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Reconstructing American Law: The Politics of Narrative and Eudora Welty's Empathic Vision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
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In the 1960s, in my home town of Jackson, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered one night in darkness, and I wrote a story that same night about the murderer (his identity then unknown) called ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ But all that absorbed me, though it started as outrage, was the necessity I felt for entering into the mind and inside the skin of a character who could hardly have been more alien or repugnant to me. Trying for my utmost, I wrote it in the first person. I was wholly vaunting the prerogative of the short-story writer. It is always vaunting, of course, to imagine yourself inside another person, but it is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
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References
1 Welty, Eudora, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge: Harvard, 1984), 38–39.Google Scholar Later in the same text Welty notes, “Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write most entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page” (100). She adds in her preface to The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), xiGoogle Scholar: “I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.”
2 For an introduction to these poststructuralist perspectives, see Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972)Google Scholar; Foucault, , Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York: Pantheon, 1980)Google Scholar; The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, Paul (New York: Pantheon, 1984)Google Scholar; Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edn., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; and Arac, Jonathan, ed., After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1988).Google Scholar Some American poststructuralists have emphasized the possibilities for social critique implicit in the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrick, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard and other French theorists; see especially Ryan, Michael, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Poster, Mark, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
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12 Matsuda, , “Racist Speech,” 2324, 2325Google Scholar and footnote 32 on 2325. See also Bell, Derrick A., And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic, 1987)Google ScholarPubMed, and “The Final Report: Harvard's Affirmative Action Allegory,” Michigan law Review, 87, 8 (1989), 2382–410.Google Scholar
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17 Ibid., 1592.
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22 Ibid., 69.
23 Prenshaw, Peggy W., ed., Conversations with Eudora Welty (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 31Google Scholar; Kieft, Ruth M. Vande, Eudora Welty, rev. edn. (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 150Google Scholar. See also Boatwright, James, “Speech and Silence in Losing Battles,” Shenandoah, 25, 3 (1974), 3–14Google Scholar; and Heilman, Robert B., “Losing Battles and Winning the War,” in Eudora Welty, ed. Prenshaw, 269–304Google Scholar, upon whose count of percentage of dialogue I rely (273).
24 Welty, Eudora, Losing Battles (New York: Random House, 1970), 344.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., 55–57, 62.
26 Ibid., 421.
27 Ibid., 269. This scene is far more disturbing that the actual rape in Welty's earlier fantasy, The Robber Bridegroom (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), 65.Google Scholar The only literary critic who shares my reading of this scene as an implied rape is McMillen, William E., in “Conflict and Resolution in Welty's Losing Battles,” Critique, 15, 1 (1973), 120Google Scholar; although Ruth Vande Kieft also describes “a cruel rite of initiation” (Welty, 158)Google Scholar, and Franziska Gygax comments upon the brutality of the family's attempt to include the outsider (Serious Daring, 89).Google ScholarGross, Seymour, “A Long Day's Living: The Angelic Ingenuities of Losing Battles,” Eudora Welty, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1986)Google Scholar, seems to go farthest in the opposite direction, as he calls Gloria fortunate to be adopted by the loving family (133).
28 Welty, , Losing Battles, 325.Google Scholar
29 Ibid.
30 Welty, , One Writer's Beginnings, 38–39.Google Scholar While some literary scholars receive Nathan's story sympathetically, others view his actions with unmitigated horror–which would make the judge's decision immoral and incomprehensible; see, for example, Gossett, Louise Y., “Eudora Welly's New Novel: The Comedy of Loss,” Southern Literary Journal, 3, 1 (1970), 129Google Scholar, and Manning, , With Ears OpeningGoogle Scholar, which describes the episode as “an incident of murder, racism, and self-mutilation,” covered up by the family (85). Part of the interpretative confusion here, as in the case of Gloria's “initiation,” appears to come from the attempt to view the Vaughn-Beecham-Renfro clan consistently as either heroic or villainous; as noted above, my own reading of their relationship with the law reveals them to be often outsiders, but sometimes prosecutorial insiders (in relation to Gloria). Welty's own sense that not all stories could be heard in American courts was first evident in The Ponder Heart (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 139ff.Google Scholar
31 Welty, , Losing Battles, 303, 307.Google Scholar
32 Ibid., 348, 346, 361, 404. Welty's affirmative vision in Losing Battles is also emphasized in Stroup, Sheila, “‘We're All Part of It Together’: Eudora Welty's Hopeful Vision in Losing Battles,” Southern Literary Journal, 15, 2 (1983), 42–58.Google Scholar
33 Welty, Eudora, One Time, One Place (New York: Random House, 1971), preface.Google Scholar