Experimentation and Versatility: Fred Chappell's Fiction

FEATURED AUTHOR—FRED CHAPPELL Experimentation and Versatility: Fred Chappeirs Fiction___________________ Casey Clabough NORMAN MAILER MAINTAINS THAT WRITERS, or at least male writers, are like pole-vaulters: "The man who wins is the man who jumps the highest without knocking off the bar. And a man who clears the stick with precise form but eighteen inches below the record commands less of our attention" (Cannibals and Christians, p. 202). If Mailer had his way and writers generally were viewed as track and field competitors, Chappell might very well be described as a decathlete, competing not only in pole-vaulting, but in numerous other events with equal skill and success—novels, stories, poems, essays, reviews, teaching, and so on. Over the past forty years Chappell has published hundreds of reviews, several celebrated books of poetry, two collections of literary criticism, eight novels (the first in 1963 and most recent in 1999) and two collections of short stories (with a third in progress). Despite some notable essays, criticism on Chappell's work has been slow to develop although it has been picking up steam of late, as evinced by this issue of Appalachian Heritage as well as the recent appearance of valuable booklength scholarship on his work. As early as 1989, Rita Quillen's Looking for Native Ground focused on Chappell and three other regional poets. Picking up the torch eight years later, Patrick Bizzaro's edited retrospective collection of essays, Dream Garden (1997), contains provocative samples of scholarship on Chappell's poetry from several decades, constituting an interesting history of Chappell criticism while also celebrating his verse in the present. Most recently, John Lang's Understanding Fred Chappell (2000) serves as a compelling introduction to his work as a whole, while also containing adroit biographical information about the Canton, North Carolina, native, who has taught throughouthis career at the University ofNorth Carolina at Greensboro. When Chappell humorously introduces a fictional projection of himself in "Snakehandling" (1997)— which appeared in Pete & Shirley: The Great Tar Heel Novel—he relates, "The bleary-eyed instructor poured words—'Aristotle/ 'syllabic achronicity/ 'Cthulhu/ 'Homeric simile/ 'grandmother'—upon his bemused audience like a man 27 slopping Pulitzer Prize-winning hogs" (31). Although Chappell's tone is comically self-mocking, his description of the fictional Chappell's random, pedagogical language points to the range of both his learning and art—Aristotle and Homeric simile (his classical education and literary applications of it), syllabic achronicity (the complexity of his aesthetic forms), Cthulhu (a name from H. P. Lovecraft, reflecting his fondness for fantasy and science fiction), and grandmother (his use of autobiographical, Appalachian materials). Not unlike the precarious relationship between the fictional Chappell and his bewildered writing students in "Snakehandling," considering Chappell's wide-ranging fiction runs the risk of "bemusing" the scholar and thus resists most ready-made, restrictive, and reductive scholarly categorizations of his work. Chappell's unique, experimental approach to writing fiction manifests itself in several respects. For example, in an interview from the early 1980s he speaks of the intricate symbolic structures of his early novels: Well, the novels are symbolic, I suppose. But not in the ordinary way that novels are symbolic, not like a novel by Mr. Faulkner or a novel by Thomas Pynchon, for example. But more like a poem's symbolism in which the intellectual structure is outside and behind, and the narrative takes place, I hope in its own terms. And so that you can figure out the novel, if you have a little information, you can figure out symbolic structures, the other symbolic structures; but you don't need it to enjoy the book. ("Flying by Night: An Early Interview with Fred Chappell by David Paul Ragan. North Carolina Literary Review 7: 1998. p. 112) Reluctant to allow his symbolic structures to dominate his books' literalnarratives, Chappell attempts to separate them from the narrative, allowing the reader the choice of either ignoring them or applying them poetically as a means of enriching the book's meaning. Chappell's distinctive use of symbolic frameworks evokes the term "mysticism," as employed byhis favorite science fiction writer, Olaf Stapledon: "[I]t is an immediate acquaintance with the hidden essence of a 'reality' which...