conversations with nature: welty’s the optimist’s daughter
by Douglas Messerli
Eudora
Welty The Optimist’s Daughter (New
York: Random House, 1972)
One
cannot help but notice that the transcendent vision of time which Eudora Welty
argues for in her fiction is achieved by fewer and fewer characters as she
continues to write. Where in Delta
Wedding several members of the family come to accept chaos and yet remain
linked in kinship to love, one sees in The
Golden Apples that the possibility of partaking in a special kind of vision
becomes increasingly less probable as the fiction progresses; in the end, only
Virgie Rainey is capable of accepting both the love and the chaos
simultaneously. In Losing Battles
there is no character presented who attains a transcendent vision; there is
only the hope that Vaughn or Lady May might come to be able to relate to the
world outside of the family while remaining within the family circle with its
bonds of love. It appears that if there has been any major change in Welty’s
thematic concerns, it has been a loss of belief in the hope that most
individuals can achieve such a vision. There is is in Welty’s working,
accordingly, an implication of an idea that perhaps reflects the influence of
Southern Presbyterianism, the idea of predestination. One cannot but feel that
those of Welty’s figures who come partake of the “mythic sensibility” are born
with it. There are clearly some people such as Miss Mortimer of Losing Battles who can accept the chaos,
but who simply because of birth or certain uncontrollable events in their lives
will never be able to know the presentness of love. There are others such as
Jinny Love Stark of The Golden Apples and
the Beecham-Renfro family of Losing
Battles who will always reject that other aspect of reality, and will
continually deny the world outside of their societal order and/or their
familial love. And, finally, there are some people such as Cassie Morrison and
Nina Carmichael, both of The Golden
Apples, who, even though they recognize the world outside of their own
contexts, cannot come to terms with it; they simply cannot open themselves up
to experience life in its fullness.
The
Optimist’s Daughter, Welty’s last work of 1972* appears at first to be a
work which perpetuates this idea of predestination. For at least three-fourths
of the book, the reader is faced with characters who very much parallel the
three non-transcendent types of individuals whom I just described.
Judge McKelva enters a New Orleans
hospital, accompanied by his second wife, Wanda Fay, and his daughter from his
first marriage, Laurel McKelva Hand, who has come from her home in Chicago to
be with her father. The Judge is disturbed because there is “something wrong”
with one of his eyes; he believes he has scratched it while pruning roses. His
fears prove justified when Dr. Courtland—a family friend whose mother lives
next door to the McKelvas back in Mount Salus, Mississippi—reports that indeed
something is wrong, not only with one, but with both of his eyes: the inside of
one eye is damaged and the other is forming a cataract. Dr. Courtland orders an
operation which is successful, but the patient must remain completely quiet for
several weeks in order to recuperate. Fay and Laurel move into a boarding house
and prepare to nurse husband and father back to health. Observing their
behavior on the alternating shifts, one soon has evidence of what one has
suspected from the start, that these two women are as completely different from
one another as is possible. Laurel is worried for her father because he does
not seem to be behaving in his usual manner; he lies completely still, obeying
orders with complaint, without so much as even a response to his daughter’s
attentions. Reading aloud to him day after day, she wonderingly observes that
he does not react at all.
Fay, on the other hand, unobservingly
entertains her husband, partially by describing the events of her day, but more
often by complaining that she cannot join in the Mardi Gras fun that is going
on around her. She resents her husband’s illness and makes that clear to him in
no uncertain terms. Even as she hears that her husband must have an operation,
Fay’s response is, “I don’t see why this had to happen to me…” (p. 8). Later, of her bandaged-eyed, recuperating husband, Fay
absurdly asks:
About ready to get
up, hon? Listen, they’re holding
parades out yonder
right now. Look what threw me
off the float! (p..
25).
At
another time she cries out:
Look! Look what I
got to match my eardrops. How
do you like them
‘em, hon? Don’t you want to let’s
go dancing? (p.
28)
A few nights later, Laurel awakens in her
boarding house room, sensing that something is wrong with her father. She
rushes to the hospital, arriving just in time to watch a nurse bodily pull Fay
from the Judge’s room, where Fay has evidently grabbed hold of her husband and
“abused” him. Laurel rushes into the room, followed by the doctor, who, a few
minutes later tells her that her father is dead. When Fay hears, her cry
completes the picture of her; one no longer has any questions concerning what
kind of person she is: turning on the doctor, she screams, “Are you trying to
tell me you let my husband die?.... You picked my birthday to do it on!” (p.
40). There is no longer any doubt, and in the following chapters it is even
more evident that Wanda Fay is the most selfish and irreparable character that
Welty has yet created.
It is quite obvious that Fay is the type
of person who sees time as progression, who does not at all comprehend the
presentness of love. Just as Gloria in Losing
Battles, Fay lays claim to the future. “The past isn’t a thing to me,” she
tells Laurel. “I belong to the future…” (p. 179). Fay is totally in the world,
in the “out-there” of separateness, so much so that she denies having a family:
“My family? …None of ‘em living” (p. 27). But even if she were to admit to
family, it would have little meaning. When her supposedly non-existent family
boisterously arrive from Texas at the Mount Salus funeral one is made to see
that they are a group with very little familial love. The Chisom’s may believe
in “clustering” as close as they can get (p. 70), but in their closeness they
demonstrate little of the love that one witnesses, for example, in the
Beecham-Renfros of Losing Battles. In
the first place, there is hardly much of a family left. There seems to have
been little intercourse between family members when it existed. Mrs. Chisom
proudly reveals that her husband died of cancer with expressing any pain to
her, but in a similar situation she cannot understand why her son Roscoe would
tell his friends what his “problem” was, but not her just before he shot and
killed himself. Despite Mrs. Chisom’s cliché-ridden assertion of the virtue of
family life, the impotence of this family and its inability to create a
fruitful love is quite apparent.**
As a product of this environment, Fay can
understand nothing save individuality, particularly her own. She has little
experience with an no ability in partaking of anything outside of herself, no
way of sharing herself through love. If all of this is made so evident,
however, that Fay appears to be as “flat” as a cartoon creation, it is not at
all clear why Judge McKelva married her. After the Judge’s funeral, Laurel’s
Mount Salus neighbors ask the very questions which the reader has had for some
time. Miss Tennyson says to Laurel as she sits in the back yard discussing Fay with
Miss Adele, Mrs. Bolt, and Mrs. Pease:
I’d only wish to ask
your precious father one question,
if I could have him
back just long enough for that…:
what happened to his judgment” (p. 107)
It
is an ironic question to ask of a Judge, particularly of a Judge who lost his
sight. But it is the question Laurel also must ask, and its answer tells her
not only something about her father, but about herself as well.
Fay has gone home to be with her “family”
for a few days after the funeral, and Laurel is left alone in the house in
which grew up, a house now willed to Fay, to ponder these issues before she
returns to Chicago. Returning to the house after dining with friends one
evening, Laurel finds that a bird has entered the house. Terrified—one later
discovers it is a childhood fear—Laurel runs about the house, turning on
lights, closing windows—a storm is coming on—and slamming doors until she has
locked herself away from the chimney swift. The room in which she finds herself
was her mother and father’s bedroom, now Fay’s bedroom. Her entrapment in this
particular room, and her movement from this room to a small antechamber, a
sewing room where she slept in infancy, functions as a visual metaphor of the
following scenes in which Laurel imaginatively reexperiences and reevaluates
her parents’ and her own pasts.
The events of the proceeding days act as a
catalyst for this remembrance. As the storm breaks loose, Laurel begins to
release the emotional rancor for Fay which for days she has held back. Like the
nurse on the night Fay attacked her husband, Laurel wants to cry out “Abuse!
Abuse” (p. 130). She wants not so much to punish Fay for what she has done,
however, as much as she wants acknowledgment, admission of guilt. Immediately,
Laurel realizes that if accused, Fay would not, could not understand what she has done. “I don’t even know what
you’re talking about,” she would say (p. 131). Laurel sees that Fay is one of
those people for whom “death in all its reality” passes right over. Although in
her time-orientation Fay rushes toward the future, it is for her a future
without a concept of death, without an end. Even knowing this, however, Laurel
finds it impossible to pity Fay. She feels she hold back her pit until Fay
realizes what she has done, and, in that unforgiving attitude, Laurel exposes
herself:
And I can’t stop
realizing it, any thought. I saw
Fay come out
into the open. Why, it would stand
up in court!
Laurel thought, as she heard the bird
beating against the door, and
felt the house itself
shake in the
rainy wind. Fay betrayed herself: I’m
released! she
thought to herself, shivering; one deep
feeling called by its name names
others. But to be
released is to
tell, unburden it (pp. 131-132).
Laurel, like Fay, has in these thoughts
“come out into the open,” has betrayed herself. For, in her bitterness towards
Fay, she connects herself to her stepmother, putting herself in a similar
position. Laurel imagines herself in court as the plaintiff against Fay, but in
Laurel’s emotional logic, Fay’s self-betrayal releases Laurel. Releases her
from what? one must ask. What crime has Laurel committed? Almost immediately
one begins to perceive that Laurel too is selfish, a fact which to reveals to
herself at that very moment. Longing to unburden herself, she momentarily
wishes that she could give evidence of Fay’s behavior to her own dead mother.
But suddenly she sees the horror of that desire:
The scene she
had just imagined, herself confiding
the abuse to her
mother, and confiding it in all tender-
ness, was a more
devastating one than all Fay had
acted out in the
hospital. What would I not do, perpetrate,
she wondered,
for consolation? (p. 132)
In thinking of her mother, moreover,
Laurel’s mind is diverted from her own failures. Instead, she calls up her
mother and, then, her father as she has fixed them in her memory. Here also the
reader sees that Laurel’s recollections issue from an emotional release. Just
as she was previously angry with Fay, she is now angry with her neighbors,
especially such people as Miss Verna Longmier, who at the funeral recalled
Judge McKelva and his wife by “making up tales or remembering all wrong what
she saw and heard” (p. 133). Laurel recalls the way it “really” was. At first
the past of her memories seems idyllic. Laurel’s mother, apparently of great
strength and perception, was certainly a person who we can imagine having come
to a transcendent vision. Becky McKelva had moved to Mount Salus from West
Virginia, from a home, unlike Fay’s, that was full of love.*** Becky returned
home to her family nearly every year, and Laurel’s recollections of these trips
are evocations of an idyllic family life akin to what Welty has previously
described in Delta Wedding. Through
these descriptions one perceives that Becky was a woman who lived in a present,
active familial love, and her returns to this love suggest that she remained
linked through that love to the past; and yet, she was one who also went
outside of that present-oriented world to join the Judge in Mount Salus,
Mississippi, where she helped to create a new world of love, memories of which
Laurel associates with images of “firelight and warmth” (p. 133). Laurel’s
mother, so it seems, was a woman who, like Audubon in Welty’s story “A Still
Moment,” ordered “things according to their time and place…not by ABC” (p.
135). But Laurel’s reveries are interrupted when other memories intrude,
especially the recollections of her mother’s illness and death. Like her
husband, Becky McKelva’s illness began when her eyes went bad. Becky’s dying,
however, was a long process; she lay sick for five years, during which time the
Judge refused to believe that his wife’s troubles would not turn out all right.
Laurel’s father, one learns, “had a horror of any sort of private clash, of
divergence from the affectionate and the real and the explainable and the
recognizable” (p. 146). When on her death bed his wife recalled the special world
of West Virginia which she so loved, he told her, “I’ll carry you there,
Becky,” to which she screamed out: “Lucifer!...Liar!” (p. 150). In his defense Judge McKelva began calling himself
an optimist. As his wife’s condition grew worse, and she began crying out more
often in pain and fear, and as she asked questions of him such as “Why did I
marry such a coward?” (p. 148), her husband stubbornly insisted that whatever
his wife did “she couldn’t help doing. Whatever she was driven to say was all
right” (p. 150). Laurel saw that it “was not
all right!” that her mother’s
trouble was that
very desperation. And no one had the
power to cause
that except the one she desperately loved,
who refused to consider that she was
desperate. It was
betrayal on
betrayal (p. 150).
Even Laurel was accused by her mother of
betrayal. Becky’s last remark to her daughter, “You could have saved your
mother’s life. But you stood by and wouldn’t intervene. I despair for you” (p.
151) could not but haunt Laurel for the rest of her life. What did her mother
mean? How could Laurel save her mother? How can anyone living help or protect
the dying or the dead?
One thing has been made clear to our hero,
however, through her memories. Her mother had been right about Laurel’s father.
He had been afraid to face anything outside of what he could control, afraid to
face death or chaos, and in that refusal he had
been a liar, a Lucifer of sorts. His marriage to Fay had been preordained.
As Laurel later tells Fay:
My mother knew
you’d get the house. She never needed
to be told…. She
predicted you (p. 173).
Becky’s
battle against her husband’s refusal to look upon life in its totality had
given their love a specialness, the “firelight and warmth” that Laurel recalls.
Let alone Judge McKelva was a coward.
His vision was bad before the loss of his eyes.
Upon entering the hospital, the Judge, in
attempting to explain that a rose briar (Becky’s climber) scratched his eye as
he was pruning the play at the wrong time of the year, admitted: “Of course, my
memory had slipped” (p. 5). The
effect of that scratch on his eye made him have flashes in which he suddenly
saw behind him. Simultaneously, they eye which saw forward was developing a
cataract—a word one must comprehend not only in the optical sense, but in its
meaning relating to “a deluge.” Seeing the past with one eye and his future
death in the developing darkness of the other, his vision horrified him. The
pull of the future, represented by Fay—who claims later that in “striking” her
husband that last night in the hospital was her way of trying to “scare him into
living” (p. 175)—and the pull of the past in his remembrances of Becky are
what, in the end, killed him. Laurel’s father, she realizes, could not accept
either view of reality; he wanted both of his eyes cured to look only upon the
present. Instead, both of his eyes were temporarily taken away, and he was
totally separated from the visual involvement with the present through which he
defined his life. Laurel and Fay’s alternating shifts only perpetuated aurally
the divergence he had been experiencing visually. So he entered a limbo state
where he could not see and would not hear, a condition, obviously,
that approximated death. When the balance was broken, so was the Judge
destroyed. Fay may have been trying to scare him into living, but she scared
him into dying instead. Like Fay’s father, his death, accordingly, is something
that disavows, disassociates, denying the communion of the world.
So the question previously asked by Miss
Tennyson, has been answered. In his poor vision it is clear that the Judge
confused Fay’s selfish impetuousness with a dynamic love of the moment. The
Judge could longer judge. But Laurel also realizes in perceiving this that if
her mother had been right about her father, that perhaps she was right in
judging Laurel as well. In her mother’s dark vision did she see even into
Laurel’s heart?
The
sad answer for those who look again upon Laurel’s recollections and make
connections is “yes.” Laurel is guilty. In her lack vision she has also
betrayed her mother. In her past-orientation Laurel has not had the ability to
accept the flux of time. She has made all the right connections, but she cannot
put them into action; she refuses to lose herself to being, and in that
inability to be one with world, she stands still judgmentally apart, nearly as
selfish as Fay in her blind flailing through life. In her anger over what she
has perceived as the falsified memories of her mother and father, we see that
Laurel, also, has attempted to “fix” the past, that any deviating from the reality
she knows is something to be denied or set aside. And so too has she fixed her
own life and closing it off just as she has the bird trapped in the rest of the
house.
Welty’s metaphor of the bird is no
accident, as Laurel recalls her childhood fears of and fascination with her
grandmother’s pigeons. Noticing her closely watching them, the adults
encouraged her to feed them. Laurel held out a biscuit, panic-stricken lest
they should attack her. She had seen them in the process of feeding:
sticking their beaks down
each other’s throats, gagging
gagging each
other, eating out of each other’s craws,
swallowing down
all over again what had been swallowed
before…(p. 140).
This
is, of course, the very image of life-in-action, of the life force in its crude
and unable to be ignored rhythms, exemplified by Becky’s repetition on her
death bed of a passage from “The Cataract of Lodore,”**** where everything is
…Rising and
leaping
Sinking and
creeping,
Swelling and sweeping—
Showering and
springing,
Flying and flinging,
Writhing and
ringing….[etc.]
The
pigeons in this state of being were horrifying to Laurel. As they came swooping
down, she ran to hide behind her grandmother’s dress. Yet, inexplicably the
adults came to call them “Laurel’s pigeons,” and she was always expected to
feed them.
If Laurel, in adulthood, seems to have
finally herself up to the present of life in her marriage to Philip Hand, it
was a temporary vision. And Laurel now recalls it with wonderment. She recalls,
in particular, they trip back to Mount Salus to Chicago after their marriage,
as, riding together, they crossed over the bridge at Cairo, at “the confluence
of waters, the Ohio and Mississippi” where they magically became part of the
world around them (described in one of Welty’s most deliciously poetic
passages):
All they could
see was sky, water, birds, light, and con-
fluence. It was
the whole morning world.
And they
themselves were a part of the confluence.
Their own joint
act of faith had brought them here at the
very moment and matched
its occurrence, and proceeded
as it proceeded.
Direction itself was made beautiful,
momentous. They
were riding as one with it, right up front.
It’s our turn!
She’d though exultantly. And we’re going to
live forever.
Philip was killed in the war, and with his
death Laurel’s world again became fixed and alone, as she stands throughout
most of this fiction, perceptive but completely unable to repeat that magic
moment.
In short, in these conversations with
nature—with both the natural world and the world of human nature—we see that
none of this fiction’s characters except Becky has a vision of life that, like
Becky’s, was all inclusive. For she had a vision unlike any of the others,
relating on her death bed a story of healing to a visiting minister that he
should have delivered to her: recalling a mountain where she once went berry
hunting, Becky reports
…on that
mountain, young man, there’s a white straw-
berry that grows
completely wild, if you know where to
look for it. I
think it very like grows in only one spot in
the world. I
could tell you this minute where to go, but I
doubt if you’d
see them growing after you got there. Deep
in the woods,
you’d miss them…. Nothing you ever ate in
your life was
anything like as delicate, as fragrant, as those
wild
strawberries (p. 149).
Becky’s statement reinforces the idea of
predestination which with I began this essay, suggesting that in her statement
“You’d miss the vision,” that Becky is telling the minister is not destined to
find meaning in the world, to comprehend it even in death.
Yet by the end of this fiction, Welty
undercuts this statement. Laurel does come to see and act it out. As her night
alone draws to a close, Laurel psychologically opens herself up to the world
around her:
A flood of
feeling descended on Laurel. She let the
papers slide from her
hand and the books from her knees,
and put her
hand down on the open lid of the desk. She
lay there with
all that was adamant in her yielding to
this night,
yielding at last. Now all she had found had
found her. The
deepest spring in her heart had uncovered
itself, and it
began to flow again.
If
I previously compared Laurel to Nina Carmichael of The Golden Apples, we now must recognize that Laurel, unlike
Nina—who intellectually willed her hand to yield to night, but could not—is
able to join with the world around her, and, in so doing, accept it on its own
terms, restoring through the process the world’s mystery, comprehending that
being in the world is not something that any man or woman can completely know
or understand. Fay is no longer someone to be judged, for who can truly judge
another person?—not even a daughter of a judge. Fay is, after all someone to be pitied because she cannot live at ease
in the flow of life. In her race against time Fay must always be on the run.
In this restoration of mystery, in
Laurel’s yielding to live once more, one also perceives a dichotomy in Welty’s
art. It is the same opposition that one can observe in Welty’s masterful “A
Still Moment,” in the way that Lorenzo Dow and James Murrell view the hero as
opposed to the way in which Audubon sees the bird. As a modern Romantic writer,
Welty first demands one to make the connections that Dow and Murrell do, that
he first put symbolic meaning upon the particular, making the particular
universal. But Welty, strangely enough, is a kind of postmodern writer in her
insistence that the reader, one he makes those connections, drop them and open
himself up to the particular without mediation. What Charles Altieri has noted
in his essay “Fom Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern
American Poetics,” applies equally to Welty: for the postmodern “value is not
mediated but stems from direct engagement with the universal forces of being
manifest in the particular….” Value for the postmodern “emerges from the ways
man participates in the world beyond himself…. Value is a way of being
informed, not of informing.”*****
True, for Welty the symbolic expression is
an expression of order, of love, of community, of the known, the particular
place, of all the present. The direct engagement with the world, the particular
presented without symbolic connotations is her understanding of the chaos, the
other, the self without connections, the unknown, the “out-there,” the future
and all of the past. However, the author demands that one accept both, that
like Virgie Rainey, one accept “the Medusa equally with Perseus.” If one
journeys out to face the chaos—if one leaves place to attempt to put order upon
the chaos—one must also return home to let that chaos come rushing in upon the
self. And the self must always eventually let in the world around if it any
transcendence is to be achieved. If man asserts meaning upon the world, in the
end he must always submit to the world. As Altieri suggests, the world is an
informer to man.
Welty’s tendency to a belief in
predestination, accordingly, is balanced by a belief that even if one is not
born with the abilities to see, the world itself can break through with its
meaning.
Laurel, suddenly, discovers, after all
these years, that indeed she might have saved her mother. She could not
previously understand what that meant because she could only think that her
mother felt that she could have saved by an assertion of her daughter’s will
exerted upon her particular life. But that is not what Becky McKelva was
thinking. She meant that she could be saved by her daughter opening herself up
to life. Becky understood that her salvation lay not in her own particular
destiny, not in her own mortality, but in the immortality of life itself, in
the continuation of life. Laurel has been battling life itself in an attempt to
bring it into order as surely as her father and Fay have tried to ignore its
disorder and mystery.
Now that Laurel has given herself up to
that mystery, however, she must still act out that knowledge. As she rises the
next morning, she frees the bird and with it all of her fears.***** As she
packs, she is relaxedly at one with the world. The house is cleaned, there are
no traces left of the human happiness and suffering and harm done in the place.
Suddenly, however, she remembers a bread board which her mother had used, a
board with particular memories for her since it was made by her husband,
crafted by his hands as a gift to the family. When she finds the board,
however, it is gouged and stained. Laurel perceives immediately that it is
Fay’s doing, and, as if by calling her memory, Fay suddenly appears, home early
from her stay in Texas. In her anger, kindled further by her conversation with
Fay, Laurel suddenly seems to lose her new awareness. Again she judges Fay, is
infuriated by the woman’s inability to make connections. When Fay again
displays her moral inadequacy of relation past to present by asking Laurel,
“Your husband? What has he got to do
with it? …He’s dead, isn’t he?” Laurel raises the bread board above her head
and holds it there for a moment as a potential weapon and “a raft in the
waters, to keep her from slipping down deep, where the others had gone before
her.”
From the nearby parlor the clock strikes
noon, and Laurel is suddenly brought into the present again, reminded of that
special time in which one does not need objects to symbolize the past, present
or future. Suddenly she sees it for what it is, a bread board (as Fay declares
“Is a moldy old bread board the best you can find?” p. 177). She lowers the board, holding it out level
between Fay and herself, with that act reinfusing it with new meaning, as it
comes to represent an act of communion between the two.
Laurel leaves the house realizing that the
past can no longer hurt, that value cannot be destroyed simply other’s
inability to perceive it, Laurel suddenly sees that
Memory lived
not in initial possession but in the freed
hands,
pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can
empty but
fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams (p. 179).
So does she become a true optimist, a
woman who realizes that by giving up oneself to life one expresses that faith
that all of mankind, not just a select few, are born to see.
_____
*Although
a version of this work was first published as a novella in The New Yorker prior to the publication of Losing Battles, Welty revised and added a great amount of material
to the final fiction, so that it must be considered to be her last work. All
references to The Optimist’s Daughter are
to the Random House edition, published in 1972.
**Although
Welty does not specify what Roscoe’s “problem” was, the description and
situation suggests that Roscoe may have a homosexual, discussing his sexuality
with friends. Certainly, given the dominance of his uncomprehending mother,
this is a logical possibility.
***Reynolds
Price in “The Onlooker, Smiling: An Early Reading of The Optimist’s Daughter,” Shenandoah,
XX (Spring 1969), 58-73, rightfully warns against reading in meaning to Welty’s
choices of birth for her characters. However, one can trace a geographical
movement from the past, present to future which is related to the character’s
birthplaces. West Virginia to Mississippi to Texas parallels the western
development of what we might describe as the American South.
****Here
the motif of cataract is once again suggested. The judge’s cataract is
blinding, but Becky, on the very brink of a deluge of death, repeats words
which suggest the whole life process.
*****Charles
Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern
Poetics,” boundary 2, I (Spring
1973), 605-641.
College Park,
Maryland, 1978
This
essay, originally titled “Eudora Welty as Optimist: The Revelation and
Acceptance of Time in The Optimist’s Daughter first appeared as part of my
Master’s Thesis at the University of Maryland in 1978.
The
present version was extensively revised and rewritten in Los Angeles, December 20, 2014.
In hindsight
this early academic essay, what I long felt was the weakest of my writings on
Eudora Welty (on a book I also long felt was her least remarkable work of
fiction—which is, surely, why I waited so long to reprint it) now seems to be
one of the most important of my early writings on Southern literary figures.
For the first time in this essay, I was able to connect the highly symbolic and
literarily conservative Welty with my growing interest in postmodern writing.
Today, I am not all sure that can still
agree with my friend Charles Altieri’s notions of the roots of postmodernism
dating back to Romantic poetry, but the leap of faith made by Charlie’s writing
helped to connect up what I had been doing and the future of my writing
efforts, even though it resulted in loud laments from my thesis advisor, Lewis
Lawson. It also permitted me to resolve, at least temporarily, issues involved
with my own Calvinist upbringing and my then-developing atheist perspectives.
Los Angeles,
December 20, 2014
