Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Gérald Préher turns to Richard Ford to delve into the writer’s own ambivalence towards his southern self and autobiography in general. In spite of his early admiration for Faulkner’s literary output, Ford tried to escape the looming shadow of the universal writer from Mississippi as well as the label of southern writer. Préher suggests that Ford’s work, like that of William Faulkner, “confirm[s] James Olney’s idea that ‘[w]hite writers from the South seem for the most part unwilling to write autobiography without veiling it or presenting it as fiction.’” (140). While admitting that the autobiographical impulse in Ford is mainly “incidental” and often “presented behind a veil,” in his contribution Préher explores how Ford’s southern self infiltrates his fiction and non-fiction. By providing examples of autobiographical elements in Ford’s novels, Préher seeks to show what he considers paradoxical in the writer, his love-hate relationship with the South—particularly in The Sportswriter, his third novel and the first of his Bascombe trilogy. In his analysis of The Sportswriter, Préher uses interviews and Ford’s essays in order to show the parallelisms between the author’s personal life and his fictional self, Frank Bascombe. Despite Ford’s claims denying his interest in the past and the South, the character of Frank Bascombe is, according to Préher, an example of the writer’s own ambiguity and a reflection of his inner struggle with his southern self. The Bascombe novels represent, therefore, a form of “fictional autobiography” in which “the narrative is always self-reflective [and] the past is mediated through the present.” Acknowledging the freedom that fiction provides for many southern white writers when they look at the past, Préher contends that “[f]ictionalizing an actual event, relocating it in a narrative, enables Ford to become doubly independent: from the South and from the past.”