Fish stories: revising masculine ritual in Eudora Welty's "The Wide Net".(Critical essay)

REPLETE WITH FETISHIZED OBJECTS AND PLACES (MASKS, SWEAT LODGES AND sitting spots), pseudo-tribal rituals (hunting, dancing, drumming, initiatory wounds), and a symbolic mapping of "the deep masculine" that consists of, among other things, "wild men," "inner warriors," "Zeus energy," and the "cosmic, life-engendering phallus," the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1980s and early 1990s, popularized by Robert Bly in his 1990 bestseller, Iron John, would seem an almost irresistible site for cultural criticism. (1) But while women's and, increasingly, men's studies scholars have offered substantial analyses of various aspects of this now largely defunct movement, one of Iron John's more revealing characteristics, namely, its demonstrable roots in the intellectual matrix of literary modernism, has gone largely unremarked. Bly and other leaders of the men's movement drew heavily on a whole array of key modernist tropes (myth, ritual, archetypalism, and primitivism, and their attendant appeals to deep structure and identity) in founding what proved in the event to be a highly lucrative enterprise. The kind of modernism articulated by and through the thinking of figures like Joseph Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, and Carl Jung, hasn't, as it turns out, died; it has just migrated to the middlebrow. (2) The mythopoetic movement's intellectual and cultural indebtedness to modernist myth criticism may help explain why Eudora Welty's 1942 story "The Wide Net" can profitably be read as a proactive invention and deflation of Iron John some fifty years before Bly discovered the sales potential, if not, regrettably, the retrograde politics, of this strand of modernist sensibility. (3) At the beginning of a 1958 review of Virginia Woolfs Granite and Rainbow, Welty wryly comments that "an editor who sent out a new book called Men Without Women to [Woolf] knew what he was doing" ("Uncommon Reader" 120). In this essay, I argue that Welty knew what she was doing when, in "The Wide Net," she wrote her own story about men without women that both parodies and revises the rituals of masculinity, ubiquitously explored by her male modernist predecessors and contemporaries, that constitute the prehistory of the mythopoetic movement.

In successfully reestablishing Welty as a major figure in American literary modernism, feminist critics have also made us aware of the extent to which Welty's stories self-consciously engage and revise key modernist texts by men. A list of such intertextual readings might include Patricia Yaeger's study of "Sir Rabbit" as a dialogue with Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" ("Fire"), Rebecca Mark's interpretation of "Music from Spain" as an "answer" to Joyce's Ulysses (175-231), and Peter Schmidt's analysis of "Asphodel" as a systematic send-up of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (129-35). (4) In the same vein, Welty's comic tale of the portentously named William Wallace Jamieson, a confused young husband who returns home after a boys' night out to find that his pregnant wife Hazel has left a note announcing her intention to drown herself in the Pearl River, and who subsequently gathers the men of Dover, Mississippi, to help him drag the river with the "wide net" of the story's title, can be profitably read as a riposte to the ritualized hunting and fishing expeditions that focalize canonical modernist works by writers such as Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway. (Welty's protagonist's name, presumably a gentle poke at Faulkner's "lost cause" Scottish genealogies, now inevitably evokes for me the literally spectacular masculinity displayed in Mel Gibson's 1995 film Braveheart.) (5) In my view, however, "The Wide Net"--although it is almost certainly in direct conversation with Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River"--is less a rewriting of a specific male intertext than a general response to the anxious, beleaguered masculinity that pervades The Waste Land, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, "The Bear," In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms. More specifically, I want to suggest that "The Wide Net" consciously interrogates and transforms a persistent and central paradigm in modernist constructions of masculinity, one which premises manhood on a horrified flight from female sexuality, and especially from the abiection attributively embodied--for Eliot's questing Perceval, as for Quentin Compson and Joe Christmas and Nick Adams--in manifestations of women's reproductive functions including menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and abortion.

To establish the context for Welty's revisionary fish story, I turn first to what is by any account a locus classicus of American masculinity, Hemingway's In Our Time. In In Our Time, the young Nick Adams of "Indian Camp" learns to be a man by mimicking his father's professional cool during a bloody scene of childbirth--an emergency Caesarian delivery so traumatizing that it apparently causes the woman's husband ("usually," Dr. Adams remarks, "the worst sufferers in these little affairs") to slit his throat (18). Nick, who participates in the operation by holding the basin into which his father puts "something," the placenta, responds to this "awful mess" (his father's half-heartedly apologetic term for the scene to which he has subjected his son) through a reaction formation--at the end of the story, the boy feels "quite sure that he would never die" (18-19)--obsessively reiterated in connection with pregnant, menstruating, and menopausal women throughout In Our Time. This pattern culminates in the ritualized masculinity of autonomy and control performed by the adult Nick in "Big Two-Hearted River." Long-standard interpretations of this final and most famous of the sequence's stories read the return of Hemingway's fisherman protagonist to the "good place" (139) of his youth as a positive ritual through which he recovers his psychological balance, spiritual health, and manhood following his traumatic wartime experiences. But it takes little probing to recognize just how strangely anxious and fragile and even self-destructive this much-valorized "healing" experience turns out to be. What kinds of order and wholeness are "recovered" through Nick's almost paranoid obsession with technique and sequence and control? Why does reconnecting with nature inevitably mean mastering it, and why--as in Faulkner's "The Bear"--does it require a sacrificial totem? Why does this ritualized masculinity depend on the total absence not only of women but of other men? Nick, we are told, "did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it." Like the "delicate mucus" covering the trout--"if a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot" (149)--Nick's equilibrium and much-announced "happiness" are, it would seem, liable to be "spoiled" at any moment by the slightest touch.

For Hemingway's Nick Adams, masculine identity is constituted and affirmed through ritual structures that simultaneously instantiate the taboo, warding off and protecting against the power of the uncontrollable and the impure: time and change; the other; nature itself; in short, "woman." What Nick seeks, through the kind of compulsive repetition Freud first discerned in shell-shocked veterans, is to contain and transcend his own bodily abjection, the buried knowledge of his vulnerable, woundable, mortal body that periodically breaks through the text's carefully controlled surface and into his massively defensive psyche: memories of his own wounding in the war and of other scenes of mutilated bodies; compulsively recalled images of gored bulls and bullfighters, humiliated, exhausted, and vomiting matadors, animals with their entrails hanging out; nightmares of men facing imminent execution, one so frightened that he loses control of his sphincter muscle. (6) Like recurrent bad dreams, the terrifying images that erupt into Nick's psyche, especially in In Our Time's uncanny interchapters, signal what Julia Kristeva describes as "the collapse of the border between inside and outside": the body's uncontrollable contents--blood, urine, excrement, internal organs--break through the carefully policed boundaries that seek to guarantee the subject's "own and clean self" (53). Moreover, usually identified as traumatic war memories, Nick's obsessive recalls of leaky, penetrated, bloody, and putrefying bodies both point toward and stem from his horror of the reproductive, maternal body in which Kristeva locates the experience of abjection. (7) The young Nick reacts to the "awful mess" of childbirth by refusing the knowledge of his own mortality, but he simultaneously denies his origin in the mess of the mother's body.

Indeed, the boy's fantasy of immortality--of an impossible autogenesis and self-possession--requires an attendant fantasy of immaculate conception, as well as a refusal to acknowledge his archaic symbiosis with and dependence on the mother. "Looking away so as not to see what his father was doing," Nick refuses to "look at it"; unwilling even to give "it" a name, he inaugurates a process of masculine identity formation modeled on his doctor-father's clinical detachment--as Dr. Adams tells his son, the mother's "screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important" (17, 16)--and maintained by a rigorous rejection of anything ...