Homewords: A Book of Tennessee Writers (review)

Book Reviews Homewords: A Book of Tennessee Writers, Douglas Paschall and Alice Swanson, editors. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Cloth, $27.50; paperback , $12.95. In American Literature and Christian Doctrine Randall Stewart, a distinguished teacher and scholar from Tennessee, identified two traditions in American Uterature, the Christian and the romantic. Similarly, in The Art ofD. H. Lawrence Keith Sagar points to two forms of art using essentially the same terms. One type, the Christian (primarily Catholic), he says is based upon "the assumption that life is chaotic and meaningless until it is transformed by art" while the other, which Sagar calls pagan or pantheistic, finds life as "already meaningful and art as a process of discovery, revelation and praise." To the credit of Douglas Paschall and the editorial board, Homewords: A Book of Tennessee Writers contains both types in abundance. Sixty-two writers are included, many of them from East Tennessee and Southern Appalachia. It is well that the volume is versatile since the fear that one normally has with such a book is that it will fall predominantly into the category of revelation and praise. In the case of Homewords the danger was even enhanced by the very theme of the occasion , the idea of "home" as in "homecoming and "homewords." There is something about the word "home" itself that makes us want to throw caution to the winds, something in the sound that echoes the universal thrum of "Aum," "I Am," "womb," and "tomb." Who among us when called upon to honor our very earth mother in this day and age would not say, "Oh, Lordy, I do want to go home," and then write or select something expressive of that heartfelt wish? Homewords has not by any means been carried away by the occasion (at least a semi-political one, some say) it helps to celebrate. There is much sentiment in the book to be sure, but there is also considerable irony, as seen in the literature of the "Hard No." The "Nay-sayer," says Fiedler in No! In Thunder, looks into the void and with the form of his or her art provides a delight that does not deny horror but lives at its intolerable heart. Indeed, the volume opens with a classic nay-saying story, "Jericho, Jericho, Jericho" by Andrew Lytle, in which the central character, "Miss Kate" or "Mammy" stares into the biggest void of all, death itself. Homewords ends with another masterful story of death in Madison Smartt Bell's "The Day I Shot My Dog" which should be included in every freshman textbook in the land as a model of clarity and power. Along the way there are other gems emitting the hard, black light of focused consciousness . Among these are pieces by Peter Taylor, Robert Drake, Cormac McCarthy, and Leigh Allison Wilson, a Rogersville native who won the 1983 Flannery Award for Short Fiction. It is easy to see why, since her story, "The Snipe Hunters," like Taylor's and Drake's, makes effective use of mystery and manners, the mystery coming from the symbol of the snipe hole which provides both meaning and delight. Thus is the amorphousness of life (in Tennessee or anywhere else) transformed into the significance by form or art. As would be expected, examples of discovery abound. Wilma Dykeman even uses the Shortia, a delicate mountain plant, as a symbol of the idea. Indeed, the spirit of exploration, Dykeman seems to say, may lead to discovery of dark chapters in the history of one's own region, as she illustrates in the retelling of Private John G. Burnette's story of the removal of the Cherokee Indians. Marilou Awiakta also points to this sad episode in "Baring the Atom's Mother Heart," a revelation on the 64 meaning of Oak Ridge in the context of Hiroshima and a Cherokee ancestry. Both Dykeman and Awiakta through the symbol of the white deer show what we have lost and through the strong woman motif what we now need to nurture, else we lose everything. Other pieces that help us to discover or rediscover what a bloody and contested ground Tennessee has been are Shelby Foote...