Post-Post-Modern South

The Late-Great Hannah

Barry Hannah passed earlier this week. The literary world is aching. Hannah was a badass. We think that’s the best way to describe him. A motorcycle-riding, knife-wielding giant of American letters.

Two weeks ago we lamented the lack of regional distinction in recent literature. Hannah was the king of the Post-Modern South.

Here we are running an excerpt from an essay by novelist and critic Eric Miles Williamson as tribute to the late-great Hannah. — Brian Allen Carr

from Barry Hannah and the Postmodern South

III

Before becoming a scholar, a Professor of “Postmodern and Contemporary Literature”, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I earned graduate degrees in Creative Writing at two different universities, the University of Colorado and the University of Houston, and I published a few things here and there. But becoming a writer proved to be way too difficult, and so I chose the easy way out, the route any schmuck can take, and I re-branded myself a “scholar.” Don’t kid yourself: it’s a lot easier to get a job as a “critic” than as a writer. If you’re a writer, you need a book or even several books to even apply for a job.

So I wrote a few lame articles with the word “Postmodern” in the title, learned how to use the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, cut my hair, and stopped cursing so much. I switched from beer and Scotch to wine, and I pretended to care when someone started jabbering about the injustices of the patriarchal oppression of the white male canon. “I hate those white males, too! Henry James has had his run — it’s Kate Chopin’s turn!”

But in the days when I wanted to be a fiction writer, those foolish and naive 27 or so years, instead of reading the important stuff, the criticism, the theory, the articles by respected professors and by young and brilliant future theoretical superstars, I wasted my time reading through what Harold Bloom would call The Western Canon. That’s what the other silly, misguided, idiot-savant wanna-be writers were doing, after all. I was just an impressionable youth, eager to be like the writers, dolts who couldn’t tell bricolage from fromage, who wouldn’t recognize a [[(de)([cent]er(ed))]] signifier if it slapped them in the face and swiped their lunch money.

The canon of dead writers was easy to get right: it’d been the same gang for thousands of years, and even the list of great Modernist writers was already established by the time I was in graduate school. The tough decisions came when I had to decide what contemporary authors I was going to read. The literature professors were of little use recommending books—they were still reading the books their professors had told them to read, stuck on the Modernists, wasting their time on hacks like F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most recent copyright date on their bookshelves about 1969. The writing professors weren’t much use, either: they tended to recommend their friends’ books. At Colorado they recommended Fiction Collective authors and the Beats and Black Mountain Poets, and at Houston they recommended New Yorker and Paris Review authors.

Where we grad student wannabe writers discovered authors was from each other. Back then, in the 1980s, what the students were reading was Gravity’s Rainbow, JR, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, John Hawkes, Robert Coover, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Donald Barthelme, Peter Handke, Milan Kundera, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Nabokov, and Barry Hannah. We might have read all these authors, but it wasn’t the so-called “Postmodernists” — Coover and Pynchon and Barth and Barthelme and Gaddis—who influenced us. We saw them as clever fellows, to be sure, but moreso we understood them to be generators of onanistic spew, of masturbatory game-playing silliness. These are the authors, of course, who the critics latch onto (draw your own conclusions here, amigo). Instead of the institutionalized Postmodernists, the authors who most influenced us, who we imitated, who we wanted to be like, were Cormac McCarthy (Suttree and Blood Meridian), and Barry Hannah (Ray and Airships).

To say that Barry Hannah’s work is Postmodern would be redundant: born in 1942, Hannah was three years old when the nuclear weapons incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and is therefore clearly of the Postmodern generation. What makes Hannah interesting as a Postmodernist, however, is not just that he is the right age (otherwise, every other writer out there of a certain age would be equally interesting, and clearly they are not), but how Postmodern dread, angst, nausea (in Sartre’s sense) manifests itself in his fiction, and how Hannah’s work is clearly a Postmodernist updating up the Modernism of his fellow Oxford, Mississippian, William Faulkner, under whose shadow Hannah has written for decades.

The Modernism of Faulkner, dread-filled as it is, always concludes with hope. In Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Address, he writes,

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last read and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Likewise, the last line of The Sound and the Fury, his great novel of the disintegration of the Compson family, is Dilsey’s statement, “They endured.” In A Fable Faulkner rips-off his Nobel Prize Address in a passage in which an old general describes his vision of Armageddon to a corporal:

It will not be someone firing bullets at him who for the moment doesn’t like him. It will be his own Frankenstein which roasts him alive with heat, asphyxiates him with speed, wrenches loose his still-living entrails in the ferocity of its prey-seeking stoop. So he will not be able to go along with it at all, though for a little while longer it will permit him the harmless delusion that he controls it from the ground with buttons. Then that will be gone too: years, decades then centuries will have elapsed since it last answered his voice: he will have even forgotten the very location of its breeding-grounds and his last contact with it will be a day when he will crawl shivering out of his cooling burrow to crouch among the delicate stalks of his dead antennae like a fairy geometry, beneath a clangorous rain of dials and meters and switches and bloodless fragments of metal epidermis, to watch the final two of them engaged in the last gigantic wrestling against the final and dying sky robbed even of darkness and filled with the inflectionless uproar of the two mechanical voices bellowing at each other polysyllabic and verbless patriotic nonsense. Oh yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom had rung and died there will still be one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster and louder’ more efficient and louder and faster than ever before, yet it too inherent with the same old primordial fault since it too in the end will fail to eradicate him from the earth. I don’t fear man. I do better: I respect and admire him. And pride: I am ten times prouder of that immortality which he does possess than ever he of that heavenly one of his delusion. But man and his folly—”

“Will endure,” the corporal said.

“They will do more,” the old general said proudly. “They will prevail.”

In Faulkner’s Modernist vision of the world, the Compsons, through broken, endure, Sutpen’s Hundred might be a shambles but Jim Bond, half-breed idiot, survives, and after Armageddon, mankind crawls out from the rubble and prevails.

This isn’t the case with Barry Hannah’s Postmodern South. Hannah’s South is not populated with people who remember the dignity of man, the hope of a future bleak as it might be. Barry Hannah’s South is populated with the destitute, the aimless, the horribles of an impoverished, all-too-romanticized (Faulkner’s partly to blame, Margaret Mitchell complicit as well), ignored and ridiculed hoard of wandering rednecks, liars inventing the world as they go, bigots, murderers, perverts, psychos, and each and all of these folks freighted with incurable existential emptiness and loneliness. Of course it’s incurable: they know not only will they not prevail, they won’t even endure. They, like us, are doomed, cursed to only live in the rubble of the ugly and irredeemable present. They, like us, are screwed.

Hannah’s short story, “Coming Close to Donna,” from his first collection, Airships (1978), illustrates this in spades. The narrator, Vince, and a girl named Donna are at a graveyard watching a fight between two boys, Hank and Ken. While Hank and Ken fight, Donna begins taking off her clothes. The two boys are Donna’s options for a future boyfriend. Once she’s naked, she tells Vince, “Warm me up, Vince. Do me. Or are you really a fag like they say?” She continues, “Come in me, you fag. . . . Don’t hurt my feelings. I want a fag to come in me.” Vince can’t bring himself to do it. Meanwhile, Hank and Ken keep fighting. Donna wants to screw, splays herself out on the ground. The boys hit to kill, and they do. They kill each other. Then Donna “goes to the two bodies and is absorbed in a tender unnatural act over the blue jeans of Hank and Ken.” When she finds the boys, dead, unresponsive, she says, “I can’t make anybody come! I’m no good!.” When Vince tries to coax her to leave the graveyard and the dead boys, she says, “Do me right now, Vince! It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Six months later, Vince encounters Donna again. Now she’s a wasteoid on heroin, and she wants to go to the cemetery again. She says, “Climb me, mount me, fight for me, fuck me,” but instead of doing any of the above,

Vince picked up a neighboring tombstone with a great effort. It was an old thing, perhaps going back to the nineteenth century. I crushed her head with it. Then I fled right out of there.

Some of us are made to live for a long time. Others for a short time. Donna wanted what she wanted.

I gave it to her.

In a Postmodern world, death, like its ugly and preposterous cause, life, is meaningless: it’s just a given, and since there’s no afterlife, no God, no future, all that exists is the present. Donna: she sees her boyfriends killing each other, her sources of pleasure becoming extinguished, and so she seeks her pleasure from whatever’s near, in this case, a suspected homosexual. Her life is nothing, and so she becomes a heroin addict. She tries to recoup some semblance of a misguidedly better past, but it’s nothing, and so the narrator, in mercy, kills her. And not only does he put her out of her misery (which is incurable — it’s a Postmodern misery), but he confesses it to all of us. He’s going to be executed for killing Donna — but he doesn’t care. Why should he? His life, after all, is no better than Donna’s. Like all of us, he’s doomed. And he’s unhappy in the now, so why should he think it will be any better tomorrow? Better to check out, end the misery, than to go on even another day in the face of unutterable meaninglessness.

Postmodernism is not a style of writing. It’s an ontological and metaphysical mode, and we’re in it, and Barry Hannah is one of its primary spokesmen.

In another favorite of my graduate days, “Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa,” Hannah takes on the great levelers of race, class, and God, demonstrating how the lower classes and the South experience Postmodernism. In this story, the narrator, a nasty redneck bigot, harasses a black man for eating bananas, and the black man invites himself and his sister over to the redneck’s house for a meal. The redneck won’t admit it, but he’s delighted that they’re coming over — he is desperate for human contact of any kind, even if it’s with blacks, who he supposedly despises. The narrator accosts a preacher in the story, and says,

“Say, Doctor Campbell, I’m surrendering my heart to Jesus.”

He laid scrutiny on me. The few hairs he had left were oily and carefully set in a dramatic way.

“Tell you what, my son.” He laid hand on my shoulder. He whispered. “I’m not the person to talk to. I hate your guts, after what you did to that poor disk jockey.”

“He was a queer and it was an even fight,” I said. “He had a baseball bat and I had a TV antenna. On the roof there wasn’t anything else.”

“He’s still lying out in Druid Hospital.”

“I know where he is. I take beer to him under my coat. What about Jesus? I was surrendering my heart.”

“I’ve got to this position, Ellsworth. I don’t think Jesus wants you. He’s too dead to want. He was a hell of a sweet genius guy, but he’s dead. The only thing left is humanism. Are you humanistic?”

“Right on.”

“Precious are the hours we touch one another,” the son of a bitch said.

The Bible-beating South? Forget about it: the preacher hates your guts. And to him, Jesus is dead. There’s only humanism. We’re all we’ve got, and we’re about to be extinguished. At the story’s end, after the narrator has the hell whooped out of him by the black man with a banana and after the characters have had a few beers and some steaks, the narrator is going to sleep with the black man’s sister — with the black man’s reluctant approval. Because what is there in this miserable meaningless world of ours but temporary and vacuous pleasure? The best we can do in this Postmodern world is eat a steak, have a beer, and get an orgasm.

Why do we want instant gratification? Because if we don’t get it now, it might not be possible for us to get it in an hour. The world might not exist in an hour.

Hannah’s still got it going. His novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), is a vicious and nihilistic as McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan is the story of a community of country folks being terrorized by Man Mortimer, an SUV driving, knife wielding, used-car selling pimp, murderer, and loan shark. Young, he looked like Fabian. Older, like Conway Twitty. He’s everything that’s wrong with America rolled into one despicable exaggeration of the bourgeois middle-class, a single-minded clot of torpor bent on accumulating money, real estate, SUV’s, sex, and the illusion of power that comes with the goodies. Nearly all the folks in the book owe him something, and he randomly and sporadically exacts payment with knives, guns, clubs, and anything else he can use to maim and kill. The body count in the novel is high, and the wounded appear with shocking regularity — a old man is beheaded, a woman kills her child (Mortimer’s) and then herself, youngsters are abused and oldsters maimed.

It’s a small community with a new sheriff, and everyone in town knows what’s going on except him, since nearly everyone has been victim to Mortimer. The sheriff, a man named Facetto, despises the place. Hannah writes, “He felt he reigned in a county which everyone of worth should have left decades ago, all breeds. He dealt with refuse, squatters, the ones gathered around their own nastiness, their own echoes, like night dogs.” A dignified old black veteran-turned-fisherman named Roman is equally disgusted: he says, “I used to be a man. People did what I said. I advanced under fire. I had dignity. I walked toward crowds with my head up. Now I hold hands with nonsense. Gnats of spite around my head. I do not know where the fight is or where to give up.”

Of course he doesn’t know that the fight is: he’s Postmodern. There is no fight. There is no dignity. There is no defeat. There is no victory. There is only the inevitable end.

Sidney Farté, an old coot who is gleeful when his father is killed by Man Mortimer because now Sidney will be sole proprietor of the bait and tackle shack, hates the land, too: “He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.” And a Cuban woman named Mimi who sings in a band on a riverboat casino, has resigned herself: “She had become the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.”

The orphans of the novel’s title are taken in by a sado-masochistic couple and reared on a peninsula across the lake around which most of the action of the novel takes place. With best intentions, the couple try to bring the kids up right, feeding and clothing them, sheltering them from the nastiness of the world. The home for orphans becomes a Waco-like compound, the children armed with grenades, guns, and dynamite. And the children use it all. Postmodern Apocalyptic warriors. What do they have to lose?

As much as these characters dislike the land and each other, just as much they brim with love and compassion, though that love and compassion, ultimately, is of no existential worth beyond the absolutely now, as is the Postmodern condition. Couples find solace in each other, and children of neglectful parents find solace in each other and in the people who take them in. The swamp is as beautiful as it is menacing, and Hannah finds dignity, albeit meaningless dignity (or perhaps the only meaning dignity can now possibly have) amid the squalor that is, ultimately, life. He writes,

“Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.”

The beauty found in loneliness is the best people can do. And the best beauty, the beauty most sublime, is the beauty of someone deaf, someone who’s physically checked out, who can’t hear. You want the perfect Postmodern life? Escape into “pure dream.”

Barry Hannah’s Postmodern South is not the Modernist South of William Faulkner. At the end of his “The Agony of T. Bandini” (which I published in Gulf Coast some 20 years ago) a Vietnam vet at the end of the story says,

I could sleep and make myself little but I always woke up the second anything anybody in range. I could smell them, my nose wake me up. I was on that tree crotch and had me a good limb with my honey and I start fucking her. They come over a hill five black pajamas in a row across like they was hunting rabbits. I blow all they heads off. Then I let myself down and each and every one I stomp they balls. But one of them a teenage girl just the top of her head blown back. I commence giving it to her mouth when I hold her up by the shoulders. That was the best I ever had.

This is not a good world. This is not the dignified though messy and ugly world of William Faulkner. This is a world of human degradation and shame and vileness more horrible than anything in human history. This is our Postmodern world, a world in which copulating with pulsing and bleeding skulls gives pleasure, relief, consolation in light of the ubiquitous alternative—our sure and impending obliteration.

Barry Hannah’s South is a metaphor for the United States, as was Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County for the Modernist USA of a generation ago. But Hannah’s Postmodern South is not Faulkner’s Modernist South. For some reason we’ve looked to the South in America for our grand metaphor, whether it be Richard Wright or Flannery O’Connor or Cormac McCarthy or Bobbie Ann Mason or Faulkner or Barry Hannah. The Southern writers, we’ve taken them as our spokespersons. But our world has changed for the ugly, and there’s no going back, and it’s no longer regional—it’s global. The entire planet is doomed, and we all know it, and Barry Hannah, in delineating his “little postage stamp of earth,” expresses the Postmodern mindset as well, perhaps better, than any writer of this our Postmodern age.

You want Postmodernism? Don’t read Pynchon — he’s just jacking off in despair. Don’t spend your time reading the criticism, as erudite and witty as it is, of William H. Gass. John Barth? Can anyone say they actually enjoy reading that garbage? And what is the new Fiction Collective other than a bunch of coffee house professorial poseurs? What happened to New Directions, to Grove? Where’s our Beckett?

Read real despair. Read Barry Hannah. Read the rest of the contemporaries who still write mimetic fiction. You’ll find their despair to be much more real than one of Coover’s characters going up and down in an elevator, one of Barthelme’s characters scaling a glass mountain. The Postmodernism that’s out there, the Postmodernism of Chris Offutt, of Paul Ruffin, of Larry Fondation, of Charlie Smith, of Marilynne Robinson, that’s the stuff of dread.

Barry Hannah’s our Postmodern writer of the South, and by extension, our Postmodern American writer. He’s the stuff of our fiction.

_________________________________________

Eric Miles Williamson

Eric Miles Williamson is an American novelist and literary critic, member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, editor of American Book Review, Boulevard, and Texas Review. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Texas-Pan American. He can be found online at Eric Miles Williamson. “Barry Hannah and the Postmodern South” originally ran in The Arkansas Review and will be included in the collection Say it Hot, forthcoming from Texas Review Press.