Sherry Chandler

Southern Gothic on steroids

When my son left home, he left some things behind, including some of his bathroom reading: several books of The Far Side cartoons, Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed. Tobias Wolff, 1994).

Curious, and maybe looking for a way to feel connected to my wandering child, I picked up the anthology and turned to the first story. It was Dorothy Allion’s “River of Names.”

Oh my soul and whiskers. What to make of this.

We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted? My maternal great-grandmother had eleven daughters, seven sons; my grandmother, six sons, five daughters. Each one made at least six. Some made nine. Six times six, eleven times nine. They went on like multiplication tables. They died and were not missed. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them…

…So I made a list. I told her: that one went insane—got her little brother with a tire iron; the three of them slit their arms, not the wrists but the bigger veins up near the elbow; she, now, she strangled the boy she was sleeping with and got sent away; that one drank lye and died laughing soundlessly. In one year I lost eight cousins. It was the year everybody ran away. Four disappeared and were never found. One fell in the river and was drowned. One was run down hitchhiking north. One was shot running through the woods, while Grace, the last one, tried to walk from Greenville to Greer for some reason nobody knew. She fell off the overpass a mile down from the Sears, Roebuck warehouse and lay there for hunger and heat and dying.

This nine-page story has in it so much violence and abuse, so much waste of human life, that it made me feel zero at the bone. A rare accomplishment for a short story. I have come to think of the form as a sort of dessicated thing, artfully put together but appealing only to the intellect. Like a poem by Alexander Pope, except perhaps without the wit. Short stories, I thought, have become vehicles for expressing middle class angst.

“River of Names” is way too full of blood to be dessicated and there is certainly nothing middle class about it. Though there may be wit and even satire, we’re a long way from Alexander Pope here. But surely this isn’t realism. Perhaps what we have here is a classic unreliable narrator. She says

I tell the stories and it comes out funny. I drink bourbon and make myself drawl, tell all those old funny stories.

Funny?

Surely this is a redneck personna pushed to the extreme of fable. Exaggerated and in your face. You want Southern Gothic. I’ll show you Southern Gothic.

I have a vague memory of Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina being a sensation back in the 90s. It was a novel I always meant to get around to reading but somehow never did. A movie I didn’t want to see until I’d read the novel. Maybe I didn’t read it because I had small children then and lots of novels and movies slipped by me. Or maybe it was because I’ve become somewhat leery of Southern Gothic. What was art in the hands of Faulkner and O’Connor too often becomes formula in the hands of their heirs. If you’re a Southern writer, sometimes it seems like you feel an obligation to be more outrageous than the last guy. I can’t spend too much time in Baby Jane land.

Looking around for some way to add context to this disturbing story, I was sort of glad to find this hard-headed post, Bastard Out of Carolina Redux at Literacy, Culture, and the Teacher of Reading, reflecting on her reaction to finding “River of Names” on the school reading list:

When I was a teenager, I was a member of the Speech and Debate team. I competed in several categories, one of which was called OI - Oral Interpretation. We would stand with these little black binders and read prose and poetry pieces with dramatic effect and facial expression. I usually read Dorothy Parker stories (I was a sarcastic feminist in my teens, too), my teammates preferred the original Grimm fairy tales, and there was always a reading from Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

But Bastard Out of Carolina held a special place in the black mini-binders of the girls from St. Joseph’s High School, Brooklyn. It seemed that whenever a St. Joe’s girl was in your OI room, you heard a terrible story of rape, incest, beatings, poverty and the struggle for survival. I hated the St. Joe’s girls because their pieces were all alike, they all involved a gruff Southern man and a shrill girl begging for mercy, I knew there was the potential for fake tears, snot and gasping for air. It seemed so over-the-top, condescending to victims of the many separate acts of violence that all managed to sneak their way into ten minutes of prose, and it all sounded so melodramatic in a silent classroom.

I also hated the St. Joe’s girls because they usually won. I hated Dorothy Allison for writing for those pieces.

So when we read “River of Names” in class last night, I felt like a teenage girl in her Sunday best, shrinking back into my seat and saying goodbye to a Speech and Debate trophy. I wasn’t surprised by the content, or the fact it was “horrible” and “fascinating” in its depth. I knew what was coming. I heard the St. Joe’s version of the gruff rapist and the crying female in my head before the rape and crying began.

There is in fact rape and screaming in this story. Too much to comprehend almost. There is also lesbianism, though I wonder whether it might be lesbianism as refuge from the abuse of heterosexuality. And it does seem as though Dorothy Allison has got in the face of this New York teacher. Or maybe it was just those St. Joseph’s girls doing OI. She (I am assuming) continues:

So, how did I do with “River of Names” when we read it in class? Pretty well, actually. I began to see it for its structure, which I never fully appreciated when hearing it read. Reading it for myself allowed me to focus on the intertwining of past and present, creating a haunting feeling that focusing only on the horribly, fascinating events could never convey. I was able to connect the text, not to the St. Joseph’s girl standing before me. It wasn’t “her piece.” It reverted back to its rightful author and was something to be experienced by anyone that read it.

But still she has reservations:

Don’t think I suddenly want to start to the Dorothy Allison fan club, though. I still feel that the material can be too raw, and read melodramatically without understanding of the core of the cycle of violence, poverty and abuse. My relationships with my students, and the knowledge of their lives and stories, make these texts too real, and much less of the novelty they can become for the “fairy tale” reader. I’m far from the “fairy tale” reader.

I don’t enjoy reading these texts for the same reason I can’t watch Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I know Special Victims; they have names and stories and they sit in my class. To have them read these pieces may be cathartic, may provide them with strength, may even give them a starting place to understand themselves and the world. However, these pieces may reinforce their cycles, prove that these cycles are normal, and hey, if other people went through them and survived to write bestsellers, maybe others will be ok too having never broken the cycle. The use of literature as a tool to expose the reader to a familiar, new world does not work with some of my readers.

I don’t think “River of Names” is a fairy tale, though I can understand any teacher’s reservation in presenting this material to vulnerable students. It is beautifully structured and written. It is moving. It is shocking. It certainly shocked me out of my prejudices against the modern short story.

It is trying to tell us something serious about the waste that is poverty and ignorance.

The question in my mind, I guess, is does it succeed? Or will most people approach it like those St. Joseph’s girls, as a tall tale to win prizes with.

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