Gone Fishing: Trauma and Repression in Ron Rash’s Water World

PREFACE: The fishing motif in Rash’s work posits a gap or “blue hole” of access into the dimly remembered, repressed, or forgotten, and through Rash’s configuration of space, action, and imagery, characters (and readers too) are allowed entry into these boundary zones of traumatic experience. Ron Rash’s fascination with looking past a surface (both physical landscapes and human exteriors) to raise things up—objects, images, stories, memories—from murky depths is, perhaps, his most distinguishing concern and metaphor as a writer. The action itself allows Rash to turn one of his favorite personal hobbies into the perfect literary metaphor for memory and recovering something unseen—fishing. In much of Rash’s work, characters “fish” for something, to break the surface and explore what rests below, whether it’s for catfish, speckled trout, a giant sturgeon, drowned bodies, an underwater valley, or an old jacket and a memory of a night long forgotten. Fishing, of course, is loaded with biblical and psychoanalytic symbolism because it implies a search for something unseen, and therefore unknown as well. This up/down formal structure pivots on the twinning themes of the seen and the unseen, the present and the past, the known and the unknown. Rash often positions characters in this formal structure to show they are immersed in acts of memory, and what they raise from the depths (or leave below) is riddled with what Freud called “condensation” (the melding of two warring desires into one image) and the “uncanny.” Rash uses the fishing motif to combine the psychic energies of memory, trauma, and repression, and to comment on how characters attempt to endure or negotiate various traumatic experiences that have been buried in memory. The fishing motif posits a gap or “blue hole” of access into the dimly remembered, repressed, or forgotten, and through Rash’s configuration of space, action, and imagery, characters (and readers too) are allowed entry into these boundary zones. As in psychoanalysis, we are given glimpses of traumatic signs that turn and twist and reform into memory tales that stir up the bottom waters and often bring painful memories to light