Triptych Time: The Experiential Historiography of Meridel Le Sueur's The Dread Road - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 2001 by Paula E. Geyh

For de Certeau, the written text is inherently unstable, open and permeable--"a movement of strata, a place of spaces ... habitable ... another person's property [transformed] into a space borrowed for a moment by a transient."(12) Reading is an appropriation of the text by the reader who "poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes [him or her] self in it .... A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place."(13) Readers bring with them to the reading their own experiences and history, and those too are interpolated into the simulacrum of the read text.(14) In effect, Le Sueur's triptych text elicits (and implicitly models) what is for her the crucial process of working through and making sense, a connecting of communal and individual history (including those of the readers) on multiple levels.

This innovative structure is an attempt to break with the narrative hierarchies and subordinations of the linear text, a text that Le Sueur associates both with capitalist commodities and with patriarchal discourse. "This is not a story to consume," Le Sueur reminds herself in a journal entry cited in the After-word. "This is a ceremonial, invoked [and] generative, making luminous this murderous space. The linear perspective is fiat, objective, seductive, lying" (52). Le Sueur's connection of "line" and "lying" is a departure from the traditional association of truth with a straight line, and lying with the serpentine. Her position here can be seen as part of the feminist response to the linearity of patriarchal discourse and its many critiques of feminine discourse as oblique, multiple, and circular--responses which in fact validate just those features of what became known in the wake of recent French feminist philosophy as ecriture feminine.(15)

The center narrative is a first-person account of the experiences of a woman traveling from Albuquerque to Denver and of the young woman she meets on the bus. The narrator is on her way to visit her institutionalized son, "buried but not dead in Denver," who was born grossly deformed from exposure to the fallout of an atomic bomb test (1). In the bus station, she notices a young woman clutching a zippered bag with bloody hands. Like the narrator, the young woman has been the victim of a poisoned land--she is a migrant worker whose exposure to chemicals in the fields has caused her to bear a stillborn baby, which she is carrying back to Denver to bury.(16) The two women sit next to each other on the bus and throughout the long night's journey, they talk about their lives, piecing together their own histories and connecting them to the histories of those who have lived in the land through which they are traveling.

The Poe excerpts running along the left side of the text are in a sense mythic, suggesting not just that "certain nightmares lie especially deeply embedded in the American grain," as Patricia Smith, one of the editors, observes (57), but also that there are forms of history, beyond the chronicle, that might provide a powerful linkage between past and present. These excerpts frequently create resonances with the themes of the center narrative, as the editors point out, "summoning suggestions of decay, foul things covered up, or unbearable truths brought to light ... the American earth riddled with unquiet graves" (57). Le Sueur's reading of Poe as American history runs counter to the prevailing psychoanalytic interpretations that have, largely through the influence of his European readers, from Mane Bonaparte to Lacan and beyond, dominated studies of his fiction for decades. Here Le Sueur offers a vision of Poe's work as an "underground history"--literally and figuratively--restoring Poe to his peculiarly American context.