Nature’s Eloquent Speech in Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods

TERRY GIFFORD Bath Spa University, UK and Universidad de Alicante, Spain Nature’s Eloquent Speech in Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods. CHARLES FRAZIER’S COMPLETE OEUVRE CONSISTS OF THREE VERY DIFFERENT novels, although each one is a historical novel set largely in western North Carolina. The narrative of each novel turns upon the ability of humans to read, survive, and in some sense, be at home, not just in an intimately known land, but in the larger natural world that includes, through the night sky of turning star systems and phases of the moon, the cosmos itself. The novels are set in distinctly different periods and cultures, whilst Frazier’s narrative voice shifts from that of a biblically inflected third person in the first, to a personalized fatalistic character in the second, to something closer to that of the psychological thriller writer in the third. The narrator of the Civil War novel Cold Mountain (1997) clearly bears the influence of the voice and allegorical ambition of Cormac McCarthy.1 The narrator of Thirteen Moons (2006) is Will Cooper, a surprisingly non-judgmental, personalized voice based upon William Holland Thomas , a nineteenth-century North Carolinian who was adopted by the Cherokee Nation and attempted to negotiate against their removal from the mountains of North Carolina to the plains of Oklahoma via the Trail of Tears. Nightwoods (2011), the shortest of Frazier’s novels, is narrated from inside the heads of its central characters in a 1950s backwoods, plot-driven thriller.2 These shifts in narrative voice arguably represent an artistic progression. At times in Cold Mountain, the author’s voice can be heard speaking too strongly 1 Cold Mountain also exhibits at least four significant differences from McCarthy’s work; see “Tests of Character in Cold Mountain ” (Gifford, Reconnecting 133-40). 2 Random House reportedly lost $5.5 million on its $8 million advance for the follow-up novel to Cold Mountain, since Thirteen Moons sold only half of its initial print-run. This must have focused Frazier’s mind as he considered the form and mode of his third novel (“Books”). 566 Terry Gifford through the novel’s narrator.3 Will Cooper, in Thirteen Moons, has the author trapped in a pessimistic fatalism from which he can finally find no escape. Only in Nightwoods does the author achieve the unity of convincing and coherent psychological perspectives of individual characters that he had sought in the earlier two novels. But there are other voices speaking from the land—its organic inhabitants, the weather and the skies. Each of Frazier’s narrators also evokes the voice of localized nature and, indeed, the larger voice of the cycle of the seasons. In an earlier article on Cold Mountain, I argue that Inman’s ability to read the terrain and attend to the voice of nature—the “signs and wonders” learned from his Cherokee friend Swimmer—is, he knows, the test of his character as he undertakes the journey that “will be the axle of my life” (Gifford, Reconnecting 137; Frazier, Cold Mountain 55). Just as Inman learned how to read the bioregional signs of nature from Swimmer, a lesson that Ada learns from Ruby, Will Cooper in the second novel absorbs Cherokee wisdom from Bear, his adoptive father figure. Throughout the novel, the narrator indicates the seasons by the thirteen moons of the Cherokee year. A long Cherokee cultural tradition of listening to the changing voices of the seasons informs the narrator’s sense of his own life’s seasons. But early in the novel, the narrator, as he remembers from the perspective of old age the early days of his getting to know Bear and his people, implicates the whole society in the loss of these skills: Many of them were busy taking up white ways of life that baffled them. With every succeeding retreat of the Nation and every incursion of America, the old ways withdrew a step farther into the mountains, deeper up the dark coves and tree-tunneled creeks. It was not any kind of original people left. No wild Indians at all, and little raw wilderness. They were damaged people, and they lived in a broken world like everybody...