In communion

IN CONVERSATION

                In our profession, a few scholars have used the phrase "in conversation" so frequently as to empty it of useful meaning .  To impress a handful of readers, Scholar Z tells them that she or he is putting Toni Morrison in conversation with Margaret Mitchell or James Baldwin with Stephen King. What a joke! What is actually "in conversation" is Scholar Z's memory of reading a novel by Baldwin in the past with the current experience of reading a film based on a text by King.  Were Scholar Z truly in conversation with herself, she would produce genuine scholarship without benefit of rhetorical spectacle.

                As I read Mississippi Blood (New York: William Morrow, 2017) by  Greg Iles, I might claim that he communes with John Grisham ---as only one Mississippi novelist can with another. I would offer as dubious proof that Iles signifies with respect on Grisham  when the first-person narrator in Mississippi Blood informs readers

"And while I was transitioning from a successful legal career  to a more lucrative one as an author of legal thrillers, Lincoln was slaving in a small firm, chasing small-time cases until he was finally busted for embezzling escrow funds from a client trust account" (28).

                My proof is indeed suspect, very personal, hardly transcendent.  I am aware that the white narrator (Penn Cage, a name worthy of medieval allegory) is referring to  his black half-brother Lincoln (Turner).  What  "Lincoln was slaving" triggers  in my mind  is not any work by Grisham but  the historical pun of Lincoln + slave; Larry Brown's Dirty Work and the theme of racial riddles  embroidered in the fiction of William Faulkner and transracial conversations in fiction by Ellen Douglas (Can't Quit You, Baby) , Richard Wright (The Long Dream), and Minrose Gwin. It is Gwin's first-person narrator in The Queen of Palmyra who lends witness and gender balance to the exquisite rightness of what Iles is excavating about violent racial history in the vicinity of Natchez, Mississippi in the voice of Penn Cage.  The citizens of Natchez who insist on living in nineteenth-century fairytales of the Old South must shudder in recognition of what Iles reveals about the twentieth-century  New South  in a way that resonates well with the twenty-first century Southscape of Jesmyn Ward's  Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). My proof is evidence that erupts from my idiosyncratic history as a reader who appreciate Iles's literary or aesthetic acumen. My history of reading fiction by Mississippi writers is in communion not in conversation.  My mind is communing with what it is treason to teach in a university classroom, just as Iles is communing with Grisham in using the thriller genre to render a superb cultural critique.

                For me, reading is communion, is protecting memory against the eroding consequences of amnesia.  In the ambiance of retirement, thank God, I do not have to climb academic ladders or racial mountains.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 22, 2017