Understanding Ron Rash

Chapter 6 Burning Bright and Nothing Gold Can Stay

Chapter 6 Burning Bright and Nothing Gold Can Stay Between 2010 and 2013, Rash published four books, two of them collections of short stories: Burning Bright (2010), which won the international Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, and Nothing Gold Can Stay (2013), which Janet Maslin in her review for the New York Times called Rash’s “best book since his 2008 Serena.”1 Like Chemistry and Other Stories, both of these volumes demonstrate a range of characters, situations, and themes evincing the fertility of Rash’s imagination. Yet the collections also reveal a clear continuity with the fictional world he has been fleshing out over the course of his career, as most of the stories are set in the mountains of western North Carolina and several draw their inspiration from poems that appeared a decade or so earlier in Among the Believers and Raising the Dead. Two of the stories are likewise linked to the novels Saints at the River and The World Made Straight. Such actual place-names as Boone and Marshall, Canton, Sylva, and Bryson City occur regularly in these stories, as does the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The temporal settings here extend from the Civil War to the present, with both books’ initial stories set in the past, as if to emphasize the crucial role consciousness of history plays in Rash’s work. These stories, in their concision of language and compression of form, as well as in their focus on key dramatic incidents in the characters’ lives, confirm their author’s increasing mastery of this genre. Burning Bright, dedicated to Rash’s mother, consists of twelve stories divided into two numbered parts of six stories each, a symmetrical structure that may owe something to the William Blake poem “The Tyger,” from which Rash takes the book’s title. In Blake’s poem both the opening and closing stanzas begin with the line “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,” and both stanzas burning bright and nothing gold can staY 105 conclude by referring to that animal’s “fearful symmetry.”2 “The Tyger” comes from Blake’s sequence Songs of Experience and raises questions about the power that created so fierce and potentially deadly a creature. Unlike its counterpart, “The Lamb,” in Blake’s Songs of Innocence, a poem whose second stanza answers the questions posed in the first, “The Tyger” is composed entirely of questions, ending with the query “What immortal hand or eye / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” Rash’s choice of title for his book thus alludes to what philosophers and theologians call the problem of evil; at the same time, however, that title allows Rash to evoke more positive images and associations of fire and brightness. As a source of life-sustaining heat, fire is essential to human well-being, and the light produced by fire can bring knowledge and illumination. But fire can also be utterly destructive. The fire imagery that helps to unify this volume represents, then, the duality of human identity and experience, its capacity for both good and evil. Evil and suffering befall many of the characters in Burning Bright, sometimes evil willingly embraced, sometimes evil inflicted upon them—whether by others, by economic circumstances, or by the very fact of human finitude. Two of the stories in part 1, for example, focus on the consequences of meth addiction for family members of those addicted. At times Rash details the rationalizations people use to justify morally dubious choices, as in “Dead Confederates” and “Into the Gorge.” At other times he highlights the virtues of compassion and hope amid the suffering to which evil gives rise, as he does in the opening story, “Hard Times,” one of the book’s finest achievements. Although set on a farm in the 1930s during the Great Depression, “Hard Times” speaks powerfully to the economic problems of the Great Recession in the twenty-first century, especially those of unemployment, foreclosure, and hunger. Inspired by Rash’s earlier poem “Madison County: 1934,” the story centers on an incident of egg-stealing, the thief originally believed to be a snake but turning out to be a neighbor’s child.3 Whereas the poem has just sixteen lines, the story runs to sixteen pages and covers a three-day period in the characters’ lives. Shifting the setting from the poem’s Madison County to Watauga County, Rash offers a chilling account of the poverty of the Hartleys as it is seen by Edna and Jacob, the owners of...