Richard Marius and cultural orphanhood

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Folks, Jeffrey J

IN WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, Kazuo Ishiguro writes of Christopher Banks, a character who, having been separated from his parents in China, has grown up in England to become a famous detective. His most important "case," however, is his search for information concerning his abducted parents, a pursuit that uncovers buried memories and rekindles a lost sense of identity. Like so many other cultural hybrids, what Banks discovers is that it is impossible to reconstitute the past even as it is unbearable to live without a sense of connection to it. As Banks declares, "for those like us [Banks and his friend, Sarah Hemmings], our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents" (367). Though it may intend to discover the "truth" about one's parents, a pursuit of childhood identity can never arrive at unambiguous knowledge concerning the past. It necessarily leads the orphan toward an awareness of the treacherous unreliability of a past in which the lives of parents are hidden forever from view, and such consciousness ushers the investigator into the role of creator of his or her own contemporary identity. In place of a "comfortable" identity within a single tradition, the cultural orphan undertakes "a sense of mission" connected with his or her special position intermediate between various cultures and between past and future.1

As the critic Homi Bhabha asserts, the person who exists in an intermediate space between two or more cultures is a sort of "migrant" whose life involves a sense of being in "transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion" (1). Bhabha's conception of the postcolonial as migrant-a homeless, international, and thus "hybrid" identity-rests on the underlying metaphor of the loss of "home." The condition of being on the border of existing identities may suggest an enviable state of freedom, yet, as Bhabha notes, there is also a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the "beyond" (1). As a fiction of the border, of at least of a border, Richard Marius's writing would seem to reflect this marginal condition of hybridity in which he is concerned with breaking from tradition but also with the need to supply something to replace the loss that this break entails: in Bhabha's terms, to establish a "contemporaneity" that "can no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future" (4). Rather than relying on a synchronic basis for identity grounded in progressive or teleological conceptions of existence, the migrant may discover identity in "discontinuities," "inequalities," and "minorities" (4). It is important, then, to look in Marius's work not only for the "break" with the past but also for the conception of living in the non-synchronous present that should emerge. Along the lines of Bhabha's theory of intermediate identity, Marius's most thoughtful protagonists, including Adam Cloud or Charles Alexander, seem to dwell in the "beyond," not merely in the past or future. They are, in Bhabha's terms, "part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our contemporaneity; to reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side" (7). In their acceptance of this condition, however, these figures necessarily experience the condition of "unhomeliness"-"the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world" (Bhabha 9).

In his Bourbonville cycle, Marius has written an imaginative record of the wrenching cultural and philosophical changes that accompanied America's transition from rural to urban existence and that relegated many living through this period of change to the position of cultural orphanhood. As Marius represents this transformation, it involves the struggle of modern secular consciousness against ignorance and atavistic tradition; of freedom of thought and belief against superstition; of art and experimentation against censorship and narrow-mindedness; of openness and truth against hypocrisy; and, to a great extent, of the rights of the individual, with his or her needs of privacy and self-determination, and of autonomy and non-interference, against the community's demands for consensus and uniformity. The transition to modernity, however, necessarily involving the removal from the world of rural tradition to that of urban innovation, is inevitably disorienting and threatening. Removal from the ordered rural existence transforms Marius's characters into cultural orphans who find themselves without inherited roles in society or prescribed rules of conduct.

Certainly, one finds in Marius's writing a strong tendency to question the validity of all accepted belief systems. In An Affair of Honor, for example, Roy Kirby represents one version of the Western ethical tradition, "the code of the hills" (91) that judges his son's murder of his wife and her lover not only justifiable but laudable. In the course of Marius's novel, however, this once coherent belief system is shown to be irrelevant to modern society: even Roy's sons renounce the "code" as they oppose their father's decision to murder Charles Alexander in revenge for his testimony against Hope Kirby. Stripped of context and history, Roy Kirby comes across as a one-dimensional cultural primitive whose depiction suggests the underlying stereotypes of the "hillbilly" and "redneck."