Home : The Voice : February 2002 : Growing in spirit

Readings

by Rick Dietrich

Past and Memories:
Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter

My editor is too gracious to append a note to this column, saying how late it was. My excuse for being late with it was not the usual, however. I wanted to write about Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, but I needed help, and my book group did not meet until after the column's deadline.

This is an opportunity to say something in praise of book groups. The one I attend regularly, at least, has not only made me read, it has made me a better reader. It has succeeded in the first through its sheer faithfulness: we have been meeting since 1992; together we have read almost 100 books. It has managed the second by its collective intelligence--we are much more insightful in conversation with one another than we are individually, at least than I am.

The Optimist's Daughter is a case in point. I had read the novel before with little profit, only wondering what it was that made Eudora Welty such a big deal. Here was, according to The New York Times, "the best book Eudora Welty [had] ever written"; and for me it just lay there on the page. If "its substance [was] everlasting human nature," as The New York Post claimed, everlasting human nature must be, I gathered, both limited and more than a little boring.

I was glad enough to let my $1.25 Fawcett World Library paperback fall apart on the shelf, but the group wanted to read the novel. And as part of my faithfulness—limited as it may be—I was willing to read it with the group. I did not, however, come to the end of this second reading of The Optimist's Daughter with significantly greater appreciation for Welty's book than I had the first time I'd read it, probably twenty years ago. It still hadn't gotten up off the page. It still seemed limited, generally boring, almost shallow. For professional reasons, I did perk up at the various mentions of the Mt. Salus Presbyterian Church-- much of the novel takes place in Mt. Salus, Mississippi. But, in the end, the church seemed to function as little more than a hall for social ceremonies, a place for weddings and funerals. This wasn't an inconsequential role in a story in which there were three significant deaths. But, it wasn't a very rich role either.

The novel is about death, in part—this is what I finally learned, when we got together as a group of readers. The novel is about death. So, it is also about the past. It is about what death can and cannot do to the past. And—because it is about the past—it is about memory. If our group read the novel correctly, Welty is careful to distinguish between "past" and "memory," something I don't always do. As the novel comes to an end, the optimist's daughter Laurel McKelva Hand prepares to leave Mt. Salus, where she grew up. She is also preparing to leave Mt. Salus behind. This is not the first time she has left home. She has been living away from home for some time—in Chicago of all places. (What's a good Mississippi girl doing up there?) But, she is finally ready, after the death of her father, to leave home behind. Welty writes, taking Laurel's point of view, "The past is no more open to help or hurt than was Father in his coffin," though, she admits, that heretofore this past "has been everything and done everything to me." Still, "the past is like him, impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist," she goes on. (Italics added.) "It will never be impervious. . . . As long as it's vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due."

For us, who are Christians, these issues of past and memory are important. We are dependent on a past reality. As Paul writes to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:13-15), "Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; [and] if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised." The reality, the fact, of this past event, Christ's resurrection, is central to the Christian's faith.

It is also true, however, that at this point, we have only stories of and testimonies to Christ's resurrection, and none of these, so far as we know, were written at the empty tomb. They are, in other words, the products of memory. The past may be utterly real, but our only connections to it, by memory, are tenuous. This is, in part, because we are tenuous, contingent, sinful. Moreover, these connections are not only tenuous. They are, in Welty's terms, not impervious as well. The way we remember the gospel must be, as she says, "vulnerable to the living moment," that is, open to the present spirit as well as to our recollections of the salvation story; that is, if we are to be today true followers of the One who has been raised.

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