I went to the annual Eudora Welty teacher workshop Friday.
Getting there was nightmarish. Ice had gridlocked the entire city of Jackson. All roads in and all roads within were obstructed by wrecks. The dreaded "stack" where I-20 and I-59 go their separate ways was completely closed. Insanity reigned supreme with selfish motorists refusing to move out of the way of incoming emergency services. I personally sat about five miles outside of Brandon for 45 minutes, engine off, waiting for some accident I never saw any trace of to be cleared.
When I finally got to Welty House, I was late. I scurried in and took up a seat in the back. The two stories we were to have read before arriving were already under discussion. I quickly got my pen out and started filling pages of notes.
These moment where I get to be a student again are precious. I love to learn, feed on it just as much as I get nourishment from any kind of food. I don't know how people function who never take in new knowledge somehow. I always feel like my brain is like a pool, and if no new material is added, I swear I can feel it getting stagnant and brackish.
The two stories we were contrasting were "The Wanderers" by Welty and "The Dead" by Joyce. I've been on something of a Joyce kick lately (the Moderns in general, but Joyce particularly). F. got me started on the Joyce, an author I had avoided for years because of all the pretentious blather he gets in my field. I can't think of another author who has more of what I have always thought of as the "Emperor's New Clothing Syndrome" attached to his name than Joyce, by which I have heard people who quite obviously had no more idea than the man in the moon what was going on in his works loudly discussing him like they were going to get some kind of celestial brownie points for doing so. In any case, at F's urging, I decided to see what the fuss was about.
(Side note about that: He sort of had to prod me a lot, and I was fairly grumpy and grudging with my acceptance. You would think by now I would just accept what F. said and go on. He is the one who got me to listen to Dylan and at least a couple of other things I had decided that I was not going to fool with because of all the loud-sounding nothing that surrounds them. He is right about things I will like to a degree that I do not understand. I haven't reached the point of just going along with it, though. I am aware that it is a character flaw. If you try to push me toward something, you can be pretty sure I'm going to move it to the bottom of my list of priorities or refuse it altogether. I know this behaviour is hardheaded and almost certainly unwise. Can't seem to fix it, though.)
I was surprised when I liked what I was reading. There was none of the deliberately abstruse stuff I'd always heard of. The stories were engaging. I finished Dubliners quickly and moved on to Ulysses. I got about halfway through it before the semester started jumping up and down on me with its great black jackboots, so I am still plowing my way through it in doses. It requires more concentration than Dubliners, more than most works I've read in my time studying literature, and while I like that about it tremendously, at the end of a long day, I don't always have that to give.
In any case, when the conference rolled around this year and I saw the pairing of Welty and Joyce, I was pretty excited about it. I had never really thought of them together, but when I saw the titles, putting them together seemed perfectly logical. Both are acutely interested in place and how it shapes culture and the characters they present. I expected to learn a great deal and maybe figure out how to put both stories into the course syllabus I'm always in the middle of tearing apart and putting together, a little like faithful Penelope and her permanently unfinished weaving.
What I did not expect was a sharp and personal revelation.
Both stories have at their heart a trapped wanderer who has to lose what is precious to become free. There are two different reactions reflecting the drastically different world views of the two different authors behind them.
Both Welty and Joyce were themselves wanderers. Welty left Jackson for a long time for school and travel, but she had that permanent and inexplicable need to return that seems to be something we take in with the waters here in Mississippi. She came home to take care of her family when they needed her.
Joyce left Dublin, that big city that felt so small, and refused all aspects and claims of its culture and practices. He refused even to kneel at his mother's deathbed. He was constantly seeking something somewhere else, yet his writing stays eternally tied to Dublin, picking it apart piece by piece in his works. For him, there is a paralysis that settles over life in Ireland, something caused by politics, religion, family. All of it was a crushing weight that froze an individual in place, and in his stories some who are trying to escape come to a realization that they are not what they thought they were, become "sadder and wiser" because of it.
Welty, too, feels the power of place over her characters. Family ties and cultural expectations reach out and twine around her wanderers, too. She has a gently satirical eye for all the human frailty and foolishness that is a part of every community. Unlike Joyce, though, I think Welty can see that there is good mixed in with all that stuff, too. Her Wanderer, Virgie, has gone out and come back. She has given up years of her life trying to fulfill the requirements of family and cultural duty. As the oldest daughter, it's her job to take care of her mother. At the end, when all the ties of family and property and obligation fall away from her, unlike with Gabriel in "The Dead," a sense that she is going to be okay now comes. She has been changed, shaped, by all her experiences and decisions, but there is hope at the end.
And that is a critical thing. That is the thing that I kept missing in Joyce. I enjoy his stuff, but at the end of the day, I miss that glimmer of hope. Maybe it's a Mississippi thing. I see the same difference when I compare Faulkner and Hemingway. I love them both, but there is usually a comfort at the end of Faulkner that I cannot always find from Hemingway.
I have to believe that this possibility of hope and comfort *is* present if we will look for it. I think Welty gives it to us maybe in part because she comes back to a place that is probably not exactly where she wanted to be but she lives in it and makes something of it. Instead of it becoming a stagnation that destroys, for her, it becomes an exercise in seeking the good, finding it wherever it appears, the garden, her friends, the ridiculous, the beautiful, the everyday miraculous.
I want to be more like Welty. I, too, feel completely trapped here. I am a wanderer who came home, and I can feel the weight of obligations and cultural issues sitting on me like bricks on bird wings. Sometimes, it almost feels like there's not enough air to breathe. I don't want to be like Joyce, though, and just lump the baby and bathwater together as I toss it all out the window. There *is* the possibility of hope and comfort. There are lessons to be learned if I persist.
Hamlet (you knew he was showing up sooner or later, right?) says that "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." I have been so focused on all the things I do not like about being home that I am forgetting there are a great many good things here, too. I think it's time to adjust my focus. Lincoln famously said, "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Time to pick Welty's Wanderer instead.
