In his new novel, Thomas Moore has taken two disparate societies linked by memory, ancestry, oral tradition, and history, and placed them, juxtaposed, against the shimmering tapestry of time.
WE AIN’T GOT THE DOG YET. BUT MAYBE SOMEDAY.
– William Faulkner, The Bear
Virginia author, Tom Moore, has struck a blow against those fatuous huff-n-puffers, the French philosophes and their “German disciples,” who believed that rationalistic scientism could provide a paradigm that defined man and his civilizations by some unalterable, universal law. Moore understands that societies and civilizations are constantly changing, a situation eloquently addressed by eighteenth century Italian intellectual Giambattista Vico: “If you were to apply the geometric method to practical life,” he wrote, “‘you would no more than spend your labor on going mad rationally,’ and you would drive a straight furrow through the vicissitudes of life as if whim, rashness, opportunity, and luck did not dominate the human condition.”
Moore, in his new novel The Hunt for Confederate Gold, has taken two disparate societies linked by memory, ancestry, oral tradition, and history and placed them, juxtaposed, against the shimmering tapestry of time. The modern South, galvanized and Yankeefied, as dedicated to profit and progress as its old nemesis, New England; and, the Old South with its recognition of hierarchical distinction, its unique “older religiousness,” its civitas, and agrarian way-of-life, define a tension rarely encountered in the American drama. Faulkner in his quest for the lost South hung the critter on a tree because no one else could; Flannery, in pointing to the purpose of all things, gutted it out; the Agrarians, learned men all, inspected the remains, made copious notes, and talked into the night, then Robert Penn Warren left for Connecticut.
For the southern people and particularly for their writers there is an innate understanding of nature; perhaps the Kentuckian, Wendell Berry, is the best example. And, this understanding is holistic in that they understand man’s correct place; without this knowledge they could not write. While nature in and of itself might provide good stories, these stories could not include man; southerners would be noted as great travelogue writers.
To include man it is necessary to grasp two additional concepts brilliantly illustrated by rhetorician, Richard Weaver, in his seminal study The Southern Tradition at Bay. First, is the idea of self-denial, gleaned from a remembered history that included the sacrifice of war and the near total destruction of their homeland. Their phenomenal act of self-restoration entailed a sacrifice and a self-denial that has been given too little attention by academics. Second, is tragedy, that base ingredient in the nature of man that gives birth to a real and continual perception of the mystery that is God. While the South, as Flannery O’Connor has pointed out, is not Christ centered, it is surely “Christ haunted.”
Thomas Moore then, in his “moral imagination,” has contrived characters that reflect an inherent oneness with the “mystery.” They are adherents not to some inane philosophy centered on man but to the divine relationship that is possible in the individual, his family, and community. It is the South then that has carried on, as Weaver tells us, “Its love of heroes, its affection for eccentric leaders, its interest in personal anecdotes, in the colorful and dramatic, discounted elsewhere as charming weaknesses, are signs that it reveres the spiritual part of man.”
That Moore has included these elements in his novel is a reflection of his understanding of the complexities and contradictions inherent within human nature. The contest then, is between the remnant; men who remember their history, live in their familial connections, and speak the language of their people; and the “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who demand the homogenization of diverse people, who worship the empire of the absurd.
As you might have guessed its not much of a fair fight. But, Professor Parker T. Hastie, a character modeled sans disguise after southern leader, historian, and essayist Clyde N. Wilson of South Carolina University, is about to be placed among the many famous characters of Southern fiction. I can’t tell you why this is without revealing too much of a very good story, but that is the point. The Hunt for Confederate Gold, is “a story well told.”
And, that is what we expect from Southern writers.
robertcheeks@core.com
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