Reading the constellation : Eudora Welty’s patterns of time, culture, and memory

• Main Author: Sylvester, Barbara J.
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10220

Eudora Welty's full stature in world literature is not clear because her canon has not yet been seen as unified by an advertent thematic structure. This oversight stems in part from the fact that critics, seeing her regional detail as an end rather than a means, neglected Lewis Simpson's insistence that Welty is a modernist writer working, like Faulkner, in the tradition of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot. By applying a modernist paradigm to several major volumes of her fiction, I have traced consistent, discernible patterns that can be communicated in classrooms as well as in scholarly discussions. Welty focuses primarily on major transitional eras in national history that particularly illustrate the inevitable disintegration of familiar cultures. Partly by employing Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes, I show that each era she portrays is systematically intersected by parallel cultures of other eras and locales, evoked by allusions to masterpieces of past art works, to historical similarities, and to myths that gave meaning to human life in times of shared belief. The juxtapositions of different cultures comment on a crucial, universal challenge for all humans: to accept time's mutability without evasion or retreat. The fragments of art form a unifying collage, reminding readers of art's importance in sustaining human life by providing codes for emotional and spiritual survival of change. Welty's final work affirms that humanity can put the details of temporal existence into an emotionally liberating perspective by recognizing the constant and reassuring cyclic patterns of the natural world, for these patterns can be held in memory and preserved in art.