“Solitude Like a Geographical Place: Some Disconnected People in Ron Rash’s Fiction,” Jimmy Dean Smith

Abstract: This paper considers how geographical displacement leads to painful linguistic unlinking in several of Ron Rash’s fictions: “The Corpse Bird,” Saints at the River, “The Woman Who Believed in Jaguars,” The World Made Straight, and its relatively obscure precursor, “Time Zones.” Using the eco-philosopher Glen Albrecht’s terminology and theoretical frame, I approach these texts as less familiar but still noteworthy components of a theme extending throughout the Rash oeuvre (“Spring Fever,” Eureka Mill), that of exile and loneliness. An Appalachian childhood, writes Rash in “The Corpse Bird” and numerous poems, involves training in the semiotics of place, i.e., learning to “live life ‘by the signs’” of a highly expressive landscape. Under the tutelage of elder bloodkin, children learn not only English (and Appalachian English), but also the grammar and syntax of birds and spiders, of sun and moon. The present texts situate their protagonists in “inauthentic” places—an upper middle class sub-division outside Asheville, the Midlands of South Carolina—where the somatic and spiritual effects of nostalgia are illuminated and magnified by loss of eco-rhetorical certainties. Cut off from the signifiers of place—whether by alteration of the land (a major theme in Rash; cf. solastalgia [Albrecht]) or exile from it (a lesser but still significant, and relatively unexplored, theme in Rash, and the subject of this paper)—erstwhile mountain people face a crisis in their own singular hermeneutics, an aphasia affecting the Appalachian part of the brain