Gothic undercurrents in the novels of Lewis Nordan

Southern Quarterly, Spring 2003 by Carney, Mary

The island where Mr. Raney had his fishcamp was a strip of high ground far out in a strange bayou, the vast, unbounded backwaters of many lakes and rivers; from underground, somewhere, salt water, brackish at least, mineral salts, filled up the swamp and broadened it far across the Delta. The water seemed limitless, everywhere, even to a boy who grew up on the island; it was a black mirror, colored by the tannic acid that seeped into it from the knees of the cypress trees.

-The Sharp-Shooter Blues

IN THE OPENING PARAGRAPH of The Sharp-Shooter Blues (1995), Lewis Nordan creates this far away place in a "strange bayou," a Gothic setting where magic and horrors might and do occur. In this novel, as in Music of the Swamp (1991) and Wolf Whistle (1993), these waterways provide a "black mirror" for Arrow Catcher, a fictional Mississippi Delta town. These three works share not only geography but also recurrent Gothic elements. In a 1995 interview with Blake Maher, Nordan admits his stories derive from a "place [of] deeply serious, melodramatic horror" (118). Horror is, as Anne Williams has explained, one of the "notoriously Gothic emotions" (11). Yet Nordan resists being classified as a Southern grotesque or Gothic writer. More precisely, he refuses to be categorized as just one of "all these writers who are just alike and write narrowly about narrow things and who are more local colorists with certain tics in common" (Maher 116-17). Despite his objections, Nordan is a southerner, and he infuses Arrow Catcher with "melodramatic horror. " The question arises then how to approach this southern writer who admits to the foundational influence of "horror" and yet rejects the label of Southern Gothic. The dilemma provides a springboard for a reconsideration of Nordan's works within the tradition of Gothicism and the American strain of this mode in particular.

The events and descriptions in Music of the Swamp, WolfWhistle, and The Sharpshooter Blues only occasionally verge into the Gothic realm. The dominant tone in these works is one of ironic comedy and tender humanity. Stories center on the day-to-day activities of the characters, as well as on their perceptions of family life and the social landscape of the small town. Not surprisingly, then, scholars have not explored these tales' Gothic conventions. Most criticism has focused instead on the novels as works of southern literature. For instance, C. Hugh Holman and Lucinda MacKethan have noted the persistent presence of the past that Nordan's novels incorporate in mid-twentieth century Mississippi. MacKethan argues that, like many other southern writers, "the greatest challenge" for the characters is the ability "to live actively and responsibly with a broken world" (217). In essence, they come to terms not only with history but also, in the words of James F. Nicosia, with "the nature of the inchoate present" (68). This reference to the "inchoate" points to a liminality in which of the formative influences of history intersect with present, shaping the region and its inhabitants. Narratives of the past and of the self, according to Edward Dupuy, animate Nordan's stories and reveal their relationship to autobiography. Nordan's writings demonstrate "that life informs fiction as much as fiction informs life" (Dupuy 99).

The southern world that Nordan creates and infuses with intermittent moments of horror can be more clearly understood through the lense of Anne Williams's Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. In her influential reconsideration of this tradition, Williams does not address Nordan's writings; however, her observations illuminate how these elements of patriarchy, history, and the individual psyche can become essential components in Gothic fiction. This mode has resisted clear definition in part due to its diverse range of texts, which include Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), John Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (1820), Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Yet Gothic stories have, according to Williams, two common characteristics. First, they employ "fictions of 'family' as a source of metaphors" because they provide "the most immediate and fundamental model of relationship available" (11). These relational issues often center on "Oedipal dynamics," which in the broadest sense express the desire to be free from the family hierarchy. The structure "-at once cognitive model and material reality-incarnates the laws fundamental to our culture and our selves: laws that also govern our thinking about property, morality, social behavior, and even metaphysics" (11,12). The lessons learned within the family dictate appropriate behavior and create boundaries; this is what Jacques Lacan has termed "the Law of the Father." Williams draws also on Julia Kristeva, particularly her theory of abjection, which suggests that one is both drawn to and repulsed by that which unsettles the social order, or "the Law of the Father." Gothic often portrays those moments when the self confronts "the abject" or what is opposite of and threatens personal or social identity, which are created within the patriarchal order. "The abject" is associated with the "feminine," as Williams explains: the (m) other is "mater, material, matrix, and the repression of that element by Western culture might well be regarded as the source of several notoriously 'Gothic' emotionshorror and terror above all " (11).