Earlier this year, I was asked by Safaa Dib, the editor of the Portuguese magazine Bang!
, if I would write a 2500 word essay on "The Books of My Life" for translation and publication in the 15th issue of Bang!
This issue came out in Portugal last month and today I received my contributor's copy. For those who can't read Portuguese (and I should note that Luís Santos does an excellent job translating my florid words into fluid Portuguese), here is the article in English. Hopefully this will allow some insight into the stories that have shaped me for over three decades now.
I have spent a long time reflecting on what truly might be
the “Books of My Life,” especially in regard to those works that touch upon
those imaginative vistas so frequently associated with fantasies and other
speculative fictions. There are so many
works that have influenced me over the years that it is difficult to just
choose a small sample of stories and discuss them without at least grounding
them in my life. Therefore, I will begin
by discussing “place” and its role in the creation of the stories that have
enchanted me for years.
In James Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus chooses to identify
his place in the world by going from the intimately local (Class of Elements)
to the, well, “universal” (the Universe).
This inductive approach to placing himself inside the context of a
greater universe is similar to how I believe many fantasies came to be: the original storytellers tried to place an
imaginative form of their own intimate locales within a larger, stranger, and
sometimes frightful world that seemed to exist outside the limns of their
villages or city-states. The earliest
mythologies preserved in writing, the Sumerian tales of Gilgomesh, Enkidu, Inanna,
the action frequently takes place just a few mountains or valleys away from the
Mesopotamian river valley. Fraught with
a dark, subterranean underworld and god-sent bulls and a rare flower (not to
mention a flood that almost certainly is the antecedent for Noah’s), these tales
served to educate generations of listeners about how they should conduct their
lives and how they should remember the limitations of human life. Yet often overlooked in discussions of
mythologies, ancient as well as more modern, are the visual aspects that shape
the tale to fit the needs of the audience.
From the hoary frost of the Norse myths regarding the world’s foundation
to the shapeless Chaos from whence Night and Day were birthed and then from
them the later gods and goddesses to the Cherokee belief that the water beetle Dâyuni'sï
scooped up mud in order to provide a resting place during his sojourn there
from the sky realm of Gälûñ'lätï, each myth takes natural elements (or the
perceived absence of them) and they create fantastical places upon which
stories of truth, justice, good, evil, and despair could be enacted upon in an
aural tapestry that would simultaneously entrance their listeners (and later,
readers) and lead them to consider the messages embedded within the stories.
In recent centuries, these fantastical
mythologies expanded roughly along national lines. The English have their “Matter of Britain,”
or the cycle of stories surrounding the legendary King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table. In France and Italy,
there is the “Matter of France” and the tales surrounding Charlemagne’s Twelve
Paladins, particularly Roland/Orlando.
The Spanish have El Cid to represent the Reconquista. Each of these, however, were birthed over
several centuries and with the exception of the 16th century epic
poem Orlando Furioso, all came before
Columbus’s voyages to the so-called “New World.”
With the circumnavigation of the globe
by the last ship in Magellan’s fleet in 1521, the belief in a world suspended
on pillars, flat as a plane, was shattered.
Yet the melding of physical and imaginative “place” continued to produce
moving works, such as Camões’s Os
Lusíadas and John Bunyan’s The
Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the metaphoric locales became at least as
important as real-world parallels. One
could argue that due to this ascendancy of the metaphoric , irreal place at the
expense of the “real” physical locations (slightly altered to fit the needs of
the tale), the unity of locale and belief, bound together in myths that
reinforced social mores, had begun to
fracture into the “speculative” and “realist” fictions of today.
There is some justification, some might
argue, to considering fantasies to be “lesser” works. After all, they do not possess the
believability of the earlier myths – there is little sense of there being a
discovery of Hobbiton in the layers of English detritus as there still is for
some faint, distant echo of a historical King Arthur. “Place” in regards to modern fantasies, feels
estranged from known realities. Yet this
is not always the case. Take for
instance my native region, the American South.
Unlike virtually any part of Anglo North America, it possesses a memory
of place so strong that history itself has been warped to suit the needs of the
populace.
“Place” in the American South is
treacherous, full of cultural and historical landmines that can detonate if the
erstwhile traveler takes a single false step.
“The South” even 152 years after the beginning of the American Civil
War, carries connotations of chattel slavery, plantation life, the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK), and of enduring memories of the “Lost Cause.” These sordid elements combine in odd ways,
creating what might be some of the finest speculative fictions of the past
century, several of which have served to influence writers across the globe
even today.
“The South” has been mythologized as a
place of sweltering summer heat and humidity, of decaying farms and encroaching
kudzu. The very air seems to sometimes
carry a hint of ruined plantations and burning homes. The devastation of the Civil War was much
more than just the loss of a significant percentage of the pre-war population
or the razing of several towns and plantations.
No, in the minds of many there was a sort of metaphysical impression put
on the souls of those who survived and endured:
a sort of social Original Sin in which not just the sins of the fathers
would be visited upon the descendants to the fourth degree but that there would
be a tendency to slip into the evils of pride, anger, and racism. While this mindset is not totally true, there
is still a sense of a sort of Hawthornian “scarlet letter” that a great many
Southerners still bear in penance for the evils of their forebears and
themselves.
Such societal feelings, however
negative they may be, can be the impetus for great, imaginative
literature. Take for instance the late
19th/early 20th century Brer Rabbit stories. These tales of a clever rabbit outwitting a
devious fox, a brute bear, and other anthropomorphized animals, represent two
strands of Southern life, each of which were born of a melding of West African,
Southeastern Native American, and
Anglo-Celtic tales. I grew up
listening to the Joel Chandler version of the tales, in which the characters
are presented as quaint tales told by plantation workers, with implicit racist
commentary. Yet the Brer Rabbit stories
carried another connotation, one that Zora Neale Hurston transcribes in her
first non-fiction work, Mules and Men. There, Brer Rabbit leads a subversive
resistance against the established order and that buried within the fantasies
is a social commentary grounded in the complex realities of post-Civil War
Southern society. These twin poles, of
white manipulation of black myth in order to suit their social hierarchical
views and the black subversion of this same hierarchy, represent in fantasy
form in cultural topography of the South even unto my childhood in the late
1970s and 1980s. Looking back on these
tales now, especially that of the “Tar Baby,” I cannot help but see the story
in two ways: a tale of a clever rabbit
who manages to escape even his own deserved comeuppance and a metaphor for the
battles fought to preserve a culture that was repeatedly oppressed by the
dominant racial group. Taking into
account the variations between the Chandler and Hurston recordings of
originally oral tales, the Brer Rabbit stories might be some of the more
controversial and yet culturally significant fantasies to be produced, not just
in my native South but in the world as a whole.
The South is also known for its
Southern Gothic literature, which captures in haunting, eloquent words the
mixture of religious fervor, faith, despair, and ruin that seem to haunt Southerners
even today. As Flannery O’Connor once
said in an essay:
“I think it is safe
to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly
Christ-haunted.”
The Devil, nearly absent elsewhere,
seems to lurk in the hollows and vales of the South. When I first read O’Connor in college, I
could not help but feel as though in her tales of sinners captured brilliantly
the looming dread of the afterlife.
Although there is nothing explicitly supernatural about her fictions,
the battle for redemption can be seen in characters such as the boy in “The
River” who seeks so earnestly for a redemption that he barely understands that
he continually immerses himself in a local river in a tragic effort to purge
his body of sin and impurity. Her first
collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find,
is replete with tales of those who seek redemption or redress of grievances in
one form or fashion. O’Connor comments
on the latent power of redemption in an essay that I believe goes straight to
the heart of why her fictions resonate so much with readers, particularly
Southerners:
“There is something
in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive
act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be
restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what
he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking
altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a
novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to
be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
Nowhere in her fiction is this “mock damnation” felt more
strongly than in her first novel, Wise
Blood, and its protagonist Hazel Motes and his “Church Without
Christ.” Having read it twice in my
life, the novel grows even more haunted and grotesque on the second
reading. O’Connor’s use of religious
imagery, particularly Catholic symbols filtered through a Southern apocalyptic
lens, served as the genesis for some of the most unsettling fictions that I have
read over the second half of my life.
If O’Connor’s South is a place in which the worst
religious-inspired nightmares haunt its denizens, then William Faulkner’s
fictions, mostly set in the fictional Mississippi Yoknapatawpha County, strikes
at the confluence of past and present that pervaded Southern customs for over a
century after the Civil War. His tales
are replete with families that have come down in life after the war, yet still
clinging to the shredded, rotting remnants of former familial fame. Stories like “A Rose for Emily” capture this
in an almost horrific fashion. When I
first read it as an 18 year-old in 1992, I recall feeling a vague sense that
Emily could have easily been any of a number of elderly women that I knew in
the 1980s, those who would rather shut themselves away from the present in
order to cling to a glorified past now mostly devoid of any resemblance to the
present’s grim realities. Faulkner’s
fictions play upon this struggle to reconcile the past and its atrocities with
the present’s demands. In Absalom, Absalom!, this conflict is
outlined in perhaps its greatest depth, making for a tale that feels as much a
synopsis of a century of cursed existence as a tale of a family’s rise and
fall. Each time that I return to
Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, I feel as though I am experiencing a past South that
exists as much on the metaphorical level of a place struggling to find itself
within a world of hide-bound tradition as it does as a penetrating look into
the actual “real” world of complicated race and class struggles. Re-reading Faulkner after reading some of the
Latin American realismo mágico
writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, who both have
cited Faulkner as an influence, it is easy to hear within their tales of three
years’ of rain and the “war of the end of the world” echoes of Faulkner’s
exploration of how humans are molded by their native lands and how those
histories shape us in ways that seem utterly fantastical to those who grew up
outside these tortured traditions and decadent societies.
Yes, the sense of the decadent pervades Southern Gothic
literature and its cousin once removed, magic realism. Ruin is in the ascendency and no greater goal
than the redemption of individual or societal souls is at stake. This has a resonance in several fantasies,
particularly epic fantasies such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which I read as a child, but despite
re-reading it several times between 13 and 18, it did not have as large of a
hold on me, perhaps due to its “foreign” qualities), but whereas
secondary-world fantasies, with their invented locales, are at some remove from
the high moral stakes that are often featured in Southern Gothic
literature. Although many of the classic
writers of Southern Gothic literature are now dead, one writer still alive who
uses its settings, themes, and techniques is Cormac McCarthy. While McCarthy might be more famous today for
his Western-set works such as Blood
Meridian or The Border Trilogy,
he began by writing dark, almost depraved works set in mountainous region of
East Tennessee. His 1973 novel, Child of God, describes the life of a loner, Lester Ballard, who
sinks so far into depravity (necrophilia is but one of his numerous crimes)
that instead of being repulsed by him, readers may instead sympathize with his
transgressions against early 20th century Southern society. McCarthy’s short, staccato bursts of dialogue
and sparse description create a setting that captures, similar to O’Connor but
in an even more stark fashion, the desire for redemption even when damnation
looms darkly over the narrative. Unlike
Faulkner and O’Connor, both of whom I have re-read several times over the past
two decades, I have yet to re-read any of McCarthy’s stories, as they are so
frightening in their feverish realism that they have seared their outlines into
my mind. Those who read McCarthy can
expect to find something more fantastical than surreal fantasy within his
tales. It’s as though McCarthy has
through his use of rural Appalachian settings created a dark, twisted fable
within what appears at first to be a grim realist work. Place here, as in Faulkner and O’Connor,
becomes as much the grounds for myths to spring up from as a location upon
which we might walk across.
Thinking again on this question of “Books of My Life,”
perhaps it is best to say that the place where I grew up, the American South,
is as much the grounds upon which fantastical nightmares and feverish dreams
arise as a region that one can find on a map.
The stories of its evils and desire for redemption are, as Shakespeare
says, such stuff as dreams are made. Our
fictions merely reflect a mindset that may be foreign to others, but which it
is difficult to read without sensing that something fantastical has come to
nestle itself beside quotidian life. To
these tales I return time and time again, in order to understand just a little
more how this wonderfully mad culture came into being.
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