DUBLIN(ER)'S JOYCE: ERNEST GAINES, FLANNERY O'CONNOR, RUSSELL BANKS

Although [James] Joyce did not invent the epiphany, he effectively “patented” it. Stephen Dedalus' theory of the epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” capitalizes upon the developmental work of several predecessors. Anton Chekov's short stories often rely on seemingly innocuous details which, when viewed from the right perspective, yield unexpected spiritual insights. Though University College Dublin professor Gerard Manley Hopkins remained largely unknown until the publication of his poetry in 1918, his inscapes anticipate Joyce's epiphanies. Nonetheless, Dubliners remains the first book of short fiction to rely primarily on the technique which has since revolutionized the short story, whether as published by the New Yorker or by the Fiction Collective.

Joyce's terminology, rather than Hopkins's, has been accepted largely because Joyce helped transform the modern idea of the “short story collection.” Prior to Dubliners, short story volumes were, with few exceptions, collections of random pieces. Since Dubliners, many have instead sought the unity long associated with the best volumes of poetry, the unity of Hopkins's canon. Dubliners provides three basic techniques for unifying story cycles: 1) focusing on one well-defined setting, the central unifying technique of Ernest Gaines's Bloodline; 2) developing a group of central thematic issues from different perspectives, an approach shared by Bloodline and by Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge; and 3) manipulating narrative stance to reflect shifting authorial attitude toward the subject matter, the style which unifies Russell Banks's Searching for Survivors. As Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio intimate, each of these techniques filters down to the present through American writers as well as through Joyce. At some times the Joycean influence is indistinguishable from that of his successors; at other times the difference is crucial. …

Both Gaines and O'Connor follow the Joyce of Dubliners in building their short story cycles on solid realistic bases. Russell Banks's Searching for Survivors rejects most realistic conventions, seeking what Jerome Klinkowitz calls a “playful disruption of content, to make the reader astonished by a world otherwise taken for granted.” Whether Banks's mode is romantic or realistic may be a meaningless question; Klinkowitz claims that the “Superfictionists,” including Banks, have moved as far beyond Beckett as Beckett moved beyond Joyce, and that no adequate critical vocabulary exists for discussing their works. While the Superfictionists do indeed exercise a dazzling stylistic freedom, they are not original in their willingness to manipulate and mock literary conventions, which have been under attack from the times of The Tale of Sir Thopas, As You Like It, Don Quixote, and Tristram Shandy down to the era of the master parody Ulysses. Klinkowitz's work, of course, is part of a long tradition of critical rebellions (typified by Preface to Lyrical Ballads) which proclaim important breaks from past models. Nonetheless, as in many past rebellions, the best work emerging from the new movements (typified by “Tintern Abbey”) builds on the very models against which it ostensibly rebels. In Searching for Survivors Banks follows Joyce both in his approach to the short story volume and in his attempt to escape the contradiction of realistic and symbolic modes.

Banks, in fact, evinces little of Klinkowitz's concern with distancing himself from his predecessors. Invoking the Joycean artistic creed, Banks describes his own creative vocation as based on “Silence, exile, and cunning, then. The first inevitably brings with it the second, while the third is merely the survival tactic traditionally regarded as characteristic of rodents and other small, fanged mammals.” Banks's concern with survival provides the key to, as well as the title for, Searching for Survivors. An example of Banks's desire “to reveal in his work the conditions that permit continued existence,” Searching for Survivors consists of fourteen stories unified not by setting or theme, but by a movement toward a style recognizing the concrete roots of emotional disruptions. Rather than establishing a clear overall progression, the way Gaines and O'Connor do, Banks intertwines three identifiable groups of stories with seven “single” pieces. The sequences are “Searching for Survivors—I” and “Searching for Survivors—II,” the volume's first and last stories; the two “royalty” pieces, “The Investiture” and “The Masquerade”; and the three “With Che” stories. “The Neighbor” and “The Lie,” the two stories at the center of the volume, also form a coherent thematic unit emphasizing cruelty, deceit, and human isolation.

Banks's apparent freedom from the logic of reality suggests that he is an essentially romantic writer. He has in fact characterized the new fiction as avoiding psychological and social realism. Indeed, the opening lines of “Searching for Survivors—I” appear symbolic in intent. The story is “set” in present-day Massachusetts, but begins: “Poor Henry Hudson, I miss him. It's almost as if I had been aboard the leaking Discovery myself, a cabin boy or maybe an ordinary seaman, and had been forced to decide, Which will it be, slip into line behind the callow mutineers and get the hell out of this closing, ice-booming bay and home again to dear, wet England? Or say nay and climb over the side behind the good Commodore, the gentle, overthrown master of the Discovery.” Even the symbolic associations which Banks develops rest not on the narrator's “real” experience but on his memories of a Hudson automobile which was his friend “Daryl's father's obsession” (SFS, p. 2). The first story ends with the image of “Hudson and his three loyal sailors … dragging the shallop filled with their dwindling supplies all the way across the endless, silent ice pack” (SFS, p. 5). Banks meditates on loyalty and/or human commitment as the only defense against an emotionally frigid world. Clearly, symbolic details provide most of Banks's “meaning” in this traditional sense.

But the deeper significance of the story stems from the narrative voice which transfers its horror at the prospect of isolation from the concrete automobile to the abstract explorer. The narrator feels the emotional isolation associated with the Hudson automobile, but, rather than tracing the feeling back to its concrete human source, Daryl's father, he transfers it to another symbol, Henry Hudson. This attempt to reconstruct reality in abstract terms fails. The horror remains, and the narrator's refusal to recognize its concrete origin leads him to aggravate his own sense of isolation by creating an “allegorical” fantasy of Daryl: “for a second I thought I felt lonelier than I'd ever felt before. I knew that nowadays loneliness was probably the last thing old Daryl was troubled by” (SFS, p. 4). This could point to two separate misapprehensions of Daryl. The narrative voice could be condemning Daryl as materialistic and shallow, or overestimating him as a well-adjusted citizen free from existential ennui. Whichever reading one prefers, Banks's story is not simply a “fiction” independent of reality. Its effectiveness stems from the tension between the abstract and concrete in the narrator's imagination.

Banks's attitude toward the fictional modes reflects a similar tension. Stating that “Almost all novelists today are allegorists,” Banks simultaneously praises and rejects the romantic tradition of American fiction: “A truly noble lineage, but one that in our time seems to have become increasingly irrelevant to the needs and abilities of a democratized consciousness so heightened or ‘expanded’ by information (input) as to be unable any longer to suspend disbelief. It's a blood-line gone watery thin.” Declaring his independence from this lineage, Banks embraces a distinct line of fictional development which “allows men to communicate with other men in such a way as both will be astonished by what is said about the world they live in.” Citing the examples of the early Hemingway, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac, Banks argues for a kind of personal realism: “Nothing is separate from existence, least of all art, and therefore the artist must allow himself to run the same risks in his work that he and all other men are forced to run in their lives.” Though rhetorically resembling a realistic manifesto, Banks's statement clearly defines the “risks of life” in a way which admits a full range of psychological and symbolic perils similar to those confronted by Leopold Bloom amidst the Cyclopses and Circes of Dublin.

Explaining his own “Cardinal” stories, “The Investiture” and “The Masquerade,” Banks identifies social pressures which have made most Americans, not only novelists, into allegorists. Banks comments: “What's my ‘thing on royalty’? Maybe proletarian American fascination with an image that defines Family in an archetypal way. One of the difficulties of being American is that we are stuck in a kind of historical and cultural cul-de-sac and end up describing our secular, democratic, materialist lives with religious, monarchic, idealistic images. Thus Che Guevara becomes an image we use to describe Oedipal conflicts. We seem to get our psychological realities in the most inappropriate ways—if we have a historical continuity, that's probably it.” Both the “Cardinal” and the “With Che” groups, despite their apparent lack of continuity, describe similar psychological realities. The motif of fluid identity, reflecting an underlying insecurity with an Oedipal role, pervades both sequences. The narrator in “With Che in New Hampshire” imaginatively confronts the residents of his hometown, Crawford, N.H., after a lengthy absence. He creates an image of himself as a hardened revolutionary, but Banks's style draws attention to the contrivance: “Everything I own is in the duffle bag I carry, and I own nothing that cannot be left out in the rain. I want it that way” (SFS, p. 7). Continually altering details of his own idealized physical appearance, the narrator ends the story by imagining a ritual shaving on his return to Crawford. Being shaved presents him with his own features, now unfamiliar and disconcerting, a result of his allegorizing propensity: “I was swung back down into a seated position and was allowed to peer at my face for the first time in several years. I was stunned by the familiarity of my own face, and also by the remarkable strangeness of it” (SFS, p. 15). In creating his persona, he has departed so far from his own character that he no longer recognizes himself.

After constructing a pastoral interlude for himself in “With Che at Kitty Hawk,” the narrator, obsessed with the “religious, monarchic, idealistic” image of Guevara, collapses into silence (and, by extension, death) in “With Che at the Plaza.” The image of the revolutionary monarch Che mingles with the image of the establishment monarchs Kennedy, Johnson, and Sinatra. The narrator grows confused; he fails to establish imaginative rapport with the Che figure, who dissolves into an Oedipal nightmare of “the machismo laughter of Latin American sadism” (SFS, p. 72). The narrator feels victimized by the very image which he has established as his ideal. Realizing that this symbolic destruction indicates a severe collapse of his emotional equilibrium, the narrator admits that “This Guevara thing was getting out of hand. I was beginning to wish I had never met the man” (SFS, p. 73). The absence of any human contact in the final scene of the story emphasizes the destructiveness of the narrator's commitment to abstract images which have left him in the position of a Hudson (or of Daryl or Daryl's father) without companions.

The pressure to recognize the concrete roots of symbolic conflicts culminates in “Searching for Survivors—II,” at once a love story (for the narrator Reed's brother, killed in a train wreck) and a “realistic” restatement of the emotional isolation of “Searching for Survivors—I.” “Searching for Survivors—II” stands apart from the rest of the volume in its relatively traditional present-tense-with-flashbacks narrative technique. The narrator casts little doubt on whether the events “really happened.” He has slight inclination, though Banks has made it clear that he has the power, to disrupt the reader's perception of a sequence of “real” events dominating Reed's consciousness. The death of his brother Allen crystallizes Reed's feelings of isolation, his sense that he is stranded “in a place where a war had been lost” (SFS, p. 153). Reed's loving attention to the details of his relationship with his brother, even to a piece of material which might have come from Allen's sock, provides the only real sense of “the conditions that permit continued existence.” The narrator's act is, finally, imaginative. He can no longer embrace his brother physically, but he can commit his imagination to the people who have shaped his life, rather than committing it to collapsing fantasy images of Che Guevara and Frank Sinatra. Banks writes that “What is in a man's life, tho, will be in his work.” Searching for Survivors pleads that the man not attempt to deceive himself—through uncontrolled and unrecognized allegories—about the actual contents of that life. Fiction becomes a tool for confrontation. To Banks, as to Joyce, the only hope (admittedly a desperate one) lies in reconciling the world of reality with the world of the dream.