Airships
Not literally tales about airplanes, the “airships” of Barry Hannah’s collection of twenty dazzling stories are vehicles to transport our imagination. And what strange, fragile vehicles they are! Mostly grotesque, they hurtle into life a cargo of tormented souls, nearly all at their breaking points, yet defiantly passionate. Hannah’s range is as remarkable as his penetration. From Vietnam to Mississippi, from the Civil War Confederacy to modern suburbia, his characters experience life at the narrow verge between disaster and redemption. A few of them attain a partial salvation; most are destined to fail, though they battle with stubborn pride.
Hannah’s characters do not suffer from the pride of the Greeks, hubris — excessive confidence in their powers. On the contrary, they usually lack confidence. As the world judges them, most are failures: disappointed lovers, betrayed soldiers, futile dreamers. Yet they take full responsibility for their lives and never complain at the defeats they suffer. In their integrity they demonstrate their pride. “There’s only tomorrow if you’re lucky,” says the old man in “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb”; many of Hannah’s characters might repeat the same sentiment. Without delusions, usually without moral rationalizations, they face life squarely and accept reality with calm; and like the greatest tragic heroes of the Greeks, they are proud to be human.
In their tragic power, Hannah’s stories remind the reader at times of the work of two other gifted Southern writers, William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Like Faulkner, Hannah is interested in violence, not for the sake of sensation alone but for the psychological and artistic effects of terror. Many of Hannah’s stories begin or end in fearsome violence. For example, in “Green Gets It,” the psychotic narrator shoots a black man on a bicycle. “At least,” he says, “I had the presence of mind not to kill him. I only shot him in the thigh.” In “Quo Vadis, Smut?” a group of redneck hunters run down a cretinous farmer who had tied “his supposed sweetheart” to a bull, then strike a pitchfork in the animal’s eye. In “Coming Close to Donna,” the narrator, a self-styled “sissy,” witnesses a battle to the death in a cemetery between two rival lovers of Donna, the nymphomanic; when she calls upon the horrified “fag” to have sex with her, he picks up a tombstone and crushes her head with it. These examples and many others that could be cited show how Hannah’s treatment of violence seems almost comically grotesque. Yet it is never gratuitous, and the comedy, also reminiscent of Faulkner, is part of the Mississippi “tall tale.” Like Faulkner’s farcical yarns about the Snopeses, Hannah’s broad comic sketches reveal characters who are both depraved and pitiable. We laugh at their madness, but the amusement is pained.
Further, in his treatment of the grotesque, Hannah resembles Flannery O’Connor. Like her, he creates a world of garrulous, compulsive, usually narrow-minded, and often dangerous types who barely glimpse a world of moral order that they cannot understand. For Hannah, the moral order is not precise — certainly not so precisely catholic; but it tantalizes his characters with its hint of reality. Without that hint, life could not be endured; yet the hint is only that, not a certainty. Good soldiers to the end for a cause that they only dimly perceive, Hannah’s characters fight their lonely battles with courage or desperation and never whimper.
For Hannah, the image of the loyal soldier is General Jeb Stuart, peerless Confederate cavalry officer. In two major stories, “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb” (probably the finest piece of this collection) and “Knowing He Was...
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Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” Hannah re-creates the myth of Stuart’s death. Again, in “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony,” news of the death of Stuart has significance in the plot, although it is not central to the action. What does Stuart mean to Hannah? Certainly the figure represents the heroic age of the South: a Christian gentleman, charismatic leader in battle, masterful companion of men. But he appears to be more than a legacy of the old South — a memory part truth but a greater part myth. Hannah posits in Stuart the verities toward which other, weaker men and women merely aspire. Stuart knows who he is; he lives with conviction, dies with honor. Shot by his own trusted officer, Captain Howard, Stuart is the victim of the world’s madness, although he is not mad. Rather it is Howard who is driven mad — maddened because he lacks conviction.
Most of Hannah’s characters are poised delicately between madness and sanity. Desperate, they conceal their terror of chaos through fantasy, brutality, or lust. Rarely do they enjoy a completed romantic affair. Even when they love purely, with commitment — for example, Quadberry and Lilian in “Testimony of Pilot” — they are doomed. The chaos of accident, mere chance, destroys them. Or they surrender to their inner chaos. In “Our Secret Home,” which treats a strange menage à trois involving deadlocked passion, the husband, Mickey, loves two women: his wife, Carolyn, and his sister, Patricia. He keeps them together in a house doomed by incest. Yet the three victims of accident struggle to love against all odds, against hope. Although the world breaks in upon them, they remain loyal to the mysteries of their hearts.
In general, Hannah’s women are more sensitive to the promptings of the heart than his men. For his male protagonists, activity can serve to fill the inner void. So they may be soldiers (“Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet”), athletes (“Return to Return”), or violent despoilers (“Green Gets It”). But women must come directly to grips with reality. In the two extraordinary stories that conclude the volume, “Deaf and Dumb” and “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt,” Hannah examines with compassion the psychology of desperate women who endure the agony of truth. Resigned to their fate, they do not grumble at what cannot be altered. Minny dreams of the past, accepts the present, then drops off to sleep; but she is awakened violently by a hammer blow upon her mouth. Similarly, Mother Rooney — perhaps Hannah’s most brilliant portrait — remembers her crumbling early life, the broach, symbol of her romantic dreams, and her betrayal. Old, unregenerate, and lewd, she is a modern version of Molly Bloom, now half in her grave but grasping for life. A triumph of Hannah’s art, Mother Rooney demands comparison with the supreme female characters of Frank O’Connor or James Joyce.
To be sure, other stories lack the roundness of Hannah’s best work. With a few exceptions, the short-short tales are inferior to the longer ones, not simply because they lack organic development, but because they seem to be experimental versions of stories yet to be written. The exceptions to this rule, however, are notable: “Water Liars,” “Coming Close to Donna,” and “Behold the Husband in His Perfect Agony.” On the other hand, stories like “That’s True,” “All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail,” and “Pete Resists the Man of His Old Room” appear to be mere sketches, promising but unfinished. Among the longer pieces, only one is disappointing: “Return to Return.” A sensitive account of the loyalties of three lifelong friends, the narrative never quite comes to life.
Rarely can the same criticism be applied to the range of Hannah’s stories; they seize the imagination with abundant life. Indeed, because of their exuberant vitality, some may appear to be entertainments only, designed to amuse the reader by startling him; Hannah delights in all forms of sleight-of-hand that serve as fictional trickery. He often changes the direction of the story, so that a comic tale suddenly becomes serious, or a poignant plot develops an unexpected antic twist. For example, the opening sentence of “Water Liars” prepares the reader for a ribald plot: “When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.” As the reader settles back in his chair, anticipating a fabliau about Sidney Farte, Jr., he is startled later in the story to discover a far more serious level of meaning. Exchanging fanciful yarns about ghosts, one of the characters, an old man, recalls how he stumbled upon his own daughter and her lover making love in the brush. And the narrator, in a hideous vision, imagines that he sees the former lovers of his wife. The story ends on the somber note: “We were both crucified by the truth.”
Similarly, in “Green Gets It,” the reader is tricked into supposing that the story is a droll yarn about Quarles Green, who “had never had a satisfactory carnal experience in his life.” Midway through the story, the tone shifts markedly. We are conscious that the narrator is a fascist brute, a vigilante FBI agent. A black man speaks to him: “Pardon me. Is yo name Toid?” Before the reader has time to relax his mood for what appears to be a farcical scene, the incident grows nasty. Offended, the narrator stalks and shoots the black man, wounding but not killing him; then he resumes his amusing tale about Green.
To understand Hannah’s art, one must be prepared for sudden, dramatic shifts in tone. For changes in tone, from ironic to farcical to tragic, signal changes in meaning. Often the change occurs in a single paragraph, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. For example, in “Return to Return,” Celia and Levaster exchange philosophical ideas on nihilism and art. He says that “decoration is more important than art.” She counters: “Is that what you learned in med school? That’s dumb. . . . A boob is a boob is a boob.” At this, “Dr. Levaster fainted.”
In the Jeb Stuart stories, masterpieces of their kind, one can enjoy at best advantage Hannah’s dramatic shifts of tone. The narrator of “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb” can be viewed, at different stages of the action signaled by shifts in tone, as a madman or philosopher, a murderer or a saint, Christ or Judas. Truly he is all these personalities. Captain Howard is a man crumbling before our eyes, one whose destiny is to destroy what he admires, then to destroy himself through remorse. Not since Ambrose Bierce has an American writer attempted to write so strange a story of terror and truth. For the story is terrible beyond the horrors of Faulkner or William Burroughs or Paul Bowles. Besides its strangeness, its quality is also visionary: an apparition of truth glimpsed though not fully perceived. With tones of rich ambiguity, Hannah mixes his loves and hates. And the truth of his best stories is a fearsome truth, part nightmare and part wild, derisive laughter. With Airships, the author establishes his claim to the front rank of contemporary American short fiction.
Literary Techniques
In nearly every tale within the pages of Airships, as well as throughout his entire body of work, Hannah employs a tapestry of first-person voices, each as distinct as the stories they tell. These voices, rich with authenticity, stand as a hallmark of his literary prowess. Rarely do the characters Hannah crafts ring false; their speech is vibrant, immediate, and unflinchingly candid.
Storytelling Style
Hannah's narratives unfold like modern-day fables. Even when the plots veer into the improbable, his narrators are quick to acknowledge the fantastical elements. Fueled by an urgent need to convey their tales, these stories often gallop forward with a frenetic, almost breathless tempo. The fantastical events within Airships are anchored in personal experiences, rendering the depicted horrors subtle in their impact.
Surprise Endings
Many of the stories in Airships unfurl with a twist, often veering into the bizarre by their conclusion. Unexpected demises, for example, serve as the final note in at least six of these twenty narratives, leaving the reader caught off guard.
Literary Precedents
Literary Reverberations in "Airships"
"Airships" is rich with undeniable nods to the tapestry of American literature, especially the voices hailing from the Southern states. In the tale "Dragged Fighting from His Tomb," set amidst the turmoil of the Civil War, the narrator boldly declares: "Nothing a body does disgusts me." This sentiment mirrors the language found in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana: "Nothing human disgusts me." Likewise, in "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa," the essence of Flannery O'Connor's vision of a Church of Christ devoid of Christ echoes through a preacher's words: "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 stories resonate with whispers from the realms of Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, enveloping "Airships" with a rich Southern literary heritage.
The Southern Gothic Underpinnings
Hannah, in the vein of many Southern storytellers, casts a skeptical eye on the facades of ordinary society, singling out its religious institutions as elaborate deceptions. The Gothic threads in Hannah’s narratives often unravel to reveal stark truths lying beneath the comforting veneer of conventional deception.
