JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 237 из 359This is Cullinan's little acre of that patch of untilled soil, soil which has always been amazingly rich. One is tempted to believe that outside of the South, such an idea wouldn't raise much more than ragweed. But in this soil, it grows a vine of potent, crazed beauty-the reader is mesmerized with horror by what goes on in that forgotten school for young ladies.
On the other hand, William Faulkner did more than drop a few seeds; he planted the whole damn garden . . . and everything he turned his hand to after 1930, when he really discovered the gothic form for fair, seemed to come up. The essence of the Southern gothic in Faulkner's work comes, for me, in Sanctuary , when Popeye stands on the scaffold, about to be hung. He has combed his hair neatly for the occasion, but now, with the rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his hair has fallen lankly across his forehead. He begins to jerk his head, trying to flip his hair back into place. "I'll fix that for you," the executioner tells him, and pulls the trigger on the scaffold's trapdoor. Exit Popeye, with hair in his face. I believe with all my heart that no one brought up north of the Mason-Dixon Line could have thought of that scene, or written it right if he or she had done. Ditto the long, lurid, and excruciating scene in the doctor's waiting room which opens Flannery O'Connor's novella "Revelation." There are no doctor's waiting rooms like that outside the Southern imagination; holy Jesus, what a crew.
My point is that there is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the Southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel.
The case of the Harralsons, the first family to inhabit the Bad Place in Siddons's novel shows quite clearly how the author has put her own Southern gothic imagination to work. Pie Harralson, the girl-wife-ChiOmega-Junior-Leaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners.
She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the love-hate-love affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully: "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!” Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works.
On the other hand, William Faulkner did more than drop a few seeds; he planted the whole damn garden . . . and everything he turned his hand to after 1930, when he really discovered the gothic form for fair, seemed to come up. The essence of the Southern gothic in Faulkner's work comes, for me, in Sanctuary , when Popeye stands on the scaffold, about to be hung. He has combed his hair neatly for the occasion, but now, with the rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, his hair has fallen lankly across his forehead. He begins to jerk his head, trying to flip his hair back into place. "I'll fix that for you," the executioner tells him, and pulls the trigger on the scaffold's trapdoor. Exit Popeye, with hair in his face. I believe with all my heart that no one brought up north of the Mason-Dixon Line could have thought of that scene, or written it right if he or she had done. Ditto the long, lurid, and excruciating scene in the doctor's waiting room which opens Flannery O'Connor's novella "Revelation." There are no doctor's waiting rooms like that outside the Southern imagination; holy Jesus, what a crew.
My point is that there is something frighteningly lush and fertile in the Southern imagination, and this seems particularly so when it turns into the gothic channel.
The case of the Harralsons, the first family to inhabit the Bad Place in Siddons's novel shows quite clearly how the author has put her own Southern gothic imagination to work. Pie Harralson, the girl-wife-ChiOmega-Junior-Leaguer, wields an unhealthy sort of attraction over her father, a beefy, choleric man from the "wire grass south." Pie seems quite aware that her husband, Buddy, makes a triangle with her at the apex and daddy at one of the lower corners.
She plays the two of them off one another. The house itself is only another pawn in the love-hate-love affairs she seems to be having with her father ("That weird thing she has with him," one character says dismissively). Near the end of her first conversation with Colquitt and Walter, Pie says gleefully: "Oh, Daddy's just going to hate this house! Oh, he's going to be fit to be tied!” Buddy, meanwhile, has been taken under the wing of Lucas Abbott, a new arrival at the law office where Buddy works.