Dying Routes: Charles Wright’s Remembered Roadscapes of the US South in Transit

DANIEL CROSS TURNER Coastal Carolina University Dying Routes: Charles Wright’s Remembered Roadscapes of the US South in Transit DEMONSTRATING THAT POETRY CAN REGISTER AND CRITIQUE HISTORICAL pressures as vitally as other genres, my analysis counters what Helen Vendler has called the “disembodied ethereality” (7) of Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Charles Wright’s poetic landscapes. My argument moves beyond the by-now standard interpretations of his work as expressing an ahistorical ethos of nontranscendence. By contrast, I investigate the cultural underpinnings of Wright’s poetics of abstraction by focusing on his aesthetic remappings of Southern roadways, which reflect larger philosophicaltransitions(theturntowardaspace-conscioushistoricism) as well as socioeconomic transformations (the increasing borderlessness and transregionality of the contemporary South). In the first instance, Wright’s poems reveal a strong cartographic impulse as his texts remap highway routes that the poet himself drove and redrove during his youth growing up in east Tennessee. These poems offer abstract models of the natural and built contours that marked this subregion of the South. The workings of cartographic imagination in his verse coincide with contemporary scholarly considerations of how spatial arrangements embody historical significance. In using the landscape as an image for memory in his poetic retracings of older Southern roadways, Wright foregrounds the spatial dimension of remembrance, personal and collective, paralleling the recent theoretical argument that space is as significant as time in shaping history.CulturalcriticsincludingMichelFoucaultandEdwardSojahave emphasized the significance of “the spatiality of social life, a practical theoretical consciousness that sees the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formationandreformationofgeographicallandscapes”(Soja11).Because Wright’s poetic cartographies are always set in the past, retracing bygone highways, they reveal “a passionate sensitivity to the presence and absence of memories inscribed in space,” reflecting how “memory too 122 Daniel Cross Turner has become spatialised” (Jarvis 190). Instead of representing past events by rooting their continuing presence in the land, such contemporary cartographies point to the way that a “landscape surfaces over [its] histories” (Jarvis 37). Wright’s poetic cartographies similarly unveil a sense of memory as pure process: rather than mimetically representing the past in a Platonic sense or creatively imitating it in an Aristotelian manner, they simulate lost times in a mise en abîme of abstract and repetitive glimpses of past places. The thinning out of memory, individual but also cultural, in Wright’s textual remappings of lost highways is consonant with Pierra Nora’s assertion that, in the throes of the postindustrial information age, there is “An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear” (7), as the contemporary subject is no longer certain what moments to value, what events to commit to memory: “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). However, this very act of surfacing over the histories latent in mapped landscapes causes cultural memory to slip through the cartographic net and therefore calls us to unbury the social formations concealed in ostensibly ahistorical landscapes. Such abstract cartographies still carry the seeds of contemporaneous material conditions. Economist David Harvey defines post-World War II capitalism—known variously as late capitalism, consumer culture, or flexible accumulation—as the integration of the Fordist model of mass production and industrial infrastructure with the “postFordist” emphasis on the service industry, on conditioning consumer habits through advertising and product placement, and on more flexible sites and forms of production and distribution. These economic transitions can elide the markers of regional culture through standardized market practices. The impetusunderlyingWright’srememberedroadscapescorrespondstothe implications of contemporary time-space compression and the “spatial fix”: late capitalism’s concern with undoing and remarking spatial boundaries that are most advantageous for creating market disequilibria since, as Harvey suggests, “the inner contradictions of capitalism are expressed through the restless formation and re-formation of geographical landscapes” (150). Seen in this light, Wright’s cartographic South is an almost infinitely malleable space of unfixed value and values, a region that no longer reflects its mythology, if it ever did. 123 Dying Routes Mark Jarman provides...