Summoning the Dead
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Summoning the Dead

Essays on Ron Rash

Randall Wilhelm, Zackary Vernon, Randall Wilhelm, Zachary Vernon

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Summoning the Dead

Essays on Ron Rash

Randall Wilhelm, Zackary Vernon, Randall Wilhelm, Zachary Vernon

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About This Book

The first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in Appalachia

Since his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O'Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction—attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The editors contend that Rash's work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.

The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash's work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash's artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash's work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.

Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

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Part I
THE NATURAL WORLD
STRANGE AGRARIANISMS
Transmutations of I’ll Take My Stand in James Dickey’s Deliverance and Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden
Zackary Vernon
In writing his debut novel One Foot in Eden (2002), Ron Rash entered headlong into Dickey country, and this was no small feat for a first-time novelist. James Dickey looms large in the American, southern, and Appalachian literary imaginations. His fiction and poetry still garner critical and scholarly attention, and his novel Deliverance (1970) remains a significant cultural phenomenon despite the fact that it was published nearly half a century ago. Emily Satterwhite claimed that Deliverance “continue[s] to shape national perceptions of the Appalachian region” in the twenty-first century (131), and that the film adaptation (1972) “continues to be the single most prominent pop cultural reference to Appalachia” (23). Even within the region, Deliverance shapes perceptions of Appalachian popular culture. This is readily apparent if one travels through the lower mountain South, particularly in the tourist destinations of northern Georgia, northwestern South Carolina, and western North Carolina; there you will inevitably see allusions to Deliverance, such as the nearly ubiquitous bumper stickers and T-shirts that read “PADDLE FASTER, I HEAR BANJO MUSIC!”
Rash entered or, one could say, invaded this Dickey-centric landscape in that One Foot in Eden bears striking resemblance to the plot and predominant themes of Deliverance. Dickey’s novel follows a group of four Atlanta suburbanites who endeavor to paddle down a “wild” river before it is dammed to create a hydroelectric reservoir; Dickey’s river is based on two rivers in northern Georgia, the Coosawattee and the Chattooga, both of which were threatened during the 1960s with damming projects and hydroelectric plants. The Chattooga, where the film adaptation of Deliverance was shot, begins around Cashiers, North Carolina, then forms the border of South Carolina and Georgia, and finally travels through parts of northern Georgia. One Foot in Eden is also about the damming of a river to create a hydroelectric reservoir, and Rash’s river is based on the Keowee, which runs through the northwestern corner of South Carolina, not far from the Chattooga. In addition Rash’s novel, like Dickey’s, explores how humans’ cultural connections to the landscapes around them change as these environments are irrevocably altered.
However, Rash’s novel is far from a mere attempt at mimicry. Instead Rash’s project in One Foot in Eden is to critique much of Deliverance, especially its unflattering depiction of southern Appalachia, by providing a more nuanced and realistic portrayal of the region. In doing so Rash focuses his narrative on the lives of the region’s natives, rather than interlopers from elsewhere, in order to show how the creation of a large-scale dam and reservoir affects indigenous cultures and economies by dismantling agricultural communities. This thematic preoccupation places Rash within a long tradition of southern and Appalachian authors who have written about the South’s relationship to agriculture. While this tradition extends back to the nation’s founders—most important, Thomas Jefferson—it increased in popular appeal in the early to mid-twentieth century as a direct result of the Southern Agrarians’ manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930). Dickey himself was intimately familiar with Southern Agrarianism, and he transmutes it in strange and unexpected ways in Deliverance. Rash, too, transmuted this tradition in One Foot in Eden but did so in order to counter the very different but equally romanticized agrarian narratives presented in I’ll Take My Stand and Deliverance. In contrast Rash’s work provides an agrarian narrative that is remarkably un-strange in that it is far more accurate and evenhanded than anything the Southern Agrarians or Dickey ever penned.1
The Uses and Limits of Southern Agrarianism
If scholars and public intellectuals in the fields of environmental, agricultural, and food studies employ the term “agrarianism,” they must do so only after acknowledging its troubling legacy within the context of the American South. If we are fully cognizant of the racism, classism, and misogyny that are pervasive in texts like I’ll Take My Stand, we may then, and only then, reappropriate the term and employ it in the contemporary context. We may even be able to return to the works of the Southern Agrarians and reevaluate them, confronting their problematic elements, while also exploring the potentially positive ramifications of their platform. My purpose in this chapter is to highlight the baggage associated with the Southern Agrarians; however, I do not want to simply bring up the Agrarians in order to denounce them yet again. Rather I aim to acknowledge their potential contributions to American environmental philosophy and agricultural activism in order to investigate the various transmutations of Southern Agrarianism, both positive and negative, that have developed in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literary canon.
The core group that would later make up the Southern Agrarians began to coalesce when several talented writers, calling themselves “the Fugitives,” banded together at Vanderbilt University just after World War I. By the mid-1920s, the Fugitives became increasingly uncomfortable with what they saw as the tenants of modernity, namely commercialism, materialism, industrialization, intellectual condescension, and an absence of an ethical foundation. As a result the group took on a new title, the Agrarians, and in 1930 published I’ll Take My Stand. The authors of this manifesto include John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Gould Fletcher, Lyle H. Lanier, Allen Tate, Herman Clarence Nixon, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Klime, and Stark Young. Ransom believed ardently that the book cultivated a central unified argument, and to stress this unity he drafted “A Statement of Principles” to serve as the introduction to the book. Although Ransom first wrote this introduction, all twelve of the authors assisted in editing it, and ultimately all subscribed to its content. The introduction encapsulates the overarching aim of I’ll Take My Stand in that it suggests that humankind is fundamentally unfulfilled, both psychologically and spiritually, in an industrial society. Conversely the Agrarians suggested that fulfillment is more easily attained in an agrarian society, and they problematically chose the Old South as their primary model. The fact that antebellum agriculture was built on the backs of slaves was rarely recognized by the Agrarians. While Frank Lawrence Owsley conceded that slavery was part of the agrarian system and indeed one facet of the ideological schism that led to the Civil War, he, like the other Agrarians, whitewashed southern history by arguing that slavery was “only one element and not an essential one” (73).
Despite the fact that some of the Agrarians, especially Stark Young, were willing to advocate or at least wax romantic about a return to a large, plantation-esque system of agriculture, most of the Agrarians tended to support a return to small-scale subsistence farming. In his essay “The Hind Tit,” Lytle contended that “it is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper respect and proper regard for the soil” (203). Lytle spent the vast majority of the second half of “The Hind Tit” describing, in great detail, the life of a “provincial” subsistence farming family that possesses a deep and satisfying sense of community. To combat the pitfalls of industrial societies, Lytle suggested that farmers become independent of the cash economic system and self-sufficient for all their daily needs. By producing and preparing their own food, making their own clothes, and tending the upkeep of their own houses and properties, farmers could feasibly “live in an industrial world without a great deal of cash” (244). Additionally Lytle argued that if southerners and indeed all American citizens in agricultural communities were to disregard “the articles the industrialists offer for sale,” then they could reaffirm local folkways: “return to our looms, our handcrafts, our reproducing stock. Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall. Forsake the movies for the play-parties and the square dances” (244). Such traditions, Lytle implied, could continue to thrive in agricultural communities but not in industrialized ones.2
While I’ll Take My Stand generally fails to address specifically the social and agricultural problems the South faced in 1930, most of the Agrarians—with the exception of Davidson—noted that they were presenting an ideology and not a practical blueprint for how to change an industrial society back into an agrarian one. Their principal objective was only to point out that “if a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off” (xlviii). With that in mind, I’ll Take My Stand should be studied for its revolutionary impulse rather than its practical importance. Southern Agrarianism has engendered a range of ideological responses in southern and American culture, and various writers have conceived it as an anecdote for the cultural pathologies of particular times and places. I will now turn my attention to one such example, Deliverance, in order to see how Dickey transmuted the Agrarian platform for the atomic age.
James Dickey’s Apocalyptic Agrarianism
After World War II, James Dickey studied both literature and anthropology at Vanderbilt University. While there he became increasingly interested in the debate between agrarianism and industrialization. Donald Davidson was the only Agrarian still at Vanderbilt when Dickey was there, although he later served as Andrew Lytle’s assistant at the University of Florida (Dickey, Self-Interviews 33, 35) and became a close friend of Robert Penn Warren (Hart xviii). Dickey has said that when he arrived at Vanderbilt the debate over agrarianism and industrialization “was no longer a burning question, but it was still in the air” (Self-Interviews 34). Consequently Dickey steeped himself in the writings of the Fugitives and the Agrarians. In particular he was fascinated by I’ll Take My Stand (1930), which in his 1970 Self-Interviews, he claimed “is still very powerful” (34). However, according to Dickey, the best book of the Fugitive-Agrarian body of work was Davidson’s Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States: The Attack on Leviathan (1938). Dickey described its significance to him: “Davidson points out that you belong to a specific time and place where you can see the same things and a certain number of the same human beings every day.
 This is the way human beings were meant to live. This is the way they can root down into a place and develop their own way of life in harmony with the environment.
 I’m really convinced of the truth and necessity of what Davidson points out: that differences give richness and variety to life and offset the terrible monotony that we’re drifting toward in Americanizing the whole world, where eventually there won’t be anything but a supermarket culture” (35).
Owing to his desire to achieve this “way of life in harmony with the environment,” Dickey remained preoccupied throughout his career with the work of the Southern Agrarians, and that work undoubtedly influenced his thinking. The question I will take up in this section of the chapter is whether Dickey drew on this influence in writing Deliverance and whether a distinctly Southern Agrarian worldview is present, problematically or not, in the novel. To address this question, I will focus on two characters, Ed and Lewis, to determine whether their conceptions of humanity’s relationship with the environment resonate with I’ll Take My Stand.
Early in Deliverance, as the men are driving toward the river in north Georgia, Ed and Lewis spend much of the trip discussing the possibility of nuclear annihilation. Although little critical attention has been paid to Deliverance in the context of nuclear proliferation, the novel is marked by an undercurrent of atomic anxiety. Dickey himself was particularly fixated on this issue, because during his service in World War II, he witnessed the bombing and subsequent destruction of Nagasaki (The One Voice 96). On one hand Ed and Lewis’s conversations exemplify Cold War America’s anxiety about a nuclear warfare–induced apocalypse. On the other hand, though, these conversations are uniquely southern, because Lewis’s fascination with postapocalyptic life seems to be informed by Dickey’s own fascination with Southern Agrarianism. While Dickey’s characters represent the alienated work force of an industrialized society, they cannot conceive of achieving an agrarian dream via a rededication to an agriculturally based society; instead Lewis believes an agrarian society would be possible only in the aftermath of some kind of apocalyptic nightmare, such as the dropping of an “H-bomb” (44), which would return humanity to a more elemental and perhaps even sustainable existence in southern Appalachia.
Emily Satterwhite argued, “Deliverance manufactured a rural, premodern Appalachia set apart from consumer society and its purportedly banal suburban lifestyle that, despite the predatory nature of the mountain villains, somehow managed to activate readers’ romance with authenticity” (156). In the novel Lewis is enamored by the same kind of “romance with authenticity” that Satterwhite identified in readers, and his return to an “authentic” society is predicated on the dismantling of contemporary American culture. He says, “I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over” (Dickey, Deliverance 42). He then asks Ed: “Where would you go when the radios died?” (44). This question alludes directly to Andrew Lytle’s contribution to I’ll Take My Stand. In perhaps the most evocative moment of his essay, which I mentioned briefly in the previous section of this chapter, Lytle entreated southerners to abandon mass-produced commodities in order “to avoid the dire consequences and to maintain a farming life in an industrial imperialism” (244). Lytle believed that such a return to the farm would have far-ranging cultural and artistic ramifications, and he famously entreated his readers to reinvigorate region-specific folkways, saying, “Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall” (244). In Lewis’s imagination southerners, so long inundated by popular culture, are no longer capable of destroying the proverbial radio; therefore Lewis envisions an apocalyptic scenario through which the choice is negated, the radio dies, and the surviving people of the South head back to the hills and begin anew in a more elemental existence. Lewis’s vision culminates in a distinctly agrarian philosophy as he tells Ed how he would live after the fall of society and the necessitated return to the land: “If everything wasn’t dead, you could make a kind of life that wasn’t out of touch with everything, with the other forms of life. Where the seasons would mean something, would mean everything. Where you could hunt as you needed to, and maybe do a little light farming, and get along. You’d die early, and you’d suffer, and your children would suffer, but you’d be in touch” (Dickey, Deliverance 44). If the narrative ended here, then we could certainly argue that, through Lewis, Dickey was promoting a distinctly Agrarian perspective at the heart of which is the small-scale subsistence farmer. But, of course, the narrative does not end here. Lewis, the mouthpiece of the Agrarian platform, albeit a strange and mutated Cold War inflection of that platform, is bested by nature early on in the novel. His leg is broken in a whitewater rafting accident, and his apocalyptic agrarian philosophizing is swiftly curtailed.
Unlike Lewis, Ed hates the rural South and repeatedly demeans Lewis’s romanticization of this apocalyptic form of Southern Agrarianism. Ed labors under an antipastoral impulse, which he employs to deflate the myths and idealizations that Lewis propagates. Ed says, “You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis” (Dickey, Deliverance 56). Assessing Lewis’s perspective in relation to Ed’s, Barnett Guttenberg argued, “In his will to dominate, Lewis is part of the devitalized society which dams the river; he, too, stops the stream of primal energy. His overriding will must be broken before he can join Ed in a right relation to nature” (84). Yet Ed’s “right relati...

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