Book #22: Racy Regionalism

"The xylophone player!  The xylophone player to marry her!  Yonder he is!"  -Eudora Welty, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies"

Not so long ago, I spent four years of my life writing a dissertation whose key insight can be summed up by these two sentences: "It is by nature itself that fiction is all bound up in the local.  The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place."  The citation is from Eudora Welty's 1956 essay, "Place in Fiction," which I stumbled across online.  A pang of sadness came over me - this essay would have been a goldmine back in the days when I was "dissertating"!  At the time, I had become obsessed with regional literature and was trying to show how all modernist art is in fact regionalist in its basis.  But now I saw that I could have saved myself three hundred pages.  Welty said it perfectly in two lines. 

(And yes, there was a touch of nostalgia for my old academic self: cuticle chewing, sleep deprived, masochistic, high on literary theory....) 

Indulging in a blue, second-guessing-the-past moment (the crappy weather wasn't helping my mood), I dug up from a storage box Welty's first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. I'd read a few of the stories back in grad school, but hardly remembered a thing about them.  Now, as I began reading the first story, "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," I found myself thinking about the way Welty uses dialect and delightful references to local institutions - like "Ellisville Institute for the Feeble Minded of Mississippi" - to create her signature sense of "place."  But it takes more than just that. 

Her real speciality, it dawned on me, is sexual deviance.  A group of gossipy southern ladies are bound together around the scandal of the idiot girl's sexual initiation.  On the verge of being institutionalized, Lily Daw announces that she is going to marry a xylophone player, who has charmed and possibly seduced or molested her, throwing all the ladies into a tizzy.  Their shock and prurient curiosity charge the story with feelings that are tied to the specific locale. 

This is the kind of racy regionalism that fascinates me.

As I kept reading, I began thinking about my own grandmother, Kayaco, and how much she reminds me of a character from a Welty story.  By contrast to my other grandmother (about whom I was blogging in my last entry), Kayaco is a no-nonsense kind of woman, named after Kayaks River in BC, where her father first lived upon immigrating from Japan.  She is a woman who knows her roots and what she stands for.  But to return to my point, she has a keen eye for sexual impropriety and seems to take a good deal of pleasure in rooting it out.  I remember when I was ten, she told me that her mother-in-law had long had designs on my grandfather.  Incest, you say?  Not quite.  You see, her mother-in-law was actually my grandfather's stepmother, but for decades, she had lived in their house.  The family dynamics were fraught, to say the least.

Hmmm....  I got out my notebook and began taking notes. 


Photo from: here 

Book #21: History or Love Story?

“This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband.” -Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Last night, I was thinking about the historical novel and how its claim to being “historical” is a bit of a sham. A love story, tragically thwarted. This is what most historical novels boil down to. Or at least the ones I adore.

I was thinking about this as I was rereading The English Patient, which is no doubt at the top of my list, along with a few others like Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! History looms large in these novels – war history, to be precise. You learn a lot about bomb disposal during the Second World War by reading Ondaatje, just as you can pick up some interesting facts about southern Confederate history through Faulkner. But what ignites these novels on an emotional level is the love plot, wrapped around the secret of one lover’s mysterious identity. The English patient is burned beyond recognition. Charles Bon’s sophisticated, urbane appearance masks over a past that turns out to be far more southern and primal.

These lovers are lost souls caught in the revolving blades of historical change. While it would be nice to think that love provides salvation, just the opposite is true. Their passion for certain women turns into full-blown obsession, which in the end proves destructive and violent. Yet, as the reader, I always feel some inexplicable hope, some utopian horizon just around the corner….

I was mulling this over while thinking about my grandfather’s life. Kaz. He died in the 1960s, following a mental breakdown, long before I was born. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve got it in my head that his unraveling began during the Second World War, when the Japanese-Canadians were interned. I never met Kaz. But I can picture him in the midst of the dusty barracks, falling in love with my grandmother in those cramped quarters, the fury in his hot-tempered brain finding its only outlet in her seduction.  Her violent seduction?  Kaz, from all accounts, was a man who took what he wanted. 

The way that Kaz met my grandmother, Masako, was strange to say the least. Unlike most Japanese immigrants, Kaz wasn't forced into internment, because his father (my great grandfather) was a well known doctor who was put in charge of providing medical services at the camps. Yet, ironically, for reasons that remain fuzzy, Kaz chose captivity. He was free - on a road trip touring the West Coast -when he met Masako. She was a beauty queen who’d won a competition for Japanese-American girls, so perhaps Kaz saw her at a pageant, as she was walking on stage and slowly turning in her rented kimono. In any case, she must have made quite the impression. He became obsessed with her and after the war’s outbreak, followed her to the internment camp.

I will never know my grandfather, yet a vestige of him grows in my imagination every time I read….

Photo from: here