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9. The “Idea of Order” in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi: Scapegoating and Redemption in The Sharpshooter Blues
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9 The “Idea of Order” in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi Scapegoating and Redemption in The Sharpshooter Blues Roberta S. Maguire A simple summary of Lewis Nordan’s TheSharpshooter Blues (1995) suggests that the novel is one depressing book. Set inArrowCatcher, Mississippi, over several days one summer in the late 1950s, it develops a number of interlocking stories, all finally shaped by a central event—the suicide of Hydro Raney, a young man of about twenty who, as the result of having been born with water on the brain, has a childlike simplicity and directness. Utterly guileless, Hydro is driven to suicide because he cannot unburden himself: aside from the town mortician, none of the responsible adults can believe that he was the one who shot and killed two out-of-town criminals—the “lovely children,” Hydro’s father calls them—who showed up at the William Tell Grocery after hours. Instead, prompted in part by a little boy’s efforts to frame another— efforts certainly intended to punish his mother’s adulterous lover—the townspeople seize on short but beautiful nineteen-year-old Morgan as the sharpshooter until their error is made plain to them through Hydro’s suicide. The novel concludes with the memorial service and wake for Hydro, attended by MAGUIRE 72 just about everyone in town but Morgan and Aunt Lily, the hoodoo woman who raised him, who are “barreling on down the road . . . in Morgan’s raggedy old truck” (291), on their way to make a new life in Texas. What that summary leaves out are several elements that redeem the story ’s undeniable sadness: the customary generosity with which Nordan draws his characters, the wonderful humor interspersed throughout the book, and Ramon Fernandez. It is this last element—and all that it points to—that helps to make Sharpshooter Blues not only a redemptive text but, to my mind, one of Nordan’s most nuanced and profound. Ramon Fernandez, aside from being Nordan’s handsome, devilish friend in Boy with Loaded Gun, is in Sharpshooter Blues Hydro’s given name—given to him by his mother, who died shortly after his birth. He is also an apparition in the form of a most attractive Mexican young man seen after Hydro’s suicide at various points and in different locations by Mr. Raney, Hydro’s father; Morgan, the “sharpshooter”; and Louis McNaughton, the little boy who blamed Morgan for the shooting.The apparition is Hydro transformed and redeemed—the swollen head is gone and he finally has the physical self to match his essence. But since we learn that Hydro’s mother “was bad to read poetry” and so got her son’s name “out of a poem” (225), we know that Ramon Fernandez is also an allusion to Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where the name is abruptly interjected at the start of the last stanza. Twice late in the novel, once in chapter 13 in Mr. Raney’s voice and once in chapter 15 in the narrator ’s, we get the opening line of that stanza: “Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know.” IfStevens’s poem is, as its title indicates, about “the idea of order,” so, too, is The Sharpshooter Blues. Well before writing the novel—in fact, well before he turned to fiction writing—Nordan registered his interest in that idea, as Edward J. Dupuy discovered when he read this in Nordan’s 1973 dissertation on Shakespeare: “At the center of [our] existence is the need to arrange” (qtd. in “Music, Mirrors, and Mermaids” 47). So I am using Stevens’s poem as a jumping-off point, moving now to one of his contemporaries and philosophical allies, Kenneth Burke, who in his own work regularly explores that human compulsion to create ideas of order and then ward off the correspond- [3.92.96.247] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:27 GMT) “Idea of Order” in Arrow Catcher 73 ing disorder such ideas “necessarily imply” (Rhetoric 249).While Nordan may not have encountered much of Burke in his studies, there is a certain sympathy between the two men, a sympathy not unlike that between Burke and Stevens, which James Longenbach draws out in his 1991 study, WallaceStevens :The PlainSense ofThings. My focus is on Burke the semiotician—his ideas regarding how signs and symbols function in language. And while Nordan tends to leave such theorizing to others (he has explained how the roles of critic/theorist and...