Inhabiting Contemporary Southern and Appalachian Literature: Region and Place in the Twenty-First Century

4. The Truths of William Hoffman’s Southern Appalachian Places: The Critics’ and His Own

4 The Truths of William Hoffman’s Southern Appalachian Places The Critics’ and His Own I. The Critics’ Each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio James Dickey liked to declare, “The true consciousness of the race is in the hands of the liars,” by which he meant “the artists” with their powerful capacities to invent and/or fabricate resonant archetypal artifacts that at once transcend and speak for a given cultural moment. It is an assertion that proceeds from the old controversial idea of aesthetically produced truths. Getting the dialogue going in earnest, the philosopher Kant denied that art could possess truth in general, only to complicate his argument by offering that indeed it did contain something ineffable which lay somewhere beyond or between experience and reason. Schiller and others later would take up the banner. Closer to our own time, in the twentieth century Hans-Georg Gadamer, wandering away from Kant’s position yet still dependent upon it, offered, “The work of art is the expression of a truth that cannot be reduced to what its creator actually thought in it” (95). By this time, the author had been dragged more into the equation, albeit as an ironic and peculiar kind of somnambulist variable that knows not what it does. And even now, as the philosophers and critics carry on the debate, the truths mysteriously continue to spring forth from the artists, be they earnest prophets, unconscious mediums, or outright liars. Ever since his days studying classical languages as an undergraduate World War II veteran at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia during the late 1940s, William Hoffman entertained a powerful fascination, an The Truths of William Hoffman’s Southern Appalachian Places · 87 insistent compulsion, for the truth of the powerfully constructed image and the memorably wrought word. The underpinnings of his vividly realized novels and stories, though sometimes autobiographical, seem almost to erase the presence of the authorial self altogether in allowing a work’s visceral material and action to evolve toward an end that seems not so much brought about as made to appear naturally inevitable. Ironically , however, Hoffman asserted that his idea of artistic destination in his work comes from perhaps American literature’s most notorious and gifted prevaricator, Poe, and his famous, albeit somewhat dubious, essay “The Philosophy of Composition”—that instructions-included formula for literary invention that may or may not actually have worked for Poe. Complicating matters further, not unlike Kant had for the philosophers who followed him, Hoffman informed a number of literary acquaintances and interviewers—sometimes joking, sometimes not—that his epitaph should read, “He didn’t cheat,” a reference to his claim that none of his novels or stories ever proceeded from or were fueled by a consciously forced inclination or disingenuous gimmick. That a body of work of such constant and astonishing integrity should be built in part upon what may be one of literary history’s most bogus compositional theories underscores for me both the suspect value and effect of artistic theory in general and the ongoing, unexplainable presence of the aesthetic ineffable—that strange shadow region (perhaps a making-cave, perhaps not) which lies somewhere between the talented artist, with all her well-meaning theories and conscious intentions, and the myriad unlooked-for truths of her achievement. * * * William Hoffman’s fourteenth and final published novel, Lies (2005), published precisely fifty years after his first, The Trumpet Unblown, marked a return to the primarily literary concerns of his earlier extended prose fiction, following a trilogy of more commercially oriented mystery novels: Tidewater Blood (1998), Blood and Guile (2000), and Wild Thorn (2002). Whereas buried formulas of circumstance lie at the operative heart of the trilogy, Lies is more concerned with the philosophically self-reflexive, wholly irrational mysteries of the buried and invented life: how, against a powerfully imagined backdrop of place, over the course of an existence, one adopts or is made into the identity or identities by which one comes to be known. 88 · Part II. A Matter of Context: Region and Place Like several of Hoffman’s earlier short stories and novels—most notably A Place for My Head (1960), A Walk to the River (1972), and Godfires (1985)—much of Lies takes place in a fictional projection of southside Virginia, a section of...