The Confessions of an Ex-Suicide: Relenting and Recovering in Richard Ford's the Sportswriter
1990; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoWe think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison --T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland To be is just as great as perceive or tell. --Walt Whitman, Preface Leaves of Grass Richard Ford is onto something. In his third novel, The Sportswriter, he has created a new character in the American literary landscape: a happy man. Frank Bascombe may not seem fit the mold for what is often considered happiness. He is, after all, a man of losses, a man with a long list of titles beginning with ex--ex-fiction writer, ex-husband, ex-lover, ex-professor, ex-father his oldest son, Ralph. Frank's losses could embitter him, for loss and happiness are terms not commonly conjoined. Nevertheless, Ford's deft portraiture avoids bitterness and irony. Bruce Weber, writing for The New York Times Magazine, noted that The Sportswriter surprised many critics with its overarching lack of irony. In the narrator's commodious acceptance of the world's unexpected turns, it was a departure from the alienated, often nihilistic spirit that has pervaded much of America's fiction in this decade. (1) Ford's characterization of Frank asks for some apposition of happiness and loss. The terms are not mutually exclusive, but neither is their relation causal: loss does not cause happiness, and happiness does not prepare one for loss. Ford does unite the terms, however, not only by means of his unironic tone and lambent style, (2) but through the first-person narrative. Frank is the teller of his own tale. Although no longer a writer of fiction, he nevertheless narrates the events of his own life. This double reflex of the novel--a man who says he has given up fiction, yet who tells us, in a work of fiction, that he has given it up and who nevertheless recounts his story--points the importance of telling for Ford. (3) Ford sees writing as telling. In an essay written for Esquire in 1983, he relates his first encounters with the Three Kings of American literature: Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. (4) Although his readings of all three eventually came bear on his own writing, it was Faulkner who first awakened in him the power and efficacy of language. He came see that language somehow became paramount for its own sake.... When I read Absalom, Absalom! ... everything came in me.... Somehow the literal sense of all I did and didn't understand lay in the caress of those words--all of it, absolutely commensurate with life--suddenly seemed a pleasure, not a task. Before, I don't believe I'd known what made literature necessary.... In other words, the singular value of written words, and their benefit lived life, had not been impressed on me. That is, until I read Absalom, Absalom!, which, among other things, sets out testify by act the efficacy of telling, and recommend language for its powers of consolation against whatever's ailing you. (5) In part, Frank's telling of his own tale makes possible his consolation, his unique reconciliation of loss and happiness. In other words, The Sportswriter, like Absalom, Absalom!, portrays the efficacy of language, and though language could not, in the end, console Quentin Compson (he couldn't tell the whole story), it does offer Frank a handle on what's ailing him. Frank's act of telling becomes a confession. It not only discloses and acknowledges the events of his life but also reconciles him those events. Thus, unlike his counterpart in Faulkner's novel, Frank does not become a suicide. He becomes, instead, what Walker Percy might call an ex-suicide. (6) For Percy, the ex-suicide is the person for whom to be or not be becomes a true choice, where before you were stuck with be. (7) He continues: Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide. Very well. You exit. Then what? …
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