often refer to: it is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Boone is the county seat of Watauga County and the home of Appalachian State University. The town is named for famous American pioneer and explorer Daniel Boone. 12. This aspect is also a constant feature of Rash’s novels: the river plays a key role in One Foot in Eden (2002) and, as highlighted by its title, in Saints at the River (2004). The diminishing forest shapes and reflects the fates of characters in Serena (2008). The Cove (2012) explores the effects, both literal and symbolic, of extreme seclusion in the mountains. 13. Remoteness and darkness somehow reach a peak in Rash’s The Cove: “Nothing but shadow land, her mother had told Laurel, and claimed there wasn’t a gloamier place in the whole Blue Ridge” (17). 14. Maslin remarks “‘Falling Star’ describes a man who is so threatened by his wife’s decision to attend a community college that he engineers his own ruin.” The main character of “Into the Gorge”—a portentous title—is similarly entrapped by his own bad luck and misjudgment, failing to accept that his family’s property has been sold to the government as parkland. 15. Rash himself cannot really be defined as a man of the mountains. Though his ancestors were from Appalachia, his own parents moved to Boiling Springs when he was a child: “Boiling Springs was not really my family’s home. I was always taught that home was Buncombe County and Watauga County, in the mountains” (interview with Brown 342). While he considers the summers he spent in the mountains with his grandmother a decisive aspect of his development as a writer, he also makes it clear that he enjoyed a dual position that is somehow reminiscent of that of his main character in “Back of Beyond.” Parson’s clear-sightedness as he (re)discovers his own whereabouts verifies Rash’s own hypothesis that distance allows a more effective form of vision:

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“The contrast in settings also gave me a sense of what made the mountains distinctive and gave me a kind of insider/outsider identity in the mountains that enabled me to maintain a certain distance from that life. So for me as a writer having that dual perspective was very fortunate” (interview with Brown 344). 16. Though situated further north, Rash’s contemporary South is not unlike Tim Gautreaux’s Louisiana, as delineated in Same Place, Same Things (1996). Gautreaux’s short stories similarly emphasize simple people in extremely modest environments and explore the influence of Southern topography on characters’ destinies. 17. In “The Corpse Bird,” Boyd’s wife Laura exemplifies the stereotypical discrepancy opposing the educated city-dwellers and the uneducated country-dwellers, as well as the well-established condescendence that characterizes the former’s perception of the latter: “‘I know where you grew up that people, uneducated people, believed such things.’ Laura said when he’d finished. ‘But you don’t live in Madison County anymore, and you are educated. Maybe there is an owl out back. I haven’t heard it, but I’ll concede it could be out there. But even so it’s an owl, nothing more’” (176-77). 18. Folklore is etymologically defined as the knowledge of the people; by extension, the term designates the traditions and stories of a community. 19. The very fact that Boyd should resist gas logs reveals the persistence of his attachment to the real thing rather than its artificial and hygienic equivalent favored by his modern, slightly ridiculous wife: “Laura had wanted to switch to gas logs. Just like turning a TV on and off, that easy, his wife had said, and a lot less messy” (“The Corpse Bird” 173). 20. It is tempting to interpret this description as a discrete tribute to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel Rash particularly appreciates (see interview with Anderson 117), and its own desolate evocation of “pilgrims en route to their several and collective deaths” (McCarthy 200). 21. It is once again Laura, the suburban “educated” wife in “The Corpse Bird,” who best embodies this resolutely pragmatic and heartless attitude towards the mind’s sorrows: “I’m getting you an appointment with Doctor Harmon. He’ll prescribe some Ambien so you can get some rest, maybe something else for anxiety” (“The Corpse Bird” 177). 22. An all-pervasive smell, the odor of meth also contributes to the castigation of the addicts’ innocent children: Jared in “The Ascent” is mocked and humiliated for smelling bad (77). 23. More generally, dismemberment is a key motif in Rash’s fiction, which is fraught with cripples of all kinds whose deformations contribute to the mythical dimension of his depiction of Appalachia. 24. This expression is borrowed from Joyce Compton Brown’s 2003 interview with Ron Rash. I want to thank Gérald Préher for making the interview available to me at an early stage of my research on Rash’s work, together with many other critical articles on many authors. I am deeply indebted to Gérald for his extremely efficient kindness and helpfulness.

ABSTRACTS

Burning Bright, paru en 2010, est le quatrième recueil de nouvelles du romancier, poète et nouvelliste américain Ron Rash. Les Appalaches dépeintes par Rash évoquent un Sud sombre et désolé, rongé par la misère et hanté par les figures de l’échec : en effet, bien que les Appalaches de Rash aient joué un rôle tout à fait singulier pendant la Guerre de Sécession, le scénario de l’essentielle défaite du Sud semble ici rejoué et réinterprété à l’envi. L’une après l’autre, ces

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nouvelles exposent la manière dont le Sud se retrouve immanquablement piégé dans le cercle vicieux de sa propre faillite. Cependant, malgré l’austérité du contexte qu’elles évoquent, ces nouvelles génèrent des figures poétiques saisissantes qui brûlent, littéralement, d’un vif éclat l’imaginaire du lecteur. Construit autour d’un traumatisme fondateur qui a fini par acquérir les dimensions d’un mythe, Burning Bright émerge d’une tension caractéristique, entre noirceur et éclat

AUTHORS

FRÉDÉRIQUE SPILL Frédérique Spill is Associate Professor of American literature; she teaches at the University of Picardy – Jules Verne in Amiens, France. She is the author of L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2009). She recently contributed to Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (Salem Press, 2014) and to Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She has also published articles in French and in English on Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Russell Banks and Willa Cather. For the past years her research and publications have mainly been focusing on the work of novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. Her contributions to Conversations with Ron Rash (Mississippi UP) and to Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash (U of South Carolina P) will be published in 2017. She is currently completing a monograph on Ron Rash’s work.

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Joyce Carol Oates's "Little Maggie": Southern Myth in Ballad Form and Beyond

Tanya Tromble

1 From the very beginning of her professional writing career,1 Joyce Carol Oates has been fascinated with the enigma of human life, placing “the mystery of human emotions” at the heart of her fiction.2 In the words of Oates critic and biographer Greg Johnson, she scrutinizes “with dogged thoroughness the moral conditions of an unstable American reality” (1). A preoccupation with metaphysical inquiry is not only present in Oates’s fiction but manifests itself in her essay and journal writing as well. The very first entry in her published journal, on January 1, 1973, gets right to the point: “Query: Does the individual exist?” (2). Various comments scattered throughout the work indicate that the mystery of what constitutes the individual and how one perceives and understands the world outside oneself are never far from her mind.3

2 Given this predilection for all that is mysterious about human experience, it should come as no surprise to find a reflection on the attraction of myth among those elements of the unexplainable, enigmatic “unstable American reality” she explores, especially in light of Pierre Brunel’s statement that “mythical explanation is different from scientific explanation in that it seeks to explain the unexplainable. [...] It insolently, some might say innocently, suggests itself when reason fails” (8, my translation). Similarly, this predilection also explains her career-long commitment to the short-story form which she has written about in the following way: For me the short story is an absolutely undecipherable fact. [...] The short story is a dream verbalized, arranged in space and presented to the world, imagined as a sympathetic audience (and not, as the world really is, a busy and indifferent crowd): the dream is said to be some kind of manifestation of desire, so the short story must also represent a desire, perhaps only partly expressed, but the most interesting thing about it is its mystery. (Oates, “The Short Story” 213-14)

3 Gavin Cologne-Brookes concludes his 2005 study of Oates’s novels with a discussion of a group of novels he considers to be a trilogy “dealing in particular with the role of myth

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and nostalgia in American life” (16): Broke Heart Blues (1999), Blonde (2000), and Middle Age: A Romance (2001). The first two works “are both more broadly about the power of myth and metaphor to shape lives and the consequences of too deep an immersion in what amount to individual or collective fictions” (205), consequences that can be detrimental to the individual psyche. In Broke Heart Blues, for example, Oates has a history teacher tell a classroom of disdainful students that “‘ninety-nine percent of human beings [...] persist in believing in fairy tales and ‘myths’’ while one percent ‘reason, analyze, come to independent conclusions’” (qtd. in Cologne-Brookes 208). “Middle Age, in contrast, shows more pointedly the value, possibly the necessity, of myth making in helping individuals to shape and reshape their lives” (Cologne-Brookes 205).

4 Oates continues this reflection in two short stories first published in 2003 and 2004, respectively: “The Haunting” and “Little Maggie—A Mystery.” Both stories make use of the traditional Southern Appalachian ballad Little Maggie and its eponymous mythical heroine as a means to explore aspects of myth in contemporary society, particularly as this relates to a predilection to idolize singers and their subject matter. Whereas the novels are adult views on mythmaking processes, the two later stories are both narrated by neglected daughters of singers aligned with myth. In this way, Oates deftly shifts the focus of the discussion from an exposition of cultural involvement in mass mythmaking delusions among adults to one of its more sinister aspects, namely an exploration of the negative effects this collective tendency might have on innocent young people. Through the compression required by what she has called this “notoriously difficult genre” (Oates, Preface 830), she uses the short-story to focus on one elemental human experience, notably the perpetuation of violence and its effects on vulnerable women and children, in two stories that tell of men victimizing women who go on to victimize their children.

Little Maggie, The Traditional Ballad

5 Oates’s story “Little Maggie—A Mystery” is part of a project in which two American Studies professors at Princeton University, Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus, invited artists “to create something new about an American ballad4 of their choosing” in the hope “to unlock some of the deeper mysteries of these songs.” The creations, mostly in the form of stories, are collected in the volume The Rose & The Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad (3).

6 In Oates’s story, Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy’s song “Little Maggie” originates with him. However, the traditional Little Maggie ballad upon which Oates based her story predates the time frame of the story though its precise origins are unclear. Wilentz explains: “Given its themes of liquor and thwarted love, and given the Gaelic associations of the nickname ‘Maggie,’ it seems a fair guess that the song has Scots-Irish origins, and that it first flourished, in its many versions, in the Southern American backcountry of which the mythical Vergennes County, Kentucky, was and is a part” (364). The Smithsonian Folkways website is more specific, identifying the ballad as belonging to the “unique oral traditions of the Blue Ridge Mountain back-country region.”5 The Blue Ridge Mountains are located in the Southern Appalachians, extending northeast from northern Georgia up through North Carolina and Virginia to Southern Pennsylvania. First recorded in 1927 by Grayson and Whitter (Wilentz and Marcus 365), “Little

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Maggie” has been performed by numerous artists over the years, including Bob Dylan, to whom Oates dedicated her famous story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” Wilentz explains that “most variants of the song tell the same story—of a beautiful, elusive, and somewhat sinister Maggie, who is standing over yonder, drinking and sparking with someone other than the adoring singer” (364). In subsequent verses, Maggie is observed sitting alone with a gun and a musical instrument as the singer takes suitcase in hand and prepares to put as much distance between them as possible. Sean Wilentz suggests the Stanley Brothers’ 1947 recording of “Little Maggie” to be a good representative of the ballad:6 Over yonder stands little Maggie With a dram glass in her hand She’s drinkin’ away her trouble And a courting some other man Oh how can I ever stand it To see them two blue eyes A shining in the moonlight Like two diamonds in the sky Pretty flowers were made for blooming Pretty stars were made to shine Pretty women were made for loving Little Maggie was made for mine Last time I saw little Maggie She was sitting on the banks of the sea With a forty-four around her And a banjo on her knee I’m a goin’ down to the station With my suitcase in my hand I’m a goin’ to leave this country I’m a goin’ to some far distant land Go away, go away little Maggie Go and do the best you can I’ll get me another woman You can get you another man. (364-65)

7 Marcus, in the “envoi” to The Rose & The Briar, claims that “in their writing, you can hear a moment every contributor to this book seems to have passed through: that moment when he or she realized that the old ballads carried a kind of truth, or, in the art historian T. J. Clark’s phrase, a kind of collective vehemence that is its own truth, that could not be found anywhere else.” When you play a ballad, he continues, “you realize that all ballads, regardless of when they might have been made, are old, and draw what power they have from a faith that just as the songs they turn back to seem to have been sung forever, they will be, too” (354). Though the editors do not specifically speak of myth or mythmaking, the notions of powerful faith and timeless collective truth alluded to in their discussion of ballads certainly tie in to the concept of myth as discussed by Mircea Eliade when he explains that the mythmaking process occurs because “popular memory has great difficulty retaining ‘specific’ events and ‘authentic’ personalities. It operates according to different structures: categories as opposed to events, archetypes rather than historic personalities” (59, my translation).

8 Regis Boyer suggests that a myth is always composed of three elements: a symbolic image; an exemplary, paradigmatic story; and atemporal value (153-54). Posited in these terms, the myth of Little Maggie is at heart that of the lone female temptress who mocks expressions of love, thus embodying the patriarchal fear of that which is dark

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and sinister in the female. In both “The Haunting” and “Little Maggie—A Mystery,” Oates explores variations on the myth and its effect on the lives it touches to reveal the competing, yet complimentary implications of mythmaking processes.

“The Haunting”

9 Set in what we understand to be Cleveland as it is described as “a big city” on the banks of the Cuyahoga river (98, 95), “The Haunting”7 recounts a six-year-old girl’s experience of moving to a new place with her mother and older brother after her father’s death. Marybeth, the young narrator, is haunted by her father’s death and transposes her feelings onto imagined cries for help from suffering rabbits caged in the cellar of her new home. The cages are eventually removed by the landlord, but Marybeth is not released from her dread. She seems to know that the sound will continue to haunt her throughout her life: “Cries of trapped creatures who have suffered, who have died, who await us in hell, our kin” (110). Marybeth’s mother remains obstinately oblivious, however, to her daughter’s turmoil, latching on to the myth of Little Maggie to recreate herself and thus abandoning her daughter to her emotional fate.

10 Before the move, the mother had been suspected of involvement in the fire that burned the father alive in his bed, but was not arrested for lack of evidence. Various elements of the narrative seem to point to her guilt, however. First, the young Marybeth remembers her mother leaving the house the night of her father’s death, although she is brought to doubt this memory in the face of her mother’s and brother’s assertions: “The man drove away with Mommy and later I would come to think that I had dreamed it because Mommy said she had not left the house, not for five minutes, she swore she had not. [...] Calvin told them Mommy was with us all night” (99). In addition, Marybeth remembers always having “to look out for” Daddy because the man could be unpredictably violent and didn’t hesitate to beat on his children (97-98). At such times “Daddy’s eyes were glassy and had red cobwebs in them and his fingers kept bunching into fists and his fists kept striking out like he couldn’t help himself. [...] And Mommy ran to protect us then and hid us” (98). Physical abuse could provide a motive for murder. Before moving, the mother apparently sustained significant injuries to her face which is still, months later, only “mostly mended” (103). The final element is not in the narrative’s content, but rather in its structure. The clues are to be found on the penultimate page on each side of a section break where the last paragraph of one section begins with a description of the mother “lighting a match” for her cigarette and the following section, which recounts the little Marybeth knows of her father’s death, begins with the words “burned alive” (109). This juxtaposition of fire-related anecdotes encourages the establishment of a connection between the two events.

11 The mother may have reacted in order to protect herself and her children, however, she is not a pure and faultless character. Indeed, her singing of the Little Maggie ballad in her new home seems to be a sign of danger as it is associated with other former behaviors of the violent father that she is gradually adopting: “Now Daddy is gone, Mommy plays his old music”; “Now Daddy is gone, Mommy brings home bottles like Daddy used to bring home”; “Now Daddy is gone and not coming back, Mommy has taken up his old guitar that none of us could touch, not ever” (102). Now that the father is gone, the mother is taking his place, including adopting his negative qualities, and the children become wary of her as they used to be of him: “But now Daddy is gone, it’s

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Mommy whose eyes are like a cat’s eyes jumping at us. It’s Mommy whose fingers twitch like they want to be fists” (98).

12 The victim status of the mother is further called into question by her alliance with the Little Maggie character whose traditional portrayal as sinister and dangerous is reinforced in this story by the modified ballad lyrics. Versions of the ballad have traditionally referred to Little Maggie as “courting” some other man, but the lyrics sung by Marybeth’s mother in “The Haunting” refer to Maggie as “cheatin’ another man” (103). Indeed, this combined with the fact that Marybeth remembers her mother driving away with a man on the night of her father’s death indicates that the mother had a motive other than that of her children’s well-being for wanting her estranged husband dead. Furthermore, in the story’s version of the ballad, it is Maggie who is described suitcase in hand, rather than the singer—who packs up and leaves—in traditional versions. This implies that Maggie/the mother has something from which to run.

13 By the end of the story, any innocence that could be associated with the mother is completely occulted by her decision to adopt the mythical persona. She decides to call herself “Little Maggie” at the river café where she works and performs. In her drinking, flirting (taking money from men but offering nothing in return), guitar playing and gun (or match) slinging, Marybeth’s mother almost perfectly embodies the mythical Maggie figure. She uses the strong, independent, deadly yet sexy Little Maggie character as a tool to help reposition herself as a figure of power and authority now that her husband is out of the picture and the silence that reigns in the café—once she starts to sing—can be taken as proof of her success (107). “The Haunting” thus recounts a story of female empowerment through myth adaptation and perpetuation. Indeed, by calling herself Little Maggie, and singing about her own mythical persona, the woman in this story effectively controls the way in which she will be perceived and understood by others. Myth-making, explains Eliade, is a process by which “the memory of historical events and authentic individuals is modified within two or three centuries to fit the mold of archaic mentality which cannot accept the individual but only the exemplary” (60, my translation). By aligning herself with an exemplary model, Marybeth’s mother uses the power of myth to mask her questionable past as well as her problems at home. Indeed, she seems oblivious to the problems of her own daughter who is tormented by her own brother and sleep-deprived due to haunting feelings associated with the terror of trapped, suffering creatures.

“Little Maggie—A Mystery”

14 In “The Haunting,” Marybeth’s mother aligns herself with an existing mythical persona. In the later “Little Maggie—A Mystery,”8 however, Oates inversely treats the mythmaking process itself, suggesting that in our contemporary celebrity-crazed culture, the process is accelerated, happening almost instantaneously, as opposed to over the centuries, or at least generations, discussed by Eliade (60-62). Two complementary examples of this are showcased in this story: the artist as singing legend and his subject matter as representative of a privileged position. The two are intricately linked as Bill Brandy’s fame is associated from the start with the song “Little Maggie” which remains one of his most popular. The former element is concerned with the reality behind the singer’s celebrity façade, unveiling the un-Christian behavior

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behind his god-fearing rhetoric and demasking the artifice that seeks to deny the man’s aging body and conform as nearly as possible to his popular image.9 Indeed, nearing the end of his career, the singing “legend” has to undergo plastic surgery and wear corsets and heeled boots in order to live up to his mythical image (115). More interesting, however, is the latter element constructed around the myth of Little Maggie which is concerned not only with the relationship between myth and reality, but also complicates the boundary between the fictional world and the real world.

15 Set in fictional Vergennes County, Kentucky, Oates’s story is the tale of a country singer’s rise to national fame and the havoc it wreaked upon his wife and children, as told by his daughter, Lucinda. Unable to deal with their feelings of abandonment, his estranged wife dies relatively young of drink and despair, and his son commits suicide while still a young man. The mystery alluded to in the title has to do with the identity of “Little Maggie,” a character in one of Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy’s most famous songs who is a source of speculation on the part of fans, journalists and family members throughout his career for the singer refuses to reveal whether or not his Little Maggie is based on a real person and if so, who this person is. Lucinda reveals that she has discovered the truth about Maggie’s identity thanks to a fortuitous combination of events —photos discovered in her father’s sock drawer as a child put together with a face at her mother’s funeral decades later—but that she plans to keep the secret, which she presumably does until deciding to tell her story as an elderly woman.

16 Lucinda’s narrative is presented as being for the benefit of “gullible” journalists who have put foolish questions to her about the identity of Little Maggie, suggesting she might have been the model for the character, even though she was only three years old when she first heard her father perform the song. The narrative is a confession of sorts. Though Lucinda has done nothing wrong, she does possess information, which she reveals in her own way. Lucinda has been estranged from her father for sixty years and must think back to herself at age three in order to begin the story from its beginning. Objectivity, in such a situation, is ostensibly impossible and Lucinda’s narrative is clearly overshadowed by the tragic knowledge she would come to acquire related to Maggie’s identity and her father’s fame. The opening line evokes the distancing and mythologizing language of fairy tales: “This was a long-ago time when we were all so young.” It is a time of innocence, a time of “before”: “You wanted to think Little Maggie was not a real woman, to cause real hurt and regret. You wanted to think, It’s just a song, it’s music fading in the air” (101). According to this logic, if Little Maggie were but an archetype, she could not do individual, real-world harm. The irony is, of course, that had the affair not happened, the song itself would have been enough to create the marital problems between Lucinda’s parents simply because of the fame it engendered. It was Bill Brandy’s career that took him away from his family, not the short-lived affair he immortalized in song.

17 Lucinda comments on the first time she saw her father perform onstage, remembering: “Little Maggie, Little Maggie!—there was not a girl or a woman of any age in that Vergennes County audience didn’t want to be Little Maggie sung of by Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy for you could see, whoever Little Maggie was, she’d got inside that man’s head.” This memory exposes the mass delusion that is instantly formed around the personality of Little Maggie and the notion that the detached, lonely, marginal woman of the song is somehow an enviable position, and the extension of this logic to the idea that anything that gets one sung about, thus immortalized, is enviable, an idea expressed in

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Lucinda’s comment directly following this memory: “Little Maggie had a song sung of her which would come to be a famous song, which will not be true of the remainder of us” (103). Bill Brandy is presented as having made “six recordings of ‘Little Maggie’ each of them differing considerably from the others except the opening words Yonder stands Little Maggie” (109). Contrary to what is generally considered healthy, her most defining characteristics then are that she is distant and alone. Yet the image continues to be attractive to Bill’s adoring public even as his career charges into “a new era”: “He had a Little Maggie for the new music, too. This Little Maggie was some kind of ‘revolutionary’—‘Free Female.’ It wasn’t a whiskey Little Maggie slugged back it was LSD, it wasn’t a .44 pistol Little Maggie clutched but a submachine gun aimed at your heart, America!” (112). In this way, Oates evokes the evolution and adaptability of the Little Maggie myth and the notion that it hits on some kind of impossible yet fundamental human desire to be aloof and unfettered by the complications of human relationships.

18 The issues related to the myth are complicated in this story by the mystery of the real person behind it: “Every reporter, journalist, TV interviewer has asked Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy the same question: Who is Little Maggie?” (114). The singer claims not to understand the fervent interest provoked by the song, to which the “reporter says Why d’you think, Bill? Little Maggie made you famous way back in the 1930s. And here you are, country-music legend Blue-Eyed Bill, still going strong. There’s some of us wondering about her” (114-15). In other words, is there a real woman behind the myth that should be granted a share of the fame, a woman being exploited by the male singer?

19 Throughout the narrative, Lucinda presents Little Maggie as the source of her family’s problems. However, though both parts of the name are consistently capitalized and never rendered in italics or between quotation marks, it is difficult to know whether she is signalling out the individual identity behind the name, the eponymous song itself, or the mythical identity created by the song. Lucinda’s discovery of the true identity behind the myth reveals the Little Maggie she constantly evokes to be a combination of the three, for the fame engendered by the popular song is shown to be more sinister than the rather pathetic actual woman. Indeed, contrary to the romantic notion associated with the woman in the ballad, Midge Kilfeather, a distant cousin of her mother’s, is neither a woman to be envied nor feared. Rather, she is an embarrassment to her family: a crude, dirty, ravaged alcoholic convicted as a young woman “of smothering her own baby-born-out-of-wedlock.”10 At first glance, Midge Kilfeather seems a far cry from her mythical counterpart. She is no longer young, and certainly not attractive: “Little Maggie! My Daddy had made so much of her!” (120). However, the story’s message cannot be simplified to the platitude that a song, recounting an image frozen in time, cannot possibly correlate with the progression of real-world time. Indeed, upon further reflection, Midge’s description does indeed correspond largely to that in the song of a dangerous, solitary alcoholic, it simply lacks the veneer of glamor that fame provides. The lyrics attributed to the ballad in this story are modified similarly to those in “The Haunting.” Rather than the “courting” of traditional versions and the “cheating” of “The Haunting,” this version speaks of a similarly calculating “fooling.” Once again, Little Maggie is the one with the suitcase rather than the singer,11 suggesting that Midge has something to run from. With these lyrics, the singer seems to be implying that Midge is wholly responsible for the child’s death and her subsequent imprisonment; he was under the influence of her feminine

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wiles and is therefore released of any responsibility, a victim rather than an accomplice.

20 The narrator, Lucinda, is a characteristic Oates protagonist in that she embodies the paradox of individuals who have both blindness and insight, a frequent Oates technique (Cologne-Brookes 219). She gains insight into Little Maggie and her family tragedy and questions the blind faith of her mother and relatives, yet remains blind to her own idolization of her father. Lucinda presents herself throughout the text as a sane and relatively objective narrator. She does not founder in shame like her mother who alternately drinks and prays herself to death, or hate like her brother who commits suicide. Indeed, she claims to have outlived her brother by so many years because she “never hated Daddy like [he] did” (108). Furthermore, she appears to coherently grasp the tragedy behind the story of Little Maggie when she writes: “Yonder stands is a joke to me now. The kind you try to laugh at but can’t” (121).

21 However, it is the short final two-paragraph section that casts doubt on this presentation. Lucinda is a traditionally Southern obedient daughter.12 She never marries, staying home to look after her mother. In spite of her father’s neglect, she keeps his secret for over sixty years. Though her narrative reveals the secret, she continues to play the role of dutiful daughter by keeping alive a blind faith in the man. Her filial devotion is countered by the image of her father as another instance of grotesque mockery of myth. At the story’s close, though she has had no word from her father in sixty years, she remains faithful, triumphantly “confident that in Daddy’s heart he loves his angel-girl Lucinda” (122), a reference to her father’s tearful on-stage presentation of her at the age of three (105). At the same time, her father lies sequestered in his Nashville mansion, “tended to by round-the-clock nurses sworn to secrecy” (121), for all intents and purposes oblivious to his daughter. The story thus closes on the image of an elderly woman mentally stuck in the distant past as if her sixty-plus years of experience have taught her nothing. Lucinda clearly idolizes the privileged father-daughter relationship she imagines to have existed at a moment in time in which, ironically, we understand that her father had already had his affair with “Little Maggie” because, as Lucinda remembers, his performance of the eponymous song drew an overwhelmingly positive response from the audience.

22 In this story, Oates deconstructs mythmaking processes by showing the tumult and artifice underneath the veneer: the mythical Maggie is in reality a ruined woman, the celebrity singer is no longer natural but a grotesque hodgepodge of artifice, the nice church-going manners of Lucinda’s mother are shown to be nothing but facade, even the “enlightened” daughter is shown to suffer from the myth of her own independence and intellectual analysis. Yet, the interplay of fiction and the outside world creates a unique twist in terms of the reading of this story. For the purposes of her story, Oates pretends the song originates with her character.13 The fictitious Little Maggie is thus almost instantaneously elevated to mythical status. However, the reader, especially that of the anthology, knows the song actually exists outside the story and may have already been familiar with it. The actual song potentially resonates with the reader, thus falsifying in a way the instantaneity of the mythmaking process depicted by Oates. On the other hand, if the reader has been enthralled by the song before reading the story, this lends credence to the power of the myth it evokes. The mystery of Little Maggie evoked by the story’s title is threefold. Literally, it is the identity of the woman sung about by the legend around which the plot unfolds. Metaphysically, it provokes

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reflection on two related questions: Why is the lonely Little Maggie depicted in the song such an attractive character?; and Why do we court fame to the detriment of our close personal relationships? Questions that the concision of the short-story form allows Oates to raise, yet prevents her from answering.

***

23 The fact that Oates does not furnish a complete version of the ballad in either of these stories and slightly modifies the traditional lyrics allows for the creation of a more authentic link with the fluidity of ballad tradition. Indeed, traditionally, ballad lyrics changed frequently when passed by word of mouth.14 In their introduction to The Rose & The Briar, Wilentz and Greil justify their ballad rewriting project, explaining: “The folklorists’ work, invaluable as it is in establishing provenances and cultural connections, can take us only so far in understanding the life of any song. Something ineffable is always missing about the emotional or historical or visual or aural experience of singing or hearing a ballad” (3). It is this “something ineffable” that they invited artists to explore and that Oates masterfully shapes into a powerful exposé of the flip-sides of mythmaking processes.

24 These two variations on the myth of the enigmatic Little Maggie explore the powerful masking quality of myth, deconstructing, or one might say demasking, the attractive fictionality of a device which is natural, but potentially dangerous when not understood. In her essay “On Fiction in Fact,” Oates writes: “Where myth and truth contend, where the ‘rounding of corners to make a better narrative’ and facts are at odds, we must learn to make our way as skeptics” (79). In contemporary society, the ruling mythology is often intricately linked to celebrity, popular culture and mediatization. It is fitting that Oates has chosen a song as the means to continue her exploration of this subject and that she does so in a fictional form that is also short. On the one hand, the natural elasticity of the ballad form parallels the melioristic notion championed by Oates that change is possible amongst individuals.15 On the other hand, standardized imagery, such as that transmitted by popular songs, is contrary to Oates’s conception of her art. Indeed, inversely to the interests of myth, Joyce Carol Oates is particularly concerned with the individuality of human experience in all its complexity. The short-story form allows Oates to create a glimpse of the mysterious dream-like reality with which her unique characters are confronted: The painful individuality of Oates’s two daughter-narrators thus contrasts with the timelessness of myth in these stories, exposing two competing aspects of our humanity and serving as a plea for vulnerable daughters gasping for breath in a sea of contemporary mythmaking.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyer, Régis. “Existe-t-il un mythe qui ne soit pas littéraire?” Mythes et littérature. Ed. Pierre Brunel. Coll. Recherches actuelles en littérature comparée. Vol. VI. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1994. 153-64. Print.

Brunel, Pierre, ed. Mythes et littérature. Coll. Recherches actuelles en littérature comparée. Vol. VI. Paris: Presses de l’université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1994. Print.

Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005. Print.

Eliade, Mircea. Le mythe de l’éternel retour : Archétypes et répétition. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Essais,” 1969. Print.

Johnson, Greg. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates’s First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30.1 (Winter 1993): 1-14. Print.

Lomax, John A., and Alan Lomax. American Ballads and Folk Songs. 1934. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. By the North Gate. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1963.

____. “Little Maggie—A Mystery.” The Rose & The Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. Eds. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. 99-122. Print.

____. “On Fiction in Fact.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 76-79. Print.

____ Preface. Story: Fictions Past and Present. Eds. Boyd Litzinger and Joyce Carol Oates. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company, 1985. 829-34. Print.

____. “The Haunting.” The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. 95-110. Print.

____. “The Short Story.” Southern Humanities Review 5.3 (Summer 1971): 213-14. Print.

____. “Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?” The Guardian 3 March 2009. Web. 12/10/2012.

Tromble, Tanya. “L’Espace du sud chez Joyce Carol Oates : Une Vision étrangère du religieux sudiste.” Mélanges de science religieuse 71.3. “Aspects de la religion dans la littérature américaine. Vol. 2. “‘Le Sud hanté de Dieu’ ou l’importance du religieux dans la littérature du Sud.” Eds. Gérald Préher and Marie Liénard-Yeterian. Institut Catholique de Lille. July-September 2014. 65-78. Print.

Wilentz, Sean, and Greil Marcus, eds. The Rose & The Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Print.

NOTES

1. The story “In the Old World” was selected as co-winner of the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition and printed in the August 1959 issue.

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2. The page including the biographical blurb in the paperback Fawcett Crest edition of her first book-length publication, the short story collection By The North Gate (1963), quotes Oates herself: “All of my writing is about the mystery of human emotions. 3. More recent remarks made in a short article for The Guardian indicate that this subject is no less important to Oates today: “Recall that D. H. Lawrence warned us to trust the tale, not the teller—the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar. Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really knows what has made us what we are, still less why we behave so eccentrically as we do; when we are pressed to explain ourselves, we invent. 4. The editors of this anthology adopt a broad definition of “ballad”: “any narrative song, no matter its stanza structure” (3). 5. “Ballads and Songs of the Blue Ridge Mountains: Persistence and Change.” Smithsonian Folkways 5 June 2013 Web. 6. A recording is available on YouTube. 7. “The Haunting” was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2003. Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, 2004. Reprinted in The Female of the Species, 2005. References in this paper are taken from the latter. 8. “Little Maggie: A Mystery” was originally published in Boulevard in 2004, collected in The Rose & The Briar, 2005. References in this paper are taken from the latter. The title in the magazine version uses a colon, whereas the title in the later collected volume uses a dash. 9. Aside from the fact that the ballad of Little Maggie can be traced to the Blue Ridge Mountains, one might wonder why Oates moved farther south to find the setting for this story given that Southern backdrops are largely absent from her fiction. The religious dimension of the story may furnish a response. Indeed, the exploration of the hypocrisy behind the characters’ religious rhetoric is an equally important component of the story. While exposing the grotesque tragedy of the Maggie myth in this story, Oates sets up a parallel commentary on an even more prevalent myth, that of Christian belief (see Tromble). 10. Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy seems to have immortalized this incident in song as well: “an early hit single was ‘Smotherin Love’ (a woman condemned to death for infanticide)” (114). 11. The song content as remembered in the story by Lucinda goes: “Little Maggie has a drink in her hand she’s drinking away her troubles, Little Maggie has a suitcase in her hand she’s running away from her troubles, Little Maggie has a .44 pistol in her hand she’s gonna shoot away her troubles. Little Maggie is a female not to be trusted, fooling another man” (103). 12. Other traditional images of families in the South are at work in the story such as notions of patriarchal duty and a twisted form of family loyalty. For example, Bill Brandy, in spite of his neglect and philandering, purchased and continued to finance his family’s home and never remarried so that, at the story’s close, we learn that Lucinda is his sole remaining heir. 13. The narrative never explicitly claims that the character Bill Brandy wrote the song “Little Maggie.” However, this seems to be the intention implied when Lucinda calls it “his special song” (103) and when the reporter mentions it as being responsible for his fame (114-15). 14. In their introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs, John A. and Alan Lomax mention some ballads of which as many as three hundred different versions have been collected. 15. For an in-depth discussion of Oates as a meliorist, see Cologne-Brookes, particularly his introduction.

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ABSTRACTS

En 2005, la nouvelle « Little Maggie–A Mystery » paraît dans le recueil The Rose & The Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad. « Little Maggie » est une chanson folk du sud des Appalaches qui date probablement de la fin du XIXe et qui raconte l’histoire d’une briseuse de cœur qui aime boire et s’amuser. La nouvelle de Oates retrace le succès fulgurant du chanteur de country Blue-Eyed Bill Brandy, du mythique comté de Vergennes dans le Kentucky, et ses conséquences sur la famille qu’il délaisse. « Little Maggie », la chanson la plus populaire du répertoire de Bill, invite les fans à tenter d’identifier la personne qui a inspiré le personnage. On apprend que la fille de Bill a résolu l’énigme. Cependant, l’aboutissement de son enquête ne lui fournit pas la paix recherchée. Cet article examine le mystère de ce chanteur énigmatique, son rôle dans l’économie de la nouvelle, ainsi que la notion de perpétuation du mythe à travers son utilisation dans un autre texte, « The Haunting ».

AUTHORS

TANYA TROMBLE Tanya Tromble is an associate member of the CIRPaLL research group at the Université d’Angers. She defended a doctoral dissertation entitled “Interminable Enigma: Joyce Carol Oates’s Reimagining of Detective Fiction” and has published articles in English and French on various aspects of Oates’s fiction including crime fiction, the epistolary form, violence, the gothic, religion, and 9/11. She is a member of the editorial board for the journal Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. She has recently co-edited a volume of essays on Oates and her work for the Cahiers de l’Herne series.

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Short Story

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Trick or Treat

Alice Clark

1 When Bo and Cheng Lee flew into the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on a Boeing 747 from Hong Kong, it was one month before the 31st of October. The precocious twins, at age seventeen, had just won a Fulbright scholarship in Chemical Engineering. Memory University had recruited these honour roll students for a four- year program. Their parents had already invested a lot in their preparatory years at the American School in London. So the scholarship was a godsend, and no one, absolutely no one, could accuse their American mother, a former alumni of Memory University, of shifting her weight around to get the Lee boys in.

2 Now that the twins were in a college dormitory they considered themselves full-fledged men. Bo and Cheng had piercing blue eyes and fine black hair. They were black belts and considered the broad-shouldered football players in the Frat dorm as raucous nuisances that could eventually serve as punching bags. Bo and Cheng knew that that the two of them could knock a pack of those drunken Frats out like a series of bowling pins. Luckily, they hadn’t had the opportunity; they were peaceful boys anyway who just wanted to fit into the melting pot.

3 This was their second month in Atlanta and both brothers were becoming restless. They had been expecting to find a town square with a church and a big clock, somewhere—like the ones they’d seen in photos of the old South. But as they were soon to discover, cities like Atlanta had much more to offer. Having no car, they did their sightseeing by bus. One of the places the bus stopped that night was upper Peachtree Street, the longest road in Atlanta which was known for its stretch of nightclubs. One of the trendiest: The Circus, was doing a pre-Halloween night, where the pulse of Atlanta had been throbbing since 5 pm. Happy Hour was in full swing when Bo and Cheng walked in. The costume theme was the Roman Empire.

4 “Get a load of that!” Cheng said gawking at the waitress, “She’s dressed to kill.” The tall brunette was wearing a sleeveless blouse with small iron cones fixed into the moulded bust line. She had a rubber slingshot strapped to her waist. The boys looked around. Plastic Jack O’Lanterns lit up the room. Yellow flames flickered from behind the shadowy grins of the pumpkins that illuminated the tables where clients were seated: secretaries and lawyers from downtown Atlanta, discus throwers, football players;

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students from Georgia Tech and Memory University were all there. The bar scene was truly a mixed bag of tricks that night.

5 “Cheng Look!” Bo s aid thrusting a finger out so abruptly that it sent the straw ricocheting across the room. “Look! It’s Mary-Joe. What a sex bomb!”

6 “Too bad Bobby’s the detonator,” Cheng chuckled. “Bobby’s not much of a brain, you know. I’ve seen him at it red-handed in Dr Kingston’s class. When he can’t understand something he makes out like he’s blowing a kiss to Mary-Joe and she slips him the answer. Dr. Kingston’s never gotten a whiff of it!”

7 Mary-Joe was wearing a light blue cashmere turtleneck sweater; the soft glow of her face flickered in the orange candlelight. “Oh man, if I could just make her!” Cheng gawked.

8 “You mean make out with. It’s a phrasal verb, and mind your tongue!” Bo corrected.

9 “Who gives a damn, as long as you get a home run,” Cheng insisted. Bo’s full attention was now focused entirely on Mary-Joe who was trying to help Bobby on with his jacket.

10 “Speaking of home,” Cheng interjected, “I hope we can still catch a bus to get back to the dormitory. You know how shop closes up in this part of the city. They say it’s a real ghost town as soon as night falls.”

11 “Good grief!” Bo bleated out, pointing a finger in the direction of Bobby. “Look! Bobby the Magnificent has just passed out cold. Good grief! Good grief! Good grief!”

12 Cheng clapped his brother on the back. “You sound like your computer program just got stuck. Come on let’s give her a hand.” “Hi,” he said to Mary-Joe, “should I call for help?”

13 “Don’t worry, it’s gonna be just fine. But, a little cold water, with some ice cubes would help, immensely.” Mary-Joe motioned in the direction of the waitress.

14 Bo got closer to Mary-Joe. His left hand prevented Bobby from sinking onto the table. “You really look nice tonight,” he said looking at Mary-Joe.

15 She shot him a disdainful smile. “Please hold him up straight. He’s drooling all over the table, can’t you see?”

16 She decided it was best to get Bobby out of The Circus and sauntered off to find her convertible. “Just toss ‘em in my car,” she said, as they struggled to stuff Bobby’s discus thrower arms into the back seat first.

17 “Guess I’m supposed to thank ya,” Bobby slurred. “Well, thank ya,” he said squinting over at Cheng on the right and Bo on the left. “Sweet Jesus! I’m bein’ chaperoned by two Kung Fu’s.” Then he dropped out cold.

18 Cheng was huffing and puffing as he stuffed the right leg of Bobby into the back seat. Bo sat him up straight, and closed the door, forgetting to fasten the seat belt. Mary-Joe already skidded off before he could say a thing.

19 “Wow, I can’t believe it, she’s blowing us a kiss in the rear-view mirror! Did you see that - a kiss?” Bo jabbered, elbowing his brother who had started walking down the sidewalk, glancing cautiously about.

20 “I’d rather have a ride back to the dormitory at this time of night than a kiss from Mary-Joe,” Cheng muttered, turning to the immense blackness, which had fallen over downtown Atlanta.

21 They must have a night-owl bus available on weekends,” Bo said reassuringly.

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22 “Ya, they do. The eleven o’clock just left five minutes ago. We’ll have to hang around this ghost town another hour.” At that precise moment Cheng felt a sharp blow on the right side of his neck. His knees buckled in— and his body struck the sidewalk.

23 Bo let out a shrill cry: “Thief, robber, thief!” but the swift hand had already disappeared into a dark side street with Cheng’s wallet. “Cheng, you all right, Cheng say something,” Bo insisted.

24 Cheng looked up. “Nearly broke my collarbone that S.O.B.,” he said rubbing his neck. “Happened too fast, even for a black belt like me.” Cheng scrambled to his feet and started limping in the direction of The Circus. A small rip in the side of his trousers was glazed with blood.

25 “At least we have my wallet,” Bo whispered, craning his head around nervously. “Better flag down a cab.” Then he started pointing wildly at something. “Look over there. If that’s not Mary-Joe in her red convertible, right there parked in front of The Circus.” Cheng stretched his neck painfully to get a better look.

26 “She was Miss Georgia, did you know that?” Bo sighed.

27 “Miss Bad Luck, you mean,” Cheng groaned.

28 Mary-Joe turned and saw Cheng who was leaning against Bo hobbling in her direction. “My gosh, don’t you men ever sober up?” She looked at Cheng with an air of disgust.

29 “It’s not what it seems,” Bo corrected. “It’s not what you think— Mary-Joe! Some jerk just ripped off my brother’s wallet. Before we knew it he’d delivered a left blade stroke and beat it down a side street.” Then knitting his eyebrows, he asked: “What are you doing back here anyway? I thought you were taking care of Bobby!”

30 “I dropped him off, but I forgot my pocket-book. I had to come back and pick it up. She started shuffling her feet nervously—Oh Lord! It’s my entire fault, I should have given you a lift, after all you did. Wanna go for another round? It’s on me,” she smiled.

31 A half-an-hour later they found themselves in a bar in the Highlands district. Mary-Joe was sitting between the two brothers. A jazz band was playing Gershwin’s Summertime.

32 “Thanks,” Mary-Joe said, “for helping me out with Bobby.”

33 “Come on, that’s the least we could do,” Bo said, flustered.

34 Mary-Joe stretched out her arms. Spreading them like wings around the back of each brother; she let her dainty hands settle down lightly and pulled Bo and Cheng closer to her. Ya’ll obviously don’t know too much about Atlanta,” she drawled.

35 “Well, we’ve only been here since September,” Bo noted defensively.

36 “True, but we’ve been around,” Cheng corrected.

37 Mary-Joe looked at them both with a knowing smile. “So you have, huh?”

38 “Ya. We’ve been to the High Museum of Art, the Philharmonic and the Ballet,” the Brothers chimed in.

39 “Ohhh, lord, why then ya’ll obviously haven’t seen anything at all. Wait till tomorrow. You’re comin’ to one of the wickedest Halloween parties ever, I mean really wicked! It’s at my folk’s place, they’re outta town.”

40 “And they know about the party?” the brothers asked.

41 “Nah, Dad’s a workaholic; he’s always out of town,” she replied.

42 And your Mom?” Cheng asked.

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43 She paused. “My Dad collects rifles,” she said evading his question.

44 “What kind?” Cheng asked politely.

45 “Clashkoffs,” she said with a slur. “He’s got a whole closet full of them, startin’ with the series of Clashkoffs that Russian guy patented in 1946. They were revamped by an American to shoot at double range in 1990. Dad’s real proud of that last model. That’s the year I was born, 1990. Dad says I’m as sharp as a...”

46 “You mean a Kalashnikov. An M16A2 assault rifle?” Bo corrected.

47 “That’s right—a Clashkoff—that’s what I said. Dad swears I’m as sharp as that rifle: got wide range, long caliber, and deadly cartridges when I‘m loaded!” The twins jostled each other, looking at Mary-Joe, incredulously.

48 “We only got a hint of what you can do sober. But now, we’re beginning to know what you’re worth when you’re loaded!” Cheng jested. “A toast to us three!”

49 Mary Joe looked stern suddenly and set down her glass, firmly. “Ok, party’s over. Ya’ll are comin’ back to my folk’s place. I’m not in shape to drive you back to Memory. But you’ll have to lay low, cuz Bobby’s there. So, keep your eyes peeled.”

50 Her red convertible was the only car on the road at this late hour. Mary-Joe took a right. Her headlights lit up a white sign indicating “Highlander’s Estate.” A guard at the entrance, drowsing off, jerked back to life under the headlights. She rolled down her window. His gaze rode absently over the twins in the back seat and fixed itself on Mary- Jo: “Evenin’ Miss Mortel.” He activated the gate.

51 When they entered—Bobby was lying on the couch inert in the living room—a pair of tennis shoes dangling over the armrest. The TV was blaring and so was the radio. “Bob, how ya feelin’? You feelin’ better?” She bent down and stroked his forehead.

52 “Guh nite Mary baby, guh night.” He turned over on his side and closed his eyes.

53 Mary-Joe turned to Cheng and Bo. “Ya’ll can sleep in the guest room over there. Just make yourself at home.” She spread her arms again and the two brothers froze, feeling her so close. “Now don’t be shy,” she smiled, “the kitchen’s over there on the left, the boy’s room is on the right. If ya’ll need a shower, it’s upstairs. That’s where I sleep. Oh ya—I promised to show you my Dad’s Clashkoff collection. It’s right there in the closet behind Bobby.” She took a key lying beside the TV and opened the large oak door. A wide variety of pistols, shotguns and rifles in shiny neat rows gleamed out at them from the darkness.

54 “Must be about fifty of them in all!” Cheng gasped.

55 “Is that legal?” Bo whispered, drawing back.

56 “I’ll show you the rest tomorrow. Better get some sleep, it’s almost 3 a.m.” She turned slowly and disappeared behind the spiral staircase blowing a brief kiss with her right hand as she vanished.

57 “Hey, wha, wha what was that supposed to mean?” Bo stuttered.

58 “Well, it’s supposed to mean that you’re protecting yourself—in America that is, since everyone has guns. It’s the state constitutional right: to bear arms and protect property, but I don’t know, maybe her Dad hunts or something,” Cheng ventured.

59 “Did you see that? She blew me a kiss. Miss Georgia blew me a kiss!” Bo repeated.

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60 Cheng snickered, “If Miss Georgia blew YOU a kiss then Mr. Discus player over there; I suppose HE must be your personal chauffeur, too. Sober up Bo!” He looked at his brother, shrugging his shoulders, “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”

61 The next day, the four of them were seated around the kitchen table having coffee. They could see squirrels scampering up the huge oak trees from the bay window that looked out on the pond. The leaves were raging with colour: flaming ochre, deep crimson, scintillating gold, a spectrum of hues that proved perilous to the overly sensitive optic nerves of minds still saturated with alcohol from the night before. “Can ya draw that curtain just a tad, Bobby? It looks like an expressionist paintin’ out there, the whole landscape’s drunk with colour!” Mary-Joe squinted her eyes.

62 “Don’t talk about drinkin’ please,” Bobby pressed a hand to his forehead.

63 Mary Joe took a sip of her coffee. “Say Bobby, what are ya wearing for Halloween tonight?”

64 He grunted and turned to the twins: “Ya’ll comin’ to Marie-Joe’s Halloween party? Ya gotta dress up —I’m goin’ as an ourangatang,” he said throttling his chest.

65 “That’s what I love about Bobby, he doesn’t take himself too, seriously!” Marie-Joe smiled, settling back on the couch. “An’ ya’ll? What are ya’ll dressin’ up as?”

66 “No idea,” Cheng shrugged his shoulders.

67 “Me either. If you’ve got any suggestions...,” Bo smiled demurely.

68 “Now I’m countin’ on ya’ll. This is gonna be a really wicked Halloween party—I’ve invited fifty people and they’re all going to be disguised as somethin’ or other.” She paused and looked at Bo: “Why, you can be a cowboy. It’s not often someone gets the right to tote around somethin’ from Dad’s gun collection.”

69 “A cowboy, hmm,” Bo tried to imagine himself with a Stetson hat swinging a Smith and Wesson.

70 “And you,” she turned to Cheng, “You can be, the Sheriff, and I’ll be, well, I’ll just be Mae-West, the damsel in distress.” Sensing no resistance, Mary-Joe continued, “We have the cowboy hat and the pistol for Bo, the badge for Cheng, the blindfold for me. Don’t even have to go out to rent a costume. Well, except you Bobby—an orangutan of all things—now be serious, what are ya dressin’ up to be?”

71 “Good grief. I don’t know. It’ll be a surprise. You like surprises, don’t you honey?” Bobby bent over and pecked Mary-Joe on the cheek.

*****

72 On Halloween night, beer, wine, champagne and mixed drinks of all sorts filled the bar. A couple of young girls, dressed up as mermaids, extended their shimmering scales, offering the guests a silver platter filled with hot hors-d’oeuvres. Halloween had transformed the salon into a wild zoo of human fantasy. The doorbell would occasionally ring and a group of children arrived, jostling each other as they went through the ritual trick-or-treating. Mary-Joe had prepared a selection of tootsie-rolls, lolly-pops, gum breakers, Baby Ruth bars, and Reese’s butter cups. In the room outside of the main bar, some of the guests were bobbing for apples. Bobby, who was the only one not to dress up, pulled her aside: “Hey, Mary-Joe, you didn’t get nearly enough

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apples for bobbin’ an’ the whiskey’s goin’ dry as well.” He threw her a blank look and swayed heavily in her direction.

73 Mary-Joe steadied him. “I’m not goin’ anywhere, I’m a bit tipsy myself,” she retorted.

74 Bo turned to Mary-Joe. “I can drive, but I’ll need a guide.”

75 “All right, if you insist, but you’ll drive carefully, promise?”

76 “Your wish is my command!” Bo said taking her hand.

77 They walked out to the red convertible. Mary-Joe had pushed her gag up over her head. It formed a white band over her blond bob and stopped the wind from mussing her hair. She looked at Bo: “Hey baby, you’re dressed to kill! That’s just how Mae likes her men!”

78 Bo’s cheeks were flaming. He glanced at Mary-Joe and slipped the .22 short Smith and Wesson into a clasp on his belt loop: “Let’s go Miss West!”

79 “Whoopee, I’m free!” she hooted and slammed the car door.

80 Cheng came running out into the driveway to stop his brother. Momentarily blinded by the car lights, he came to a halt. Bo drove up next to him. Cheng leaned towards Bo’s open window: “You crazy or what, you’re half wasted, now don’t go looking for the sheriff.”

81 The red convertible swung into first, stifling Cheng’s voice. Bo entered into a small stretch of the suburbs. Jack-O’lanterns lit up the windows of the neighbouring houses. “Mary-Joe,” he said in a low voice.

82 “Ya?” she turned to him, thrilled and afraid at the same time.

83 “You know, I really think you’re the world’s most fabulous creature, I mean the most fabulous. You oughta get yourself treated right. I mean, you know what I mean?” He slipped his hand into Mary-Joe’s. They drove in silence for a good fifteen minutes when suddenly the car started to putter to a stop. “Oh jeez, we’re out of gas, you might know,” Bo said in a low voice. The car idled, puttered softly and rolled to a stop in the middle of the darkened road.

84 Bo turned to Mary-Joe, patting her shoulder gently, “now don’t worry,” he said soothingly, while opening his door.

85 Mary-Joe pulled him back. “Don’t, please don’t go!—she said, grating her teeth.

86 “I’ll be right back, I promise. See, there’s a house right over there. Halloween is hospitality night, don’t you worry your pretty little head. Just lock the door. I’ll be right back.”

87 She could see Bo making his way up to a lone house on a hill. She waited and waited and waited. It seemed like an eternity. Then she heard a man yelling: “Get off my property, right this minute, you hear me! I’ll give you to the count of three and if you don’t get off my property...”

88 Two sharp explosions followed as her name pierced the night: “Mary-Joooe!”

89 She ran up towards the house. Bo was sprawled out on the lawn. One lead bullet had gone through the moistened chamber of his pericardial cavity; the other lay lodged in his diaphragm.

......

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90 Although the Lee family claimed it was murder, the newspapers summed up what happened as an act of legitimate self-defence, abiding the Second Amendment. In Georgia, it should be remembered that trespassing on private property is a federal crime and the use of deadly force to prevent imminent injury is justifiable. Samuel Jenkins, arguing in his defence, dismissed accusations of inebriation, for he was on his own private property and could durn well do as he pleased. He was under no influence, except Jesus who lit his way. Jenkins claimed that he answered the doorbell that Halloween night with the fear of god in his heart. When he saw Cheng marching up the hill, dishevelled and breathing heavily, he asked the boy to retreat. The Lee family says that Cheng heard “treat”—not—“retreat” and was probably expecting to find a bowl full of Sugar Daddies, or Mars Bars, when Jenkins slipped his own Smith and Weston into shooting range that fatal night.

AUTHOR

ALICE CLARK Sydney Alice Clark is an Associate Professor of literature at the University of Nantes, France. Her short stories have appeared in French and American journals and anthologies such as Bridges: a Global Anthology of Short Stories, Temenos Publishing; Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville and Résonances, Université Paris 8. A collection of poems in French and English was published in Imaginaires, University of Nantes, France. Her short story manuscript collection, A Darker Shade of Light, was awarded first prize (Prix Manuscrit Technikart) at the Paris Book Fair (March 2011). She is a member of the Jury for English Short Story Fiction, organised by the CIRHILL and the CRILA at the University of Angers and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Nantes. Her work on Shakespeare and French theatre (Le Théâtre romantique en crise, Shakespeare et Nerval, Paris: Harmattan, 2005) was short-listed for a research prize by the Franco- British and Franco-American Research and Higher Education Associations (SAES and AFEA). Numerous articles on short stories and theatre have been published in French and American literary reviews. She has also co-authored a book on the Anglo-Saxon short story (La nouvelle anglo-saxonne, une étude psychanalytique, Paris: Hachette).

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Interviews

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"… trying to find out how to balance tragedy and comedy": an Interview with Lisa Alther

Alice Clark, Sarah Delmas, Nicole Moulinoux, Gérald Préher and Frédérique Spill

1 Born in Tennessee, Lisa Alther is not a typical Southern writer. After leaving the South for her studies, she spent several years in the North and in various foreign countries like France which she used as the backdrop for her 1995 novel Five Minutes in Heaven. She has written six novels, a memoir and a narrative history, Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of Murder and Vengeance (2012). Recently, she and her long- standing friend, French artist Françoise Gilot, have brought out About Women: Conversations between a Writer and a Painter (2015), inspired by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s artistic relationship. The volume is a composite memoir that includes pictures and reminiscences, helping the readers get a sense of the importance of both Alther’s and Gilot’s backgrounds in the shaping of their artistry. The collection Stormy Weather and Other Stories published in 2012 reflects Alther’s interest in place, the stories being set in the South, in the North, but also abroad. It shows her interest in human interactions and in matters of the heart. She constantly questions the stability of her characters’ identities, be they sexual or national, and thus deconstructs American mythologies. The interview was conducted in Lille on June 20, 2013.

***

2 Gérald Préher: Lisa, we are very happy to welcome you in Lille.

3 Lisa Alther: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

4 Gérald Préher: … and happy to say that your collection of stories, Stormy Weather is out —at last because we’ve talked about it for quite a while before it was released.

5 Lisa Alther: Yeah.

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6 Gérald Préher: I saw the drafts of the stories long ago and I’m glad to see them in print together with a couple new ones. Today there are a few people around the table: Alice Clark, from the Université de Nantes; Sarah Delmas, who is a student here in Lille; Frédérique Spill, who is a Faulkner specialist and has read all your stories—she teaches in Amiens; Nicole Moulinoux, who is the President of the Faulkner foundation in Rennes and a specialist of Southern literature. I will let them start with their questions—Frédérique, maybe?

7 Frédérique Spill: I don’t mind, sure, thank you Gérald. It is an honor, Lisa, to be here with you and be able to ask you questions. Except for the novella, Birdman and the Dancer, all the stories collected in Stormy Weather were previously published over more than two decades: in what respect do they reflect your evolution as a writer?

8 Lisa Alther: Good question. Actually two others weren’t published. One was “God’s Country” and the other was “Grassy Top”—but they very much do reflect my evolution. I decided I had these stories—I hadn’t done anything with any of them—and I decided to go through them all and pick out my favorites and do a slim volume and, so, once I picked out my favorites, just by chance it turned out that, I think, five were set in the South where I grew up and lived until I was eighteen and went to college in the North; and then four were set in Vermont where I spent my young adulthood and raised my daughter; and two stories and the long novella were set in New York where I lived in the 1990s. So they reflected my trajectory and my own life but also my stylistic changes. I think the Southern stories were Southern stories in that they had a lot nature imagery and were mostly concerned with god and death—as Southern fiction tends to be (laughs). The Vermont stories were set during the seventies when it was the back to the land movement in Vermont. There were 250 communes, and those stories were about the people and politics of that time and place. In New York every man is an island (laughs). People are very much into their work. You make a date three weeks in advance and then they cancel. So you’re on your own, and those stories are about looking inward to try to find meaning. So they do, I think, reflect my evolution as a person and also as a writer.

9 Gérald Préher: Some of the characters in the Southern stories actually reappear in the Northern stories—“Squeamish” and “Wedding Belles” for instance with Winston— giving the impression that Stormy Weather is a short story cycle though a broken one. We have the first four stories about the South and the next six set in the North. I was wondering if you had envisioned a novel that didn’t really work out—you had bits and pieces but couldn’t see any driving force.

10 Lisa Alther: Well, that’s the other thing that surprised me when I picked my favorites. I went back and I saw that they were somewhat linked. You know, a minor character in one story would appear as a major character in another one and I realized it was probably my own attempt to bring the pieces of myself together into a coherent narrative. My mother was a Yankee from upstate New York, and my father was from Southwest Virginia. So in my household as I was growing up life was a constant Civil War (laughs). Those cultures really are so different—Northerners are much cooler emotionally than Southerners. There’s so much violence in the South and in Southerners, whereas Northerners are more intellectual. And this was going on between my mother and father all the time. So I contain both cultures, but it’s been a very uneasy alliance, until recently. I think I’ve sort of come to terms and feel more at

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peace with it, but I guess I was trying to work that out through those stories and through taking Southerners and putting them in the North, having minor characters become major characters. It was a surprise to me, really, to realize there was a certain very loose coherence.

11 Gérald Préher: It’s not that loose! It’s nice to see the evolution from “Squeamish” to “Wedding Belles”—it takes another story to get the story, another story to find the key that unlocks the first one. So there is a structure, the collection is a kind of echo chamber.

12 Lisa Alther: Well, thank you. It was actually more an intuitive than a conscious structuring. I mean I don’t think I even realized until I put them all together that I had taken Winston, who had been a child in the South, and made him a character in the North during the back to the land movement. I was looking at it thinking, “Oh my god, it’s the same character.”

13 Gérald Préher: Initially he was not named in “Squeamish”—in the drafts you sent me his name never appears, he is just referred to as “Son” by his father—working from those earlier versions I was surprised to see he was Winston in the book.

14 Lisa Alther: Surprise! In terms of your question about whether the stories were a novel that didn’t quite work, different people have asked me, “Why don’t you write a novel using those characters—particularly that Jessie character?” I think basically I’m not really a short story writer. I have more of a novelist’s temperament in that once I write a short story, I want to know more about the characters and who their ancestors were and what makes them behave as they do in the present—what happened to them in the past. Short stories, it seems to me, are closer to poems in a way. Every word has to count. You are trying to establish a mood and a sort of single crystalline moment, whereas with a novel you can just ramble on and on. All six of my novels started as short stories that I just couldn’t stop writing. So in a sense, I guess these short stories were short stories that didn’t become novels, but that, taken together, almost are a novel, which is really odd to me.

15 Gérald Préher: Going through your books I realized there was a slight change in the presentation of your novels. The early ones include titles for chapters and sections while Other Women does not. Five Minutes in Heaven is divided into titled parts but the chapters only have numbers. I was wondering if this can be seen as an illustration of what you are saying—the novels started as short stories. I feel that some chapters in Kinflicks, Original Sins and Bedrock could be read as short stories. Like the Stormy Weather stories, it is once they have been put/are read together that the overall design is made clear. But they do have individual strength…

16 Lisa Alther: I wasn’t aware of the point you make about chapter titles vs. numbers. Very interesting observation. It wasn’t deliberate on my part, but I think I could very well support the explanation you propose. Thanks for opening my eyes to my own work!

17 Gérald Préher: Well, you’re welcome! Why were some of your stories left out of Stormy Weather—“Silver Moon Bay” for instance? How did you select the stories and decided on a title for the collection?

18 Lisa Alther: “Silver Moon Bay” just didn’t make the cut for me. I was never entirely happy with that story because I originally wrote it as a script for a graphic novel that never got published. I always preferred the unpublished script to the story I adapted

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from it. As I say, I selected the stories I liked best. I picked “Stormy Weather” as the title because I liked that story and I liked the title song that appears in it, and because many of the stories embody a kind of psychic turmoil.

19 Alice Clark: Lisa, thank you. I’d like to go back to a point you’ve just elucidated, an interesting biographical point, which also has implications on your writing, which is your “uneasy alliance” with the South and the North. And coming from the South myself, I can identify with that, with many of your short stories from “Squeamish,” with the horseback riding, the foxhunt, these sort of rituals. My question goes to your “uneasy alliance”—does it translate somehow in the uneasy alliance between nature, animals and humankind? I’ll give you a couple of examples: in “Squeamish,” the horse dies in a deplorable way; in “The Fox Hunt,” Julius, the hunting dog is sacrificed, in “The Eye of the Lord,” Curious the cat dies with the bird—he gets attacked and then they both die.

20 Gérald Préher: Curiosity killed the cat! (laughs)

21 Alice Clark: exactly… but curiosity brought him back… and lastly in Birdman and the Dancer, which is a larger much developed story or novella, we have the reference to the gull smashing into a New York window. So that’s just something that crystallizes as a leitmotiv in my mind. I don’t know what meaning is there but there seems to be an uneasy alliance between mankind, civilization and nature.

22 Lisa Alther: That’s an interesting point but unconscious. I never realized that until you pointed it out right now. And I really don’t know what to make of it. Well, the South was primarily rural, and then after the Civil War, the North brought industry to the South, and our town was an industrial base for Northern industry. So in that sense capitalism collided with a somewhat primitive rural community, and I think that’s always in the back of my mind. Industry brought prosperity, but it also damaged the environment and destroyed local traditions. East Tennessee is very rural, our biggest city is probably Knoxville, and the reason I love Vermont so much is that it is really very similar to East Tennessee. It’s rural and the lay of the land is the same. The mountains aren’t as high as in Tennessee, and they’re covered with snow half the year. But when my Tennessee friends come up there, they say, “Oh my God! It’s East Tennessee!” The local people are very similar. They’re not as rambunctious as Southerners but they have this wry comic sense of humor, and they’re tied to the land, and they’re spiritual. They ask questions about the meaning of life, and they find the answers sometimes in nature, the way East Tennessee people do. So I felt right at home, right away. But then I moved to New York City—and during that time I was also living a lot in Paris—so that was my immersion in urban life, and I think that’s probably what I was struggling with in Birdman and the Dancer. So your point about the gull’s crashing into the glass and steel building makes sense, Alice—the animal world colliding with the urban world. That’s what I was doing at that time.

23 Alice Clark: And these expressions linked to bonding, bonds and bondage. It is sort of ironical that the protagonists are seeking a bond, to bond with someone. And this duality of bondage that I thought was interesting.

24 Lisa Alther: Trying to bond without having it turn into bondage.

25 Alice Clark: Seems to be a leitmotiv in your writing. That was my question. A second question.

26 Lisa Alther: This is like a therapy session! (laughs)

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27 Alice Clark: Alright, I’ll stop there then! (laughs)

28 Lisa Alther: No, I like it. It’s very nice. As long as I don’t get charged at the end! (laughs)

29 Alice Clark: No, no. It’s only intuitive, I don’t know…

30 Lisa Alther: I had a very domineering father who, I felt, really made my mother’s life a misery. So I think in my own life I’ve always been trying to find a way to be with someone without having it turn me into a slave.

31 Alice Clark: It is a problem for a lot of people, I think, especially in the South which is very conservative.

32 Nicole Moulinoux: Quite a challenge.

33 Lisa Alther: It’s weird because on the surface, Southern culture is a very male dominated culture. Men are coddled and taken care of. But behind the scenes there are these women of steel, you know, like my grandmother, and you realize that they are running things, but they’re giving men the illusion that the men are in charge. It seems to be what happens in a lot of cultures that have been crushed, in which the men had been disempowered, in a sense—like in Jewish culture the women are so strong, and in Native American cultures also, and in the African American culture. The men have been cut off at the knees by historical events so the women have had to take on strong roles.

34 Alice Clark: And your characters, do they reflect that in your writing?

35 Lisa Alther: I don’t know.

36 Gérald Préher: They do, they do. You have strong women, don’t you?

37 Lisa Alther: Do I, I don’t know?

38 Gérald Préher: The women make decisions in the stories, men hardly ever do. Frédérique could also talk about that—the endings, when we feel that the woman has won the game.

39 Frédérique Spill: Yes, it’s no quite clear though. I mean, the endings are quite inconclusive or elusive: some stories stop very abruptly, almost in midsentence. So I wouldn’t be that sure. (laughs)

40 Gérald Préher: In some of them, I felt it was all about the power of women.

41 Lisa Alther: In Birdman and the Dancer, she is sinking in the well, and he is going off in the desert; it appears she’s lost. But then this rope reaches down and she is starting to be pulled up—but you don’t actually know what will happen when she hits the surface. (laughs)

42 Gérald Préher: Well at the end of “The Architect of Utopia,” Camilla tells Aaron that she does not need him anymore.

43 Frédérique Spill: Yeah, that’s right.

44 Gérald Préher: And if I remember correctly in “Encounter,” the woman ends up not sleeping with the man so there too a decision is made…

45 Lisa Alther: Yeah.

46 Gérald Préher: So…

47 Alice Clark: In Birdman and the Dancer, starting out with Penny, she seems to be ironically related to all the mercantilism her husband is trying to escape. I thought it funny that you named her Penny—I don’t know if you did that intentionally to associate her with everything he is trying to get away from and thence did. He ends up with the

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dancer who seems to be a figure of fantasy more than carnal reality. And the dancer, at the end of the story, is contemplating all the bad decisions of her recent past: “finally she shrugged off the sodden robe that was dragging her under. Reaching up, she seized the rope, and felt the slack disappear.” So this seems to be a woman who is empowered. On the other hand, what happens with Kostas who doesn’t seem to have had that fate although he was seeking it very adamantly….

48 Lisa Alther: He was unable to give up control enough. He saw bonding as bondage…

49 Frédérique Spill: Penny is a wonderful name for this character because she is an old American woman and at the same time she is Penelope, isn’t she? She is waiting for Odysseus.

50 Lisa Alther: Yeah.

51 Frédérique Spill: The strength of that name is really compelling.

52 Lisa Alther: I did plan that—Penelope. Thanks for noticing!

53 Gérald Préher: So what would you say about myth in your stories? I felt that you were deconstructing myth rather than writing about myth—questioning myth and myth related to masculinity by putting the emphasis on gender issues most of the time. It is probably more about American mythology than about Southern mythology. You seem to be questioning American identity more than you are dealing with Penelope and Ulysses but—

54 Alice Clark: That’s my feeling as well.

55 Lisa Alther: As I said, so much of it is intuitive for me that it’s hard for me to say what I’m doing exactly. I guess if I could have said it in words then I wouldn’t have needed to write the story. So in other words I was writing this story to try and figure out what I wanted to say or what I actually thought. And so I’m not writing stories just to write stories but rather because I’m trying to figure out my own identity, which means figuring out what it means to be American, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be gay. All of those things I keep struggling with.

56 Alice Clark: Is exploring myth a process which allows you to go into that personal quest because myth is a quest…?

57 Lisa Alther: Well, yeah. It seems to me that myths, the ones that have survived down to our time, are ones that have helped other people answer those kinds of questions. I’ve tried looking at a bunch of them to see if any of them will fit. Will they fit contemporary American women? Or do we have to create a new myth?

58 Alice Clark: It’s not an easy one if we start with Penelope who’s waiting for… (laughs). But who would those women be in myth, if any of them come to your mind that you would identify with?

59 Lisa Alther: There are certainly some fierce women in myths. I can think of one but it’s not really a positive role model I guess. I’m good friends with the painter Françoise Gilot,1 and she did a painting that I now own of Daphne. It’s this magnificent painting, it’s huge. I have it in my apartment in New York. Apollo was pursuing her to rape her, and so she rooted herself and turned into a tree. So the painting is somewhere between figurative and abstract, as her arms are shooting up and turning into branches. It’s an immensely powerful image of a woman able to evade rape and domination—but at what price, you know? That of being rooted and going back to nature, but then she’s rooted, so what happens next?

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60 Alice Clark: So in many ways it’s a complex question. There are too many female figures to turn to in mythology. The stories but maybe not the female stereotypes or whatever you want to call them that would feed into your personal quest. How do you use mythology? Does it surface in your writing? It certainly does with Kostas in Birdman and the Dancer and it is mainly through male figures, it seems—they’re Greek, the Greek males. And the female who comes in is, she seems more like a fantasy than anything, she is not rooted in any specific historical period or mythological period.

61 Lisa Alther: I think about those years in the 1990s when I was living in France and what I learned about French women. I may be wrong about this, and it may be just a myth that I’ve totally made up, but French women seem to me more powerful than American women. They didn’t get the right to vote until 1946, but in personal relations, it seems to me as though they sort of run the show. Though this may be just another myth. It does seem to me an awfully heavy role to bear. You have to be able to be beautiful and well-dressed, and cook well and be a fantastic lover. That’s the myth we have in America! (laughs)

62 Alice Clark: Keep it! (laughs)

63 Lisa Alther: In Birdman and the Dancer, I was quite intrigued by that idea that it’s lack that breeds desire. You know, as long as Kostas can’t have this woman, he wants her. And she knows it and holds him off, so he keeps coming around until finally he gets fed up and tries to kill her.

64 Alice Clark: And this was inspired by your observation of French women, indirectly?

65 Lisa Alther: Yeah and I was reading a lot, too—Lacan and Derrida and…

66 Frédérique Spill: More generally, Stormy Weather shows a plurality of approaches or genres, ranging from comedy to magic realism through (melo)drama. It also seems that the South takes a plural rather than a singular form in the stories, reaching as far as Homer’s Ancient Greece. Your Birdman also contains beautiful echoes to Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Is that pluralization of the South a notion that is deliberate?

67 Lisa Alther: That’s a very interesting point. No, it wasn’t deliberate. But over the course of my writing career, I’ve come to realize that the qualities I used to think of as uniquely Southern are in some cases shared by other countries in Southern latitudes. I’ve had to do some thinking about the extent to which climate and its exigencies determine the psychic make-ups of populations.

68 Frédérique Spill: Most of your stories reveal a rather critical, let alone rebellious, attitude toward the institution of marriage. The conventions, traditions, obligations and inescapable deteriorations characterizing marital relationships are thoroughly anatomized in your book; their essential hypocrisy is thus revealed, while it seems that your characters are much more likely to be happy when emancipated from that bond. Could you comment on / react to this?

69 Lisa Alther: Many of the marriages I witnessed growing up seemed to me to stifle the women involved, including that of my own parents. So I was always a bit wary of that institution. My own marriage ended in divorce but was fairly successful in that we produced a wonderful daughter and had a lot of fun. Now I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman, but we don’t feel much interest in marriage since we’ve both already done that with men.

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70 Gérald Préher: How much of you, then, is there in the stories? I was a bit intrigued at times to find a similar situation in a story and in an essay that you had written about yourself…

71 Lisa Alther: Oh…

72 Alice Clark: That’s devilish.

73 Lisa Alther: Yeah—it is…

74 Gérald Préher: It’s the Sunshine rooms that are mentioned in “Encounter,” the Montreal story. But is there something of yourself in that story—maybe I shouldn’t be asking… I think there is something of you in all the stories but not necessarily as the authorial voice. Maybe you were also staging yourself—“altherizing” your characters— but it probably has to do with what you were saying earlier about figuring out where you are and who you are.

75 Lisa Alther: Well, “the Sunshine rooms” is autobiographical. Early in my career, I was having trouble finding time to write. I had a baby at home, and it was hard for me to have a sustained thought. So finally when she was about two, I persuaded her father that every now and then I could go away for a week or so to Montreal to write. So he agreed to this. He worked at home too. He was a painter and did advertising but worked at home. So I would go up and stay in the Sunshine rooms in Montreal and do nothing but write and eat and sleep and go out to bookstores and walk through the aisles and see all the books and think, well you know, all these turkeys can write books surely I can. (laughs). So Montreal was my escape place. I was very much immersed in French culture up there too. You know, a third of Vermonters have French Canadian ancestry, so it’s got a French flavor to it. And in fact I did have an abortion, and I guess that story was my way of trying to sort out what it meant to me.

76 Gérald Préher: I felt it might be you when I read the story but I wasn’t completely sure. I shouldn’t have asked a question about that…

77 Lisa Alther: Well, I had one child and was very happy with her. But I thought if I have a second child, I’m never going to write another word. So it was a very cold-hearted decision. I thought I could manage one child, but not two.

78 Gérald Préher: … and you decided not to sleep with Max…

79 Lisa Alther: That part was fiction.

80 Gérald Préher: And it’s your first professional story, isn’t it?

81 Lisa Alther: Yes, right. I wanted to go back and sort out why I had done what I did, and what it meant.

82 Alice Clark: So that was the Sunshine rooms, which goes back to your Montreal period. So you moved around quite a lot.

83 Lisa Alther: I have.

84 Alice Clark: And that colors your writing, I mean, indirectly, it seems.

85 Lisa Alther: I also lived in Cincinnati for a while, and I went to school in Boston. I’ve been very unsettled and nomadic in my life. But if you look at East Tennessee and the mountains, it seems so settled and isolated, but if you really look at the history, people were coming and going all the time. I mean, my ancestors moved every couple of years. So I think it’s in my genes. And also for Americans, you know, most of us are a mix of eight or ten things. What

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does it mean to be part English, part French, part German, part Dutch, part Irish, part African, part Native American? So some of us are driven to explore all those different branches, to try and find out that you’re not really any of them.

86 Alice Clark: That’s why you came to France and lived in Montmartre as well. Have you written anything in Montmartre?

87 Lisa Alther: My fifth novel, Five Minutes in Heaven, was about France. I wrote it in Montmartre, yes.

88 Alice Clark: So it’s, it’s got the local color of Paris.

89 Lisa Alther: I tried. You see, I think you can’t live in a place for a few months or a few years and think that you really have any sense of it. I’ve always had the feeling that my French novel was my least successful because I just began to scratch the surface.

90 Gérald Préher: That’s my favorite!

91 Lisa Alther: Oh, is it? Thank you for that! I think I’m just looking for an excuse to come back to France. I need to, for my development.

92 Gérald Préher: It is really good and it has qualities that Frédérique noted in the stories —especially the cinematic quality.

93 Frédérique Spill: Yes, I was about to ask something about that, if I may? I was struck by the fact that some of your stories—especially “Encounter”, “Wedding Belles,” maybe “Stormy Weather” as well—have a highly cinematic quality. Your talent for writing dialogues, creating an atmosphere and dramatic tension is very compelling. So would you say that you are inspired by the cinema?

94 Lisa Alther: Yes. Very much so. When I first started writing, I thought I needed to write each scene so that the reader could picture what I was talking about. I don’t know why I thought that, but I decided that that was the kind of fiction that I wanted to write. That may be Southern, that business of setting a scene and putting in a lot of physical details —it tends to occur in most Southern fiction. I also paint, so I have a pretty visual way of perceiving the world. I didn’t study writing at school. I just had one course in college, but mainly I learned how to write by reading. When I was growing up in East Tennessee, in school we always studied British literature things like Julius Cesar, Silas Marner and the Brontës and George Eliot… I managed to convince myself that the red clay hills on my family’s farm were moors (laughs); I used to run around them with the son of the local farmer that I was convinced was very much like Heathcliff. One day in the town library, I discovered some Eudora Welty short stories and when I read “Why I Live at the P.O.,” it was like this incredible shock of recognition and I thought “I know this town and I know these characters.” And that opened the floodgates so I read everything I could find especially McCullers, Welty, O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner—and that’s what I mean when I say they taught me to write. I tried to copy them and tried to learn what I could by the act of reading them. I especially was thrilled to find the women writers of the South because they showed me that women could write and write very well. I soon realized that all these writers were not just writing to tell a story and to entertain themselves or to entertain us. They were using fiction as a way to try to make sense of the world around them and since there was so much in the world around me I didn’t understand I thought I would give it a try.

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95 Frédérique Spill: Have you ever envisaged writing scripts?

96 Lisa Alther: People bought the rights to make movies of Kinflicks and also Other Women. I worked pretty closely on the Other Women script. But neither was ever filmed. I enjoyed that because I love to write dialogue. I’ve often thought of writing plays, but I haven’t done it.

97 Alice Clark: A lot of the writers you’ve told us about—many of them being Southern women writers—do you find they have a more cinematic, theatrical, visual, sensorial quality?

98 Lisa Alther: Yes, that’s my impression. When you’re first writing, or first painting, or first doing anything, you try to copy the people you admire, so I decided that what I responded to most were things that appealed to my senses, all the senses, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, seeing. So I tried to flood my own writing with sensual details, to try and make the scene come alive for the readers. I guess that’s basically what I still do. As a writer, you don’t want to impose your view on people, so it always seemed to me you needed to give enough details so that the image started to form, and then the readers could complete it the way they wanted to. In that way, if it works, the reader participates in the formation of the story. And that’s why sometimes when you’re talking to readers they have such different reactions, because they’ve completed it in their own way, in their own heads. I think it’s wonderful that the same story can provoke very different reactions. And I’ve always had the feeling with reviews that the review was really saying a lot more about the reviewer than it was about what they were reviewing. In some ways it makes it very interesting because you get an insight into that reviewer, you know. Of course if they hate you, it’s kind of painful… but then you can blame it on them and say, “Oh, they were just having a bad day that day.”

99 Alice Clark: Do you have any Faulkner influences?

100 Lisa Alther: Oh yes, I’ve read all of Faulkner. And didn’t understand half of it, I’m sure (laughs). I studied Faulkner in college. I think I had about a year on him—Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury. Just dazzling. Faulkner blows everybody else out of the water, what can you say? (laughs).

101 Gérald Préher: When did you first start writing?

102 Lisa Alther: Well, my first short story was written when I was sixteen and I’d been reading Faulkner after school. In the fourth grade I had acted in a play in which I was Miss Verb, who was being married by the preacher to Mr. Noun… I had thought that to have a complete sentence you had to have a noun and a verb. But here was this famous writer who sometimes would just put one word and then a period. I thought this was really cool. So I decided I was going to write a story in stream of consciousness. I was an editor on the newspaper and it was the anniversary of Nathan Hale’s death—a patriot who was hanged by the British for spying during the American Revolution. And so I wrote my story in stream of consciousness about Nathan Hale in jail looking through the bars of his cell as the British soldiers arrive to take him to the gallows. The leaves were falling and their boots were crushing the leaves, and he was reflecting on the meaning and the brevity of his life: “Leaves falling. Gold and red and green.” (laughs). So I turned it in to be published in the paper. When it came out, it was completely rewritten. I marched into the office of the advisor, who was the wife of the local sheriff, and I said: “What’s happened to my story? It’s been ruined.” And she said: “Well, I bet

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you thought that was pretty good!” And I said: “Well, I didn’t think it was so bad that it needed to be rewritten.” And she said: “Well let me tell you something, little lady—that story wasn’t even written in complete sentences.” So she had rewritten it in complete sentences. I said, “Well, I think if you’re going to rewrite my story, you should put your name on it, not mine.” And she said: “Well, I think if you’re going to talk to me in that tone of voice, you need to go visit the guidance counselor.” So I was expelled for the afternoon. I was sixteen, and that was my first experience with editors. It was a good lesson to learn, that you have to stand up for your work. After that I didn’t try to copy Faulkner… because he is too good, I couldn’t begin to copy Faulkner. I think he was just always there in the background. And the other thing I started realizing was that my South, the mountain South, was really very different from Mississippi. The writers that I loved so much, they were writing about the Deep South, and I had a different job. Appalachia is very different. We have 7 % African-Americans in my hometown, versus 50 or 60% in the Deep South.

103 Nicole Moulinoux: It’s a different culture. Do you know of Mary Lee Settle?

104 Lisa Alther: I didn’t know her. She died, didn’t she?

105 Nicole Moulinoux: She died in 2005.

106 Lisa Alther: I didn’t know her, but I read her, and I wrote a review of one of her books, I think. I believe she wrote me to thank me for it. I didn’t discover Mary Lee Settle until well after I was writing, so she wasn’t a big influence on me, although I liked what she wrote a lot. But I don’t know her work well enough to say anything much about it.

107 Nicole Moulinoux: She did a wonderful job, I think. Beautiful literature. Still, I think you might have been more influenced by the Southern Renaissance, the 50s. The names you mention: O’Connor, McCullers, female voices. Writers that had been silenced before.

108 Lisa Alther: That’s what was available in our library at the time. I don’t know if Mary Lee Settle was or not. When I was trying to teach myself to write, those were the books that were available, and I didn’t keep up very well with the more nearly contemporary writers to me because I don’t read very much when I’m writing. It confuses me. It’s kind of like getting static on the radio.

109 Nicole Moulinoux: How do you relate to the voices from the mountains? Have you got link with other contemporary women writers?

110 Lisa Alther: I attend conferences with other women writers from the Appalachians such as Lee Smith. I like her books a lot, but as I say, they weren’t formative for me because they weren’t written at the time I was teaching myself to write. As for non-Southern women writers, I was very close to Doris Lessing, who was a mentor for me.

111 Frédérique Spill: I’d like to return to the South as a region. You seem to derive great pleasure in making fun of the stereotypes traditionally associated with the South. Some of the most comical moments in Stormy Weather are related to the characters’ Southern backgrounds or to the sudden emergence of a trueborn Southerner in “Yankeedom.” At the same time, it is true that some of the most tragic moments are also set in the South —for example, Jesse’s recollection of her father’s suicide in the title story. My impression as a reader is that there is no grey zone between those two extremes, in your imagination the weather seems permanently stormy… Does this reveal a conception of the South as a land of excesses and extremities, generating either dramatic or highly comical vignettes?

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112 Lisa Alther: Well, I think one of my big memories from my childhood is the weather in the summer. In the mountains, it would be very oppressively hot all day and then right at the end of the day, and in my memory it was almost every day, the clouds would roll in and there’d be these huge dramatic thunderstorms, lightning.

113 Nicole Moulinoux: Impending disaster.

114 Lisa Alther: Yeah, and to me that was emblematic of how people were too. You know, they’d go along and they were very polite, very sweet, very calm and helpful and kind. Then all of the sudden, they’d yell and curse. In fact, the South, statistically, does have a much higher violence rate, murder rate. I tried to address this in Kinflicks—tried to find out how to balance tragedy and comedy, because they seem to be present in life in about equal proportions. Throughout my whole career, I’ve been trying to figure out this question of violence—why does the South have so much violence? Religion too has something to do with this—not the Episcopalians, but the Baptists, the fundamentalists. Very repressed and extreme. My last book was about the Hatfield— McCoy feud and I was using that book as an excuse to meditate on violence in the South. It’s hard to say which came first, whether there was repression because of the code of manners, and then the violence erupts from underneath that polite veneer, or whether the polite veneer is a way to try to keep the violence at bay, because if you didn’t have good manners then hell would be going on all the time. It can be a real hornet’s nest down there. I think one thing that’s bothered me about a lot of the Southern writing tradition is its tendency to make violence a source of comedy. But it’s not funny. My father and grandfather and three of my siblings are physicians. Whenever we thought we had problems as kids, my father would take us to the emergency room to show us what real problems look like. (laughs) So we learned that violence is not funny. We saw people who had been shot and knifed and there’s nothing funny about it. But it is a source for a lot of Southern humor. So my whole career I’ve been trying to understand how to deal with violence and what it means and where it comes from.

115 Gérald Préher: You talk about names at some point—people who call their children after hurricanes or various catastrophes… In “The Architect of Utopia,” I think.

116 Lisa Alther: Like Thor—the God of thunder… yeah. It’s very Southern to try to pick weird names. I have a friend who was a school principal and she told me some of the names at her high school: one was Formica Dinette. Another was Beaupeep Seahorse. (laughs)

117 Gérald Préher: How do you choose your characters’ names?

118 Lisa Alther: I paste different names on them as I write different drafts. Eventually one sticks.

119 Sarah Delmas: I was reading a thesis that was written about the relationship in Appalachia literature between animals and humans. Since animals are so pervasive in Stormy Weather and in your other works, I was wondering if you feel that animals have a different place in Southern culture than in Northern culture?

120 Lisa Alther: I think it’s present in a lot of Southern writers’ works because those of us in rural cultures did grow up with and live with animals. But as I said, Vermont is also very rural, and there’s a lot of animal symbolism in Vermont writing. So I think it’s a question of rural versus urban. In my stories set outside the South, in cities, animals tend to be replaced by people and the interactions among people.

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Another influence, at least in my part of the South, is Native American—there’s a large Cherokee reservation in the mountains in North Carolina right over the gap from East Tennessee. And a lot of the people in our area, including my family, have Native American ancestry. And in Cherokee culture animals have an almost totemic power.

121 Gérald Préher: This somewhat extends your ideas on labeling to all kinds…

122 Lisa Alther: I try to look at what’s actually underneath labels and why labels come to exist and what function they serve for the people who apply them. I was just thinking about the animal question. You know, in the Native American tradition, the goal is to stay in balance with the animals, whereas in our contemporary American tradition, the idea is to dominate them and contain them and even to destroy them… I guess that’s another way in which East Tennessee, having become a colony of the North, an industrial base, finds itself in collision with Native American values and their idea of balance and stasis.

123 Nicole Moulinoux: I’m really impressed by your intercultural perspectives and dynamics… You started out telling us “I write to be at peace with myself.” I am wondering what makes you want to write now and what it means to “be at peace” with yourself today?

124 Lisa Alther: The odd thing now that I am almost 70 is that I feel very peaceful. I think it’s because I’ve explored all these different labels to put on myself and none of them have fit. I’ve realized that we’re all just who we are. We cling to groups to define ourselves, but ultimately you have to let it all go. It’s kind of terrifying. We try to create our identities, and in the end you realize your identity is already there and you just have to accept it. I did three books in 2012 and I was exhausted, so I decided if professors get to have sabbaticals, I do too. So I’m on sabbatical right now. But of course, I always feel this after I’ve finished a book. I don’t really see that I have anything else I want to write. I probably will, you know, something will emerge, but I don’t have anything driving me the way it used to—I have to write this about being gay, or I have to write that about being Southern, or whatever. The main thing that I learned from all my experiences in France and Britain and everywhere I’ve lived—North and South—is that when you talk to anybody in enough depth, we really are very similar—we all want to love and to be loved, and we all feel pain when people whom we love are harmed. That we sometimes end up at war with each other is just absurd.

125 Gérald Préher: Thanks Lisa, for these words of wisdom, for being with us and sharing your ideas and inspirations.

NOTES

1. Birdman and the Dancer was published as a stand-alone novella in Denmark, Germany, and Holland, including reproductions of some monotypes by Françoise Gilot that inspired the story.

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AUTHORS

ALICE CLARK Sydney Alice Clark is an Associate Professor of literature at the University of Nantes, France. Her short stories have appeared in French and American journals and anthologies such as Bridges: a Global Anthology of Short Stories, Temenos Publishing; Short Story, University of Texas at Brownsville and Résonances, Université Paris 8. A collection of poems in French and English was published in Imaginaires, University of Nantes, France. Her short story manuscript collection, A Darker Shade of Light, was awarded first prize (Prix Manuscrit Technikart) at the Paris Book Fair (March 2011). She is a member of the Jury for English Short Story Fiction, organised by the CIRHILL and the CRILA at the University of Angers and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Nantes. Her work on Shakespeare and French theatre (Le Théâtre romantique en crise, Shakespeare et Nerval, Paris: Harmattan, 2005) was short-listed for a research prize by the Franco- British and Franco-American Research and Higher Education Associations (SAES and AFEA). Numerous articles on short stories and theatre have been published in French and American literary reviews. She has also co-authored a book on the Anglo-Saxon short story (La nouvelle anglo-saxonne, une étude psychanalytique, Paris: Hachette).

NICOLE MOULINOUX Nicole Moulinoux is Professor of American Literature at Rennes 2 University (France). She has published many articles on Faulkner and collaborated in the William Faulkner Pléiade Edition. She is also a specialist on contemporary American Literature and has written prefaces and introductions for the French translations of various works. She is the Founder and President of the William Faulkner Foundation (Rennes, France) and Editor of the Collection Études Faulknériennes. In a forthcoming book, she will examine and evaluate the French Face of Faulkner.

GÉRALD PRÉHER Gérald Préher is Professor of American Studies at Lille Catholic University (France) and a member of the CIRPaLL (University of Angers, France). He defended a doctoral dissertation on southern literature and has written essays on various 19th and 20th century writers. He co-edited several collections of essays on American literature, is the associate editor of the Journal of the Short Story in English and the general editor of the review Résonances. He has a forthcoming monograph on Elizabeth Spencer and the volume dedicated to Richard Ford in the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series.

FRÉDÉRIQUE SPILL Frédérique Spill is Associate Professor of American literature; she teaches at the University of Picardy – Jules Verne in Amiens, France. She is the author of L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2009). She recently contributed to Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (Salem Press, 2014) and to Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She has also published articles in French and in English on Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Russell Banks and Willa Cather. For the past years her research and publications have mainly been focusing on the work of novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. Her contributions to Conversations with Ron Rash (Mississippi UP) and to Summoning the Dead:

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Critical Essays on Ron Rash (U of South Carolina P) will be published in 2017. She is currently completing a monograph on Ron Rash’s work.

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Something Rich and Strange: Ron Rash on Short Story Writing – an Interview

Frédérique Spill

1 In fall 2014, Ecco, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, released a selection of short stories by Ron Rash, who is advertised on the cover as the “bestselling author of Serena.” The book is entitled Something Rich and Strange, echoing the title of a story first published in Shade 2004 and reprinted as part of Nothing Gold Can Stay—a Shakespearian title that, while evoking transformation and change, is full of promises and carefully avoids elucidating its object. A novelist and a poet, Ron Rash is also the author of five short story collections that were published over the now twenty years of his career as a published writer: his first collection, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth, appeared in 1994; his latest, Nothing Gold Can Stay, in 2013. In the meantime, Rash has been the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the O. Henry Prize (which he obtained twice) and the Sherwood Anderson Prize. He was also twice a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Ecco published his sixth novel, Above the Waterfall, in September 2015.

2 The publication of Something Rich and Strange, a volume of selected stories seemed to be the perfect moment to ask Ron Rash about his perception of the short story—a genre he holds in high regard; about his practice as a short fiction writer; about the writers that he likes and that may have inspired him; about his personal stylistic and aesthetic choices, the narrative constraints he imposes upon himself and his recurring motifs, let alone obsessions, as a fiction writer.

3 Something Rich and Strange is made of thirty-four short stories, most of which were previously published both individually and in one of Rash’s five earlier collections (three had never been collected before). As such, it is representative of Rash’s art as a short fiction writer and of its evolution. As Janet Maslin put it in her New York Times review of the volume, “as with great music, it would be a mistake not to revisit this material because you’ve experienced it once.”1 While showing great variety in form, plot, atmosphere, time and characterization, and demonstrating Rash’s

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experimentation with viewpoint and focalization, the stories collected in Something Rich and Strange present an extraordinary unity, part of which is certainly due to the writer’s exceptionally vivid sense of place, most of which derives from the sheer power of his signature.

4 Ron Rash, who is remarkably generous with his time and quite eager to talk about literature in general and to comment on his own personal choices as a writer, agreed to answer my questions about his poetics as a short story writer. Our conversation took place over the phone in early June 2015.

***

5 Frédérique Spill: Thank you, Ron, for accepting to talk about your practice as a short story writer. Something Rich and Strange was published just a few weeks after The Ron Rash Reader appeared. Last time, I asked you how you felt as a writer whose novels were adapted by movie writers. Now I’m asking you: how does it feel to be an anthologized writer?

6 Ron Rash: I believe “anthologized” may not be the best word. In the United States, it usually refers to being put into a magazine or, say, a textbook. I know the term was used in The New York Times review of the volume, but “collected works” is probably a better phrase in this case, the implication being that you’re starting to see someone’s life’s work as a whole. Anyway, it is a little bit unsettling because you get the sense that people already put you in the past.

7 FS: Incandescences, the French translation of Burning Bright, was published in France last April and received extremely enthusiastic reviews. What will be the next Ron Rash book made available to the French readership?

8 RR: It will be my second novel, Saints at the River.

9 FS: The French term nouvelle, which designates the short story as a genre, also refers to the announcement of a usually recent piece of news to somebody that has not heard about it. By extension, the word nouvelle also designates the information heard about the situation of a person one has not seen recently. I think this somehow sheds light on the essence and art of the short story: etymologically related to news and to a sense of novelty, can the short story be regarded as a way for a writer to let his readers know about a little known aspect of the world he experiences?

10 RR: I think of the short story as a dispatch. That’s the most concise thing I can say. But, along those lines, I think that because of its brevity and the way a story—a good story, at least—pulls us into it, there is a sense of urgency, the sense that something needs to be conveyed with a degree of quickness. Henry James said of Tolstoy’s novels that they were “loose baggy monsters.” To me, the novel is a more leisurely form, for both reader and writer.

11 FS: What’s your idea of the perfect short story? Is there an example that immediately comes to your mind?

12 RR: I would say Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and probably Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.” Joyce’s “The Dead” shouldn’t be perfect when you look at it technically, but somehow it still is. And I’m pretty sure that if I could read Chekov in Russian I would probably find a couple there.

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13 FS: It seems to me that you have quite a lot in common with one of America’s first and most eminent short story writers (who like you, was also a poet and like you was from the South): Edgar Allan Poe. Are you still a reader of Poe? Do you have a favorite Poe story?

14 RR: Poe was certainly one of the first “adult” writers that I read as a child—probably the first, actually. Those stories had a huge impact on me. I suspect my love of the short story started right there with his stories. I read Poe and Twain about the same time, together with Jack London’s stories. With Poe, there was always a sense that much more was going on than what I could understand as a child. What I’ve come to realize— and this is part of what I sensed early on—is Poe’s understanding that what’s inside the mind is often just as terrifying as what is outside of it. My favorite Poe story is “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it is certainly the story that best illustrates his whole philosophy of writing. Just think about the great opening lines… There’s so much going on in that story, things that I cannot articulate but feel their presence.

15 FS: Poe was also a remarkable essayist. Do you feel, together with him, that it is important that your reader should read a story of yours—any story—“at one sitting” for it to achieve its full effect?

16 RR: Yes, I think that is the ideal way to read a short story. If we’re talking of a really well-done short story, interrupting one’s reading would be the same as reading a poem and stopping halfway.

17 FS: You obviously pay extreme attention to your openings. Do you consider, along with Poe, that a story’s first sentence is a decisive step in how you build up an atmosphere? Do you always write a short story’s first sentence first?

18 RR: Rarely. My stories start with an image and that image could end up anywhere. For instance in Serena the initial image was that of Serena on horseback and Pemberton watching her. That’s the image that first came to me but it’s in the middle of the novel. In the case of my short story entitled “The Ascent,” the story really started when I had an image of the child discovering the plane. But that’s not in the first sentence. First sentences are crucial, and I usually spend more time on them. Very often, the story will go through several drafts before I decide on what I feel is a good opening line.

19 FS: Do you read literary theory? At some point in your writing career, has the reading of literary theory been useful to you?

20 RR: In my late twenties and early thirties I did, particularly Derrida, Eagleton, De Man, Foucault and Lacan; but then I realized that to be a good writer I needed to forget every bit of it, and I pretty much have.

21 FS: Commenting on Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Irish writer Frank O’Connor once wrote: “the Americans have handled the short story so wonderfully that one can say that it is a national art form,” words that have been made much of. According to you, why have American writers always been so keen on writing short stories? Do you think that the short story as a genre says something about American experience and identity?

22 RR: That’s an interesting question. Part of it may be the Americans’ sense that Europe had done such daunting work in the epic, lyric poetry, drama and the novel, so we wanted to do something that hadn’t been done that well. That might be an aspect of it. Perhaps it may also be that the oral tradition, with its particular American voice, influenced some of the best early stories, writers such as Mark Twain or Bret Harte.

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Another thing that has kept the form so viable is that in the first part of the twentieth century writers such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner or Hemingway could make more money selling a couple of stories than publishing a novel. There was a real market for short stories in the United States with popular magazines. I’m not sure that European countries did that. So that certainly had to be an incentive for some writers. I know when Faulkner or Fitzgerald needed money that they would write stories.

23 FS: Most of the American fiction writers you admire write (or wrote) short stories alongside novels, with the notable exception of Cormac McCarthy? How do you personally understand this choice?

24 RR: Did you know that early in his career McCarthy wrote two short stories and never wanted them republished?2 I think it is just that, for whatever reason as a writer, he made that decision. I’m not sure why but I don’t think we can quibble about it because he has certainly done very well with the novel. But it is interesting because so many American writers do both.

25 FS: Do you really “hate” writing novels (this is something I’ve heard you say before)?

26 RR: I do for the most part. What is very hard for me with the novel is that once I’ve started I cannot get it out of my head. It’s very difficult for me to stop thinking about it and I find that very wearying at times. Wine helps, of course... I love novels when they’re done; there’s such a great feeling of accomplishment, to hold the book in my hand and think—in these pages I have created a whole world. But very often they’re very draining physically; they’re exhausting. Obviously, when the writing is going well, it can be wonderful, but there are so many days when it is not. With short stories it usually takes two weeks to get a very good draft that I can start tinkering with. It is that feeling of being able to dive in and get something done that I don’t get with novels. What I hate most with novels is first drafts. If I can get that done, then I get to the point when I can really start to work with the language, and that makes it somewhat less tedious.

27 FS: Can short story writing be considered a more light-hearted venture?

28 RR: I don’t think that it is more light-hearted, except in the sense that the length is such that I know I can go into this very intense writing period for two weeks and pretty much come out with something I’ll be able to let go of.

29 FS: In his study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor suggests that the short story enjoys greater freedom than the novel, which, he writes, “is bound to be a process of identification between the reader and the character.” According to him, it is this greater freedom that allows for the appearance of “the Little Man” in fiction and the surfacing of what he calls “a submerged population group” that would not be granted right of residence in fiction if not for the short story. Are your characters somehow part of that submerged population?

30 RR: I have not thought of it that way, but I find it an intriguing idea that it might be so. I certainly know of many writers who seem to find characters such as that that we might not see in their novels. That’s something I have never really thought about.

31 FS: Still with Frank O’Connor in mind, would you agree to say that short story writing allows for a greater sense of wreckage than the novel because it is not concerned with being a good, long-term companion for the reader?

32 RR: I like his idea; there’s certainly something to it. Once again the duration of a short story—ten or fifteen pages—can take a reader into the darkest places and not break

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that darkness in the way Shakespeare in Macbeth has the knocking at the gate scene to inject some humor,3 or the way McCarthy tends to have humor even in his darkest novels. In a story the readers can go into darkness and at least know they’ll be out of it in about thirty minutes! It is an interesting idea, but, again, something I’d rather realize on a less conscious level.

33 FS: As a writer coming from the South of the United States, you inhabit the same territory as Southern ladies that were extremely perceptive about short fiction writing. Reading Eudora Welty’s essays on writing is a very humbling experience for critics. When she writes: “To me as a story writer, generalizations about writing come tardily and uneasily, and I would limit them, if I were wise, by saying that any conclusions I feel confidence in are stuck to the particular story, part of the animal,” she cunningly challenges the relevance of interviews like this one. A similar lesson emerges from F0 F0 Flannery O’Connor words: “ 5B a 5D story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.” This basically means that no additional words are needed beyond the limits of the short story, and brings me to tell you again how grateful I am that you accepted to answer my questions. I’m fully aware that some questions should probably not be brought to you and that it is for the reader to try and find answers.

34 RR: I will say this: both O’Connor and Welty spoke at times about their fiction and made some comments that I have found helpful and that have enriched my reading of their work. Sometimes a little input from the writer can be useful to the reader. Yet I do believe that once the story is out there the writer has no more right to say what it means than the reader. What O’Connor has to say about her work is just like reading another critic who might make me think of a story in a slightly different, and maybe deeper, way than I have on my own. I might disagree with her, but I might still find her view interesting.

35 FS: Eudora Welty concludes one of her well-known essays on writing with the following remark: “a story’s emphasis may fall on any of the things that make it up—on characters, on plot, on its physical or moral world, in sensory or symbolic form.” She thus inventories the components of the short story, suggesting that “the making of the written story” is merely a matter of emphasis. I have a clue what your answer will be; and I also know that I probably shouldn’t be asking you this, but I’ll do it anyway: is there a list of necessary ingredients entering the composition of a Ron Rash story?

36 RR: You already know the answer. I mean this in the kindest of ways, but I just cannot think like that. I think if I did, my writing would become stilted and artificial. This is the way I feel as a writer: it is not so much that I create a story but that it is something found. It really feels like that and the more I write the more mysterious it is. I don’t know where the stories come from; I don’t know why an image gets into my head. It just happens. There’s something inexplicable about it, but I’m comfortable with that.

37 FS: I guess this is the kind of question your students keep asking you in your creative writing classes.

38 RR: Yes, and I keep telling them that’s why art is not like a McDonald’s hamburger: it can’t be made the same every time.

39 FS: Welty particularly praises the value of atmosphere in a story, which, she writes,

F0 F0 “may not be the least of its glories, and 5B … 5D may give a first impression that will prove contrary to what lies under it.” What I understand is that, when writing this, Welty

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readily admits she is likely to make use of irony or to generate false expectations in the first stages of her stories, which is probably a characteristic she shares with Flannery O’Connor. My impression is that you do not work that way at all: on the contrary, it seems to me that you put every possible effort in a story’s opening paragraph for it to convey the right impression. Consequently, your opening paragraphs can often retrospectively be regarded as condensed versions—fraught with hints and veiled announcements—of what follows. But I think the initial atmospheres you create early on remain consistently true to themselves until the end of your stories. Am I right?

40 RR: That’s a tough one. I think one of the things I’m trying to establish is a tone and I suppose this is what we’re talking about to a degree, right? What I want to do is put that reader as deep into the world of the story as possible and keep the reader there to the conclusion. I suspect that’s what you’re saying and in that sense I am often in Poe’s camp regarding the “single effect” a story can accomplish.

41 FS: I guess this was a way for me to suggest that though your stories are certainly full of small and large-scale surprises, my feeling is that, unlike O’Connor or Welty, you are not such a fervent practitioner of ironical twists (there are exceptions though, I do not want to oversimplify things: “A Servant of History” certainly is an ironical story). My impression is that most of the time in your stories, surprises and revelations are more likely to be found in small details: the repetition of a word—“map,” “haversack,” “mother,” “lost”—that gradually acquires the density of a metaphor, a close-up on a hand, or the deceptive vision of a falling star.

42 RR: Well, this is probably where critics make that decision better. But I do hope everything in a short story I write brings the reader deeper into the story and that includes even the smallest details, which will resonate throughout the story and, often, help foster certain visual rhythms in the story.

43 FS: Flannery O’Connor envisions writing as an organic process, in a way that is extremely resonant with how you write stories, with an unflagging awareness of nature. Here is her definition: “I’ll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. […] Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.” This perfectly applies to your writing, doesn’t it?

44 RR: Yes, definitely. The story comes, it grows; the writer does not know where it is going. This is something I have said in previous interviews: sometimes the worst thing a writer can have is an idea. I’m not going to write a story in which this happens. The way I work, I have no ideas. I’m quite willing to wander, sometimes for pages, not knowing where this is going and how things are going to come together, and I’m ok there. The story keeps growing. There often will be places where I take wrong turns. With Above the Waterfall, I pretty much had to scratch that whole novel and start over again. I still had the image and I still had the characters, but it just wasn’t working so I had to go another way. This happened with a lot of my novels. It happened with The Cove: I had to get rid of some characters that were major. But once again, that’s ok; that is just part of the wandering, the patience and the willingness to maybe write three hundred pages that I’ll have to throw away.

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45 FS: So writing is made of subtractions as much as it consists of additions?

46 RR: Yes, absolutely. I do a lot of drafts—I tend to do fourteen, fifteen drafts. And when I talk about a draft at that level, I’m talking about looking at every syllable carefully.

47 FS: Are there fewer drafts in the composition of short stories than in the case of novels?

48 RR. No.

49 FS: Let’s return to your current news: did you take part in the selection of stories making up Something Rich and Strange? In any event, how do you feel about the choices that were made and the stories that were left aside?

50 RR: I did. The reason why “Speckled Trout”4 was left out, and actually there were two or three other stories I wanted to put in, is that my former publisher only allowed me to take, I think it was, four stories from Chemistry. I kept “Speckled Trout” out because of the novel. There is a story called “Overtime” about basketball that I really wish I could have put in there and a couple more.

51 FS: The title that was picked up for the book is that of a short story previously printed in Nothing Gold Can Stay. A very beautiful title, it conjures up Ariel’s song in Act I, scene 2 of The Tempest. Did you suggest that title?

52 RR: Yes, I did. To me, this is a crucial passage in the way I read Shakespeare. What Ariel is talking about is the death of the father in the story, but when she says he undergoes “a sea-change / into something rich and strange,” it is as if in some way he was not really dead, only transformed. There is a kind of magic that transforms an event that would normally be thought of as tragic into something beautiful and strange. It just struck me that that’s what art does. If my work does what I want it to do, it very often is very dark; it deals with the tragic elements of life, and yet at the same time, I hope, on one level, through language perhaps, such stories allow the reader to feel something beautiful too. What I’m ultimately aiming for is the sublime.

53 FS: Talking about Something Rich and Strange you said it pretty much captures your “life’s work”5 as a short story writer. Rereading your stories in this new configuration— i. e. separated from their initial ensembles—was a startling experience for me, especially because at first sight the order in which the stories appear is quite disorienting for one that is used to your collections. In this new selection the original collections appear to be dismantled while stories from various sources intersect in new combinations, more or less disregarding their original publication dates. For instance, your earlier stories—those that were published in The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth and Casualties—appear at the end of the volume, in the vicinity of uncollected stories. Was there a guiding principle that presided over the selection?

54 RR: Yes, I hope there was. I made the choice of putting some of the strongest stories early on, but I also wanted to have the reader feel adrift through time, even unsure at first if the story was contemporary or any time back in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet I also love the notion of time being a kind of geography. One aspect tied to this is that a dozen or so of the stories take place on the same three-mile stretch of a road in Watauga County, the road where my Grandparents lived, and where I spent large portions of my summers and holidays. I wanted the comic stories to be interspersed to give the reader—and this is something we talked about earlier—a chance to come out of the darkness for a little while.

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55 FS: Do you generally think of your short stories as individual artifacts or as part and parcel of a collection?

56 RR: That was another thing: I wanted to highlight each story more individually in Something Rich and Strange, but when I write a book such as Burning Bright or Nothing Gold Can Stay I’m very conscious of how those stories play off each other. I want them to be woven together for a singular effect. In these two books more particularly, I wanted the movement, the way you read the stories, the order, to add, I hope, another level— almost like listening to a CD by a really good band, where the sum is more than the parts. To me, Something Rich and Strange is in some ways artificial since I’m taking these stories out of books that I consciously put together. There were stories for instance that I could have put in Burning Bright because they were good stories, but they didn’t fit the effect I wanted in that particular book.

57 FS: Still talking about Burning Bright, did you know that you were writing a book from the start?

58 RR: I had a sense of it. I think that book is probably my favorite if I had to pick a book of stories. Once I had got a few stories, I got the sense that they might interrelate and I believe that probably shaped the stories that came afterwards to me on some level. But it wasn’t like I said I was going to write fifteen stories and publish them together. I just kept working until I felt I had something that could work as a single piece.

59 FS: Should the fact that “Hard Time” appears in the first position both in Burning Bright and in Something Rich and Strange be considered significant?

60 RR: Yes, it is. I think what I wanted with that story is to plunge the reader as quickly as possible into my world. That’s because that story is so short. I hope this is a story that resonates all the way through the collection. To me, it’s really almost like planting a flag in the ground: this is my world; you’re in it now.

61 FS: So, on a different level, this echoes what you’re trying to do with opening sentences.

62 RR: Yes, exactly.

63 FS: Is “Hard Time” your favorite Ron Rash story?

64 RR: I don’t know. I’m really proud of “The Ascent;” I think that story does something interesting... I don’t know: it’s like having to pick a favorite child. I do think that “Hard Times” is one of my best stories. “The Ascent” is one of my favorite as well. There’s also a story that few readers talk about, “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars”: that’s also a favorite.

65 FS: When dealing with tragic, often violent, denouements, your writing remains extremely subdued; it seems to me that when you write comedy, there is no stopping you: your words are prone to yield to all sorts of excesses and exaggerations. “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth,” “Love and Pain,” “Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes” and “Waiting for the End of the World,”—mostly 1st-person narratives, by the way—are hilarious examples of your talent as a writer of comic pieces, making your reader cry with laughter.

66 RR: That surprises people sometimes, that I’m able to writer lighter works. The writers I admire the most have both a tragic and a comic vision of the world. I’ll continue to write comic stories. To do one well is in many ways just as challenging as a tragic story. I certainly enjoy the outrageousness and the sense of being a bit over-the-top. They are usually the most fun to write.

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67 FS: So we can hope for more laughs?

68 RR: Yes, or at least I’ll try to make you laugh; that I promise you.

69 FS: “Chemistry,” after which your third collection of stories was titled, particularly well exemplifies the wide range of emotions you write with and provoke in your readers. My first reading some time ago chose to retain the comical image of the father opening the front door of his house in his scuba diving outfit; so when I read the story for the second time a couple of years later, the tragic denouement—another instance of depression, another drowning—appeared all the more chilling to me. The more I read you, the more I believe that a part of your huge talent for storytelling specifically comes from this ability that you have to elicit such conflicting, mostly ambivalent, feelings with a single plot. I think that if your stories ring so true, it is because they are restlessly aware of the essential ambivalence of human nature and man’s motivations. Welty considered Chekhov a writer of character, D. H. Lawrence a writer of “the world of the senses,” Hemingway a moralizing writer and Faulkner the writer of “an ever- present physical territory.” If I wanted to pigeonhole you the way Welty did with other (short story) writers, I would probably say you are a writer of ambivalence. How would that suit you?

70 RR: I hope I am. I think that’s probably where art should be. We’ve got politicians to give us simplifications. Faulkner said that the sole purpose of writing was to show “the human heart in conflict with itself.”6 I can’t disagree with that. An interesting question is whether one can be fully conscious without ambivalence.

71 FS: Thank you, Ron. Reading you is an inexhaustible source of wonder.

NOTES

1. See Janet Maslin, “Chained to the Verities of Hunger and Heartbreak. Something Rich and Strange, A Ron Rash Anthology,” The New York Times 19 Nov. 2014. Web. 15/01/2015. 2. McCarthy only published two short stories in early succession in 1959 and 1960, “Wake for Susan” and “A Drowning Incident” in The Phoenix, the literary supplement of the University of Tennessee’s student newspaper Orange and White. Since then he has, indeed, always adamantly refused their being republished. 3. This scene, which occurs in Act II, scene 3, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is a well-known example of comic relief. 4. “Speckled Trout,” a story that eventually developed into Rash’s third novel, The World Made Straight, received the 2005 O’Henry Award. 5. See “Jeffrey Brown interviews author Ron Rash about his collection of stories Something Rich and Strange at Miami Book Fait International 2014.” Web. 15/01/2015. 6. The phrase comes from Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature Acceptance Speech.

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AUTHORS

FRÉDÉRIQUE SPILL Frédérique Spill is Associate Professor of American literature; she teaches at the University of Picardy – Jules Verne in Amiens, France. She is the author of L’Idiotie dans l’œuvre de William Faulkner (Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 2009). She recently contributed to Critical Insights: The Sound and the Fury (Salem Press, 2014) and to Faulkner at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). She has also published articles in French and in English on Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Penn Warren, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, Russell Banks and Willa Cather. For the past years her research and publications have mainly been focusing on the work of novelist, short story writer and poet Ron Rash. Her contributions to Conversations with Ron Rash (Mississippi UP) and to Summoning the Dead: Critical Essays on Ron Rash (U of South Carolina P) will be published in 2017. She is currently completing a monograph on Ron Rash’s work.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 67 | Autumn 2016