Rereading THE PONDER HEART

Rereading Eudora Welty's The Ponder Heart

Eudora Welty's novella The Ponder Heart (1953) is a comic masterpiece, a gem of heritage and observational comedy.  The comedy imprisoned in the text is pathological and ,thus,  deliciously Mississippi, Southern, and American.  Like many writers of her gender and class, the accomplished  white women writers of the 1950s, Welty seems to have possessed (and to have been  possessed by) a wicked sense of white humor.  From various perspectives available to us in 2019  --  many of them having origins in African American praxis, and especially in any sustained attention to Edna Earle, the first person narrator of the novella, we discern how the power of the grotesque and the stereotype is undiminished in our contemporary negotiations with text and time. Indeed, recent discussion of ANT (actor-network theory) reminds us that reflection on what we are doing in the act of reading can be fresh and sobering, leading to admission that absolute description of reading isn't possible.  ANT isn't new.  It's only a change of underwear for literary criticism.

 Like Edna Earle, Welty was faithful to what Fred Hobson examined in Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1983).Welty, however, displaced a rage to explain with a need to tell.  Should one be interested in accounting for the grounds of Welty's imagination, one reads Welty's comedy in tandem with Suzanne Marrs' Eudora Welty: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005).  One ought to be honest and cold in examining racial humor and the positioning of observational comedy, either in the 1950s or now,  against the distractions of literary theory and  with one's experience of  history as always unfinished narrative.

Much to her credit,  Welty tried to avoid the banality of  racism, in a fashion which demarcates her  from her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner.  For example,  Faulkner's narrator Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom was as Hobson claims somewhat oblivious to his listener inside and outside the text; by contrast, Welty's narrator is excessively conscious that she is captivating the ears of a listener with the "magic" of calculated orality.  Hobson avoids engaging what Welty truly donated to Southern explanation, giving her only a single mention on page 245; he gives  fuller, not unappreciated attention to the more easily digested legacy of  Lillian Smith.  It is noteworthy that Hobson avoided an authentic confrontation with the phallic dimensions of Welty's project in The Ponder Heart.  In her own way --- in her use of the devices  of orality and speech, Welty calls into question Hobson's gender-compromised,  hegemonic purpose. She charms our ears into almost forgetting that laughter can range from the tragic to the comic, that laughter is at times the bitch's brew of Miles Davis. Listen to the mind-altering laughter of his music.

If one listens with passionate, subjective attention to Edna Earle, one hears a magpie in need of psychoanalytic notice , the scrutiny which literary and cultural  criticism of 2019 deserves.  Edna Earle is very much a prejudiced, unreliable narrator. She has Caucasian  female  disdain for the supporting cast of black characters in her discourse, a discourse that unites paternal and maternal dimensions in making Uncle Daniel the perpetual child of his father in a perverse mirror of slave and master.   Edna Earle and Eudora Welty conspire in The Ponder Heart , beyond their respective graves, to instruct readers about the blurred, racial torrents and torments of American humor in 2019.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            February 25, 2019