THE VERTICAL SENSE OF
PLACE IN THE FICTION OF BARRY HANNAH AND FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Sandra Lee Kleppe
University of Tromsø
In Barry Hannah's novel Ray, the protagonist by the same name is
simultaneously a Vietnam and a Civil War veteran and his memory
is cluttered with events from both wars. Ray, who narrates his
own story, says in the two-sentence chapter V, "I live in
so many centuries. Everybody is still alive" (41). In another
chapter Ray, as ex-pilot, simply relates the coordinates for an
air attack. The chapter looks like this:
XXIX
ERD. #92. #Doe4. Utap. At
40-50. Range. In Clear. Solid. Ventro.
How Hannah has managed to portray Ray
without sacrificing the verisimilitude of the character may have
something to do with his sense of place and time, and I propose
that this sense is vertical. By vertical I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin's
vertical chronotope, one of the many time-place schemes he outines
in his monograph entitled "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope
in the Novel." The vertical chronotope enables a literary
use of time and space which spreads the world out along a vertical
axis, blotting out linear time and twisting horizontal space into
a right angle with the earth. "The temporal logic" of
this chronotope, Bakhtin says, "consists in the sheer simultaneity
of all that occurs" (157). Hannah's Ray
is usually read as an incoherent story told by a fragmented character.
Michael P. Spikes, for example, points out that "almost every
critic and reviewer of Ray has commented, either directly or indirectly,
on the fragmentation of its principle character" (70). Spikes
argues that "Ray also seeks stability and order" through
his narration of the text (71). I would like to argue that this
quest for order has its own vertical logic characterized by simultaneous
time combined with perpendicular movement suggested by the motif
of flight. This vertical sense of place characterizes several
of Hannah's works and is a feature which he shares with other
Southern writers, one of them is Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor has
said that "the writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where
time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find
that location" (1969, 59). These are the three ingredients
of vertical space as I understand it: place, time and the extra-temporal
other-worldly, and it is this kind of space I think O'Connor and
Hannah construct in their fiction.
Vertical time and space are grounded in a Dantesque vision
of the world. Hence the temporal in the vertical chronotope has
a significance which goes beyond Ray's simple simultaneous "I
live in so many centuries." "Only under conditions of
pure simultaneity," Bakhtin says, "can there be revealed
the true meaning of 'that which was and which is and which shall
be'" (157). There is a line from O'Connor's novel The
Violent Bear it Away which
is even more illustrative of vertical time than Ray's line. It
has to do with the 14-year-old boy Tarwater who has been abducted
by his great-uncle, a fundamentalist old man who isolates his
nephew in a cabin in the woods in order to give the boy a proper
education. It reads:
His uncle had taught him Figures, Reading,
Writing, and History beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden
and going on down through the presidents to Herbert Hoover and
on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment.
(4)
Owen W. Gilman, Jr. has singled out a
difficulty one inevitably meets in a comparative reading of Hannah
and O'Connor in the remark that "O'Connor's fiction, with
all of its grotesque characters and scenes, always had an overreaching
purpose illuminating certain principles of faith and there is
no such motive behind anything produced by Barry Hannah. The closest
thing to faith in Hannah's world is the process of storytelling"
(216). While it is true that O'Connor was a professed Catholic
and Hannah has expressed no particular religious conviction, Hannah's
work, in my analysis, is no secular counterpart of O'Connor's,
as some suggest. In
her illuminating article The Whole Lying Opera of it : Dreams,
Lies and Confessions in the Fiction of Barry Hannah Ruth D.
Weston says Hannah s characters inhabit a moral void which is
a secular version of what O Connor depicts (415). Although
Ray, for example, has intentionally killed, maimed and abused
in his careers as soldier, pilot, doctor and husband, had he lived
in a moral void he would not have the sense of guilt and purpose
expressed in such passages as, "rising sins from my past
are coming up and haunting my insides [....] Look here, I'm an
important doctor on a mission" (61).
On the other hand, most of Hannah's characters do not live
in a Dantesque world consisting of spheres of hell beneath the
earth and spheres of purgatory and paradise above, which is the
original form-generating image behind the vertical chronotope.
Bakhtin notes that "in the subsequent history of literature,
the Dantesque vertical chronotope never again appears with such
rigor and internal consistency. But there are frequent attempts
to resolve, so to speak, 'along the vertical.'" (158). In
what follows I will examine such attempts in O'Connor's and Hannah's
fiction. I see in both of these writers a striking tendency to
portray characters ascending and descending, literally and metaphorically,
through vertical spheres as well as recurring images of verticality
such as flight, bridges and ladders. O'Connor is certainly the
more rigorous of the two in her allusions to the traditional categories
of heaven and hell in her works, while Hannah constructs some
very concrete spheres of underworld, earth and overworld which
are not necessarily poles of unequivocally negative and ideal
worlds. Again, this is not to say that Hannah is presenting a
secular version of O'Connor's world, both writers, I think, are
dealing with spiritual movement in their employment of the vertical
chronotope.
The use of the vertical chronotope, Bakhtin claims, is
a device which enabled Dante to portray all of the "manifold
contradictions" and "representatives of all social classes"
of his epoch by means of a single feature. In "Revelation"
O'Connor attempts such a feat by twisting the social stratification
of her time and place into a vertical line. The protagonist of
the story, Mrs. Turpin, spends her mental energy constructing
a social hierarchy which she imagines in vertical terms: "On
the bottom of the heap were most colored people [and] the white
trash; then above them were the home-owners, then above them the
home-and-land-owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she
and Claud were people with a lot of money" (491). Mrs. Turpin
considers herself a clean, virtuous, middle-class land owner,
as opposed to blacks and poor whites whom she finds dirty and
disgusting. But at the end of the story a vision appears before
her in the sky in which her vertical scheme is ironically reversed:
She saw [...] a vast swinging bridge extending
upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it
a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were
whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their
lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes and battalions
of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like
frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of
people whom she recognized at once as those [...] like herself
[....] Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away (508).
"In Dante the real time of the vision"
Bakhtin says, "as well as the point at which it intersects
with two other types of time, the specific biographical moment
[...] and historical time has a purely symbolic character"
(156). In "Revelation" O'Connor has woven together the
biographical time of Mrs. Turpin, the historical reality of the
mid-twentieth century South (which she depicts with concise detail),
and eternity which all meet in the scene of her symbolic vision
of the day of judgment. Mrs. Turpin literally sees herself at
the bottom of a vertical bridge to heaven in the climactic scene
of the story. The material security and physical cleanliness which
Mrs. Turpin prizes belong to the horizontal realm of the earth
and have no value, or rather, have a negative value, when they
are twisted into the vertical realm.
O'Connor's "The Artificial Nigger" is likely
her most Dantesque story, and the allusions to Dante have been
studied at length by a number of scholars. I have therefore chosen
to concentrate on the vertical journey in O'Connor's "The
Lame Shall Enter First," a story characterized by a clash
between evolutionary theory with its linear temporal-historical
chronotope on the one hand and Christian fundamentalism with its
vertical chronotope on the other hand. The confrontation between
the horizontal and vertical is realized through the use of two
antagonistic characters. The atheist and humanist Sheppard says
that "man's going to the moon [...] is very much like the
first fish crawling out of the water onto land billions and billions
of years ago. He didn't have an earth suit. He had to grow his
adjustments inside. He developed lungs." (462) The satanic-prophetic
delinquent Rufus Johnson, on the other hand, claims that "I
ain't going to the moon and get there alive [...] and when I die
I'm going to hell" (462). Much of the plot is concerned with
Sheppard's determination to convert Rufus Johnson to his scientific
world-view; he is convinced that intellectual stimulation will
enable Rufus to cast off both his criminal behavior and his Christian
bias. Rufus, however, will not give in to the pull of the horizontal
and in the course of the story will begin his movement upward
along the vertical ladder, ultimately to exclaim, "when I
get ready to be saved Jesus'll save me, not that lying stinking
atheist" (480).
A third character, the child Norton, is involuntarily pulled
into this battle of wills, and will become its victim. The conflict
between Sheppard and Rufus crystallizes through the use of the
moon-voyage theme which is an age-old device for portraying utopian
travel along the vertical line between the earth and the moon.
One of the central characteristics of the moon-voyage genre is
the emphasis on scientific plausibility to fabricate a journey
to the moon, but this journey virtually always becomes, to quote
one commentator on the genre, an "incidental item in the
effort to achieve a perspective from which the metaphysical, cosmic,
or social phenomena of human existence can be evaluated"
(Bennett 142). The deeper meaning of the vertical voyage theme
in "The Lame Shall Enter First" lies in the fate of
Sheppard's ten-year-old son Norton.
At the outset of the story we learn that Sheppard and Norton
live alone after having lost wife and mother. Sheppard does not
tolerate his son's grief, his attitude is that "she had been
dead for over a year and a child's grief should not last that
long" (447). Sheppard, consistent with his role as representative
of the objective material world, reproaches his son for not appreciating
material security and completely neglects the boy's emotional
needs. Sheppard invites Rufus Johnson, who lives on the street,
into their home and a central passage in the story is when the
three characters are gathered around a telescope which Sheppard
has purchased as part of his ploy to stimulate the children:
"It's at least possible to get to
the moon," Sheppard said dryly [....] "We can see it.
We know its there. Nobody has given any reliable evidence there's
a hell."
"The Bible has given the evidence,"
Johnson said darkly, "and if you die and go there you burn
forever" [....]
Norton lurched up and took a hobbled step
toward Sheppard. "Is she there?" he said in a loud voice.
"Is she there burning up?" [....]
"She's saved," Johnson said.
The child still looked puzzled. "Where?"
he said. "Where is she at?"
"On high," Johnson said..."it's
in the sky somewhere." (461, 462)
The telescope in the story becomes a metaphor
for Sheppard's material tunnel vision and the distance between
father and son. At one point Norton "appeared so far away
that Sheppard might have been looking at him through the wrong
end of the telescope" (460). At the same time the telescope
will become, literally, a means for Norton to see his mother.
Norton cannot accept Sheppard's explanation that "your mother
isn't anywhere. She's not unhappy. She just isn't" (461).
Sheppard realizes with "revulsion" that "the boy
would rather she be in hell than nowhere" (462) and when
Rufus Johnson tells Norton that his mother is "on high"
the stage is set for the dramatic turn the story will take.
The disturbed child Norton embarks on a quest to find his
mother, and believes that he has found her in the telescope. In
the final climactic scene of the story Sheppard rushes to the
attic to find that Norton has committed suicide to be with his
mother:
The tripod had fallen and the telescope
lay on the floor. A few feet over it, the child hung in the jungle
of shadows, just below the beam from which he had launched his
flight into space. (482)
The vertical chronotope, Bakhtin says,
is accompanied by a tension which arises from a conflict between
fictional characters who strive to "set out along the historically
productive horizontal" (157), and their creator, who pushes
them upward rather than forward. When the artist employs the vertical
chronotope with any rigor, Bakhtin says, there is an "antagonism
between the form-generating principle of the whole and the historical
and temporal form of its separate parts. The form of the whole
wins out" (158). In the early 1960s, when O'Connor wrote
"The Lame Shall Enter First," the histrorical reality
was that man was preparing the first scientific voyage to the
moon. But Norton is pulled out of his father's horizontal scientific
world by his search for a place in the story, and it will be found
only when he embarks on a vertical journey to join his mother
in space/heaven. Hence, the need for a sense of place in this
story is intimately tied to the characters' deepest existential
crisis, the lost of a loved one, and the 'nowhere' of Sheppard's
humanism is utterly incapable of helping Norton to weather this
crisis.
In an interview from 1983 Barry Hannah has said, "some
of the weakest writing I read is where some guy is trying to grab
you and hold you up to a telescope: this is nature my way, look
at that" (Vanarsdall 340). This is exactly what Sheppard
does to Rufus in "The Lame Shall Enter First" and he
will pay dearly in the story for his words and deeds as the artist
uses the vertical chronotope to abduct his son. In Hannah's work,
however, there is seldom any moral or narrative judgment telling
us who is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and
the characters are given more freedom of movement in the here
and now of the contemporary world. But even though their creator
starts them moving along a horizontal line it seems almost as
if it is the characters who inevitably strive to move upward.
In Hannah's semi-biographical novel Boomerang, for example, the characters try "to practice
secular humanism as good as we can" but this only leads to
them "staring out of windows trying to see even the rough
face of God in the clouds" (55).
I would like pause here on an important distinction between
a chronotopic motif and a chronotope. Bakhtin makes bold claims
for the significance of the chronotope in literature. One of them
is that "a literary work's artistic unity in relationship
to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope" (243).
Such is the case only when chronotopes are employed with rigorous
internal consistency, something which is seldom the case outside
of the epoch in which they originate. Literary works, in Bakhtin's
analysis, are complex conglomerates of chronotopic motifs which
have been passed down, altered, and given new meaning from generation
to generation. In O'Connor's work, I did not choose to make the
distinction between chronotope and motif because, although the
Dantesque vertical chronotope may not be the controlling time-place
construction of her work, in the standard analysis, it is a Christian
world-view which is very similar.
In two of Hannah's stories, which I will save for last,
I see the vertical chronotope as being specifically connected
to the artistic unity of the work. But the vertical as chronotopic
motif is strikingly recurrent throughout his fiction. It is especially
present in his use of the themes of flight and music as well as
movement along a perpendicular line. Pilots and musicians are
stock characters in Hannah's work, and most of them experience
a spiritual high from these activities. The first paragraph of
chapter LX of Ray is only one of many examples where flight,
music and vertical movement are combined:
Over Hanoi. Hendrix coming in clear. Coming
down from high nowhere to blue somewhere to spy the water and
the Bonhomme Richard
in the luminous China Sea. There was a certain spirit that had
the controls and guided me in to make the deck [....] At the last
moment it is all spirit, because five things could go wrong before
the hooks catch you and you are climbing out of the cockpit. (107)
The motif of music is inherently compatible
with the vertical chronotope. Michael Holquist, in his glossary
to Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination, says under the entry orchestration that "within the novel perceived
as a musical score, a single 'horizontal' message (melody) can
be harmonized vertically in a number of ways" adding that
the literary chronotope's "sensitivity to time finds a natural
kinship with the overwhelmingly temporal art of music" (431).
In Hannah's works the sheer horizontal limits of the here and
now are often transcended through flight or music, or a combination
of the two.
In the story "Testimony of Pilot," from the collection
entitled Airships, the
three main characters all start out as promising musicians; two
of them, however, will end up in aviation, and the third, who
will live to narrate the story, becomes a writer. The character
Quadberry flies an F-6 jet in the Vietnam war which, it is stated,
can turn "perpendicular in the air." But the F-6 is
also capable of descent into a dangerous underworld. On one occasion,
taking off from an aircraft carrier, Quadberry takes part in the
following scene:
Then he went off the front of the ship.
Just like that, his F-6 plopped in the ocean and sank like a rock.
Quadberry saw the ship go over him. He knew he shouldn't eject
just yet. If he ejected now he'd knock his head on the bottom
and get chewed up in the motor blades [...] Down what later proved
to be sixty feet, he pushed the ejection button. It fired him
away, bless it, and he woke up ten feet under the surface swimming
against an almost overwhelming body of underwater parachute. But
two of his mates were in a helicopter, one of them on the ladder
to lift him out. (41)
Quadberry's girlfriend in the story, a
stewardess named Lilian, is given no chance to climb a vertical
ladder out of the aquatic underworld. She is killed in a plane
crash in which "the poor stewardesses were all splattered
like flesh sparklers over the water just out of Cuba. A fisherman
found one seat of the airplane. Castro expressed regrets"
(ibid.).
The two stories in which the vertical chronotope is most
intact are from Hannah's 1993 collection Bats out of Hell.
Here Hannah develops flight as a motif into a consistent
patterning of imagery which spreads movement out along a perpendicular
line from an underworld, through the earth and on into the sky.
In the story "High-Water Railers" there are three vertical
spheres: an aquatic underworld, an earthly middle sphere and the
sky. There is hardly any plot at all, the story is simply a short
episode in the lives of a group of old men who have a pier, Farte
Cove, as their habitual hang-out where they lie to pass the time.
The character Ulrich is interested in birds and aircraft; Lewis,
his antithesis, is fascinated with the underworld of the sea.
Each pursue their chosen hobby with religious fervor. We learn
at the opening of the story that "Lewis, ninety-one, had
watched some four-foot square of water for three years" (3).
A few lines down we are told how this spatial aspect of what Lewis
considers a scientific pastime is inextricably linked to the temporal:
he "considered himself an ichthyologist of minor parts and
kept a notebook with responses to fishlife in it. There were no
entries or dates when he did not catch or witness interesting
water life" (3).
Ulrich, on the other hand, is a self-appointed representative
of the upper sphere of the vertical world. Here is how he is portrayed
in the story:
This man featured himself a scientist
or at least an aerocrat, [he] was in the process of 'studying'
blue herons, loons, and accipiters in flight and for some nagging
reason he was interested in the precise weight
of everybody he met. He thought it happily significant that the
old had lighter, hollower, more aerodynamic bones, such as birds
have. (3)
Ulrich's conception of time is consistent
with his role as self-appointed spiritual mentor of the old men
on the pier. Ulrich had once been blown a distance by a hurricane,
and he never loses the opportunity of pointing out to his peers
that he is "wiser in actual 'hurricane minutes.'" These
minutes are supposed to support his theory that "the body
was preparing the elderly for 'the flight of the soul.'"
Ulrich "expected to weigh about thirty-five pounds when he
died, just a bit of mortal coil dragged away protesting like a
hare under an eagle" (4).
In order to illustrate my point that the story's controlling
image is that of vertical spheres, I have worked out a graphic
presentation of all of the creatures who are mentioned in the
text:
|
Winged Creatures (Ulrich)
|
|
birds, eagle, accipiters,
saint, (Wooten, Wren)
chicken
wading birds, loons,
blue herons, geese, duck
|
|
Earth Creatures
|
|
human being, pet, glass
animals
dog, horses, fox, mink,
nutria, hare, mice, rat
cricket, nits, mites,
worms
|
|
Water Creatures (Lewis)
|
|
three unrecovered human
bodies, mocassins, turtles, alligators
fish, sunfish, perch,
bluegill, gar, buffalo, carp, trout, bass, bream, gaspergou
shad, sturgeon, shark,
shrimp
|
The meticulous zoologists Lewis and Ulrich
would balk at such an arbitrary classification, but it is only
meant as a concrete version of my discussion, not a treatise on
natural history. The emphasis in the story is on transition, movement
from one sphere to the other, and hence the verticality of this
chain of creation is in sharp contrast to Sheppard's linear evolutionary
scheme in "The Lame Shall Enter First" in which progress
is horizontal and irreversible. For example, shrimp and crickets
are both used as fresh-water bait in the story and both are thus
moved from their rung on the ladder. The lake which is the setting
of the story is full of all kinds of oddities from all rungs;
salt-water creatures washed into it from hurricanes, three human
bodies, the transitory shoreline which is the haunt of reptiles
and webbed birds, and the pier from which the humans fish. In
addition to the three spheres of sky, earth and water, each level
is inhabited by its own vertical layers of creatures.
The central metaphor of this scenery seems to be that our
place on the vertical ladder is by no means static or secure,
we may ascend and descend, both bodily and spiritually, as well
as consume and be consumed by other creatures. The movement in
this story is reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau's loon in Walden. "Loons have been caught," Thoreau
says, in "lakes eighty feet below the surface, with hooks
set for trout [....] how surprised must the fishes be to see this
ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their
schools" (235). In Hannah's story it is the character with
a bird's name, Wren, who catches the gaspergou which surprises
all the fishermen. This freakish creature elicits a speech from
Ulrich about our vulnerable and transient existence. The gaspergou,
Ulrich says, is "an anomaly of the food chain, hardly ever
witnessed. We've got the aquatic equivalent of a fox and a chicken
here, on your food chain. Reminds you of man himself. All our
funereal devices are a denial of the food chain [....] pitifully
declaring ourselves exempt from the food chain. Our arrogance.
But we aren't. we're right in it. Nits, mites and worms will have
us" (10).
"High Water Railers" is a story full of humor
and irony. In one scene, Sidney Farte, exasperated by one of Ulrich's
flight lectures, points out, "I knew a rat once could fly.
Throw that sumbitch cheese in the air. Shit in the air too"
(7). Yet the comic aspects and the ironic distance do not exclude
an underlying sense of the seriousness of death, the impermanence
of flesh and, implicitly, the permanence of spirit. At the end
of the story Lewis, the ichthyologist, has a sudden need for a
dog. The last sentence of reads, "All in [the car], they
set out to Vicksburg to find Lewis a dog" (11). One wonders
if Lewis is not on the ladder upward, if his fascination with
the underworld of piscatorial life is being renounced here in
his impulsive need for an earth creature, a dog. As dog is backwards
for god, the whole lying bunch may be setting out on a spiritual
quest ultimately to lead them to the birdwatching of Ulrich. Yet
birdwatching is not necessarily morally better than fishing, and
the sea of lies and tall tales in this story and its precedent
"Water Liars," although it may be a mysterious underworld,
is not unequivocally evil. In fact it seems closer to being a
metaphor for the art of telling tales; if the closest thing to
faith in Hannah's work is the process of storytelling, it is this
hobby that is the spiritual bond between all of the men on the
pier. All the characters are dedicated to their daily lying sessions
more than they are to fishing or birdwatching.
In the title story of the 1993 collection, "Bats out
of Hell Division," Hannah takes the metaphorical play of
matching the characters's weight with their spirituality one step
further. A whole division of Confederate troops, or rather, what
is left of them, is so gaunt from hunger and mutilation that the
men are hardly fit targets for the enemy. The division's scribe,
who narrates the story, has lost all limbs except his writing
arm, and is pushed around in a wheel-barrow. At the outset of
the story he tells us, "They have shot hell out of us. More
properly we are merely the Bats by now" (43). These bats,
fresh from hell at the start of the story, will ultimately climb
the vertical latter through earth and on into paradise. The enemy
Union soldiers are wholesome and gluttonous earth creatures, "The
smoke from the enemy's prime ribs, T-bones and basted turkeys
floats over here at nights sometimes, cruelly, damn the wind"
says the scribe, while his men, he says, "were hardly anything
but eyes, shoulders and trigger fingers" and are nourished
on dry bread and water (47).
There are two soldiers in the story who provide the type
of thesis and antithesis of underworld and overworld represented
by Lewis and Ulrich in "High Water Railers." Beverly
Crouch has burrowed himself permanently into a hole in the ground,
literally crouching to dodge the fire of the enemy. Like Lewis and the lake of tall tales,
Crouch is associated with lies, his boasts, since he never leaves
his hole except to attack the enemy, are related to the division
second hand, and it is said that he spends his time practicing
telling the tale of the war because "it will set the tone
for the century and be in all the books. Great-grandchildren will
be shaking their heads, overpowered" (46). At the other end
of the vertical ladder in the story is the Division's observer,
Jones Pierce-Hatton (see the pun on the fate of his hate below),
who has made a "crow's nest" in a tree from which he
reports on the movements of the enemy. The scribe comments that
"it must be rather godly up there, calling the wrath and
precision down on individuals of the indigo persuasion [....]
his ladder's been all shot away for a long time" (46). Jones
Pierce-Hatton, having literally climbed to a higher sphere, will
remain a permanent fixture there. In his new habitat, he appropriately
refuses to consume the food sent up to him in a basket from the
lower sphere, a gesture of abstinence worthy of his godly status
in the division. Here is how the scribe retells the fate of the
superior Union Army's observation balloon:
The same ill wind that brought us those
belly-churning odors of roasting prime meat increased and blew
the [balloon] off its anchor, so it wobbled over here right up
alongside Jones Pierce-Hatton in his nest.
You could hear the cries of dismay from
the disheartened passenger as he came alongside the lone enormous
tree at bright high noon. Pierce-Hatton shot into the thing with
his French double quailing piece, and such a blast of burning
air covered the top of this single stick of the forest we reckoned
on a momentary view of hell itself [....]
Somebody called up to Pierce-Hatton to
ask whether he was injured. A head wearing nothing but the scorched
crown of a hat arose from the hutch.
"Why shit, yes! Haven't you got eyes
man?" came the reply. (47)
It is by sheer perseverance against impossible
odds that this ragged shadow of a division who "advance by
inches and retreat by yards" will vanquish the enemy. For
all their ghostliness, they have what the Union lacks: spirit.
Due to a scientific diet of the kind Ulrich advocated in "High
Water Railers," they have been severely reduced in matter
but proportionately increased in soul, and they have music, which
will prove to be the final onslaught to the gluttonous blue-coats:
"By God we surrender" shouts the Union General, adding,
"This can't go on. The music. The
Tchaikovsky! You wretched specters coming on! It's too much. Too
much."
Our general, stunned, went over to take
his sword [....] Nothing in history led us to believe we had not
simply crossed over to paradise itself and were dead just minutes
ago. (49)
Gluttony is also a central concern of
O'Connor's "The Lame Shall Enter First," although in
her story she is not making use, as Hannah is, of the mythical
dualism between the materialistic North and spiritual South, but
rather pitting Sheppard's literally nauseating humanism against
the spiritual needs of the boys. Tony Magistrale has suggested
that in this story "various acts of eating are employed as
metaphors to mirror the spiritual conditions of the characters"
(58). In his hunger, Rufus Johnson is driven to eating out of
garbage cans and Norton is emotionally starved, yet it is these
two who carry the spiritual weight of the story; just as the starving
Confederate soldiers, especially the fasting Pierce-Hatton, carry
the spirtual weight of their story. The implication of both of
these stories is that it is paucity rather than bounty that leads
to a purgatorial process necessary for a positive spiritual condition.
At the end of "The Lame Shall Enter First," Sheppard
realizes that he has neglected his son; he thinks in horror that
"he had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a
glutton" (481). Likewise, I realize that, like a glutton,
I have stuffed some empty pages with good words about fiction
which probably speaks for itself. It may be time to go on a scientific
diet.
***
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Gilman, Owen W., Jr. "Barry
Hannah" in Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. Edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora.
Wesport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 213-219.
Hannah, Barry. Airships. 1978. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
------------------. Ray. 1980. New York: Grove Press, 1994.
------------------. Boomerang. 1989. Jackson: Universty Press of Mississippi,
1993.
------------------. Bats
out of Hell.
New York: Grove Press, 1993.
Magistrale, Tony. O Connor s The Lame
Shall Enter First. The Explicator
47 (1989): 58-61.
O'Connor, Flannery. The
Violent Bear it Away.
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1960.
-------------------------.
Mystery and Manners. 1969.
Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux, 1993.
-------------------------.
The Complete Stories.
1971. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995.
Vanarsdall, R. "The
Spirits Will Win Through: An Interview with Barry Hannah"
The Southern Review
19 (1983): 317-341.
