Bewilderment

or, making sense of "Sequatchie Valley"

[Image: “My Driveway” by Michael Hodge, licensed under CC BY 2.0.]

Ordinarily I believe in the thought that a writer’s fiction, though it might disturb the reader, should not disturb the writer. It might “save a few souls or try a few others,” in O’Connor’s words, but upon completion of the piece this ceases to be the writer’s business. The uses of the piece are now in other hands—primarily Divine, and therefore on my view trustworthy, ones. Post-hoc attempts at authorial interpretation may not do anyone much good: the author least of all, who should be about her proper business, which is working on new pieces.

But in the case of “Sequatchie Valley” I can’t follow my own advice. The story is still somehow under my skin. This may have to do with my sense that, for all I knew the precise effect I meant it to arrive at—and, in as much humility as I can scrape together, must acknowledge the story did arrive at—I can’t shake the sense that the story may also have other effects I did not intend: that it got, to some extent, out of my control.

Is this a good thing? That might be a matter of who you ask. Socrates, in the Ion, tells his poet friend that the divine madness overtakes the rhapsode and causes him (or her) to sing in ignorance of the song’s deeper meanings. There’s a part of me that ratifies this. There’s also a part that resists it: that thinks I, or any writer, ought to have no truck with obscure spiritual forces bent on using my faculties to say I know not what to I know not whom, with my only ever possibly partial because only ever possibly uninformed consent.

Well, but as Henry James said, if we were never bewildered there would be very little to say of us. And bewildered is the right word, as “Sequatchie Valley” takes us into a literal wild place, thereby also into contact with that which is uncultivated and mysterious in the soul.

The plot follows an idealistic nuclear family’s attempt to rewild itself, in isolation from community and with a deliberately courted scarcity of resources. Suffice it to say that things do not go as planned, nor at all well. The woman’s increasing instability and suggestibility are not noticed by either husband or wife until damage has been done that can’t be undone. Worst (for some readers), the damage is partly caused by an exaggerated, literalistic reading of advice from a source that could and arguably should have steered them right, yet rather spectacularly didn’t.

As I said, the story is a tragedy, meant to be read as such (though in canny hands it wouldn’t make a half-bad horror film either). And though (to quote Contemplative Realism) it “occupies an incarnational middle ground between the fixation on Nature found in Crane and the humanism of Henry James,” it does so in a way that is not at all reassuring about Nature. If in (for example) Berry we have a natural world that is beneficent, glorious, and consoling, “Sequatchie Valley” gives us one that can just as easily be fickle, cruel, and spiteful.

If at times the natural world can be mistaken for divine, “Sequatchie Valley” reminds us that nature makes a good companion but a bad divinity, especially to the extent that we are nature: whenever we give the word a capital “N” and a pedestal that suggests deification, we might be effectively hiding the truth of what we’re doing behind a screen of virtue, but we’re still only ever worshiping ourselves. This is sure to end badly: and yet there’s no guarantee that the path by which it ends badly will be that of excess self-indulgence. The lure of self-destruction can be, for some temperaments, just as tempting; “Sequatchie Valley” takes to extremes an illustration of what may happen when the impulse to make false sacrifices goes unchecked.

---

This is my reading of the story; there may be others just as legitimate or more so. But one other thing I can now contribute, which may not be immediately obvious (it wasn’t during composition), is the “holometabole” for the story. This word, holometabole,¹ is of poet Ryan Wilson’s coinage: it’s the creative stimulus which the writer has so thoroughly taken in, so completely assimilated, that it has ceased simply to nourish the mind and has to some extent become a part of the mind.

For “Sequatchie Valley” it was, entirely without my conscious awareness, the passage from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man where he discusses the loss of the concept of human nature, with all of the intellectual and interior complexity that “human nature” has in most times and most places been understood to imply, and its replacement with the concept of humanity as “Nature”—that is, raw material on which various forms of control and manipulation are practiced, possibly by external forces or by other agents, possibly also by the self itself:

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may ‘conquer’ them. We are always conquering Nature, because ‘Nature’ is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

If you’ve read the story, it’s now not difficult at all to see how its events play out in precise accordance with the arc Lewis describes. Yet acting in accordance with the nature of the practice of art, I wasn’t at all aware of the influence while I was working on the story (over a period of nearly two years, remember).

But what a relief, having woken up in such a dark forest, to find that you’ve been guided all along by a hand and a voice that you recognize.

1. “Holometabole” also has a meaning in biology: it refers to the previous lifestage of an insect which has since undergone a total physical metamorphosis, so that nothing or nearly nothing of the earlier stage of development is still discernible in the mature creature. Wilson means something different by the word.