• 1 It is also very revealing that the only dependable certainty in Cash’s definition should have to do (...)
• 2 The interview by Noah Charney in the “How I Write” section of the 02.27.2013 issue of The Daily Bea (...)

3As suggested by Cash himself (we can remark his own cautious ­insistence on the modifying adverb “fairly” and his endeavors to qualify the ­simplifying impact of his words), this definition of “the mind of the South” should undoubtedly be taken with a grain of salt. The very combination of ­conflicting, if not irreconcilable, approaches—social constructs and ­fleeting impressions—should make one wary of such plain generalizations. Yet it seems that the very definition of a geographic and cultural region in terms of mind, or myth, inevitably involves or generates such oversimplifications.¹ In Outside The Southern Myth, Noel Polk vehemently criticizes the harmful consequences of the elaboration of such Southern myths. A Mississippian, Polk devoted a whole book to the denunciation of how such constructions tend to imprison Southerners into caricature-like definitions in which they can hardly recognize themselves: “The radical ­difference between my ­experience of the South and what my reading and all the culture have told me ‘The South’ was—and which has therefore defined me as a Southerner—has over the past several years provided the grist for my intellectual and personal mills” (xii). Yet, though Rash similarly fights against the nefarious consequences of this kind of pigeonholing, unwittingly fostered by long-­lasting stereotypes about Southerners and their culture,² there is such a thing as a Southern flair in his work which brings us to ask the question—how does a twenty-first century (Southern) writer deal with Southern myths?

• 3 In his 1992 book devoted to the South, Michel Bandry remarks that regardless of its causes, the def (...)

6In their wide-ranging variety, Rash’s stories are undeniably Southern. They share what Faulkner defined in one of his famous “Introduction[s]” to The Sound and the Fury as “the indigenous dream of any given collection of men having something in common, be it only geography and climate, which shape their economic and spiritual aspirations into cities, into a pattern of house or behavior” (229). Rash certainly confirms the assertive power of “the indigenous dream,”—or nightmare for that matter—of the South. At the same time, he makes light of the expectations and stereotypes ­traditionally associated with the South by suggesting that what is known as the South is made of several particular Souths. His notion of what is the South is mainly located in the mountains of western North Carolina which was certainly shaped, as in the case of most ex-members of the Confederacy, by the Civil War.³ However what makes Rash’s South remarkable lies in the fact it experienced small-scale, yet equally dramatic, divisions within the larger conflict. In his 2007 interview, “The Natural World is the most universal language,” Thomas Bjerre asked Rash why, about 150 years after the war, “Southern fiction [was] still haunted by that war” (218). This is Rash’s very enlightening answer:

• 4 Charles Frazier in Cold Mountain (1997) and, more recently, Lisa Alther in Blood Feud (2012), which (...)

8Whether directly or obliquely, Rash’s stories evoke some of the traumatic repercussions the Civil War had on the South: failure, loss, an all-encompassing sense of debacle, the violence of everyday life, the estrangement caused by dramatic changes, the questions of trust and distrust, division and the awareness of irreconcilable choices and, more generally, the sometime terrible difficulty of making a decision. More ­specifically, they also illustrate the double trauma people experienced in the Appalachian Mountains—located far from the plantation South—, as trouble from without ricocheted much like trouble from within. While being at war in their own country, the people Rash describes were also at war with those who had been their neighbors and friends before they had to make the most dramatic choice and endure its consequences—joining the Confederacy, as most did, or flying off on a tangent and siding with the Union.⁴

• 5 Burning Bright illustrates the recycling process that is at work in Rash’s writing, as images that (...)
• 6 This characteristic aspect of Rash’s short story collections is reminiscent of Paul Ricoeur’s conce (...)

9Such existential considerations resonate throughout Rash’s writing; their very repetition through different time periods and circulation within his work⁵ certainly expose the signification of their traumatic impact, which is best exemplified by one of the recurring stylistic features in his short story collections. These are all built upon a similar principle: the continuity between past and present is sometimes so tight that, from one story to the next, it can be difficult for the reader to distinguish then from now.⁶ As they almost imperceptibly slip from one historical period to the next through incursions into a present that is hardly ever datable, Rash’s short stories (and this is somehow equally true of his poems) are indeed imbued with a sense of timelessness. Rash is quite eager to acknowledge the fact that this general sense of blurring is deliberate: “In the story collections, I want the reader to be, at times, uncertain of the era. That uncertainty creates an effect that I want” (interview with Spill). The overall impression of changelessness thus conveyed by Rash’s stories is ambivalently worrying and reassuring at the same time. It points to the radical seclusion of Appalachia, which somehow appears to be permanently enmeshed in the repetition of the same patterns; yet, it also conveys the comforting feeling that in the forever ­quickening pace of the world, some things may resist change and remain true to themselves. Meanwhile, repetition and unadulteratedness certainly are two aspects Rash’s stories share with myths.

• 7 In his presentation of Burning Bright in Understanding Ron Rash, John Lang suggests that that “symm (...)

10Structurally, Burning Bright splits into two sections, each of which contains six stories.⁷ While the first section opens with a story set during the Great Depression—“Hard Times”—, the second section opens with the “Return” home of a World War II veteran who fought in the Pacific. In between, though set in what is, just this once, a clearly identifiable present time, “Dead Confederates” takes the reader back to the Civil War:

• 8 In that respect, the story is quite reminiscent of the much earlier story that provided Rash’s firs (...)

11While the gothic motif of digging up corpses—which keeps ­reappearing in Rash’s writing in various forms and circumstances—, reasserts, if ­humorously, the continuity between present and past and the long-­lasting effects of past events upon the present, “Dead Confederates” definitely conveys the most provocative subversion of the myth of the noble cause, the lost cause, of the South in Rash’s work.⁸ As small-time grave robbers dig up the graves of Civil War Generals, satire is particularly palpable when chuckling Wesley strives to justify his greedy transgression by evoking the respect owed to his Confederate ancestors: “He unknots the bedsheet and hands the buckle to the old man. ‘I’ll polish it up real good and wear it proud, wear it not just for my great-great-grand-daddy but all them that fought for a noble cause” (62). The devotees of Civil War nostalgia—“that Confederate stuff” (46)—are clearly ridiculed in this burlesque vignette and black humor reaches a peak in the description of Wesley’s demise, the sudden victim of a heart attack while digging up a grave that is about to become his own. While contemplating his inert body, the cemetery keeper—who allowed the sacrilegious pillage because “[his] folks sided Union” (62)—coolly remarks: “I don’t reckon he’ll be strutting around and playing Johnny Reb with his sword and belt buckle” (68). As the cemetery keeper derides Wesley’s mock-heroic death, his resorting to a stereotypical representation of the common Confederate soldier further suggests that the antagonism between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank is a long-lasting one, indeed.

• 9 “Lots of people don’t bother to know that anymore, but there was as many in these mountains fought (...)
• 10 The fact that Lily remembers Mr. Vaughn clerking at the store and giving her candy resonates as a t (...)

12Somehow reversing time, the collection concludes with the only actual Civil War story it contains: “Lincolnites”⁹ evokes the painful, ­iconoclastic fate of Unionists in the South through the description of nineteen-year-old Lily’s killing of a prowling Confederate—a previous acquaintance of her family¹⁰—who threatens to rob her of her horse. Deeply rooted in the intricacies of history, the conclusive story sheds an ambivalent light on the whole collection. As Lang suggests, “Lincolnites” is “among the book’s best stories” (115) and certainly draws the portrait of an extremely effective woman, who retrospectively outshines the other female characters in the collection; a young mother suddenly empowered with great ingenuity to protect her children, Lily probably is the one that burns the brighter. Yet, “touch[ing] again upon the hostility that can pit neighbor against neighbor in wartime” (Lang 115), “Lincolnites” is also an extremely violent story: therefore, Burning Bright concludes with the complex idea that in extreme cases no compromise can be reached and that violence may be inevitable when one’s security is at stake. Another myth, which is more American than typically Southern, thus burns through Lily’s example. In his ­introduction to The Ron Rash Reader, Randall Wilhelm remarks: “In ‘Lincolnites’ […], Rash rewrites this ‘lost cause’ response to life’s vicissitudes by ironically using a ‘Lost Cause’ character to stage a scene of violence and victory” (21). With Lily’s story in mind, it suddenly appears that most characters in Burning Bright somehow adopt similar survival strategies against an overwhelming sense of loss—strategies that often, if not always, entail one form of violence or another.

• 11 Boone is the town characters in Burning Bright most often refer to: it is located in the Blue Ridge (...)

13The stories making up Burning Bright are peppered with names of actual communities like “Tuckasegee” (26) and “Marshall” (53), of towns—“Boone”¹¹ (9, 127, 194, 197), “Asheville” (51), “Bryson City” (76), “Sylva” (37)—and faraway cities like “Charlotte” (93, 127) and “Atlanta” (91, 94), which merely loom in the background of the deeply rural world evoked by Rash. Only two of the twelve stories making up the collection take place outside the western North Carolina mountains: both are set in Raleigh, the state capital of North Carolina. But strikingly (and paradoxically) enough, the titles of the two “urban” stories revolve around the evocation of wild animals: the jaguar in “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars” is emblematic of species that are imperiled by extensive urbanization; the eponymous bird in “The Corpse Bird” points to the obsoleteness of traditional beliefs. City life is therefore intimately associated with a sense of loss.

• 12 This aspect is also a constant feature of Rash’s novels: the river plays a key role in One Foot in (...)

14This device imbues the collection with verisimilitude and allows the reader to draw, imaginatively at least, the map of Rash’s South, which is rooted in “Western Carolina” (189). It is a rocky region, where mountains, coves and creeks are given proper names like “Goshen Mountain” (128), “Brushy Mountain” (26), “Bluff Mountain” (71), “Sawmill Ridge” (75), “Goshen Cove” (5), “Chestnut Cove” (26) and “Middlefork Creek” (195). While nature operates as an everyday landmark allowing characters to find their bearings, it somehow turns into an omnipresent, full-fledged ­character.¹² Whether they are set in small towns or in the mountains, in the past or in the present, the short stories collected in Burning Bright all evoke isolated or forsaken places: “the truck disappeared back into the folds of the higher mountains, headed up into Chestnut Cove, what Parson’s father had called the back of beyond” (26). The expression “back of beyond” provides the collection’s second short story with its title, evoking the nooks and recesses of forlorn places, where nature literally engulfs those who venture there. This sense of remoteness from modern times is also materialized by the dirt roads that the characters travel as in the title story, “Burning Bright”: “As she drove down the half-mile dirt road, red dust rose in the car’s wake” (110). The presence of dirt instead of asphalt clearly marks the limits of civilization; the numerous occurrences of mountain dialect in dialogues reinforce this sense of seclusion. Many of Rash’s plots are actually set “where the map ends,” to borrow the title of a story to be found in his latest collection. Few families and individuals inhabit such remote places, sticking to traditional ways of life. In “Back of Beyond” their living ­conditions are described as rudimentary and miserable:

• 13 Remoteness and darkness somehow reach a peak in Rash’s The Cove: “Nothing but shadow land, her moth (...)

15The singular topographical environment of the cove (a sheltered recess in the side of a mountain) encapsulates utmost isolation.¹³ The remoteness of the place is marked by the exceptionality of cars, while an impending sense of danger is suggested by the absence of guardrails. The pace of the driver is, consequently, characterized by a constrained, metaphorical slowness. The area’s landlocked geographical situation takes the form of meandering roads that keep merging into still smaller, disaffected roads that even the Floridian vacationists, sarcastically characterized by their taste for ­adventure in a tamed wilderness, have failed to conquer. This idea reoccurs in “Burning Bright”: “Five miles from town on a dead-end dirt road, with not even the Floridians’ houses in sight” (120).

• 14 Maslin remarks “‘Falling Star’ describes a man who is so threatened by his wife’s decision to atten (...)
• 15 Rash himself cannot really be defined as a man of the mountains. Though his ­ancestors were from Ap (...)

16Generating a sense of entrapment, the dead ends evoked also foreshadow the metaphorical traps more than a few characters in the ­collection are ushered into.¹⁴ In the course of his drive to the family homestead, which he willingly abandoned in order to live in town, Parson—who operates as the center of consciousness—takes stock of the desertion of such places: “Parson had never regretted leaving, and never more so than now as his gaze moved from the rusting tractor and bailer to the sagging fences that held nothing in, settled on the shambling farmhouse itself, then turned toward the land between the barn and house” (“Back of Beyond” 27). Parson’s panoramic vision reveals how seclusion goes hand in hand with dereliction: the succession of gerunds (rusting, sagging, shambling) evokes a dilapidating environment where objects, unused, are abandoned to their slow decay. This description takes the form of a striking moment of revelation:¹⁵ indeed, it seems that Parson actually sees the circumstances of his own upbringing for the very first time. At the same time, he becomes aware of the reasons for his own irrepressible urge to “leave.” But, ­ironically he did not go very far: he actually found the semblance of a community in Tuckasegee, a few dozen miles from home. In that place, he set up to exploit the neediness of his peers—a likely consequence of the seclusion of the place—in order to make a cynical living as a pawnbroker, the owner of “PARSON’S BUY AND SELL” (20). The underlying notion (and ­indictment) is, of course, that money can buy pretty much everything in modern ­capitalistic America.

• 16 Though situated further north, Rash’s contemporary South is not unlike Tim Gautreaux’s Louisiana, a (...)

18Harsh life is captured by the title of the opening short story, “Hard Times,” which is contextually related to Serena. Its Dickensian title soon turns into a set phrase which, as it is repeated with variations from one ­narrative to the next—“hard as times were” (5), “times were rough ­everywhere” (6), “these troubled times” (23), “in these times” (196, 199)—relevantly sets the tone of the whole collection. The South sketched in Burning Bright is neither prosperous nor particularly healthy. Lang ­persuasively suggests that “[a]lthough set on a farm in the 1930s during the Great Depression, ‘Hard Time’ speaks powerfully to the economic problems of the Great Recession in the twenty-first century, especially those of unemployment, foreclosure, and hunger” (Lang 105). The very fact that several characters in Burning Bright should live in trailers (49, 183)¹⁶ ­testifies to a general state of precariousness, which is resourcefully exemplified by “Dead Confederates,” whose autodiegetic narrator ends up digging up the graves of dead confederates for valuables (antique swords and belts) that might be auctioned. The temptation to live off past splendors points to the limitations of the present; yet Rash the writer commenting on his work refuses to endorse the simplistic illusion of good old times: “There never was an Edenic time” (interview with Spill), he says. To a certain extent, Rash turns the very notion of nostalgia upside down. Indeed, “Dead Confederates” suggests that Civil War nostalgia is just another consumer fad, as some people are prone to spend fortunes in order to lay hands on a piece of wartime memorabilia: “It’s filled with buttons that fetch two hundred to a thousand dollars apiece” (47), and others to take advantage of their ­gullibility. So goes the world. Yet, as often with Rash’s ­characters, things turn out to be a bit more complex than they first seemed. The ­character-narrator of “Dead Confederates” turns out to be less motivated by greed than by the pressing need to pay for his sick mother’s hospital bills: “I think about how Daddy worked himself to death before he was sixty and Momma hanging on long enough to be taught that fifty years of working first light to bedtime can’t get you enough ahead to afford an operation and a two-week stay in a hospital” (49). Such comments reveal the narrator’s awareness of a sense of self-generating absurdity. Rash’s stories convey the feeling that the sorry faces hardened by adversity that were immortalized by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration have outlived the 1930s and perpetuated themselves in 21^st-century America.

• 17 In “The Corpse Bird,” Boyd’s wife Laura exemplifies the stereotypical discrepancy opposing the educ (...)
• 18 Folklore is etymologically defined as the knowledge of the people; by extension, the term designate (...)

19“Hard Times” begins with an ominous saying which also introduces the privileged metaphor in The Cove: “This cove’s so damn dark a man about has to break light with a crowbar, his daddy used to say” (3). Darkness is overwhelming in the cradle formed by the mountains: it is both literal in the shade of the cliffs threateningly hanging above isolated lives and symbolic when synonymous both with backwardness and hopelessness. Viewed by the urbanites as “hillbillies” (130), the inhabitants of the mountains treasure beliefs which, setting great store by the powers of nature, verge on superstitions. While city life, the realm of educated people,¹⁷ is evoked as “a world where the sky did not matter” and where whatever nature has to say is considered “irrelevant and mute” (“The Corpse Bird” 169), backwoods Appalachia is both a sanctuary of folklore¹⁸ and a myth-­generating environment:

• 19 The very fact that Boyd should resist gas logs reveals the persistence of his ­attachment to the re (...)

20In the “Corpse Bird,” Boyd, a trueborn Appalachian who educated himself out of his milieu into suburban upper-middle class, embodies the ­unsolvable conflict between the irrationality of myth and lore and the pragmatic urges of modern life. The unexpected appearance of an owl in his ­everyday environment saturated with comfort and gadgets¹⁹ unwittingly brings forth the beliefs with which he was brought up and that his scientific education methodically stifled: “The owl called again from the scarlet oak behind the Colemans’ house, and Boyd knew with utter certainty that if the bird stayed in the tree another night someone would die” (166). In this quote the character’s essential ambivalence is highlighted by the contrast between the assertive jargon of science and the irrational conclusion drawn from the bird’s third call, which—as typified by its portentous name—he believes heralds a corpse. For Boyd, the “bird’s low plaintive call” (165) thus operates as an eerie manifestation of the return of the repressed.

• 20 It is tempting to interpret this description as a discrete tribute to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a (...)

24All in all, some characters have very little left. In “Hard Times” the Hartleys are made to appear as the epitome of loss: “With their ragged clothes hanging loose on bony frames, they looked like scarecrows en route to another cornfield, their possessions in tow” (6).²⁰ The portrayal of the family actually highlights how little of them is left, their rags failing to conceal their emaciated, skeletal bodies. While, out of misery, Hartley seems to be on the verge of losing his voice: “It struck Jacob that even the man’s voice had been worn down to a bare-boned flatness” (7), the compelling impression of fleshlessness conveyed by the whole family is further confirmed by the comparison of his daughter with “a rag doll” (16). The Hartleys finally represent that against which others can measure and appreciate the fact that they have not fallen so low yet: “They hadn’t lost everything the way others had, but they’d lost enough” (5).

• 21 It is once again Laura, the suburban “educated” wife in “The Corpse Bird,” who best embodies this r (...)
• 22 An all-pervasive smell, the odor of meth also contributes to the castigation of the addicts’ innoce (...)

26Some characters have simply lost it all. In the opening short story the Hartleys merely introduce a prolonged gallery of the dispossessed, which actually expands far beyond the limits of the collection. A ­recurring feature in Burning Bright and Rash’s 2013 collection of short stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, is his modern time characters’ addiction to drugs, whether in the form of the unexceptional anxiolytics and sedatives²¹ which are eagerly dispensed to remedy the anxieties of modern life or, even more ­dramatically, in that of crystal meth. Indeed, Rash’s fiction evokes a twenty-first century America that is often impregnated with the nauseating odor of crystal meth: “The odor of it came in the door with them, in their hair, their clothes, a sour ammonia smell like cat piss” (“Back Beyond” 22)—an odor that immediately stigmatizes those that are ready to lose it all in order to get high.²²

• 23 More generally, dismemberment is a key motif in Rash’s fiction, which is fraught with cripples of a (...)

28Because of the low cost and easy availability of crystal meth, the addicts clearly appear as a propagating species in Rash’s South, as noted by the Sheriff in “Back of Beyond”: “There’s too many of them to keep up with. This meth, it ain’t like other drugs. Even cocaine and crack, at least those were expensive and hard to get. But this stuff, it’s too easy” (25). When used as a recreational drug for its euphoric properties, the ­physical effects of meth include withdrawal, anorexia (all the meth addicts in Burning Bright have indeed renounced feeding themselves), dilated pupils and blurred vision, itchy skin and dry mouth or bruxism. The expression “meth mouth” designates an abnormal and quick loss of teeth, a gruesome symptom highlighted in the first of several portrayals of characters that are literally ruined by their toxic addiction.²³

• 24 This expression is borrowed from Joyce Compton Brown’s 2003 interview with Ron Rash. I want to than (...)

33While make-believe takes the extreme form of escapism in drug addiction, Rash’s stories develop their own violent course and the memory sustaining them is “blood-memory,” a form of memory that does not “[deny] the reality of that which was lost”²⁴ and which Rash defines as follows: “part of my responsibility is to be true to lives that were often tragic and complex, to avoid sentimentalizing those lives” (interview with Brown 347).