590 The American Century: Literature since 1945humor, describes people waging a disgracefully unequal struggle with circumstances
who remain hopeful despite everything – and who, above all, use old tales and
talking as a stay against confusion.
“I wanted,” Welty has said of Losing Battles, “to get a year in which I could show
people at the rock bottom of their lives.” So, instead of the wealthy Delta family in
good economic times described in Delta Wedding, she focused on some poor farmers
from the hill country during the Depression. “I wanted,” Welty has also explained,
“to see if I could do something that was new for me: translating every thought and
feeling into speech.” “Can’t conversation ever cease?” asks one character, an outsider,
toward the end of Losing Battles, and the reader can see what he means. The novel is
centered in a family reunion, and the Beechams and Renfros who make up the bulk
of it never seem to stop talking. There are tall tales, family legends, personal
memories, folk humor, religious myth, stories of magic and mystery; and everyone
seems to possess his or her own storytelling technique. Always, accompanying the
main text, the talk requiring the reunion’s attention, there is a subtext of comment,
criticism, and anecdote, like that background of anonymous voices, inherited folk-
speech and wisdom, that gives resonance to traditional ballads and epic. There is a
constant sense, in fact, that each tale and conversation, however trivial, belongs to a
larger body of speech, a continuum of storytelling: stories knit into one another, one
anecdote recalls another in the series, and tales are told which we learn have been
told many times before. “A reunion,” Welty has observed, “is everybody remembering
together.” “There’s someone to remember a man’s whole life,” she added, “every bit
of the way along.” That suggests why the Beechams and Renfros talk. It enables them
to escape from their loneliness; it gives them a feeling of identification with a
particular place and past (a place and past that, of course, their talk helps to create);
and it seems to certify experience for them, to make it manageable and real. In turn,
their language gives them a sense of being and a feeling of belonging; to put it
crudely, they feel they are there because they say they are and other people say so too.
Yet all the while they are saying so, they are, as always in Welty’s fiction, warning
about the other side of things: the mystery of personality, the secret phases of
experience, the accidental moments in life – the things that no language or code, no
model of reality can ever accommodate. An accomplished photographer, Welty was
fond of using photography as a paradigm of the human project to name and know
experience: to use stories, like her own, and ceremonies, like those of the Beechams
and Renfros, to get a purchase on ourselves and our world. Just as we click the
shutter, Welty intimates, the object will disappear, leaving “never the essence, only a
sum of parts.” Writing is a pursuit of the real, but the real will always elude us. It is,
as Welty memorably put it in her 1972 novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, like “a child
who is hiding in the dark while others hunt him, waiting to be found.”
“Ours is the century of unreason,” Welty declared once, “the stamp of our behavior
is violence and isolation: nonmeaning is looked upon with some solemnity.”
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) would have agreed with some of this, but not all.
What troubled her was not lack of reason but absence of faith. “The two circumstances
that have given character to my writing,” O’Connor admitted in her collection ofGGray_c05.indd 590ray_c 05 .indd 590 8 8/1/2011 7:31:33 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 33 PM