"Tragic and Meaningful to an Insane Degree": Barry Hannah
1982; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
ResumoAccording to Cleveland, Mississippi, Bolivar Commercial, August 4, 1982, Barry Hannah is leaving a successful eight month stint as writer-in-residence at University of Mississippi to serve as writer-in-residence at University of Montana. He has finished another novel, Tennis Handsome, about a Vicksburg tennis pro, to be published in spring of 1983, and is collaborating with movie director Robert Altman on a novella/ screenplay called Power and Light, a story of four lady hardhats in Seattle. After fall semester at Missoula, Hannah hopes to return to Old Miss permanently. This level of activity is not unusual Hannah; thirty-nine year old author has moved swiftly from one publishing success to next. His first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972), was nominated National Book Award, and his latest, Ray (1980), has been both a commercial and a critical triumph, and went immediately not just into paperback but into prestigious Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series, taking its place among such novels as Saul Bellow's Seize Day. Hannah is not a writer who has been ignored or who needs to be brought to light. Benjamin DeMott in New York Times Book Review (November 16, 1980) calls Ray: the funniest, weirdest, soul-happiest work of fiction by a genuinely young American author that I've read in a long while, ordinary reviewerese is no help in explaining why. You need a fresh lingo to do justice to this much magic, mystery and hilarity. You need new strategies, new arguments, new adjectives, new everything. DeMott ends his review, like Ed Sullivan of American letters, introducing, for first time on our stage, Elvis Presley of contemporary fiction: Will you welcome, please, a sensational new American comic writer, one with poetry in his pulses, witty hot wires in his sentences and, so I'll swear, sunny love every single Jack and Jill of us in his sly and larking heart? While DeMott's praise may seem excessive, he is not alone. Hannah has received a generally strong reception, well deserved, he is a fresh and talented writer. Rather than trying to recreate some traditional Southern literary landscape, Hannah writes of South he knows, South of suburbs and of sixties and seventies. Hannah, writing in Mississippi and Alabama, knows that his own life and lives around him are fit subject art. His characters are, obviously enough, rarely planters or sharecroppers. They are people who would be comfortable in a Walker Percy novel, but not in one by Erskine Caldwell or Margaret Mitchell. These are denizens of small cities, Tuscaloosas, Chattanoogas, and Jacksons. They are sometimes students, physicians or country club types, sometimes hairdressers or plant managers. These are Sunbelt characters, not Old South or New South people. Hannah brings to this relatively unused material an essentially comic, fragmented, though not negative or nihilistic point of view, and his singular, indelible, narrative voice. Hannah's split vision, his inherent, implicit belief that world is chaos, disconnected, that cause and effect are dead and that effort will not bring forth fruit, are all obvious in Ray, but they were there all time, becoming more and more obvious in each book. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared in The Crack-up that the natural state of sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. For Hannah, typical state of adults is one of violence or constant pain or embarrassment or lingering humiliation. In a Hannah story, after protagonist has picked up girl and gotten her drunk and is at last about to seduce her, she vomits on him and her brother shows up to beat him to a pulp. There is very little Rhett Butler in a Hannah hero. His heroes are usually fringe types, simultaneously envious and contemptuous of boys in their classes voted most popular or most likely to succeed. …
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