Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope

11. Lewis Nordan’s Southern Magic

11 Lewis Nordan’s Southern Magic Manuel Broncano Lewis Nordan’s fiction is as southern as fried catfish or hush puppies, and his literary landscape is as deeply rooted in Dixieland as Faulkner’s, Welty’s, or O’Connor’s.And yet, as is also the case with these illustrious literary progenitors , Nordan’s writing overflows the narrow confines of region to become a profound meditation on the human condition, regardless of place and time, a condition that is summed up in the refrain so often repeated in his narrative: “We are all alone in this world.” In his work, Nordan manages to transform small-town life in the Delta’s Arrow Catcher into a universal meditation on the paradoxical nature of human beings, the strangest of creatures in a world populated by strange fauna and flora, Nordan’s Delta. In this respect, Nordan is not only a southern writer but also an American writer and a world writer whose work attracts readership from very different geographical origins, as Marcel Arbeit’s and my own contributions to this volume testify. And I think it is important to insist on the universal dimension of Nordan’s oeuvre, for at times we critics can’t see the forest for the trees, and nothing may be worse for a writer than being pigeonholed in narrow and confining categories, as Nordan himself has remarked: “Almost always one knows what you mean when you say ‘southern literature.’ You usually mean grotesque and exag- Nordan’s Southern Magic 105 gerated, comic, or dealing with race or at least race relations.You almost always know what it means, and it is almost always used pejoratively. It almost always means it is only southern literature. . . . So I get defensive about calling the great writers like Faulkner or like Eudora Welty southern. . . . I think of southern literature as part of American literature” (see chapter 18 of this volume). As I will argue here, Lewis Nordan is thus not simply a southern writer, he is an American writer, and I use the term American to mean inclusive of the American continents, not just the United States, for Nordan truly belongs in the great tradition of pan-American letters that has been labeled “magical realism” or, more aptly, the “ marvelous real,” in the sense that Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier uses the latter term to refer to the distinct and unique texture of the reality to be found in the Caribbean, and by extension all over the Americas. Although I do not intend to discuss here the critical controversy about the differences between magical realism and the marvelous real, I should point out that Lewis Nordan findsCarpentier’s notion quite akin to his own perception of the relationship between reality and fiction: “The idea of the ‘marvelous realist’ strikes me as exactly right” (chapter 18). Those readers interested in the theoretical approaches to these terms will find in both Zamora and Faris’s and Schroeder’s studies ample information. I will recall an anecdote that illustrates, I think, the magical transformation that the southern landscape undergoes in Lewis Nordan’s hands: a transformation that has changed forever the locale of the Delta, at least in his readers ’ imagination. Soon after I arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, in the summer of 2005, to begin a year-long sabbatical at Ole Miss, I started asking everyone a question that had intrigued me ever since I first read Lewis Nordan, a question whose answer had eluded me, despite the many dictionaries, encyclopedias , and Web pages I had checked back in Spain. Since I didn’t want to sound like a dumb foreigner ignorant of everything about the South, I always tried to pose my question in a very indirect, matter-of-fact way, as if I took for granted that everybody knew the answer. To my surprise, that was not the case, and I thought it was perhaps because I was not asking the right people, as I was talking mostly to university people who probably were not familiar with life in the Delta. BRONCANO 106 A few weeks after my arrival, I met my admired colleague—and ever since dear friend—Charles Wilson, who was at the time director of the Center for SouthernStudies. ProfessorWilson is the editor of the Encyclopedia ofSouthernCulture , and I was convinced he was just the right one to answer my question , which was by now...