William Gay, Agrarianism, and Environmentalism

SARAH ROBERTSON University of the West of England William Gay, Agrarianism, and Environmentalism WILLIAM GAY’S FICTION IS WELL RECOGNIZED AS EMERGING OUT OF THE southern Gothic tradition,1 with strains of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy particularly evident throughout his writing.2 Although in his three novels, The Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2001), and Twilight (2006), Gay often struggles to free himself from the influences of these forebears, his own literary voice becomes most pronounced when matters of ecology and environmentalism come to the foreground, which situates his work alongside that of fellow contemporary writers including Ron Rash, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Pancake, and Janisse Ray. In Gay’s work these preoccupations oscillate around his fictional Tennessee town, Ackerman’s Field, and more specifically the Harrikin, an open expanse of land that skirts a number of county lines.3 Gay repeatedly returns to the Harrikin to explore the interplay between economics and ecology, exposing the devastating impacts of colonization in Appalachia. From the moment that settlers first started encroaching into the Appalachian frontier in the eighteenth century, this wave of colonization brought with it “a distinctive pattern of engagement with nature: a destructive, utilitarian and cornucopian view of the feasibility of yoking nature to economic gain” (Adams 22). Ever since, the Appalachian terrain has been ravaged for its timber, coal, and mineral resources and has seen its waterways manipulated for the construction of dams. While on the surface Gay’s fiction involves characters at war both with each other and with themselves, across both his novels and his short stories a clear engagement with environmental issues emerges. 1 See Bjerre’s “Southern Evil, Southern Violence” for an account of Gay’s Gothicism. 2 Gay talks at length about his literary influences in an interview with William Giraldi, “A World Almost Rotten.” 3 In an interview with Clay Risen, “Inventing Tennessee’s Own Yoknapatawpha County,” Gay discusses the influence of William Faulkner’s fictional county in his creation of Ackerman’s Field and the Harrikin. 360 Sarah Robertson Gay’s Tennessee has a “nightmare quality,” and while this frightful landscape owes much to his interest in the southern Gothic tradition, the Gothic qualities of his writing are decidedly politicized (The Long Home 20). Eric Savoy usefully reminds us that the Gothic is both a central and recurring theme in American literature because the United States is a place “where progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs” (167). This Gothic strain is particularly pronounced in the South, with its legacy of Native American removal, slavery, and segregation, and Gay is one of many southern writers who adds the vast destruction of southern ecosystems to this list. As Gay writes about an increasingly changing southern landscape, the question arises about the extent to which nostalgia for an earlier time emerges. Writing about Gay’s fellow Appalachian writers Ron Rash, Terry Roberts, and Charles Frazier, Zackery Vernon argues that although they complicate a reductive approach to agrarianism, they nevertheless present an Appalachian sense of place that reflects a yearning for a largely bygone Appalachia that was based more substantively on an agrarian cultural and economic platform. As a result, what sometimes transpires is a fetishization of a particular sense of place that is inevitably anachronistic. (654) It is important to consider whether Gay also falls foul of this agrarian trap. There is certainly a profound sense in Gay’s fiction that a way of life is irrevocably lost. In Provinces, when Junior Albright looks up the “cherted road. . . . all he could hear was doves calling mournful as lost souls from some smoky hollow still locked in sleep”: this reflects a mournfulness that appears across Gay’s writing (47). In an interview with Derrick Hill in 2011, Gay compares his childhood in rural Tennessee with that of his grandchildren. Gay laments that in twenty-first-century life “everything is speeded up” and that “things are different in the rural South. . . . It’s like [an] information overload. Everybody’s got computers and iPhones.” Gay is clearly nostalgic for the simpler days of his youth, but what part this sentimentalism plays in his fiction forms part of this inquiry. What is certain...