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| COMMENTARY |
The Gap in the Circuit
By providing a new way to look at the ordinary, this richly textured novel also shows a reliable way to endure calamities.
Donald Secreast teaches creative writing and American literature at Radford University.
When Robert Morgan began teaching at Cornell in 1971, fresh from his M.F.A. program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he was hired primarily on the impression he had made with his first book of poems. At the time, the only alternative he saw to trading his comfortable North Carolina roots for the unknown dangers of moving to New York was to stay at home in Henderson County and be unemployed except for the occasional house-painting job.
Although he did leave North Carolina, the longer he was away, the more he found himself writing about the people, landscape, and history of the area where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. Apparently, he had a great deal to say about the place, using it as his main source of material for nine books of poetry, three short story collections, and three novels. So focused on North Carolina was his writing that Morgan almost got into trouble with the people he worked for. During an interview with William Harmon, Morgan related a rumor he heard about the discussion that went on when his colleagues evaluated his eligibility for tenure: " 'Well, he doesn't write about anything except North Carolina. Why should we give him tenure and keep him here?' " Luckily, other colleagues disagreed with this objection. Now they must be feeling extremely wise about their decision to keep him around as a writer.
Not long after the astounding success of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, another book about the Appalachians has commanded similar attention: Morgan's Gap Creek. This novel about the daily struggles of Julie and Hank Richards, newly married at the turn of the last century, gained a wider audience than might have been expected when, in January, Oprah Winfrey chose Gap Creek as an addition to her book club.
According to an article in Publishers Weekly, readers had begun appreciating the novel's power early on. The original 10,000 copies of Gap Creek disappeared even before Oprah made it one of her selections. In fact, Algonquin didn't have enough books on hand to provide her audience with the 500 free copies she wanted to distribute. More quickly than anticipated, the second printing of 350,000 copies proved insufficient when orders reached 600,000.
On the most obvious level, Gap Creek is about loss. The first chapter introduces Julie Harmon, the narrator of the story, who seems marked as a woman who must survive. In the first year of marriage, she faces a daunting array of disasters: a fire that kills the old man she and her husband live with; a flood that either spoils or sweeps away the food they saved from the fire; a cold spell that freezes the trees so solidly they explode; two visits from crooks pretending to be heirs to the old man's estate; and the premature birth and death of her first child. Ironically, when the true heirs send their representative, the results are even more devastating than when the crooks visited. At the end of the novel, as Julie and Hank walk back to their parents, we are certain that she is more prepared than ever to meet life on its own unforgiving terms.
For the first twenty years of Morgan's literary life, he published poetry, starting in 1969 with Zirconia Poems. During this time, he chose to concentrate on poetry rather than fiction, perhaps because he insisted on measuring himself and his work against the highest standards of originality. In an interview with William Heyen and Stanley Rubin, Morgan confessed: "I decided about 1965 or 1966 that I wasn't going to write fiction for a while--I had written stories and even published a few--because southern fiction had been 'done.' It was what we associated with the South and southern writing--Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy--but there was no such thing as 'southern poetry,' and certainly very little poetry about the southern mountains. That seemed an opportunity."
So, during the following years, as he produced his next eight collections, Morgan continued to refine his poems using the same critical attitude that had turned him to poetry in the first place: "You work against the erosion of freshness, that abrasion of use, not only by newness and texture, but by voice and gesture." One possible explanation for the success of Gap Creek, then, arises from Morgan's demand for unflagging freshness. Writing fiction or poetry, he refuses to choose from recycled images, stock phrases, or hackneyed scenes. Every incident in Gap Creek delivers the sensation of having just been closely observed and pondered by the narrator. Perhaps because he trained himself as an exceptional poet first, Morgan has produced a fiction plugged into the vital instant of perception, those moments when the specific gesture translates into the fresh gesture.
Perception starts with images
Early in the novel's first chapter, when Julie's younger brother gets so ill that she and her father have to carry him to the doctor's house at night, Morgan endows the dark mountain landscape with elements that echo the dread felt by Julie and her father. In one deft image, while presenting Julie as threatened by the local and cosmic darkness she must pass through, Morgan also establishes her as something of a spiritual guide who carries the lantern "like a pail of light down the path in front of Papa." The spark of this image results from the freshness of joining the abstract notion of light to the concrete and unexpected reality of a bucket transporting that illumination.
When the three wayfarers enter the forest, the darkness becomes even more oppressive. As if to emphasize the significance of this new level of gloom, Morgan drops another simile around his reader: "In the hollers where the moon didn't reach it was black as a Bible." In a novel that will eventually explore the sustaining and transforming power of religion in the lives of people who lose more than they gain on a day-to-day basis, this first reference to religion does not establish a comforting tone.
In discussions of Morgan's poetry, reviewers have pointed out that he refuses to sentimentalize the forces of nature. While not necessarily the nature "bloody in tooth and claw," his presentation certainly isn't out to accommodate the emotional needs of its human components. For similar reasons, religion--which might have part of its foundation in nature, or maybe nature has part of its foundation in religion--doesn't always serve to make one's physical existence easier.
With remarkable economy, through these two extremely precise images, Morgan sets up one of his dominant themes: the glow of the human spirit against the indifferent grandeur of nature and the indecipherable tribulations of religion. Clearly, Morgan's concern for the resilience of the human spirit offers another explanation for the success of Gap Creek. His characters, flawed as they are, survive with their decency fully intact. They do so not because of any special talents or abilities that might make them exceptional examples but precisely because they are so ordinary.
Whether Morgan writes about historical events or more contemporary conflicts, he always focuses on the sustaining presence of the ordinary. Only three months before Gap Creek was published, his third short story collection came out. The Balm of Gilead Tree and Other Stories blends historical and modern narratives, but the title story best demonstrates Morgan's ability to use the ordinary world as a resonating chamber. It follows the adventures of a laborer who witnesses a passenger jet collide with a smaller plane in the air above his construction crew. As the narrator scuttles from one crash fatality to the next, removing what cash he comes across, the macabre nature of his activity is counterbalanced by his very ordinary daydreams about what he can do with the money.
Further obscuring the apparent immorality of his behavior, the narrator spends a great deal of his mental energy working out the very practical concerns of moving through the hostile terrain while not getting injured, outstripped by his fellow looters, or caught by the authorities. Because the narrator can tune his view of himself and his behavior to ordinary considerations despite his extraordinary situation, he is able to escape back to the normal world with his pants stuffed full of money.
The fundamental territory of literature
Regardless of where it appears--in his poetry, short stories, or novels--the ordinary represents the unifying ground against which Morgan figures his drama. The ordinary functions as the circuit for existence. It provides the sustaining power of our lives, a power composed of coherence, routine, familiarity, and continuation. Dramatic tension develops in his narratives when the ordinary is disrupted. According to Morgan, this disruption of the ordinary should be the fundamental territory of literature. In an essay entitled "Mica" (which appears in his collection of essays and interviews, Good Measure), he speculates about the potential power locked within the ordinary: "It's the gap in the circuit that makes the welding fire, that cuts the hardest steel, and joins seamlessly." How he uses this insight as a structuring device in Gap Creek provides one of the most compelling explanations for the novel's popularity.Of course, some might point out that a more familiar term for gap is conflict. In crucial moments throughout the novel, Morgan presents his narrative gap as the source of dramatic conflict. Considered more carefully, this literary device allows him to see conflict in many subtle forms, starting on the perceptual level. Most frequently, he employs perceptual gaps in the form of similes or metaphors. The originality of his unexpected comparisons elevates his writing above the merely descriptive, providing the reader with recurring arcs of illumination.
Often, brief phrases are worded so brightly that they almost glaze themselves on the surface of the eye. "The fire spread on the wood like fingers on a keyboard." Here, the perceptual gap is created when Morgan combines visual, tactile, and auditory sensations. He refuses to let his reader, or himself, simply see a flame. Its movement becomes intensely specific: horizontal, smooth, and deliberate. The simile also implies a certain intentionality within the flame. Later in the novel, this intentionality emerges in two highly dramatic scenes: first when a kitchen fire started by spilled fat takes the life of an old man, and second when Julie's younger sister, Carolyn, is almost consumed in flames when her dress catches fire during a field burn-off.
Many of Morgan's best perceptual gaps occur in his descriptions of work. Before Julie marries Hank, one of her primary jobs at home is to cut the wood that satisfies her family's basic energy needs. Though used to hard work, Julie still harbors very specific objections to this chore, particularly splitting the wood: "I hated the ring of steel on steel. It was a ring of pain, of bones breaking. There is a sourness of doom in the ping of steel driving steel." Starting with a simple sound, Morgan first provides a leap from auditory stimulus to emotional translation; sound becomes a human reality only to then become a very specific type of physical pain.
While breaking bones summons a specific type of pain, it also alludes to an ancient view of ultimate human suffering: the deepest kind of physical injury a person can endure before the soul starts leaking out. The biblical Job, near the height of his suffering, exclaims, "And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest." As if to emphasize the universal suffering connected to broken bones and the sound of steel striking steel, Morgan closes his description by associating it with "a sourness of doom." Thus connected, Julie finds herself partaking of the Job tradition and, more important, predicting the texture of her own life, at least for the year covered in the novel.
The importance of religion in the lives of Appalachian farmers such as Hank and Julie Richards received a great deal more attention in Morgan's previous novel, The Truest Pleasure (1995). Ginny, its female narrator, comes under the spell of the Pentecostal Holiness movement, primarily because her father, who was a prisoner of war during the Civil War, had listened to the preaching of a fellow prisoner "who could make anybody speak in tongues just by looking at him. That preacher could raise himself high in the air while preaching so he was talking from way above." The primary conflict explored in this novel develops between Ginny and her husband because he can't tolerate Ginny's involvement with the Pentecostal Church.
Talking about his own father's connection to the Pentecostals, Morgan clearly revealed the impact of exposure to this particularly energetic brand of religion: "When young, I remember being extremely frightened of him and others speaking in tongues, shouting, and I remember being especially terrified of the phrase 'baptism of fire.' It sounded too much like hell to me. And I was often afraid the Rapture would come and I'd be left with the sinners and the moon turned to blood."
Like many other writers who were taught as children to take their elders' beliefs seriously, Morgan still carries the echoes and implications of religious conviction into his writing, particularly when he establishes the prevalence of misery encountered by Julie and Hank.
There's more to the gap than pain
Nevertheless, in contrast to the images of suffering that spark Julie's description of her life, Morgan also provides a broad range of images conveying the deep pleasure she receives from the world. Significantly, pleasure also represents a gap in the circuit of the ordinary, which affirms both the necessity of the ordinary and the importance of the need to escape it--even in the smallest ways.When Julie first observes her future husband, Morgan endows him with many traits that no woman of her time and culture could resist. In particular, "He had the straightest, widest shoulders, and you could tell how powerful he was, and how much he could lift. It was the way he was made, and not that he was such a terrible big man." In this description, the gap of pleasure is probably stronger for Julie than it is for the reader. What receives emphasis in her description of Hank, though, is his departure from the ordinary. No one trait distinguishes his physique. Something about how all his parts come together, "the way he was made," speaks to Julie. By the end of the novel, the reader will realize the irony of her impression of him as a "powerful" man.
Much more effective for the reader is the pleasure gap that opens up when Hank talks to Julie's mother about music. Asked by Mrs. Harmon to clarify how much he likes to sing, Hank replies, "Better than I like to eat peaches." As a child, Morgan considered becoming a composer, so this connection between music and fruit shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Where Morgan manages to surprise his reader is in the fruit he chooses. According to Hank's assertion, songs are sweeter than peaches. But peaches are a highly complicated fruit. While they may not be juicier than, say, an orange, their sweetness carries a more intimate flavor and rides on the edge of a fuzzy skin. Music, then, to Hank, isn't simply a sound or even a taste but a suggestive, tactile experience.
Once Hank enters Julie's world, a different type of gap begins shaping her narration. Still connected to her perceptions, this new gap concerns itself more with illuminating her desires. Just as pain and pleasure represent gaps in the ordinary world, desire also creates a broader rift in the circuit. Desire functions as a recurring focus, clarifying or even creating the gaps in the ordinary world. Once a human being discovers her capacity for desire, pleasure and pain finally assume their full connection to conflict. Perceptions lit by desire lead us to see the world in terms of what moves us closer to or pulls us farther from fulfillment. Oddly, fulfillment of desire implies completing a circuit that returns us to that of the ordinary--the circuit of comfort--but not to the point of pleasure.
Through a progression of highly sensual scenes, Morgan reveals Julie's evolution from girlhood to womanhood: her first thrill when the man of her dreams simply looks at her, their first kiss, her first sexual experience. These moments of progressive intimacy, these gaps of intense physical pleasure, are counterbalanced by those of emotional pain when Julie and Hank fight, when Hank's mother comes for a prolonged visit, when Julie watches her younger sister flirt with Hank. Toward the end of the novel, the moments of pleasure and pain reach their climax when, completely alone, Julie must deliver her premature baby.
In this long, dramatic scene, two important circuits of the ordinary are broken. First, Julie's birth pains interrupt the daily functions of her body. Second, the complete isolation disrupts her society's customary expectations of having a few other people in attendance. Initially, Julie accepts the birth process as part of her workload. She seems determined to make the experience part of the ordinary circuit of her world. Then, just before the baby emerges, when the pain is at its peak, Julie comes to an important discovery about the relationship between pain and pleasure.
"Inside the pain was the pleasure of stretching. It was pleasure so intense I couldn't name it. It was pleasure so hard I felt blood tearing out of my veins and through my skin. The pleasure stabbed through me like it was going to bust my heart wide open."
What Julie has gained during this moment of insight is an appreciation of the gap itself. Neither pain nor pleasure can claim a superior position in human consciousness. Both heighten awareness. In doing so, these moment-by-moment gaps in the ordinary world should also emphasize the value of the ordinary. Gap Creek demonstrates that we need the ordinary every bit as much as we need pleasure and pain.
As Julie discovers after her infant daughter dies, a world too filled with gaps becomes unendurable. "Time kept spilling down on me, and the only way I could take hold of the minutes and make sense of them was to work." Completing a dramatic circle, Julie returns to the theme of work, which was introduced in the very beginning of the book. The ordinary world demands that its human inhabitants work simply to survive. On another level, work also provides relief from all the disappointments that attend our struggle to survive. Work becomes an end in itself, a reward in itself, even a therapy in itself. As a girl, what Julie assumes she must endure becomes the source of her strength. Work becomes her ability to endure.
Perhaps this book's broadest appeal lies in its careful presentation of Julie Richards' evolution. By basing his narrative on a spectrum of gaps in the ordinary, Morgan is able to show her growth from maidenhood to womanhood, from hardworking child to wise wife. Because we're able to see the gaps from Julie's point of view, her development as a character feels less literary and more organic--paradoxically, more ordinary. Rather than working as merely a device for presenting an Appalachian woman's voice, Morgan's use of the first-person narrator succeeds in creating a genuine sense of interiority--but one that stays convincingly connected to the outside world. The texture of Julie's perceptions proliferates into the very structure of her narrative. Gap Creek creates a genuine psyche for Julie Richards. Far more than a voice, she becomes someone we know, part of the circuit of ourselves. And this novel, built on and from the ordinary, becomes exceptional.