The Southern
Quarterly, vol. XXXV, 1, (Fall 1996), p. 43--54.
Anne Foata
Death in the Garden : The Edenic Images in the
Fiction of Andrew Lytle
Abstract.
In Andrew Lytle's fiction, the story of America's settlement is the sad tale
of a large-scale deflowering of the virgin land. This accounts for the
mortiferous character of the Edenic images that fill his novels, the lush
forests, beautiful gardens, fragrant coves, which serve as many metonymies
for the entire West and which eventually merge into images of Chaos, of the
undifferentiated origins of the world, whereas the Edenic quest itself, the
settlers' yearning for the state of renewal and happiness, more and more
forcefully appears as a withdrawal from life into an impossible state of
androgynous unity. This is particularly apparent in Lytle's last novel, The
Velvet Horn; it also allows a reading of A Name for Evil
as a parable of the death wish lying at the core of the West's
Edenic venture in the New World. ``To yearn for the West is simply to yearn
for death.''
In warning the reader that the family chronicle he is
about to read in A Wake for the Living (1975)
is the story of an American family's search for Eden, Andrew
Lytle chose to seal by the exemplary story of his own family
the major theme of his fiction, proclaiming one last time the
importance of the Edenic drive in the making and destiny of his
country.
anne2.foata@wanadoo.fr
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