Category: Literary Criticism

Literary criticism by novelist Rae Cline. The series Where Moral Authority Begins asks what gives a writer the right to enter violence, childhood and survival on the page, through Toni Morrison, Dorothy Allison, Cormac McCarthy, Jesmyn Ward, bell hooks and J.D. Salinger.

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Where Moral Authority Begins | Part VI: The Ohio River Valley, Holden Caulfield and the Seduction of False Prophets

Americans have always been drawn to figures of spiritual power. Revival preachers, family patriarchs, cultural icons, presidents. So often, we mistake confidence for capability, narcissism for strength, repetition for truth. The false prophet employs a performative brand of certainty that outlasts objective, empirical reality—the child who reports the abuse or the woman who saw it happen or the person who witnessed it and refuses to believe the lie doesn’t matter because everyone else has already agreed to accept the systemic ease of deception. The lie becomes the truth and they who wield it best become a sort of prophet, the moral authority, because the lie is the story that will come true, regardless.

The Catcher in the Rye celebrated its 75th birthday this year. I am curious about J. D. Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield, a quintessential reflection of American infatuation with dishonesty: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful.” What I also find curious are the ways that Salinger and my hometown Marietta, Ohio, intersect.

Like Holden, my life has been a search for moral clarity through the lies that began in Marietta. When I finally landed in Murray Hill, I thought Manhattan would be an entirely new chapter, an exclamation point leaving behind girlish origins and trading one version of America for another. What I found was quite the opposite. I found a connected origin story with many threads.

1970s Marietta was fishing on the river and Woolworths, where we sat at the soda counter with ice-cream floats. It was the Marietta Beer Barn, a funny little beer and soda store in a building made of concrete block with a giant cooler on one side and a drive-thru middle. The men took your money and filled your trunk with Budweiser and you never had to get out of your car. Marietta was summer afternoons walking over the bridge for a new pair of Levis at my Uncle Wayne’s Working Man’s Store. Marietta was also the Betsey Mills Club, where I learned to swim and plié from a one-time New York City ballerina who wielded a yard stick similar to Debbie Allen’s cane in Fame. The Betsey Mills was central to Marietta social life, a club devoted to young women transitioning from rural life to town living with rows of Victorian mansions along the river. The Victorian mansions were glorious, some built by the Ivy League magnates who established the city of Marietta, some by river boat captains. With all its small town grandeur, Marietta was most importantly family and church every Sunday, without fail, with Sunday dresses and Sunday hats and change to put in the offering plate. What I didn’t know, growing up, was Marietta’s dark past…. READ THE FULL ESSAY

Essay originally published at Eckleburg.

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Where Moral Authority Begins | Part VI: The Ohio River Valley, Holden Caulfield and the Seduction of False Prophets

Rae Cline, author of Precious Ugly, by the river.

Americans have always been drawn to figures of spiritual power. Revival preachers, family patriarchs, cultural icons, presidents. So often, we mistake confidence for capability, narcissism for strength, repetition for truth. The false prophet employs a performative brand of certainty that outlasts objective, empirical reality—the child who reports the abuse or the woman who saw it happen or the person who witnessed it and refuses to believe the lie doesn’t matter because everyone else has already agreed to accept the systemic ease of deception. The lie becomes the truth and they who wield it best become a sort of prophet, the moral authority, because the lie is the story that will come true, regardless.

The Catcher in the Rye celebrated its 75th birthday this year. And I am curious about J. D. Salinger’s character, Holden Caulfield, a quintessential reflection of American infatuation with dishonesty: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful.” What I also find curious are the ways that Salinger and my hometown Marietta, Ohio, intersect.

Like Holden, my life has been a search for moral clarity through the lies that began in Marietta. When I finally landed in Murray Hill, I thought Manhattan would be an entirely new chapter, an exclamation point leaving behind girlish origins and trading one version of America for another. What I found was quite the opposite. I found a connected origin story with many threads…

Read the full essay at Eckleburg: “Where Moral Authority Begins | Part VI: The Ohio River Valley, Holden Caulfield and the Seduction of False Prophets”

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Where Moral Authority Begins | Part V: The Unbearable Virtue of Superbelt

I was nine or ten when the lashings turned end of day ritual. Before each lashing I was to undress from the waist down—pants and panties—and bend over the edge of the bed they shared, my mother and stepfather whom I called Daddy. She was never in the room, my mother, always somewhere else in the house, doing something. I imagine her, now, drinking a cup of coffee or a glass of pinot grigio or folding laundry or cleaning the kitchen because that was what she often did, clean the kitchen. She liked a tidy home and was good at keeping a tidy home. We left our outside shoes at the door.

I could hear the slide of the belt behind me each time as he pulled it from his slacks. I still have one hanging in my closet, a belt, not the slacks. I don’t remember being whipped with that belt, in particular, but it became a talisman of sorts. It had personality, like an aging college hippie in bell bottoms and loose cotton shirt, the belt low on the hip, swaggering, holding it all together. It is brown leather and wide with a big metal buckle. I wore it nearly every day in grad school at Johns Hopkins then American University. I secretly called it Superbelt, my symbol, my token, my power stolen from his waning youth, reappropriated for my cause.

The Ritual

Daddy’s preferred belt was finer, smooth leather, meant for business. It was not luxurious. It was middle class appropriate. Brown or black, usually, whichever belt he’d chosen to hold up his slacks that morning, which is to say that it was always the belt he wore, never a belt from the closet. I sometimes wondered if he chose the belt in the morning with this in mind, feeding the belt through the loops of his slacks, visualizing ripping it out that evening upon returning home, an effective routine after a hard day’s work like a fresh cocktail waiting in my mother’s hand, a kiss on the cheek. I was the kiss. The belt was his unbearable virtue….

Read the full essay at Eckleburg: “Where Moral Authority Begins | Part V: The Unbearable Virtue of Superbelt“

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Where Moral Authority Begins: Part IV: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Rae Cine

 

I first fell in love with Jesmyn Ward’s prose when I read her 2017 National Book Award winning novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it over the years. Jojo struck my heart at the very beginning. I do love a vulnerable character, a young character forced to grow into their adulthood at a much too young age, because this is the reality for so many children, a reality that “society” prefers to ignore. And therein lies one of the novel’s many values—its power to connect with the morals and mortalities readers bring to it.

We meet Jojo in the opening lines, a dark and uncertain space:

I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hanger; that’s how Pop walks. I try to look like this is normal and boring so Pop will think I’ve earned these thirteen years, so Pop will know I’m ready to pull what needs to be pulled, separate innards from muscle, organs from cavities. I want Pop to know I can get bloody. Today’s my birthday…. (1)

Read the full essay at Eckleburg.

Where Moral Authority Begins

Part I: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Part II: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Part III: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Part IV: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

 

Rae Cline’s debut novel, Precious Ugly (7.13  Books), is a work of Appalachian literary fiction. It was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award and CRAFT’s First Chapters Contest. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City.

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Where Moral Authority Begins: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

by Rae Cine

 

Trigger warnings. Spoiler alerts.

I am curious about moral authority in stories and how moral authority presents within openings. Morality is a central function of stories that I find most engaging, in particular, the moral implications surrounding gender-violence and abuse. I prefer stories that push the boundaries of moral dilemmas. Some questions of morality present as axioms of the human condition, yes, I would agree with this, but there is still a social construction within it, nuances that make it less “truth” than manufactured. The way these moral axioms apply through human consumption and synthesis can become something entirely different depending upon the human, especially when manufactured through privilege. The authors who dare to pose these questions of morality as consumed and synthesized through privilege are often the authors I follow as a reader and writer. As I’ve discussed before, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is perfection for me if there is such a thing as a perfect novel. Beloved questions morality synthesized and told through the eyes of marginalized perspective, which I find necessary and fascinating as a study in craft. I thought you might find it fascinating, too, so perhaps we can be fascinated, together, for a time.

Omniscient Narrator

Beloved opens with an omniscient narrator’s personification of a house, a “spiteful” house, named “124.” Set outside Cincinnati, Ohio, 124 is a haunted place where the now deceased grandmother, Baby Suggs was an “unchurched preacher,” whom we will later learn in the novel once tended to a community of runaway slaves and freed people. 124 began as a loving place, a “cheerful, buzzing house” and “way station,” but for some undisclosed reason, 124 grew dark, “spiteful.” And so we open with the narrator’s moral authority and judgement on 124’s “venom”:

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them….(3)

Read the full essay at Eckleburg.

Where Moral Authority Begins

Part I: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Part II: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Part III: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Part IV: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

 

Rae Cline’s debut novel, Precious Ugly (7.13  Books), is a work of Appalachian literary fiction. It was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award and CRAFT’s First Chapters Contest. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City.

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Where Moral Authority Begins: Part III: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

by Rae Cine

 

Trigger warnings. Spoilers.

It was in a fiction workshop at Sewanee Writers’ Conference when one of the workshop leaders said to the attendees, “Cormac McCarthy is Irish for don’t try this at home.” It was a response to my comment about McCarthy’s aesthetic—the limited punctuation, lyrical prose, unflinching detail to human vulnerabilities and violences. I was a fan. The leader’s comment was supposed to be funny. And it was funny in the delivery. Well-timed. The workshop attendees laughed. Who wouldn’t laugh at a famous author’s joke? I did not laugh. I was embarrassed and distracted from the conversation I was trying to have about style and prose mastery, a conversation I wanted desperately to have at Sewanee and one that I would later have with my advisor, Alice McDermott, who also did not laugh at her fellow workshop leader’s joke. She was my first workshop advisor at Johns Hopkins and she knew me a little and I think she saw I was trying to encourage a conversation, not a joke. It isn’t always easy for female, emerging writers to be taken seriously by male authors or academia or anyone, if we are to be honest. Or perhaps McDermott felt an obligation to simply take an emerging writer’s comments seriously. Either way, for me, she gained moral authority in the workshop from that moment forward, which coupled with her craft authority, made it easy to understand how she is so regarded in literary circles and academia.

This experience taught me an incredible lesson, not so much how to navigate the demeaning comments of male authors making jokes at the expense of younger, female writers, which happens quite a bit. I knew how to navigate that already, but rather, how to lead a conference workshop and how not to lead a conference workshop. I had two amazing examples right in front of me that day. Alice McDermott, arguably the prosaist of our time and incredibly generous with her care and craft. And the Jokester shutting down conversation, embarrassing a young female writer in front of a room full of writers. This was important to me. I had already been teaching literature and creative writing a few years and so I knew that teaching, like writing, was a craft to be learned and nurtured. Needless to say, I am not a fan of the Jokester.

The Cormac McCarthy Problem

I am also not a fan of Cormac McCarthy, the person. He does not present moral authority in his personal life. Let’s get that out of the way. But I find his books to be riveting, unflinching, beautifully crafted in so many ways, not all ways, but many. And timeless. His books are immersive regardless of place and time. I do take issue with female and marginalized voice representation within his novels, absolutely, and this is a conversation I’ve had many times. But, today, I’d like to explore a specific topic, moral authority, as crafted within Child of God.

“A child of God much like yourself perhaps.”

It is rare to find prosaists such as McCarthy, authentically from Appalachia and writing about Appalachia in a way that is so very lyrical and organic to the cadence of the land and the people. Child of God is arguably Cormac McCarthy’s most violent novel, if you don’t count Blood Meridian, which every writer should read, in my opinion. Child of God is set wholly in Appalachia as opposed to the trilogy and The Road, also must reads. But more than this, Child of God gives us a glimpse into the moral positionalities and gender politics of McCarthy’s storytelling that is authentically Appalachian, an important focus for me being a daughter of “God” and Appalachia, myself. And so I have found myself returning to the work often as a master study. As repugnant as the gender positionalities are within McCarthy’s novels, I find authenticity in these positionalities. They are in many ways similar to how I grew up. And no other McCarthy character represents more combined misogyny and moral depravity than Lester Ballard.

Lester Ballard

In the opening of Child of God, we meet Ballard, a man as devoid of moral authority as any character before him or after. And we meet him at his most vulnerable as he loses his home:

They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. They passed under flowering appletrees and passed a log crib chinked with orange mud and forded a branch and came in sight of an aged clapboard house that stood in blue shade under the wall of the mountain. Beyond it stood a barn. One of the men in the truck bonged on the cab roof with his fist and the truck came to a halt. Cars and trucks came on through the weeds in the yard, people afoot.

Read the full essay at Eckleburg.

Where Moral Authority Begins

Part I: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Part II: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Part III: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Part IV: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

 

Rae Cline’s debut novel, Precious Ugly (7.13  Books), is a work of Appalachian literary fiction. It was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award and CRAFT’s First Chapters Contest. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City.

 

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Where Moral Authority Begins: Part II: Bastard Out of Carolina

by Rae Cine

 

Trigger warnings. Spoiler alerts.

In “Where Moral Authority Begins: Part II,” I am curious about what truth costs a child and her family in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. I have obsessed over this novel for years, not only the story but also the language—authentic, textured, defined in place and socio-economics to which I am particularly drawn having grown up as a young girl in northern Appalachia. I am also in love with my paperback copy. French flaps and deckle edges. I have written about my love of French flaps. The French flap and deckle edge makes this paperback Bastard something more than a book. It is really an experience.

Allison set the novel in South Carolina but the textures are familiar to me, the way Cincinnati chili tastes of cinnamon and southern chili Tex-Mex. The spices are different but the feel is home. And so is the trauma.

Bastard reveals brutal truths through its young narrator, “Bone,” thirteen years old and a survivor of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Glen, Bone’s stepfather, but we don’t know this in the beginning. Bone introduces her story, taking us back to when she was still inside her mama, Anney, who is fifteen:

I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anne. I was named for and by my oldest aunt—Aunt Ruth. My mama didn’t have much to say about it, since strictly speaking, she wasn’t there. Mama and a carful of my aunts and uncles had been going out to the airport to meet one of the cousins who was on his way back from playing soldier. Aunt Alma, Aunt Ruth, and her husband, Travis, were squeezed into the front, and Mama was stretched out in back, sound asleep. Mama hadn’t adjusted to pregnant life very happily, and by the time she was eight months gone, she had a lot of trouble sleeping. She said that when she lay on her back it felt like I was crushing her, when she lay on her side it felt like I was climbing up her backbone, and there was no rest on her stomach at all. Her only comfort was the backseat of Uncle Travis’s Chevy, which was jacked up so high that it easily cradled little kids or pregnant women. Moments after lying back into that seat, Mama had fallen into her first deep sleep in eight months. She slept so hard, even the accident didn’t wake her up…. (1)

Read the full essay at Eckleburg.

Where Moral Authority Begins

Part I: Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Part II: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina

Part III: Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Part IV: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

 

Rae Cline’s debut novel, Precious Ugly (7.13  Books), is a work of Appalachian literary fiction. It was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award and CRAFT’s First Chapters Contest. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City.