Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic (review)

Barry Hannah used to be known as the enfant terrible of Southern letters. These days, of course, he has plenty of competition, as militants of various sorts—African American, feminist, gay activist, and so on—have exploded on the scene with sometimes angry, sometimes achingly funny diatribes and revelations. The frantic inventiveness of Hannah seems to have paved the way for some stylistic postmodern acrobatics too, so it is only apropos that we now have before us a long-overdue study of this richly gifted writer’s comic arsenal.

Weston goes at it with some sophisticated tools of her own. She’s a fine close reader, pinpointing the way Hannah doesn’t really jettison Southern literary traditions but, rather, turns them on their head. She shows how his use of biblically inflected cadences makes these new turns richly poetic but also comic, especially as he sacrilegiously fuses them with contemporary argot. Weston does especially well with her penetrating examinations of Hannah’s use of parody (particularly his riddling of clichés of Southern gothicism and his hilarious reinventions of the bildungsroman). Throughout her discussion, she draws parallels between Hannah and his predecessors and peers, displaying a wide range of reading, on both her part and Hannah’s, in the broad spectrum of Southern letters.

I also admire Weston’s consideration of Hannah’s fascination with war; like Faulkner, he never served but somehow manages to create gut-wrenching and convincing portrayals of military conflicts, from the Civil War to Vietnam. But in general, it is in her analysis of the short stories that Weston excels; her reading of “Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” perhaps Hannah’s most often cited story, offers a case in point. When she ventures to survey the broader canvases, however, she sometimes fails to do them justice. Yes, The Tennis Handsome is a mind-boggling, underappreciated postmodern masterpiece, but if you’re going to label it as such you need to explore the implications of this sometimes murky genre. Weston tends to gloss over the complications of postmodernism in favor of more traditional readings that concern figures of the hero, fisher kings, and standard modernism, rather than wading into the deeper swamp of the genre.

Similarly, the book would have been stronger if Weston had availed herself of some important new approaches to humor by such social scientists as Mahadev Apte, Christie Davies, and Victor Raskin, not to mention the work of more literary critics like Elliott Oring, Larry Mintz, Nancy Walker, or Neil Schmitz. She does bring in Bakhtin, but all too briefly, and she doesn’t really follow through after commenting on Hannah’s fiendish sense of play.

Weston succeeds in her larger aims: to offer an initial assessment of Hannah’s considerable achievement and to delineate the linguistic brilliance of the “desperate hilarity required to make a brave show” of the contemporary Southern male. One leaves the book eager to get reacquainted with Hannah’s shenanigans and to rediscover in his books, in Weston’s apt formulation, a “truth teller” who is both “raving” Lear and the fool, a dichotomy found in every human heart.