Birth of a novel

For the last three years, I’ve been trying to help Gary Mawyer get his epic novel Rockfish published. Here is a synopsis of the book, first called Shad River, that we sent a few years ago to a prospective publisher:

Shad River is a multigenerational story exploring the evolution of racial and family identity in the Appalachian South. The intertwined histories of three families, one white, one of Native American descent, and one African-American, are followed episodically from settlement times through November 2001. The best recent work of comparable scope may be Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The setting and action of the middle part of the book would be most easily compared to Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. We believe that Shad River would complement the books on your list while distinguishing itself by its American perspective on racial issues and civil rights.

Says Canadian writer, critic, and scholar John Moss, who read the book and prepared a reader’s report:

Like all great books, Shad River is both a stunning surprise and inevitable. Once it has been read, one cannot imagine a world in which it did not exist. In a lifetime as a writer, literary critic, editor and academic,  I have experienced the thrill of discovering great books many times over, but I have read only a few, and never a manuscript, to match Gary Dale Mawyer’s unpublished chronicle about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Here is an unlikely thought: imagine a conspiracy among Faulkner, James Mitchener, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they come together, the living and the dead, joined by Samuel Clemens, Alex Haley and Stephen Crane, maybe Eric Idle and Erich Maria Remarque, and they invent Gary Dale Mawyer. Mawyer in his mature years writes a book of life that is also a book of the dead. He calls his book Shad River and puts it in a drawer. But it won’t stay there. The world is too much invested to let it lie.

Possibly the best descriptions of the Civil War ever written lie in these pages. Conflicts from before the Revolution that force people into the hill country of Virginia and conflicts that draw them out again, generation by generation, are opened to the reader as real people turn to memory and memory turns into myth, all in a context shaped by the intricacies of genealogy along the Shad and by History as it whirls each succeeding layer of consciousness to the surface, from then to now. What has passed is prologue, yes, but is perpetually revised; presence is antecedent to the past. The sweep and scope of Mawyer’s narrative is breathtaking. It thrums with details of authenticity. The sustained brilliance as a narrative of times and a place is comparable only to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Yet this book is as much a history of the western world from a wondrously conceived finite perspective as it is a fiction; it is as much a meditation among quarreling philosophies as it is a novel; as much the dream-vision of an astonishingly wise and irrepressibly witty raconteur as it is a chronicle. It is a confession of remembering blood articulated through infinite research, an exorcism and celebration of racial awareness, a guide among bullets and carnage through local gossip, regional politics and global imperatives. It is a novel about a small place in the world and about the world itself. It is a war novel, a pamimpsest of military memoirs, a documentary of race and religion, and it is American history. It is about living in the twenty-first century, and about the generations of men and women who gave us a place to stand on even as they fade to quirks of custom and genetic lore.

Gary Mawyer in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, at the Mule Shoe—or Bloody Angle, as it was known by the Northern troops—on the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield.

Shad River is not always an easy book to read. The writing is superb; brilliantly  articulate and often hauntingly evocative. Exhaustively researched materials of the past are given flesh-and bone-intensity, yet never recede into anecdote or exemplary vignette; more recent recollections, for instance of Washington under siege in the 1970’s, achieve a gut-churning immediacy, tempered with wry cynicism. The characters, from Abraham Marr, a Pennsylvania Quaker whose progeny mix native, white, and black in an infinitely fascinating quilt of cousinage, to Lynn Marr, the divorced Episcopal minister from the west coast, home in the hills for Thanksgiving, 2002, all have brief and glowing narrative lives which, together cast Shad Crossing and the Shad River region into dazzling illumination. The pacing, the narrative tempo, is right on the mark; leisurely at times among the old men around the stove in Marr’s General Store, frenetic in the battle scenes (which are many and varied, as finely detailed as escutcheons on a prize musket, dents on a cop’s billie-club), solemn in the intellectually charged debates on eugenics and Jim Crow, while irreverent, even raucous, in enumerating the strange intricacies of color, race, and genealogy from a layered perspective. The writing is superb. What might have been a sprawling inchoate welter spun around a chronological axis holds together as the whirling visionary gift of a narrative voice that shows absolute confidence in its own judgment to make sense of it all, its own ability to make it all accessible. The reader, however, is not meant to be passive. There are no genealogical charts, no potted historical summaries. These would be a betrayal of its vision. Shad River is implicitly postmodern. It interrogates and subverts and exploits the distinctions among history and fiction, myth and genetics, memory and imagination. It declares, not sole was I born but entire genesis. As with Marquez, it does not give itself as a gift to be consumed but as a parallel world within which to better see our own.

Mountain Wizards, City Scholars, and the Art of Having Beliefs

When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s
Ethnography of the Other World
by Wilburn Hansen
University of Hawaii Press, 2008

Religious reformation and nation-building are frequent bedfellows. Culturally speaking, few things are more useful to a rising nation than the resurrection of some lost age of traditional spiritual purity, whether it ever existed or not. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration, Hirata Atsutane came to prominence as a proponent of Japanese cultural uniqueness and superiority, based on the singular spirituality of the island nation as the land of the Kami. He wanted to distinguish the sources of Japan’s traditional spiritual purity from invasive foreign (mainly Buddhist) contamination, with the goal of reviving the true religion of ancient times. But where was he to find the true religion of ancient times in anything like a living form?

Atsutane believed deeply, and complexly, in ancient mountain spirits and forest wizards who wielded the power of the Kami. So when word came that a human disciple of these magical beings was actually living in his neighborhood, he pulled every string he knew to capture the tengu’s disciple, a slum lad named Torakichi, and add him to his household as a new didactic weapon in the seminars and soirees where he fought his intellectual war for religious reform.

Wilburn Hansen takes up this story in When Tengu Talk: Hirata Atsutane’s Ethnography of the Other World. The core question of When Tengu Talk is how a brilliant scholar like Atsutane could believe Torakichi was not a fraud, and how a street con like Torakichi could successfully convince Atsutane and quite a few others that he was a disciple in the kingdom of the Gods. Hansen treats this mystery with the seriousness it deserves. Neither Atsutane nor Torakichi was naïve. The elder needed the younger as a witness from the Other World but understood that the younger man needed leading questions to cue him what to say. Torakichi’s goal was more closely related to escaping from beggary but his methods, by a fantastic stroke of luck, were useful to one of the leading thinkers in Japan.

Atsutane, though on a different level, was no stranger to the kind of intellectual jugglery Torakichi practiced and he did not despise it. He could not resurrect a “pure” Japanese religion without falling back on the concepts that were in play around him. Atsutane was compromised by the Buddhist social religion of his day even as he fought against it. Torakichi was compromised by poverty. Both responded with a degree of cunning. In a way, Atsutane and Torakichi were simultaneously mentor and disciple to each other.

When Tengu Talk is of interest for students of Japanese religion and the emergence of Japanese modernity. It is also a fine anthropological case study and a fascinating pair of psychological portraits. I would add that anyone who loves irony for its own sake could hardly help being charmed. To the irony of the sage who inadvertently hosts a con man, we must add the larger irony that Shinto revivalism in the Meiji Restoration soon required the suppression of local mountain cults and belief in rural demons, in the name of state religion (described by Gerald Figal in Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan). Religious revivalism often has unintended consequences like that. Best of all is the happy detail that Atsutane and Torakichi went on to other things, Atsutane one of the great scholars of his age, Torakichi either a Buddhist monk or the operator of a public bath called the “Tengu Hot Springs.” I prefer to believe the latter.

Gary Mawyer

Taisho Chic

My big read of the last month has been a Honolulu Academy of Arts book called Taisho Chic: Japanese Modernity, Nostalgia and Deco, by Kendall H. Brown and Sharon A. Minichiello, which I carefully rationed out to a minimum of four but not more than six pages at a time. I finished it last night and look forward to reading it again in a few months. I can only call this a “thundering good read” rich with the sweet pain of having to put it down repeatedly even though you know you must. I am no fan of art criticism; art criticism often appears to be practiced as a vice. But the text of Taisho Chic was written in a gloriously conversational mode by someone with the eyes of an axe, and with no hawk to grind—text as sweet and subtle as the art on the facing page. Taisho is technically the imperial reign that followed the Meiji, but Taisho Chic is here defined to include the 1930s, up to the wartime austerity measures and reinforcement of nationalistic retro-traditionalism, what Miriam Silverberg called “the end of modernity.” This art is closely related to ukiyo-e bijin ga, featuring style and mood above all else, in particular through portrayals of beautiful women. It all puts the reader or viewer in mind of Lafcadio Hearn’s remark that of all the traditional fine arts of Japan, the women themselves were the highest achievement.

Gary Mawyer

In Godzilla’s Footsteps

I am enjoying In Godzilla’s Footsteps, Tsutsui & Ito eds., 2006, despite about half the essays being a bit academic. In essay #6, “Mothra’s Giant Egg: Consuming the South Pacific in 1960s Japan,” author Yoshikuni Igarashi quotes the once-famous Nagayama Yasuo’s “Kaijo no michi” (“Passage on the Sea”). In 1992, he was asking, “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in Toho monster films?”

Igarashi moves on to a more focused 2006-type question: “Why do monsters always come from the South Pacific in 1960s Toho monster films?” In particular he is interested in Mothra and commercialization, versus the Gozilla/war/nuclear-testing theme that belonged originally to the 1950s.

In this context he discusses the return of tropical fruit to Japanese markets, the arrival of Barbie about the same time as the tiny women in Mothra and Mothra versus Godzilla, and the inception of Japanese-Hawaiian tourism and its related themes.

I happened to be reading all this as a spin-off from some  allusions in the Mechademia issues. For one thing, I realized that I have never actually seen the original Godzilla—and learned that there was no way I could have, because it was not screened in the U.S. until 2002, and then only in a limited number of art houses. It was released on DVD the same year, in a two-pack along with a remastered re-release of the American (Raymond Burr) edition, also for the first time. I have a copy en route to me, and I am really looking forward to seeing the original, which apparently contains a lot of material edited out in the U.S. release.

In Godzilla’s Footsteps included two other essays I thought were piquant: “Gojira as Japan’s First Postwar Media Event,” by Barak Kushner, which portrays this movie as Japan’s first return to the international stage (several years before the Tokyo Olympics)—and a very appropriate return, if somewhat unexpected in this form; and Eric C. Rath’s “Godzilla Meets Super Kyogen, or How a Dinosaur Saved the World,” which traces Gojira’s ancestry to guys in monster suits (such as a fire-breathing giant toad) in kyogen and kabuki.

There is other neat stuff in In Godzilla’s Footsteps, but this appears to be the cream of the crop.

Gary Mawyer