Can Novels Prevent History From Repeating Itself? A Guest Post by Adele Holmes
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Can Novels Prevent History From Repeating Itself? A Guest Post by Adele Holmes
Often, in the United States, the very mention of “the South” brings to mind a foreboding landscape with deep, dark secrets. Inhabited for 12,000 years, the land is permeated with the hopes and dreams of millions of souls, with the wrath of the civil war, and with the unspeakable indignities laid upon an enslaved race plucked from abroad.
Southern literature, and especially Southern Gothic which dissects the sins of the past to help prevent history from repeating itself, thrives today. I posit that we must recall and retell these stories as a constant haunting of the psyche; we must remember these stories to recognize the path and prevent our feet from treading it again.
The history of social deviancy drips from some places in the South like moss from a southern live oak. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the protagonist Sethe could not escape her memories of slavery, even after fleeing to the North. Harrowing as it is—so much so that we cannot look away—the malevolent tale may do its part to chasten such future evils.
Plantation homes dot the deep south and, whether in ruin or in resplendence, they seem to blush crimson. To all appearances, the countryside itself attracts magnificence, overindulgence, ostentatiousness: Biltmore superseded the plantations. One visit to the Vanderbilt Estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, and you might leave with a southern drawl and a yearning for “ices taken on the veranda.”
The flip side of extravagance is destitution. And in the South, historically there was little middle-ground.
Millennia of Native Americans populated the area before Hernando DeSoto ever set foot there. Afterward, their way of life was diluted into the European settlers’ lifestyle. From the South, moonshine begat bourbon, Harriet Tubman hailed slaves to freedom, and, following the path of England’s love of reading goth, a new genre of literature was birthed—through labor and travail. The Southern Gothic.
A phrase from William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” sums up what seems to be left of the past hopes, fears, and scars: “Tell of the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
The tales are written, and we cannot look away.
I am drawn to the South’s depth, whether salacious or righteous. I am drawn to the works of authors toiling to bring to life the meaning of existence in rural isolation. I am drawn to the beauty, the decay, and the horror.
Truth be told, it was I who sat on the veranda of the Biltmore one hot summer day, enjoying the breeze, dreaming not of “taking ices,” but of all the past inhabitants of the land that the grand old estate occupies. I felt their voices in my soul and yearned to tell their stories. Not just the stories of the Blue Ridge Mountain people, but the collective stories of all the people of the South. I felt the Faulkneresque tug to show “why they live there . . . why they live at all.”
The South, with its brooding charm, its glimmering mysticism, and its cry for atonement seeping up from the very earth, presents us with stories so evocative that we cannot look away.
That day at Biltmore my own novel was conceived. It would be born after years of study of the grand southern mountains and plains and shot through with references to the people whose blood stain its soil: native Americans, African slaves, European immigrants, granny women, carpetbaggers, witchdoctors. It, like the multitudinous—and much more prominent—books that came before it, strives to tell of the past in hopes of bettering the future.
Can Novels Prevent History From Repeating Itself? A Guest Post by Adele Holmes
