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\auteurcourant={ANNE FOATA}
\titrecourant={THE GOSPEL SINGER}

\raggedbottom
{\eightpoint
\noindent
From: {\sl The Southern Quaterly}, vol. 39, no. 4, 2001, p. 58-62.

}
\vglue 1.5cm
\parindent=12pt
\parskip=5pt
\centerline{\bf Tragedy on the road to Enigma:}
\smallskip
\centerline{\bf  Ritual death in Harry Crews's {\it The Gospel Singer}}


\medskip
\centerline{
Anne FOATA}\smallskip
\centerline{\it Universit\'e Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, France}

\bigskip
\rightline{\vbox{\hsize=7.5cm
\noindent
{\sl Just as Dionysus is he who devours and is\hfil\break devoured, so Apollo
is he who pursues and flees.}}}
\bigskip\bigskip
Viewed from the panoramic vantage afforded by thirty odd years
of novel writing, Harry Crews's violent, macabre, often farcical world of
grotesques is apt to convey an unsettling impression of sameness.
Unsettling, that is, for the writer of the present article, a dedicated
reader of Crews's novels, who might appear not to do justice to the enormous
variety of characters in his fiction and, hence, to his sustaining ability
to create life-like, albeit extreme, people and situations.

     But sameness all the same, if one may say so, to the extent that any one
of Crews's characters is prey to an obsession; and who of all people can be
more monochord, monobasic, and let's say it, monotonous than a monomaniac?
Karatekas, bodybuilders and beauty queens share the same obsessive worship
of perfection, car freaks consume their vehicles in manic communion,
compulsive sinners hanker after salvation. Most of Crews's males lust after
female flesh and about all of his characters long to be somewhere else, far
from their ordinary lives and ordinary selves, in a frenzied, misdirected
search for meaning.

Thus, Crews's grotesque Southern landscape may appear as the landscape
of modern man's soul set adrift in a world deprived of the old Christian
certainties and prey to untrammeled desires of every kind. This vision of
deformed, i.e., depraved, humanity may be the sour milk the young Crews
suckled in the stern Calvinistic surroundings of his native Southern
Georgia, compounded by the ignorance and superstition of its tenant
farmers, the squalid poverty and utter destitution of the Depression years
during which he grew up.  It is a vision all too familiar in many a
Southern novel of its kind, the very stuff that must have boomed down on
many a chastened audience during revivals in the Bible Belt. It was,
however, for the Roman Catholic Flannery O'Connor, Crews's fellow
Georgia writer, to articulate its grassroots metaphysics most convincingly.

In O'Connor's words, Crews's outlook on life is the ``prophetic vision" of
the ``realist of distances" who does not hesitate to distort appearances in
order to show a hidden truth to a world that is no longer willing or able
to see. He is fond of quoting her when she said: ``For the hard of hearing
you shout, for the very nearly blind you draw large pictures"({\it Getting
Naked} 29), adding in his own words that ``if there are freaks
in my novels\dots\  it is only that these people have conditions which are
more apparent and more immediate than the people around them" ({\it ibid}
30).

The freak, then, for Crews as he was for O'Connor, is but ``the figure
of our essential displacement" ({\it Mystery} 45) from the basic values of
Christianity that have shaped the Western world (so far).   Told
differently, we are all of us grotesques of some sort in our alienation
from God, but as our spiritual deformity has become the condition of the
world, we no longer perceive it as such, and think we are normal.

Crews's ``job" (as he says) over the years has been to jolt the reader out
of his comfortable belief and make him see ``grotesquerie as grotesque and
freakishness as freakish" ({\it Getting Naked} 29), which, looking back
on the thirty years or so of his novel writing,  he has certainly done,
with a vengeance!

All this came back to me when some time ago I chanced upon an old {\it Time}
magazine review of Leslie Fiedler's book on {\it Freaks} that I have kept in
my Crews files. Together with a picture of the wedding feast from Director
Todd Browning's 1932 film {\it Freaks}, it shows a series of six woodcuts
reproduced from the late mediaeval {\it Liber Chronicarum} of 1494 that
probably appeared in Fiedler's book.

There, staring at me amidst the six ``nightmare confrontations with the
body" (the picture's caption), was the image of Foot, the freakish {\it
alter ego} of Crews's Gospel singer, with his twenty-seven-inch-long
podiatric appendix, ``the biggest foot in the world" ({\it The Gospel
Singer} 29); and flowing into my memory with his (its?) characteristic
squirming movement (``like a huge caterpillar") also came The Thing, his
arms looking like legs and his legs like arms and his huge square head
jammed below his collarbones, while from far back resounded the screeching
of the chicken being torn up and eaten alive by the Geek.

Rereading {\it The Gospel Singer} on the urge of these images, I was struck
again by the stark inevitability of the story, the black, unremitted vision
of life and humanity it exudes, the awesome {\it catharsis} of its ending.
And full of admiration, nay awe, once again in front of the power, the lean
(despite all baroque excess) perfection of Crews's creation, the spare
tension and terseness of his prose. This being all the more so that some of
the novels that have succeeded  {\it The Gospel Singer} over the years had
somehow failed to convince me as to the appropriateness of their plot lines
and the effectiveness of their closures.  Crews's weakness, it seemed to me -
barring a few very good ones- lay in his endings, in his failure to provide
convincing, ``final" d\'enouements, which in turn reflected upon the somewhat
far-fetched and gratuitous character of some of his novels.

Certainly not so in {\it The Gospel Singer}, however.  Here was
{\it catharsis} in the old Aristotelian meaning of the word, here were
characters driven by some god-inflicted madness, here was {\it hamartia} as
flawed and tragic as you may want it, the bleak ineluctability of death and
retribution, the strict husbanding of means toward end. Here, in short, was
Tragedy.

If one follows the lead of its title and confines oneself to the world of
Gospel singing, soul saving and the laying on of hands, one
might expect {\it The Gospel Singer} to be what it purports to be, a tragedy
of the Western world, where the lame and the halt, the freaks of the Freak
Fair and the Gospel singer himself are but God's punishment for the world's
sins and the ``signposts for humanity`` ({\it Gospel} 44). This seems further
enhanced by the epigraph Crews added to the novel, namely: ``Men to whom
god is dead worship one another."

There are clues, however, embedded in the narrative that hark back to the
rituals of a much older world, to tragedy's own beginnings, when the
orgiastic killing and consumption of vegetation gods had not yet given
rise to their apotropa\"\i c, i.e., propitiatory, representation on the
tragic stage.

Did Crews have that whole mythic background in mind when he set the action
of {\it The Gospel Singer} in Enigma, named a character Didymus (``Hell of a
name for a man of God to have", 50), and set about to follow the strict
rules of unity of purpose and reversal of fortune enacted by the great
Greek tragic playwrights and later codified by Aristotle?  Did he mean his
unnamed Gospel singer to be murdered and sacrificed like Adonis or Attis of
yore so that rain can fall and vegetation grow?  He may not have done so
consciously, but as newspaperman Richard Hognut (one of the new priests of
our age of medias) has it, ``there is nothing so predictable as the ritual of
catastrophe and tragedy" (198).  Both go far back into the ages of mankind
and bear the color of the human heart, their recurrence through history
merely clad in the vestments of their time.

Thus the Gospel singer's woman-shy, self-flagellating manager, Didymus
(``the violent murderous lover of God," 58), might be an avatar of one of
the {\it Galli}, whom the Greeks called {\it Corybantes}, those castrated
priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, who commemorated the slain Attis'
death and resurrection on a wild rampage of mourning and violence to the
sound of savage music, while they  inflicted on themselves and any unwary
onlooker those bloody mutilations no newspaper or network was yet to report
on the next day. Or, couldn't we see in the infuriated crowd that hounds the
Gospel singer the avenging Erinyes that pursued Orestes after the murder
of his mother?  After all, hasn't the Gospel singer murdered both his
childhood sweetheart and his black childhood pal, albeit indirectly?

The unleashing of violence is one of the few constants of mankind. With 
the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd of Enigma and the lynching of the hero,
it seems we plunge again into the murky waters of the worship of Dionysus
with its flesh-tearing, flesh-eating followers, and eventually into the
ritual death and dismemberment of the god himself in the Orphic version of
Dionysus-Zagreus.

At first, however, the general characterization of the Gospel singer, the
very name of his manager Didymus would more pointedly outline the far less
tragic figure of Apollo, sunny triumphant Apollo, forced by the end of the
novel to stumble into the dark revelries of the god who shared his shrine
at Delphi.

Like the musician God whom Homer shows playing the lyre to the
assembly of the Olympians, the Gospel singer's radiant good looks and
golden hair make him shine like Apollo {\it Phoebus}, the sun god, who
was also {\it Xanthus}, the ``fair," ``he of the golden locks", Apollo {\it
Chrysocomes}.  To the crowds gathering to hear him sing, he is also the
healer of bodily afflictions (Apollo {\it Alexikakos}), the saviour of
diseased souls and parched fields, the rainmaker, as Apollo must
have appeared in one of his earler avatars, before later Greeks promoted
him to the Pantheon of their gods. By the end of the novel, he has turned
into a second remove murderer, not  unlike the {\it Hecatebolos} who shot
his arrows from afar. He also shares the god's gift for divination
and prophecy, harassed as he is by his supplicants who demand that he
predict and shape their future, divine their innermost longings and fulfill
them.

At this point, the name of Didymus finds its proper niche, 
not a man's but a place's, the very toponym of one of Apollo's earlier
oracles in Asia Minor, before he won the battle against Python and settled
in glory at Delphi. Couldn't we fancy the Gospel singer's manager as one
of the priests of Apollo's oracle at Didymus, ``furiously writing" in his
Dream Book?\footnote{$^1$}{Didymus' Dream Book is further reminiscent of
the Sibylline Books, the books of the Sibyl of Cumae near Naples, which
were kept in the temple of the Capitol in Rome.} As an aside and keeping in
mind Didymus' ``furious" writerly industry, might not Crews have been elated
in discovering the real-life first century (B.C) Alexandrian scholar of this
name, whose assiduous writing of reputedly three thousand and five
hundred books earned him the nickname of ``{\it Chalkenteros}" or ``Brazen
Guts"?

To come back to the Gospel singer, why should his compulsive need for
penance after every carnal sin remind one so much of Apollo's self-exile
to the Thessalian Vale of Tempe, where he sought to expiate the killing of
the serpent Python: the Serpent, that age-old archetype of promiscuous
coupling, the lustful arch-seducer of the Book of Genesis?

For the Gospel singer is weak in the flesh, aroused by every passing
tit, rounded hip, and promise of the eye.  This in fact is his
{\it hamartia}, the tragic flaw that leads to his undoing, as it most
certainly gets into trouble some of the fifteen-year-old virgins that he
seduces underneath the stages of the gospel singing circuit or on the back
seat of his Cadillac-turned-brothel. Many too were the adventures of
fair Apollo, and many the maidens, princesses and nymphs driven to a bitter
end: Daphne turned into a laurel, Castalia throwing herself into a
fountain, and poor Coronis, the Lapith princess, burned on a pyre by the
jealousy of Apollo's twin, Artemis.

Had the Gospel singer stayed clear of Enigma and its man-devouring Sphynx,
Crews's novel might have read as a paean to gospel singing
indeed,\footnote{$^2$}{and not, of all things, to sinning, as a blurb on my
Dell edition of the novel proclaims, ``A powerful paean on the wages of sin"
(from the {\it Milwaukee Journal\/})!}
with the protagonist's progress
across the United States no less triumphant than the procession of Apollo
and his Muses around Greece. Enigma, however, effaces the golden image of
the {\it Musagetes}, or, perhaps by way of the sacrificed Adonis, that other
golden swain, makes him endorse the fatal lineaments of Dionysus' story.
Enigma, in other words, turns the paean to Apollo into a wild,
lethal, dithyramb for Dionysus. Tragedy catches up.  Enigma, indeed, as the
very first sentence  of the novel informs the reader, ``is a dead end."

Clad in the long white robe of his trade, his golden hair curling around
his god-like face, the very image of the effeminate Dionysus wearing the
long Lydian robe, the Gospel singer in Woody Pea's revival tent strikes
the crowd of his worshippers with the raving, destructive madness the god
once wreaked upon his followers, in Thebes, Attica, Argos, wherever he
went.  Like the Bacchants and Bacchantes on the rampage on Mount Cythaeron
near Thebes, they bite and tear and claw, the Gospel singer's mother no
less ferocious than King Pentheus' own. Old men lose their footing,
babies thud from  their mothers'  laps, crutches, braces and
wheelchairs flow in all directions, while the cripples go under the raging
mob and Didymus collapses ``like an empty sack" (194), clutching his Dream
Book.

The collective hysteria ends in a nearby field, with both the Gospel
singer and the black preacher hanging from the same tree.  Tragedy has been
consummated.  ``The thousands of faces" that had been feeding on his words,
on his singing, ``but mostly feeding on him\dots\ on the beauty of his face
and the beauty of his voice" (56-57), have become one huge collective mouth
to swallow the god alive.

As in the Orphic version of the myth, and to paraphrase Plutarch,
the god has been destroyed, he has disappeared; he has relinquished life
and\dots\ been born again.

Born again? Yes indeed, as Mirst and Avel, the Gospel singer's brother
and sister, are seen to take over in the last pages of the novel and about
to launch into the Gospel singing career with a far-seeing manager of
their own. ``{\it Le roi est mort, vive le roi!}" went the official
proclamation at the Court of France at each demise of a king, the person
himself far less important than the function he embodied in the light of
perennity.

Here the reader who has seen French Director Marcel Camus's 1959 film
{\it Orfeu Negro} set in Brazil during the Rio Carnival will perhaps
remember the young favella boy hurrying to retrieve the slain Orfeu's
guitar so that he may sing the sun to rise on another day, and life to go
on. And we may leave the Gospel singer on this last image of yet another
tragic hero, the poet and musician Orpheus rent to pieces by the Thracian
women for failing his own MaryBell Carter.

Tragedy comes dressed in many a garb, but tragedy is one in its essence. The
Greeks, who had a sunnier notion of man's carnality, may not have called
their gods' wrath upon the Gospel singer's overindulgence of the flesh, but
they knew about Transgression and made it the essence of Tragedy.

In {\it The Gospel Singer}, Harry Crews has reached far beyond the 
Christian belief in a Redeeming God to remind his readers of the ritual
killing of the {\it pharmacos} so that the city, or the community, may
erect a new safety zone and go on living its ordinary life. Sacrifice, the
outcome of what Ren\'e Girard has called ``la violence fondatrice``
(``generative violence``), ensures that the community of men
can find an area in which to live without fear of violence and death\dots\
for some time at least.

Law and order have been restored to Enigma. Violence has once again faded
in the background. But the survivors keep mum about it.  And they are so
keen on erasing it from their memory, so eager to clean the slate, that in
time it will erupt again, somewhere, somehow.  As Harry Crews has shown in
not a few of the novels that have succeeded {\it The Gospel Singer}.

\bigskip\medskip

\centerline{\bf Bibliography}

\bigskip
{\parskip=0pt\parindent=0pt
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1
Roberto Calasso. {\it Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia}. Milano: Adelphi,
1988 (in the present author's translation from the French.)


\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1
Harry Crews. {\it The Gospel Singer}. New York: William Morrow, 1968. 
(Quotations are from the 1969 Dell Paperback, which the novelist has
inscribed to the present writer.)
  
\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1           
\vrule height .4pt depth 0pt width 2cm. {\it A Childhood: The Biography of
a Place}. New York: Harper \& Row, 1978; reissued by U. of
Georgia Press, 1995.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Anne Foata. ``Interview with Harry Crews", {\eightrm RANAM} (U. of
Strasbourg), 5, 1972; 207-225; repr. in {\it Getting Naked with Harry
Crews}, ed. Erik Bledsoe. The University Press of Florida, 1999; 26-48.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Ren\'e Girard. 
{\it Violence and the Sacred}. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins U. Press,  1977).

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
{\it New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology}, with an Introduction by Robert
Graves and translated from the French by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames.
London: Hamlyn, 1959.  (Greek mythology, 84-198; more particularly: Apollo,
109-120; Dionysus, 154-163; the Plutarch citation is on 160).

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
Flannery O'Connor.  {\it Mystery and Manners}, eds. Sally and Robert
Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969.

\medskip
\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=4mm\hangafter=1   
R.Z. Shephard. ``Leslie Fiedler's Monster Party", {\it Time}, 20 Feb. 1978;
95-96. (on Leslie Fiedler's {\it Freaks}. New York: Simon \& Schuster,
1978).

}

\vfill

\eject

\bye





Prof. Fed Hobson
Department of English
Greenlaw Hall
The University of North Carolina
CHAPEL HILL,NC27599-3520


Dear Editor,


Seeing your interest in the work of novelist Harry Crews, I wonder
whether you'd be interested in publishing my paper "Tragedy on the Road
to Enigma: Ritual Death in Harry Crews's ``The Gospel Singer".

As indicated in the title, my essay proposes a classical reading of the
novel, emphasizing the hunting down of the central character as the
sacrificial victim of Greek tragedy.

I actually met Harry Crews during one of my first visits to your country.
The interview he granted me was my first scholarly publication in France.
It turns out to be also the very first of Crews's numerous interviews
over the years and has recently appeared in a collection of them by the
University Press of Florida.

It was Crews who introduced me to Andrew Lytle whose work became the
subject of my doctoral dissertation for the University of Strasbourg.
A great part of the initial research was done in the library of your
university and at Duke, while attending the seminar on the Fugitives and
Agrarians in Professor Rubin's house on Ghimgoul Road. The Southern
Literary Journal published two of my papers on Lytle's ``The Velvet Horn" in the 198Os.

I have kept in touch with Professor Rubin and occasionally fly down to
Chapel Hill and Duke during my trips to the United States. Great places,
both of them indeed!

With my best regards and wishes for a happy 2000





Dear Karen,


I loved your Christmas letter and loved the hat you're wearing for Will's
christening.

I see you have travel plans in Asia this year.  You are turning into
seasoned world travellers. We'll be back in Princeton this summer; I also
would like to do some sightseeing in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick...

The season's holidays were dull somewhat due to Dominique's and most of
the family's various illnesses (mostly flue and bronchitis).  The storm
felled our fir tree in front of the house. We still have all the tiles on
the roof and we have never been without electricity or telephone.

My university's February recess is completely disconnected from
Dominique's university's, so there isn't much we can do in the way of
travel.  Too bad, for I'd welcome a change.

Tell me about Ella Fountain's party.

Fondest regards to Clark and yourself


Ch�re Marie-Dominique

Vous nous avez laiss�s sans nouvelles et je m'inqui�te.  Etes-vous rentr�e
en France pour les f�tes de fin d'ann�e?  J'esp�re que votre maman va
aussi bien que possible.

Rien de sp�cial � signaler ici; la routine, l'hiver strasbourgeois, la
grippe chez Dominique, et � 
partir de demain les soldes... et le temps qui passe, passe, passe.

Bonne et heureuse ann�e

Anne


Ch�re Sabine,


Je viens d'envoyer un message � Marie-Do qui nouis a laiss�s sans
nouvelles pendant toutes ces f�tes.

Comment allez-vous vous-m�me? Toujours en plein boom?

Bonne et heureuse ann�e

Anne




Hello, Professor Rubin,

Where have you been cruising lately? the Greek islands? Alaska? the Gulf of
Mexico?

Dominique was a one-course "temp" at UCSD last Spring.  We had a very
pleasant three-month visit in California, went back to the deserts,  drove
up the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Seattle, and were happy to see
our Duke Law School friends in Santa Monica. The heat wave was waiting for
us in Princeton, where we catsit a house without air-conditioning.

We'll probably be back in Princeton this summer.

I hope you and Eva are well.  Dominique and myself send you our very best
wishes for a happy 2000


Anne



Ma ch�re Manuelle, 


Tout va bien? David a-t-il pu conserver son appartement?  Avez-vous des
projets de voyage?  As-tu trouv� des traductions?  Polly me dit qu'elle
conna�t des fili�res.  T'a-t-elle dit qu'elle servait d'interpr�te dans un
tribunal?

Dominique a eu la grippe pendant quinze jours, puis une bronchite.  Autant
te dire que nous n'avons pas beaucoup festoy�. St�phanie a pu venir quatre
jours pour No�l.  Elle a pass� la St Sylvestre dans un ch�teau pr�s de
Loches.

J'ai d�cid� de passer tout le mois d'avril dans un centre de r��ducation
pr�s de Lorient.

Bien affectueusement


Mon cher Etienne

J'ai rouvert mon petit ordinateur et j'en profite pour envoyer des
messages.  Je  voulais te faire savoir que nous avons tous beaucoup
appr�ci� ta lettre.  Tu as de v�ritables talents �pistolaires.

Le doigt op�r� de grand-maman se gu�rit bien.  Mais nouveau malheur, la
mort et l'enterrement d'oncle Louis et l'hospitalisation de tante Marie-
Louise.  Ce sont malheureusement des choses qui arrivent, sutout quand on
est vieux.

Chez vous il y a la perpective des vacances � la Guadeloupe; cela doit
vous aider � supporter ces semaines d'hiver et le travail scolaire.

Grosses bises

Anne


Ch�re Anne


Je vous souhaite � tous les quatre une bonne ann�e.  J'esp�re que ton papa
se maintient et que ta bourrique de fille commence � devenir plus
raisonnable.

� bient�t pour une petite sortie d�natoire et bien amicalement

Anne


Hi Stef,

Juste un petit bonjour parce que j'ai sorti le portable pour corriger un
de mes articles. J'envoie quelques messages.  J'ai donn� le livre sur le
ch�teau d'Yquem � Fran�oise Boulanger qui m'a offert quelques bouteilles
de Sauternes de l'ex-propri�t� de ses parents.

Il y a un beau soleil cet apr�s-midi et un ciel bleu. M�m� se remet bien
de son doigt op�r�; elle n'a pas l'air d'�tre trop affect�e par la mort de
son fr�re; elle doit se dire qu'� cet �ge ces choses sont in�vitables et se
demander qui sera le prochain; ce n'est vraiment pas dr�le.

Ton p�re n'a pas abandonn� son projet de venir � Paris, rassure-toi.  Nous
avons re�u une invitation pour le mariage de la fille de mon amie Patricia
Ross � New York. C'aurait peut-�tre �t� une occasion de prendre l'air,
sauf que je ne suis plus en vacances et que c'est le jour de
l'anniversaire de m�m�.

Okay sweetie! je t'embrasse

Mom


Hi Noel,

This is still Dominique's email. His plans to get me my own email have
foundered again, after last year's attempts.  I don't really care, as long
as he transmits my messages.

Aren't you on your way to Poland or somewhere?

You looked lovely on the picture between Sam and Emily.  Is Scott
remaining a bachelor to comfort his father?

I'm sending a paper on `Harry Crews to the Southern Literary Journal,
because the Southern Quarterly had this special issue on him not long ago.
If they don't want it though, I might try your quarterly all the same. I'm
xgetting tired ofthe game; writing articles and thewn trying to find a
review to publish it.

Fondly,

Anne


