Magical Realism and the Mississippi Delta
from the The Seventeenth Southern Writers Symposium
Art Taylor, George Mason University
Art Taylor, George Mason University
Abstract:
Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle draws upon historical
concerns rising from the South's experience of Civil War and Reconstruction, but
magical realism provided him, as white southerner, with perhaps a most powerful
way to transform the past and even to rewrite history without denying the brutality
of known facts.
Art Taylor is a native of Richlands, NC. A graduate of Yale University, he also holds an M.A. in English/creative writing from N.C. State University and is currently enrolled in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University. His literary criticism has been published in The Armchair Detective, Murderous Intent, North Carolina Literary Review and The Oxford American. His short fiction has appeared in regional and national publications ranging from the Raleigh News and Observer's "Sunday Reader" section to the North American Review.
Art Taylor is a native of Richlands, NC. A graduate of Yale University, he also holds an M.A. in English/creative writing from N.C. State University and is currently enrolled in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University. His literary criticism has been published in The Armchair Detective, Murderous Intent, North Carolina Literary Review and The Oxford American. His short fiction has appeared in regional and national publications ranging from the Raleigh News and Observer's "Sunday Reader" section to the North American Review.
Essay Sections:
Introduction |
Magical Realism | Magical Realism in Wolf Whistle
| Conclusion | Southern Writers Symposium
Introduction:
After the 1993 publication of his novel Wolf Whistle, inspired by the 1955 lynching of
Emmett Till, Lewis Nordan penned an essay for The Oxford American reflecting on his
fictionalized treatment of the murder: "…the book I produced was a complete surprise to me,"
he wrote. "It was not the Emmett Till story but a phantasmagoria based upon history's
broadest outlines…. Animals spoke, nature wept, dead eyes saw, monsters and angels
roamed the Delta flatscape on some other planet…. I had become a magical realist, and was
grateful to Latin America for making me possible" ("Making" 76).
Elsewhere in the essay, Nordan discusses his long-time obsession with the Till case — from the time of the murder itself, when he was a fifteen-year-old boy living in the same county as the killers (his family actually knew members of Roy Bryant's and J.W. Milam's family), through his time in the Navy and in college, and well into his adulthood and career as a novelist. He recognizes his own palpable sense of guilt about the crime — "I believed that by race and geography I myself was somehow implicated" — and admits to having smiled at locker room jokes about the murdered boy and then to envying the one classmate brave enough to say, "I'm for the nigger. It ain't right. Kill a boy for that. I don't care what color he is." Assessing himself in the wake of those memories, Nordan recognizes: "For thirty-eight years I have wished I had been the boy who spoke those courageous words" (75-76).
In the midst of these facts, then, and given Nordan's own statement elsewhere that "I grew up in Mississippi, wrote all my books about Mississippi" (Personal), one might reasonably ask why Nordan credited "Latin America" with making him "possible."
Elsewhere in the essay, Nordan discusses his long-time obsession with the Till case — from the time of the murder itself, when he was a fifteen-year-old boy living in the same county as the killers (his family actually knew members of Roy Bryant's and J.W. Milam's family), through his time in the Navy and in college, and well into his adulthood and career as a novelist. He recognizes his own palpable sense of guilt about the crime — "I believed that by race and geography I myself was somehow implicated" — and admits to having smiled at locker room jokes about the murdered boy and then to envying the one classmate brave enough to say, "I'm for the nigger. It ain't right. Kill a boy for that. I don't care what color he is." Assessing himself in the wake of those memories, Nordan recognizes: "For thirty-eight years I have wished I had been the boy who spoke those courageous words" (75-76).
In the midst of these facts, then, and given Nordan's own statement elsewhere that "I grew up in Mississippi, wrote all my books about Mississippi" (Personal), one might reasonably ask why Nordan credited "Latin America" with making him "possible."
Essay Sections:
Introduction |
Magical Realism | Magical Realism in Wolf Whistle
| Conclusion | Southern Writers Symposium
