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1978 - "MOUNTAINS IN OUR MIND'S EYE" In 1978 Appalachian studies took a new turn in its scholarly direction. Many scholars in the field began to re-think what defined the area we called "Appalachia". Two books in 1978 were largely instrumental in shifting the focus of scholarship and subsequently literature -- both non-fiction and fiction. The two books are Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (1978), and Helen Lewis' Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (1978). Both were early postmodern explorations of the Appalachian mountains. The two scholars tapped into the evolving streams of postmodern thought and study and used this new methodology to challenge the conventional scholarship of "peculiar" and "otherness" that had previously dominated the literature about the region. Shapiro's book has not worn well with some scholars over the intervening years and some believe his dismissal of an Appalachian "reality, " -- a discreet entity defined by boundaries and tangible in a geographic and regional social and economic sense, cannot be trusted, and more importantly cannot be securely defined, particularly by those who live within that "reality." Shapiro in his important book, challenged us to think about our understanding of "insider" (those who profess to understand life in the Appalachian mountains) and the "outsider" (those who write about the region and are often criticized as not understanding the region). He asked the reader to consider carefully how those intellectual constructs shaped the idea of "Appalachia." Shapiro's critics feel the Appalachian mountain region is real and not just a mental construction, as Shapiro describes it. The ensuing argument, itself, became a postmodern dialogue, and an attack on Shapiro's cognitive dissonance theory and his constructivism that suggested that life in the region was neither unique nor "other" has still not subsided. (See Roger Cunningham. "Appalachian Studies Among the Posts," Journal of Appalachian Studies, Fall 2003, vol. 9 no. 2, pp. 377-386). "Appalachia" according to Shapiro, was an idea that had been invented. It was he suggested, a purely intellectual construct. In this healthy debate, his critics profess to "know" Appalachia, not as an American idea, shaped by local color writers, missionaries, tourists, and other outsiders, but as a geography within which there are defining environmental, social, medical, and economic realities. The idea that there can be two "realities" has recently become a favored position in this energetic dialogue. Helen Lewis, on the other hand, has fared well with her critics. Her development of another postmodern thread in Appalachian scholarship, that of "colonialism," has given her many sympathetic readers. What Lewis suggests is that "colonialism" when applied to a regional concept holds up well and exposes the colonial relationship between Appalachia and America --- thus suggesting that the region is unique and that it can be freshly explored by overlaying the dialectic theories of Foucault and Marx. As Roger Cunningham has suggested in his essay, "Appalachian Studies Among the Posts," Lewis poses the question not "What is reality?", but more "What is our reality?" Lewis' thesis, say her supporters, has been substantiated in the extensive analysis of late given to the economic and political status of this region we refer to as "Appalachia", of which western North Carolina is a sub-set. Whether Lewis, like Shapiro will fall out of favor as new scholarship brings new perceptions, remains to be seen. Both these authors, and others continue to struggle with life as they see it in the Appalachian mountains. Theirs is a meta-view that runs throughout much of the recent writing about the mountains of the region. Whatever the philosophical bent of the writer, "place" commands a healthy respect in all who live within or who visit the mountains. |
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| Shapiro 1978
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HENRY D. SHAPIRO APPALACHIA ON OUR MIND: THE SOUTHERN MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAINEERS IN THE AMERICAN CONSCIOUSNESS, 1870-1920 Appalachia On Our Mind "Our job as historians is not to argue with the past but to understand it, and in attempting to understand we must take great pains to remember that what "actually happened" need not have happened in the way it did; but that "what" actually happened and "how" it actually happened is what we are after. The discovery of Appalachia, we must remember, did not in itself pose a problem which required solution or create a dilemma which demanded resolution. And although the dilemma which the existence of a strange land and peculiar people in the southern mountains posed occurred in the realm of ideas rather than action, it was not for this reason any less a dilemma, nor were the "real-life" responses of railroad promoters or home missionaries for this reason inappropriate. .. By talking about cognitive dissonance, we insist that ideas are not natural emanations from objective reality but are the creation of men, and stand between consciousness and reality; and that insofar as ideas become the surrogates for experience and representations of reality, they become also the subjects of discourse and the objects of action." Shapiro, Henry D.. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, preface xviii. "In the sketches and stories of the local-color writers, assertion of the otherness of Appalachia was more critical than close description of its characteristics. In the literature on the southern mountains generated by the agencies of systematic benevolence, assertion of the mountaineer's "need" was more critical than close description of that need, or of the conditions which created it. Given the absence of hard information about the characteristics of mountain life, writers on Appalachia even at the turn of the century were thus free to offer metaphor instead of statement of fact, to speculate on the consequences of isolation on Appalachian otherness, to propose programs for the melioration of mountain conditions appropriate to their speculations, and to generalize broadly on the 'meaning'' of Appalachia's existence for an understanding of American history..." Shapiro, Henry D.. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, p.81-82. "The perception that Appalachia was a land of lawlessness facilitated the widespread acceptance of a regionalist view of the southern mountains after 1900, and the general abandonment of a view of Appalachian otherness as a survival of earlier patterns of American civilization. It was only through the insights of the new social sciences, and especially their acceptance of environment as a determinant of culture, however, that an alternative view of Appalachian otherness could have been framed --- a view which did not assume that the particular patterns of culture found in the mountains were survivals, degenerations, or developments from patterns of culture found elsewhere in the nation or elsewhere among the racial stock which made up America's native-born population." Shapiro, Henry D.. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, p. 139. "The churches discovered Appalachia quite independently of the local colorists, and saw the region in terms of their own experiences and in terms of their own needs. But because they shared with the local colorists certain notions about the nature of American civilization and about the exceptional quality of cultural diversity in America, they found an essentially literary vision of Appalachian as a discrete entity, in but not of America, not simply the most readily available but an entirely acceptable picture of the reality with which they were to deal. As a result, like the local-color writers, it was to this vision of reality, and to the dilemma which Appalachia's existence as a discrete entity seemed to pose --- rather than to the reality of Southern mountain life --- that their response was made." Shapiro, Henry D.. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, p. 57-58. |
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Miller 1974 1978 |
JIM WAYNE MILLER THE MOUNTAINS HAVE COME CLOSER On writing: "Growing up in North Carolina, I was often amused, along with other natives, at tourists who fished the trout streams. The pools, so perfectly clear, had a deceptive depth. Fishermen unacquainted with them were forever stepping with hip waders into pools they judged to be knee-deep and going in up to their waists or even their armpits, sometimes being floated right off their feet. I try to make poems like those pools, so simple and clear their depth is deceiving. I want the writing to be so transparent that the reader forgets he is reading and is aware only that he is having an experience. He is suddenly plunged deeper than he expected and comes up shivering." [Quoted with permission for the Southern Appalachian Writers Exhibit Collection, UNC Asheville, 1980.] Miller said that he was dealing with the "experience of the contemporary person living in the modern world ... We live among the vestiges of a traditional culture and then we have the modern, contemporary world all about us ... You don't deny the reality of contemporary America nor the reality of this inherited traditional culture ... you make some synthesis out of that. That's what I'm trying to do individually with my life and in my poems ..." Miller, Jim Wayne. Dialogue with a Dead Man. (1974)
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Turner
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KERMIT TURNER REBEL POWERS Rebel Powers is that rare thing: a totally honest book." (Guy Owen) On Writing: "I believe the urge to write fiction, particularly the novel, springs from a desire to make human experience explicable, to create out of the flow and confusion of life something that can be held and contemplated and understood.. That urge, or need, is the only inspiration I acknowledge, and beyond that what the writer needs most is discipline. I mean primarily the will-power to make oneself keep a writing schedule..and face the blank paper or the imperfect manuscript and to make oneself do something...." [Quoted with permission for the Southern Appalachian Writers Exhibit Collection, UNC Asheville, 1980.]
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| Green 1980 |
LEWIS W. GREEN Green was raised by his grandmother in the Wildcat Cliff section of Haywood County. His youth was racked with numerous hardships; a constant struggle to survive in a tough mountain community. His difficult trek was complicated by the narrow paths offered by hellfire and brimstone preachers on one hand, and the wild, dangerous delights of honky tonks and white lightening on the other. Many of Green's mountain peers seemed to fall into the vast, gray, hypocritical area between those difficult choices. On Writing: "Anyone who speaks a sentence can write a sentence...students should develop their minds and communicate feelings in a way readers understand...students should know about archetypes, symbolism and imagery by employing Jungian psychology. "I just sit down and write. The literary symbolism one finds in my work is generally subconscious. Writing is the hardest work there is. You have to give up television, friends, and a lot of other things." [Quoted with permission for the Southern Appalachian Writers Exhibit Collection, UNC Asheville, 1980.] |
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| Morgan
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ROBERT MORGAN GAP CREEK In Topsoil Road Poems Morgan writes about the "Mountain Dulcimer." He asks:
And in part of a poem from Red Owl he captures the essence of a "Warm Winter Day"
On writing: "In my poems I want to discover and evoke both the landscape of experience and memory and the landscape of language. The two seem to happen simultaneously when the writing is working: the delight in word and world as enactments of each other. Of course I like to tell stories in poems and dramatize the minutest facts of nature, and I especially like to talk about the way people work and make things, and humble details, pain, and the lost things of childhood and the mountains. But its's the terrain of American language I'm exploring and remembering also, I hope, and hearing a fresh even in the most plain and transparently direct lyric." [Quoted with permission for the Southern Appalachian Writers Exhibit Collection, UNC Asheville, 1980.]
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| Bradbury 1984 |
RAY BRADBURY FOREVER AND THE EARTH While Ray Bradbury is neither from North Carolina, nor did he come here to write, he has a special fascination with Thomas Wolfe and it is to Wolf and to another mentor, Norman Corwin. that he wrote a little radio dramatization called "Forever and the Earth." He first discovered Wolfe when he was given a copy of Wolfe's The Web and the Rock by a friend when he was 19 years old. He refers to the Wolfe novel in his 1984 script for his radio dramatization and pays homage to Corwin who first adapted pieces of Wolfe's work for a radio dramatization read by Charles Laughton and with music by Bernard Hermann. In Bradbury's play he imagines a time in the future, 2257, when an experimental time machine brings a dying Tom Wolfe to the home of his admirer where Tom is then sent on a futuristic space journey and told to write all he sees. Wolfe travels through the universe and to Mars, finally returning back to Earth where his admirer and sponsor has captured all that he wrote in his journal. Wolfe calls his new collected works "Forever and the Earth," and he and his sponsor delight in the vivid descriptions of other worlds. Wolfe is then transported back to the hospital where he dies. The year is 1938, but through Bradbury's manipulation of time and space, the historic fabric of Wolfe's life and death is not shattered. The time-travel, the weaving in of pieces of Wolfe's earlier work, the integration with Bradbury's fantasy world and the hyper-textual quality of this creative piece captures the tone of the imaginative work of many authors of the 1980's and later. But, imagine, if you will, the transport of Constance Woolson, to today's Asheville or William Bartram to Harrah's in the Qualla Boundary. What would their stories look like? What would be their language? This is Olive Tilford Dargan's dream of Hellvyln and this is also Wilma Dykeman experimenting with new poetic form and creating new literary forms as she expanded her contact with past authors. Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker. But, unlike Bradbury who revived a long dead Wolfe, many of Dykeman's muses were still living when she composed her series of poems "in the style of." Further, many of her choices were not "mountain" writers. Writing in the style of another author can still be a stimulating and creative exercise for students. One is left wondering which authors today's youth would turn to for inspiration -- those with whom they may share a mountain heritage, or those outside the region who resonate with their perspective of the world. In their mind's eye, and in ours, how much are we influenced by place and how much by common themes within our humanity.
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FRED CHAPPELL THE ATTENDING In this excerpt from his poem "The Attending," Chappell calls to our attention those memories that follow writers in the form of creative spirits who have come before ... writers, painters, sculptors, weavers ... and he, doing as "they did then" ... ...
For we are nothing without the ones who came before, Earthsleep : A Poem / Fred Chappell Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1980 See also: Wind Mountain : A Poem / Fred Chappell Baton Rouge : [Louisiana State University Press], 1979 |
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CHARLES FRAZIER COLD MOUNTAIN "There in the highland, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final ranks were indistinguishable from sky. It was as if all the world might be composed of nothing but valley and ridge. During a pause in the play, Swimmer had looked out at the landforms and said he believed Cold Mountain to be the chief mountain of the world. Inman asked how he knew that to be true, and Swimmer had swept his hand across the horizon to where Cold Mountain stood and said, Do you see a bigger'n?" And, at the end of the novel, Inman shares with Ada his copy of Bartram's Travels: "He rose and went to his sack and pulled out the Bartram and showed it to Ada as if it were evidence of something. It was scrolled up and tied with a bow knot of dirty string and had been wet and dry and wet again for months now and looked grimy and ancient enough to contain the aggregate knowledge of a lost civilization. He told her how it had helped sustain him on his journey, how he had read it many a night by the firelight of a lonesome bivouac. Ada was unfamiliar with it, and Inman described it to her as a book concerned with this very part of the world and with everything that was important in it. He shared with her his view that the book stood night to holiness and was of such richness that one might dip into it at random and read only one sentence and yet be sure of finding instruction and delight. To prove his point, he pulled the end of the boy and let the limp coverless book flap open. He put his finger to a sentence which, as usual, began with the climbing of a mountain and went on for much of a page, and as he read it aloud he could not wait to reach its period for all it seemed to be about was sex, and it caused his voice to crack and threatened to flush his face. It was this:
Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997. p. 330. |
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