Barry Hannah--Airships (1978)

Though this collection contains a variety of stories, from Civil War story to science fiction, they all approach similar themes of American (and southern) masculinity, war, and our ability to connect.  The ways in which many of these stories reflect back on the past, and illustrate the wonderful Faulknerian idea that the past is always with us, remind me not only of Faulkner but of Roth, too, in the way that so many of these stories show men trying to navigate the present while the past is always with them. 

“Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet” is a great example of this, as a Vietnam War story about Bobby Smith, a young American soldier from Mississippi who encounters his old classmate, Tubby Wooten while on patrol one evening.  Tubby’s photographs of home—and in particular, one of Mississippi golfer White Whitelaw, cuts through Bobby’s bravado and pierces his heart, a wound made deeper with Tubby’s death while with Bobby’s platoon.  The juxtaposition of Vietnam stories with those set during the Civil War provide an interesting commentary on the similarities of the two conflicts: when a soldier in “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed” says, “We are not defending our beloved Dixie anymore.  We’re just bandits and maniacal” (145), his sentiment could just as easily be felt by Bobby Smith.

Though a few of the stories have female protagonists, the strongest pieces in the collection are those which follow male protagonists engaged in various kinds of battles.  One of the most recurrent symbols throughout the novel is the figure or specter of Jeb Stuart, the flamboyant Civil War general who was celebrated for much of the war for his daring cavalry strategies, but whose failure to convey intelligence led to the Confederacy’s defeat at Gettysburg.  Stuart functions in a couple of ways in this collection: not only does he represent the long shadow which the Civil War continues to cast over the South, but he also represents a certain kind of futility in life, that flamboyant victories in the past can be overshadowed by today’s defeat.  Hannah often writes about southern men who are at the moment of facing their first defeat, whether by women or in the eyes of other men.  

Hannah’s biggest strength to me is his prose style.  Though he writes in a rather straight-ahead narrative style, his sense of language combined with his darkly comedic view of the South specifically and people in general.  In “Love Too Long,” for example, the narrator tries to figure out how to survive his wife’s infidelities by thinking, “Maybe I need to go to church, I said to myself.  I can’t stand this alone.  I wished I was Jesus.  Somebody who never drank or wanted nooky.  Or knew Jane” (12).  Or in “Water Liars,” another character deals with his own wife’s sexual past (not even infidelity, but the idea that he wasn’t her first): “My sense of the past is vivid and slow.  I hear every sign and see every shadow…there is a blurred nostalgia women have that men don’t” (4).

Normally, this kind of romanticized misogyny (my term for this sense of obsession which some straight male authors have about women, which claims to be so obsessed with the wonder that is woman—an obsession which is usually unrequited, frustrated, or damned—that romanticization turns into objectification, and they cease to think of women as people, and can only see them as symbols (a process which I usually identify as rather narcissistic and immature))—normally this stance gets on my nerves, because of the misogynistic tones it often has.  However, this collection by Hannah doesn’t quite have that effect on me—it comes close at times, but the characters’ primary engagements are with the past than in each other, and how to live up to the impossible standards set by the Southern ideal and the American dream.

Eudora Welty--Curtain of Green (1941)

Last spring, I did my class presentation in Southern Lit on Welty and Curtain of Green, her 1941 short story collection.  I also did my final paper on her.  So, rather than try to write a short summary, after the jump I'm posting my notes on Welty and Curtain of Green, as well as the text of the paper I wrote (which I'm working on revising in order to try to get it published.

Eudora Welty--The Ponder Heart (1954)

Edna Earle Ponder narrates this story about her Uncle Daniel, accused of murdering his estranged wife Bonnie Dee.  Taking place in rural Mississippi, Edna Earle runs the Beulah Hotel, a family business given to her by her Uncle Daniel after her grandfather turned it over to him to run.  Uncle Daniel, whom Grandpa at one point describes as hiding behind the door when brains were being handed out, was institutionalized at one point, though he managed to escape almost despite himself.  Once out of the asylum, he marries: first Miss Teacake Magee, and then Bonnie Dee Peacock.  His first marriage doesn’t last, and Bonnie Dee only agrees to marry him on a trial basis.  Eventually, she drives him out, and he leaves her living at the old homeplace while he lives at the hotel with his niece.  Bonnie Dee leaves town for a while, causing Uncle Daniel to pine for her and repeat the story of his heartbreak daily for the hotel’s dinner guests.  When she returns, she invites him back; upon his return, however, she is found dead, and Uncle Daniel is put on trial for her murder.  Fortunately, Uncle Daniel is acquitted.

Edna Earle is identifiable as a Welty narrator, for me evoking Sister in “Why I Live at the P.O.”  Though she makes occasional references to her on-again, off-again romance with Mr. Spring, a traveling salesman who occasionally stays at the Beulah Hotel, she is primarily a supporting character in her own story.  I read her role as caretaker and narrator as an important analysis of the role of women in Southern communities: in her own words, “I’m the go between, that’s what I am, between my family and the world.  I hardly ever get a word in for myself” (404). 

Bonnie Dee also reminds me of a Welty short story character, that of Lily Daw in “Lily Daw and the Women.”  Both Lily Daw and Bonnie Dee suck on flowers (357), an odd characteristic I’m curious about.  Though Bonnie Dee is often described as pretty as a doll, her appearance is marked as odd: “She was little and she was dainty….But I could tell by her little coon eyes, she was shallow as they come” (355).  Edna Earle claims to be able to read people from their appearances, a trait she connects to her job as innkeeper: “I don’t run the Beulah Hotel for nothing: I size people up: I’m sizing you up right now” (341).[1]  Like Lily Daw, her lack of intellect is apparently readable in her appearance, as well as connected to a certain implication of wantonness.

It would take a certain kind of wantonness to take advantage of a man as simple and sweet as Uncle Daniel.  His primary motivation in life was happiness; according to Edna Earle, “H loved happiness like I love tea” (343).  Such vulnerability also has a physiological manifestation, which is what is meant by the title reference to the “Ponder Heart”: “Well, it’s our hearts.  We run to sudden ends, all we Ponders.  I say it’s our hearts, though Dr. Ewbanks declares Grandpa just popped a blood vessel” (358).  While she’s referring specifically to their hereditary heart condition, she could also be referring to the vulnerability of their very way of life.  Though their family at one point was “rich as Croesus” (410), Uncle Daniel throughout the novella is constantly giving away not only their possessions and property, but cleans out their bank account and gives away most of their cash money as well.  There is a certain satirical tone about the South and its wealth and identity throughout the novel—at Uncle Daniel’s trial, a relative of Bonnie Dee is quite disparaging of the Ponders’ wealth, claiming that it comes from the fact that “the Ponders did not burn their cotton when Sherman came” (418).  And Edna Earle dismisses the judge’s authority because he “wasn’t even born in this county” (418). 

Published in 1954, the novella’s representation of and commentary on the South comes at a real moment of crisis and change for the American South.  In this texts, African Americans are still treated as childlike inferiors by the white people, and there does not seem to be any irony in this presentation (despite claims I have heard by Welty scholars to seem willing to perform major contortions to make Welty seem in retrospect to be much more (anachronistically) politically liberal that seems plausible).  Nevertheless, it’s a very fun read—Welty’s use of language is really stellar here, with lines such as, “with the wrong element going spang through the middle of it [the town] at ninety miles an hour on that new highway” (342). 

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[1] As an aside, Welty several times uses this double colon sentence structure (which I don’t think I’ve seen before) in this story; I’m curious to think more about it’s meaning.

Cynthia Shearer--The Celestial Jukebox

      This novel takes place in a small rural town called Madagascar, Mississippi, following the lives in its culturally diverse community.  Angus Chien, a second-generation Chinese man, runs the Celestial Grocery, the town’s center and home of a beautiful though unreliable jukebox which was last updated in the 1960s.  He employs Boubacar, a young boy who’s part of a Mauritanian immigrant community, whose love of African music leads him to discover the blues and Christian gospel of the Delta.  It also follows Raine, an unhappy suburban wife and mother suffering worsening panic attacks at having to drive in traffic, who is in a way healed by the oracular artwork of Marie Abide, a possible love child of Henri Matisse.

Celestial Art

It makes sense that a novel called “The Celestial Jukebox” would have music as a foregrounded theme and symbol.  Throughout the novel, music is emphasized as a primary art form of the South, as it functions both as repository for the region’s history as well as a cross-cultural language.  An equally important aspect of music, however, is its imaginative aspect as artistic expression.  This aspect is highlighted by its juxtaposition with other art forms in the novel, especially the found art sculptures made by Marie which incorporate sheet music into their designs.  The importance of art and the imagination in The Celestial Jukebox demonstrates that the most promising strategy for the survival of the South is through the work of its artists and the artwork they produce.

Given the scope of this paper, I wish to focus on the figure of Bebe Marie Abide and her artwork in the novel.  Certainly, the realization about the true nature of music that Dean Fondren makes—that “music was like a seine net…trawling the air to catch the spirits of the mutilated of the world, and to romance them back into the arms of the rest, who could help them.  Anything else was just noise, a plague of grasshoppers that would strip the land bare” (410)—applies to Marie’s artwork, especially her birdhouses which find their way into the lives of many in the novel. 

Marie’s imaginative perspective as an artist allows her to see possibilities which elude others.  The sheet music which to others looks like garbage on the side of the road appears to Marie as “abandoned valentines” (62), which she works into the birdhouses she creates from bottle caps and the covers of old books.  Like the blues music present throughout the book, Marie’s artistic vision also comes from a tragic background, as she was born out of wedlock to a mentally unstable artist who may possibly have conceived Marie with the artist Henri Matisse.  Also like the blues, Marie’s artistic vision is recognized as having a uniquely spiritual component.  While there are no stories about Marie selling her soul to the devil in exchange for her art, her memory of watching an image of herself painted by her mother burn in a zinc bathtub in Paris is certainly a vision of hell.

Marie’s artistic spiritual authority is recognized in various ways by other characters.  When Boubacar sees her bottle tree, he recognizes it as the work of an African sorcière (29).  Further, Marie’s encounters with the suburban Raine often have an oracular tone to them, with Marie making tantalizingly mysterious statements such as referring to her birdhouse as “A little fresh fruit from the orchard of abandoned dreams” (73).  Marie’s birdhouses may serve a similar purpose as her bottle tree, “detain[ing] whatever spirits meant harm to the household” (28).  Especially in Raine’s case, these art objects have magical properties which seem to help facilitate change in the lives of those to whom they have been entrusted.

Perhaps most importantly, Marie’s artistic life is one which openly rejects finance- and commodity-based capitalism.  As her own artwork not only is made from scavenged items but also sold outside of the system—literally, as when she is threatened by the “hospitality man” outside of the upscale grocery store for selling without a license (72).  She is arrested for breaking televisions for sale.  She refuses to properly participate in the kind of commodity-based capitalist system which is blamed both in the novel as well as by critics for the destruction of the South, both in the destruction of its idyllic landscape as well as the erosion of its unique cultural identity.  By ending the novel with the “Benediction” chapter, which follows the life of Marie, Shearer may be privileging the artistic vision as holding out the last hope for the perpetuation of the South.  Ending the novel on an exchange between Marie and Henri Matisse which starts about art and ends with her affirming in French that he is her father, Shearer emphasizes the important familial potential of cross-cultural artistic exchange, which has been thematized throughout the novel not only in the African-inflected blues and gospel music played in the Delta, but also in the ubiquitous expressions of the ineffable through folk art.  Even if the casino seems to be winning over the farmer, the South will always have its Robert Johnsons, Howard Finsters, and Bebe Marie Abides to translate these events into a southern vernacular through their art.

Jack Butler--Jujitsu for Christ (1986)

Ugly Violence

In Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ, the narrator’s identity is not overtly revealed until the last chapter of the novel.  Such calling attention to its narrative nature demonstrates the difficulty of restoring unheard stories to the accepted version of history.  These stories often resist being told, as the narrator Marcus admits: “This was supposed to be my story.  Turns out to be everybody else’s” (197).  In fact, it is just such a subplot on which I wish to focus: the story of Marcus’s sister, Eleanor Roosevelt Gandy, and the tragic consequences of her attempts to meet white standards of beauty.  Though her story is not the main one, it is important enough that it does break through the main narrative for a couple of chapters.  By including Eleanor’s story, the novel calls attention to the very physical dangers posed by unattainable white beauty standards on young black girls.

Thirteen year old Eleanor is described as “sensitive” because she does not like to sit in the movie theater balcony “watching the pretty white people all together and happy down below” (109).  Her crush on Roger Wing, her white college-aged neighbor, is at first rather cute.  However, when she appears at his jujitsu studio wearing her best dress, her innocent puppy love quickly takes a disturbing turn.  Roger, in his typical state of lust, uses her flirtation as an excuse to molest her.  Eleanor understands this act to be a declaration of love.  Roger, however, subsequently vacillates between guilt over his molestation of a child and anger over what he considers to be her seduction of him (111). 

Eleanor becomes withdrawn and begins pulling her hair out.  Her unconscious behavior attempts to mark on her body the abuse she has suffered, not only to make visible what is invisible, but also as a form of self-punishment for her perceived failure to keep Roger as her boyfriend.  She attributes this failure to her own ugliness—specifically, her lack of pink skin.  We see this after Roger describes the torture of a young African American girl, about which Eleanor asks, “‘Wa[s] she ugly?’” (126).  Eleanor equates racist violence with what she perceives as the ugliness of her race, and takes extreme measures to rectify this, as she “washed her face with Drano” in an attempt to bleach it (132).  Even more horrifying than this act alone is her reaction to the pain: though she yells with pain, she is thinks that she is “smiling and singing” (132), and as she is taken to the hospital she celebrates what she imagines is her victory over her brown skin, expecting her skin to grow back a beautiful pink color.

In the midst of the larger, more overtly political violence in the book, it seems strange to focus on what might be read as a minor subplot involving a disturbed young teen.  However, Butler ties Eleanor’s story to the novel’s larger themes of sex and violence to emphasize just how dangerous life was for a young African American girl in Mississippi in 1961, even if she somehow managed to avoid the riots and thrown bricks.  In fact, resistance to white standards of beauty is identified as a political act in the novel when Roger encounters a young woman who has refused to embrace white standards of female beauty: “She wore her hair in a way that he had never seen anyone wear hair before: it was a great busy globe nearly two feet in diameter, like a trimmed hedge, like a large strange hat from outer space” (39).  Both her glare at Roger and Marcus’s explanation—“She ain’t arn it….She mad at white people” (39)—emphasize that hair can be a form of social protest:

Despite his detestable molestation of Eleanor, Roger is ultimately a good guy, taking Marcus from the dangers of Jackson and raising him in the comparatively safer environment of Arkansas.  However, that he can sexually assault a girl and not only get away with it but put it behind him as he does highlights not only the entrenched violence of the system but also Roger’s own privileged position within it.  More importantly, it shows how the violence of the time was not only in the billy clubs and the Klan but also present in less dramatic elements, part of an insidious force in the larger culture.  By allowing Eleanor’s story to break through, Butler emphasizes the subtle ways in which privilege and violence intertwine in 1960s Mississippi.

John Howard--Men Like That (1999)

John Howard’s Men Like That “argues that notions and experiences of male-male desire are in perpetual dialectical relationship with the spaces in which they occur, mutually shaping one another.  This book examines sexual and gender nonconformity, specifically male homosexualities and male-to-female transgender sexualities in Mississippit from 1945 to 1985—from the end of World War II to the dawn of the age of AIDS” (xiv).  Howard’s work is different from much of gay and lesbian history, which is often “urban-centered and identity-focused” (xiv); instead, Howard’s work emphasizes “desire as an organizing category” (xviii).  Relying heavily on first person accounts, oral histories, and news stories—as well as his own memories growing up in Mississippi—Howard illuminates a Mississippi where many homosexual desires were able to be exist and be acted on in the context of a “tradition of quiet accommodation” (184).

Unlike many coming out narratives, which follow a trajectory of movement from the rural to the urban, Howard examines what took place within the rural setting.  He shows that much homosexual desire and activity took place despite of or because of this rural context; further, not only were there gay people who stayed in Mississippi and acted on their desires, but there were also people who, while originally followed the rural to urban trajectory, returned home (for myriad reasons, from families who needed them to their own desire to live in Mississippi).  Howard examines the role of the “closet” in these paradigms, noting that within the confines of the closet, much desire can be acted on.  Important to my own work, he makes the claim that “the South—rural space generally—functions as a gay America’s closet” (63).  We see this in the paradigmatic coming out narrative, then, the move from South to North—rural to urban.

An important point that Howard makes is how the “tradition of quiet accommodation” was interrupted primarily by the rise of the Civil Rights movement.  Over time, queer desire and civil rights agitation became conflated, as the “dirty beatnik” stereotype included suspect sexuality: “over the course of ten years, a vibrant, ever more successful civil rights movement would become connected in the minds of many Mississippians to queer sex, among other practices and ideologies.  Consequently, police and judicial responses to queer Mississippians would prove increasingly hostile and punitive” (129). 

Further, Howard shows how queer desire, acts, and identity were all very different elements which were not necessarily conflated.  While public officials earlier in the period were often quietly accommodated when their own queer sexual practices were discovered, more publicized sex scandals which arose later in the period nicely illustrated how desires, acts, and identities were understood as separate.  In his discussion of Mississippi Congressperson Jon Hinson, who was discovered on several occasions engaged in homosex, Howard points out that it is only when Hinson is discovered in an unacceptable sexual role—penetrated by a black man—that his public rebelled.  Using the Protestant rhetoric of sin and forgiveness, however, allowed Hinson to continue to “def[y] queer identity by speaking—and repenting—only of queer deeds” (270).  Howard’s analysis of this rhetoric in light of Judith Butler’s theory of queer performance is intriguing: “Hinson, in producing and performing a spiritual inside, ensured that he wouldn’t be relegated to a stigmatized cultural outside” (272).  By claiming (and I would say performing) an internal spiritual terrain, Hinson was able to mitigate the significance of the actions of this physical, external body.

I’m glad that Howard ended his analysis with the mid-eighties, as AIDS truly did change everything, including understandings of identity.  As I just read Henry Abelove’s Deep Gossip, I’m really intrigued by how the two texts interact.  Simply taking Abelove’s idea of the “queer commuter”—a term which he uses to describe a group of American poets from the first half of the twentieth century, whose travel away from and back to America (prompted by an America hostile to gay identity) informed their work—I’d like to apply that to the idea of the South, as I would maintain that no one can ever fully leave the South.  I appreciate Howard’s focus on an often-ignored identity.