Research Papers for Eudora Welty
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Greater than scene … is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any form. —Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings I owe a special debt to Jan Nordby Gretlund for his Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press; Newark: University of Delaware Press, ¡994). Given his extensive and intensive analysis of Welty’s fiction, which he makes in response not only to that fiction but also to the considerable body of historical and critical work that has been done on it, Professor Gretlund establishes both a scholarly and a critical context upon which my speculative concerns depend. It is in the light of his study that I have written what follows, intending to bring to the support of our common concern for literature a metaphysical dimension of concern which I believe appropriate to literary criticism.
Eudora Welty has understood from the beginning a responsibility to the truth of things in response to the wonder and delight she is granted by life itself, and both the delight and the responsibility have governed her deportment in creation as person and as artist. Her long remembering of that deportment, in celebrating existence as fiction writer, she gives us in her Massey lectures at Harvard in April of ¡983, published as One Writer’s Beginnings. She recalls that, “beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly, noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart.” As artist, concerned with imitating the actions of human nature—the possible or probable—she was from childhood shyly aware (as she would put it) of her own participation in humanity that requires a certain deportment as person, but also as an artist presenting simulacra of persons through her special gift as artist. Now because piety requires a recognition of limit by the artist as both in himself and in the attendant complex of
Greater than scene … is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any form. —Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings I owe a special debt to Jan Nordby Gretlund for his Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press; Newark: University of Delaware Press, ¡994). Given his extensive and intensive analysis of Welty’s fiction, which he makes in response not only to that fiction but also to the considerable body of historical and critical work that has been done on it, Professor Gretlund establishes both a scholarly and a critical context upon which my speculative concerns depend. It is in the light of his study that I have written what follows, intending to bring to the support of our common concern for literature a metaphysical dimension of concern which I believe appropriate to literary criticism.
Eudora Welty has understood from the beginning a responsibility to the truth of things in response to the wonder and delight she is granted by life itself, and both the delight and the responsibility have governed her deportment in creation as person and as artist. Her long remembering of that deportment, in celebrating existence as fiction writer, she gives us in her Massey lectures at Harvard in April of ¡983, published as One Writer’s Beginnings. She recalls that, “beginning to write stories about people, I drew near slowly, noting and guessing, apprehending, hoping, drawing my eventual conclusions out of my own heart.” As artist, concerned with imitating the actions of human nature—the possible or probable—she was from childhood shyly aware (as she would put it) of her own participation in humanity that requires a certain deportment as person, but also as an artist presenting simulacra of persons through her special gift as artist. Now because piety requires a recognition of limit by the artist as both in himself and in the attendant complex of