Tag: Literary Fiction

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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.