| "Far don't matter," The Unvanquished's Loosh announces, to Bayard Sartoris's bewilderment. "Far don't matter, cause it's on the way!" This dissertation examines the knotty ideas of "far" and "on the way" in the novels of Willa Caller, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. These writers imbue the act of migration with a compelling set of tensions: tensions between points of origin and destination; tensions between the "fresh start" model endorsed by D.H. Lawrence and R.W.B. Lewis and a continuing desire for -- and dependence on -- a sense of past, a cultural memory; tensions between the drive to move, to go, and the imperative for rootedness, for at-homeness. These novelists, I argue, pair the major idea of human movement with the less-intuitive ideas of human oscillation and human betweenness.;As innovations in transportation made even large-scale human movements relatively simple and straightforward, the writers in this project continued to think about the act of migration as complex and inherently significant, and experimented with ways to most fully capture it in writing: Ellison dreamt of "a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift." But my dissertation also examines my authors' underlying ambivalence towards the acts of migration and relocation, which discloses itself through unexpected, and often paradoxical, experiences of paralytic simultaneity (resulting in a "push" effect, in which subjects push forward even as they double back on themselves). Elsewhere, it generates a sense of ceaseless oscillation, of back-and-forth -- so that not only the novels' characters but also the narratives that contain them may seem to hover, despite their locomotive energies, in a permanent state of betweenness, of not-there-yet-ness. In this formulation, the points of origin and destination are not only literal but metaphorical; and the acts of geographical migration the authors depict -- from Europe to the American west, from rural Yoknapatawpha to Jefferson, from South to North, even from one side of town to another -- become continuous acts of figurative reorientation. Moments of migration and oscillation simultaneously propel and confine our reading experience, so that the narrative sense of momentum, of directionality, is perpetually open to revision -- and to inversion. |
