Spirals of the Self: Barry Hannah’s Autobiographical Method

BRAD VICE University of West Bohemia Spirals of the Self: Barry Hannah’s Autobiographical Method THE NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER BARRY HANNAH HAS BEEN depicted as a postmodern heir to Faulkner by many critics such as Martyn Bone and a postmodern romantic by Ruth Weston; however, there is a lingering sense of insufficiency about these descriptions.1 Indeed, Hannah testifies to being a romantic in his craft essay “Mr. Brain, He Want a Song,” anthologized in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop collection The Eleventh Draft.: “I do not think process is interesting, but I believe what brought a writer to the table might be. For me, that would be romance, big and little letters, failure, and the pissed off conviction that almost everybody of my era had gotten everythingwrong”(71).This angry conviction mixed with a drive for romantic quest is palpable in Hannah’s Geronimo Rex (1972), a desultory, picaresque debut novel whose youthful protagonist seeks out romantic experience in a sublime, yet sometimes bitter, rush of sex, violence, and music. Much of Geronimo Rex is set at Hedermanserver College, a thinly veiled version of Hannah’s alma mater Mississippi College. In a 2004 interview with the Paris Review, Hannah was asked about the novels that influenced him the most in his university days. He replies: “The Sun also Rises, Catcher in the Rye, and then, best of all, Tropic of Cancer.” Critics most often compare Hannah to J. D. Salinger due to their voice-driven narratives and protagonists who tend to prevaricate. But Hannah’s considerable debt to Henry Miller as a stylist has remained unexplored. Hannah is a writer of fictions that reflect the self, and this feature of his prose has been left neglected for a long time, not only because of the theoretical enthusiasms of past decades, but also because his autobiographical stance is strikingly unusual. Like Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (1934), some of Hannah’s work does not neatly fit into the genres of fiction or memoir. Miller’s autobiographical maneuvers can help us understand Hannah’s ambitions as a writer at many junctures. 1 See Bone, Perspectives on Barry Hannah; Weston, Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic. 502 Brad Vice Reviewing Geronimo Rex in 1972 in the New Yorker, John Updike immediately identified a strong autobiographical element in the work, characterizing it as something of a derivative throwback: Geronimo Rex . . . belongs to an older tradition—the whining-adolescent novel of the fifties. . . . The major weakness of a first novel like this is its limp susceptibility to autobiographical accident; its vitality must lie not in the shaping but in the language of the telling, and here Mr. Hannah is no mean performer. His whine is full-throated. (121) The whiny adolescent fictions Updike sees as Hannah’s forbears are “Salinger’s Holden Caulfield [and] Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar . . . [who] were too savvy to believe things could ever be otherwise” (123). Hannah’s novel featuring a “caustic small-town boyhood becomes, finally, a hollow shootout, with real bullets and blood if not real reverberations. Granted, guns seem standard equipment down South” (123). Updike is amused when protagonist Harriman Monroe and his father Ode Elan Monroe fall for the same poor but attractive factory girl working the line in the family furniture business, remarking that Hannah “is nowhere better than he is in showing the complex currents ofparent-childsympathythatswirlaroundactsofovertrebellion”(124). Typical of the bildungsroman, an Oedipal psychodrama ultimately setsthegroundworkfortheprotagonist’sdevelopmentintomaturityand renunciation of adolescence. Harry loses the ability to empathize with his father’s erotic fantasies of economic power after the would-be author leaves home and goes to college. Harry becomes enthralled with the wild man, rebel Geronimo who ultimately inspires him to become a poet and live a life dedicated to art, freedom, and most likely poverty. On a trip home to visit his family, Harry has the impulse to court his classmate Layla Sink, the angelic daughter of his wealthy next-door neighbor, a family Harry’s father almost worships, but it doesn’t work out and from this point forward, Geronimo becomes Harry’s spiritual father. Harry loses interest in both the Sink millions and poor factory girls like Anne Mick, whom he...