The Eye That Is Language

A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty

Danièle Pitavy-Souques, Pearl Amelia McHaney

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496840608
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty's view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty's fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty's work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty's masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as "A Curtain of Green, " "Flowers for Marjorie, " "Old Mr. Marblehall, " "A Still Moment, " "Livvie, " "Circe, " "Kin, " and The Optimist's Daughter, One Writer's Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include "Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples " (1979), "A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty's brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal. Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques's European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty's narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

Chapter 1

TECHNIQUE AS MYTH

The Structure of The Golden Apples (1979)

Tu remarquas, on n’écrit pas, lumineusement, sur champ obscur, l’alphabet des astres, seul, ainsi s’inique, ébauché ou interrompu; l’homme poursuit noir sur blanc.¹

— MALLARMÉ

Because Eudora Welty herself has suggested that The Golden Apples was more than just another collection of short stories,² the structural unity of the book has puzzled critics over the years. Nearly all the articles dealing with The Golden Apples as a whole tackle the problem and attempt to solve it by establishing close parallels between (mostly) Greek mythology and the various characters and incidents in the book.³ Whether they underline the recurrent myths that can be traced in the different stories or organize all mythical allusions into echoes and leitmotiv that weave a symphonic web in the book, these critical approaches remain at the surface of the work. No doubt, the task is not easy, perhaps chiefly because of the looseness of the book. It is composed of seven stories, each a brilliant experiment in technique, and of several different myths—Celtic as well as Greek—collected under a title that seems to introduce yet another myth. The very multiplicity of these mythic readings and the lack of a strong unifying device, such as one finds in Ulysses, have marred all attempts at finding a satisfactory structure. Could not then a different approach be used that would do full justice not only to this complex work but to the artist herself who of her generation is perhaps the most deeply aware of her art?

Content cannot be dissociated from form; the text should be analyzed as a whole. Indeed, its narrative functioning deserves the closest attention since it alone shows the author’s intentions. Just as important is the examination of any infraction of the norms established by the work itself, as these infractions help evaluate the aesthetic success of the book and give clues that indicate the presence of a less obvious narrative system. The study of the structure of The Golden Apples should thus be based on the narration as well as the fiction and take into account the apparent infractions of its narrative code. Only through such study can one perceive the essential function of myth in the book, thence the deeper meaning of Welty’s work.

In The Golden Apples, Welty very deliberately used what T. S. Eliot called “the mythical method” in his 1923 Dial review of Ulysses: “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious. It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious” (177–78). Myth here is technique, imposed on the world of action, shaping our perception and reaction to it. Eliot’s comment is further relevant because he gives credit to Yeats for adumbrating this technique and also mentions the horoscopes. Both are directly related to the technique used in The Golden Apples. That Eudora Welty intended to experiment with the mythical method in a sustained and deliberate way is indicated by the genesis of her work. The first story of the cycle, “June Recital,” was originally called “The Golden Apples”⁴ and appeared in Harper’s Bazaar under this title, partly inspired by “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Yeats’s poem was extensively quoted in the first version. This nucleus story was thus under the double parentage of Yeats and Greek myth. Later, it was renamed, and the mythical title was transferred to designate the collection as a whole—a unique instance in Welty’s work, for the three other collections bear the name of one story. As she worked on the various stories of The Golden Apples, she realized, as she said, she was “writing about the same people” (“‘The Interior’” 43).

The futility of decoding the characters and events of the book according to a strict mythological system becomes evident from the first story. The warning is there, in the title itself, which functions as a signal to indicate a reality beyond the events in the story. “Shower of Gold” heralds the birth of Perseus to any cultivated reader. But on what level? If we remain on the purely factual level, we read in the story nothing more than the birth of the MacLain twins, Randall and Eugene, not the clandestine birth of an only son. And the “quotation” in the text is scant; the word gold is not even mentioned: “She looked like more than only the news had come over her. It was like a shower of something had struck her, like she’d been caught out in something bright” (322). Moreover, this title appears as an infraction of the functioning of the story, which rests entirely on the “truth” of King MacLain’s visit to his wife on Halloween. Indeed, this title has nothing to do with the fiction if we except the incomplete allusion. (It functions, of course, as a mythical clue of King MacLain, whom we are thus invited to see as the modern counterpart of Zeus. But this belongs to the surface level of the book; story after story, we are told of the amorous exploits of the character.) We must therefore look elsewhere for the function of the title, beyond the single short story, considering this first piece of narrative as part of a whole, and see whether other allusions to Perseus occur in the book.

The hero reappears, again without being named, in the fourth story, “Moon Lake.” The parallel is explicit enough never to have left critics in doubt as to the equation of Loch Morrison’s bringing Easter back to life after she has fallen into the lake with Perseus’s rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster. The reference is quite precise, developed at length and confirmed, so to speak, by the vision of Loch, alone and enjoying his triumph outside his tent as Perseus did after his first victory. But here again, Perseus and Andromeda and their love affair have no part in the plot of the story. What is most impressive is the strong sexual coloration of the life-saving process. We are once more aware that the significance of this episode is on a second level of reality.

Finally, Perseus’s slaying Medusa is the object of Virgie Rainey’s long meditation in “The Wanderers.” The meditation functions no more directly in this narrative than in the other two stories. It should be noted, however, that Virgie’s interpretation is rather unorthodox and shakes the commonly accepted views of the myth:

Miss Eckhart had had among the pictures from Europe on her walls a certain threatening one. It hung over the dictionary, dark as the book. It showed Perseus with the head of the Medusa. “The same thing as Siegfried and the Dragon,” Miss Eckhart had occasionally said, as if explaining second-best. [ … ] [Virgie] saw the stroke of the sword in three moments, not one. In the three was the damnation—no, only the secret, unhurting because not caring in itself—beyond the beauty and the sword’s stroke and the terror lay their existence in time—far out and endless, a constellation which the heart could read over many a night.” (554, 554–55)

At this stage, we can draw two conclusions. The myth of Perseus is undoubtedly present in The Golden Apples, and Welty’s use of this myth is highly deliberate, creative. There is another technical difficulty to solve before examining more closely the function of the myth of Perseus: the title of the collection itself.

The quest for the golden apples is very distantly linked to the myth of Perseus—some late accretions, which critics bent on finding thematic unity have hunted for and made the most of. But generally speaking, no one connects Perseus with the golden apples (though he is Heracles’s ancestor). Since the title “Shower of Gold” functions symbolically, we may infer that the only other title with a mythical connotation, the general title of the collection, functions in the same way: it would thus refer not to a definite search but to any search. The text corroborates this hypothesis. The title “Golden Apples” was first given to “June Recital,” which originally included the full last stanza of Yeats’s poem, with the reference to “The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun” (Welty, “The Golden Apples” 320; Yeats 150). When Eudora Welty revised the story, she eliminated the too explicit lines, favoring indirectness to pedantry, the more refined method of distant allusion to a labored exercise in name dropping. In fact, she kept the spirit rather than the letter of the poem. And what quest had Yeats in mind? Several times he pointed out the duality in the myth and legends about those who live in the waters and can take any shape like “the little silver trout” which became “a glimmering girl”: “The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams” (Yeats 149, 802).⁵

Indeed, the search for the apples provides a loose thematic link between the different short stories. By their Greek and Celtic parentage, the golden fruit represent the artist’s attempt at showing the universality of myth— human desire and longing, at bringing about a new awareness of the fundamental ambivalence of man through a comparison between several worlds.⁶ The brilliant fabric of mythological names and echoes that adorns the surface of the text functions in this same way. Welty’s use of this technical device is quite original; it is not coincidence or influence but technique. She uses mythology as deliberate “quotations” from Yeats, Joyce, or T. S. Eliot, with the resulting effect of implying that she is writing about universal passions as eternal as art and the created world itself. (Another way of doing it is to project what takes place on earth into the stars and constellations, whose names are derived from the myth, what T. S. Eliot implied when he mentioned the horoscope.) This effect of quotation is a means of guaranteeing the truth of her fiction, just as, paradoxically, this truth is warranted at the other end, the realistic end, by the list of the characters printed at the beginning of the book. What is more, these highly sophisticated literary “quotations” are a means of suggesting that literature is itself the endless repetition of the same stories. Welty’s attitude becomes reflexive, just as literature, she seems to suggest, is a mirror. She questions her art in the very moment she is creating it. Somehow, those “quotations” are the play within the play, contesting the story and the genre while functioning within it. They constitute the mirror that Welty holds to her fiction. Perseus does nothing else: the writer is Perseus. To the point here is Reynolds Price’s superb definition of the artist—not unconnected with The Golden Apples, it seems, as it appears in an essay significantly entitled “Dodging Apples”: “The central myth of the artist is surely no Narcissus but Perseus—with the artist in all roles, Perseus, and Medusa and the mirror-shield” (8). Here, brilliantly summed up, are indeed the elements of the myth—Perseus, Medusa, and the mirror-shield.

The center of this trinity is fascination—Medusa’s deadly gaze, or rather fascination defeated, overcome by another gaze—Perseus’s in the mirror. At the mythic as well as the symbolic level, fascination means death. At the level of human relations, it refers to that spell, that abus de pouvoir [abuse of power] by which we tend to objectify the Other, to make him lose his identity and become a thing, an object. In his phenomenological study of gaze in L’Etre et le Néant,⁷ Sartre was perhaps the first to show that fascination is central to the problem of the gaze and to the relation of one being to another. Nearly every form of meaningful relation to the Other derives from fascination. Prestige likewise reverses the relation of subject-object. It forces the admirer to lose his identity and wish to identify with the object of his admiration. Emptied of his substance, drained of his blood, the contemplator dies, so to speak. There is also the reverse form of fascination, shame, which is self-loathing. Sartre concludes at the end of his chapter on gaze that, beyond the irreconcilable duality of our relation to the Other, there is the body, apprehended as the purely contingent presence of the Other. This apprehension is a particular type of nausea. We can see how seduction and the wish to possess the body of the Other are, eventually, another form of fascination with one’s own death, what Sartre calls the obscene. That the myth has strong sexual connotation is evident when we look at its development. Originally, Gorgo was an ugly creature with hissing snakes as hair; she later became a once beautiful woman turned ugly by Hera’s jealousy; at the Hellenistic period, she was simply a beautiful young maid whose gaze was deadly.

All the complexity of feelings based on fascination, tearing man between attraction and repulsion, loving and loathing, fulfillment and destruction inform the treatment of human relations in The Golden Apples. There is the fascination for an unworthy type—King MacLain, a rascal who brazenly defies all the social and moral conventions in “Shower of Gold” and “The Wanderers.” The nausea linked to the flesh and the self as experienced in sex is central to “Sir Rabbit” and “The Whole World Knows.” Death also provides a perilous allure in “Moon Lake.” In the more complex stories, the theme of fascination shapes with infinite subtlety the projection of the self onto the idealized alter-ego, as in “Music from Spain” and “June Recital,” which present the most devastating picture of feelings related to this theme.

Perseus is not a “culture hero” in the sense Prometheus and Heracles are culture heroes, that is, the saviors of mankind, the transgressors, the “transformers” who by their heroic action help civilization progress. Perseus’s victory is of a more private kind and concerns the terrors of the soul and the agony of the heart rather than the ordering of chaos.

Even if to the painters Perseus must have been the triumphant hero (“The vaunting was what she remembered, that lifted arm,” The Golden Apples 554), even if Loch’s victory over death swells him with too much pride in the eyes of Nina Carmichael and Jinny Love, Perseus in The Golden Apples is above all that most complex character who alone was able to conceive the full horror of Medusa since he overcame it: “Because Virgie saw things in their time, like hearing them—and perhaps because she must believe in the Medusa equally with Perseus—she saw the stroke of the sword in three moments, not one” (554–55). Those three moments in one represent the utmost fascination and the awareness of it; somehow it is the fascination of the artist himself, as André Malraux, before Price, suggested in the preface he wrote for the French translation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary in 1932: “The deepest fascination, the artist’s, draws its strength from its being both the horror and the possibility to conceive it” (9). To this fascination, Welty gives a personal coloring: “Cutting off the Medusa’s head was the heroic act, perhaps, that made visible a horror in life, that was at once the horror in love, Virgie thought—the separateness” (554). Perseus stands for the fascinated become fascinator, the slaying of Medusa for the lover who could grasp the full essence of his beloved only by killing her. The severed head is not only the visible sign of that permanent scandal—death; it is also the visible sign of that other scandal—the destructive power of love, any form of love (of fascination). For it is the essence of fascination, the utmost form of gaze, to become annihilated in the very accomplishment of the transgression it implies. This failed epiphany Welty calls “separateness” In “A Still Moment” Lorenzo Dow, the watcher, and Audubon, seer and voyeur, slayer and lover, knew already that fascination is a knowledge and a love that contains in itself the death of all knowledge and love.

The agony of separateness is what most married characters in The Golden Apples experience. Whether it be an unfaithful husband (“Shower of Gold”), an unfaithful wife (“The Whole World Knows”), or an inadequate spouse (“Sir Rabbit,” “Music from Spain,” Mrs. Morrison in “June Recital”), they all feel the unbreachable gulf between what they dream or hope for and the reality that makes their lives. In “The Wanderers,” Virgie Rainey’s long chain of lovers shows that she too has not been able to find fulfillment in love. Just as excruciating can be the loneliness of thwarted affection, whether born of unrequited devotion—a maternal love transfer, Miss Eckhart’s feelings for Virgie Rainey in “June Recital”—or the result of death, the scandalous distress of the orphaned child (“Moon Lake”), or the hundred smaller sorrows daily experienced.

The third constituent of the myth, the mirror, points to the fascination of Perseus—his awareness of horror and its fascination for him. The place of desire, the mirror becomes the door to death. A reflection, it is the sign of the near identity of opposites: “Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying; but of them all, hope and despair were the closest blood—unrecognizable one from the other sometimes, making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again, amending but never taking back” (546).

This endless doubling upon oneself is fascination—again. And this is true not only of “moments,” but of the short stories themselves as structures. They are built on this endless reflection, which doubles and doubles again. There are two parts or two movements in each story that are based on the ambiguity between a real experience and a dreamed one, between asserted reality and hypothetical reality. (Interestingly, some of Virginia Woolf ‘s finest stories, like those of Welty, follow this pattern).⁸ In “The Wanderers” the axis is “the feeling of the double coming-back” as Virgie Rainy experiences it (or the double departure, which is just its reverse, its reflection in the mirror) (545). Starting from that evident dichotomy, Eudora Welty elaborates on a most sophisticated play on reflections. Two examples will illustrate the technique and stress the duality in the composition of the book itself, since it rests on two major trends, a comic one based on the celebration of the word—the art of telling—and a tragic one based on vision—the fascination of the spectacle.

This reflection at times functions as the proof of the authenticity of the object, as in “Shower of Gold” The narrative problem here is the “truth” of King’s visit on Halloween. In the first part, Mrs. Rainey draws a portrait of King MacLain, a rogue pursuing his amorous career all over the South, and through her, we hear the adoring voice of the community. In the second part, she tells at length how he was seen at the door of his house on a surprise visit to his wife, how he thought better of it when circled by his two young sons disguised for the day, and ran away once more. But these facts cannot be proved. Apparently, part 2 illustrates the gossips told in part 1 and corroborat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Eye That Is Language: An Introduction
• Chapter 1. Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples (1979)
• Chapter 2. A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty (1987)
• Chapter 3. A Rereading of Eudora Welty’s “Flowers for Marjorie” (2018)
• Chapter 4. Of Human, Animal, and Celestial Bodies in Welty’s “Circe” (2005)
• Chapter 5. “The Fictional Eye”: Eudora Welty’s Retranslation of the South (2000)
• Chapter 6. Private and Political Thoughts in One Writer’s Beginnings (2001)
• Chapter 7. Eudora Welty and the Merlin Principle: Aspects of Story-Telling in The Golden Apples—“The Whole World Knows” and “Sir Rabbit” (2009)
• Chapter 8. “The Inspired Child of [Her] Times”: Eudora Welty as a Twentieth-Century Artist (2010)
• Chapter 9. “Moments of Truth”: Eudora Welty’s Humanism (2014)
• Afterword by François Pitavy
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Additional Publications by Danièle Pitavy-Souques
• Index