An Arkansas Epilogue: Reading and Response
Note: I am taking the questions Pick a theme or image and trace it through the essay. How does each resurfacing layer and intensify meaning? and What do you make of the distance provided in Wright's use of the third-person to talk about herself about such personal sections of her life? as starting points for my reading of Wright’s epilogue.
Writing almost twenty years after Stanford’s suicide, Wright uses a recurring thematic framework of compound adjectives to produce a deeply dissociative distance from the events of 1978. Her frequent linguistic use of the prefix un creates a layered fog through which she recalls the events of her affair, but also its violent end. She describes unstained doors and unfiltered cigarettes. How Stanford went unhonored in his poetry and her untipped as a waitress. And how, when learning to understand who she was, she found herself unloveable and unloved. It’s the same thread Hardy pulls on in his poem Drummer Hodge in describing the uncoffined boy soldier. The sense of removal, of being there and not there. And how down there isn’t a where, it’s a when. Moving back and forth in time between memory and lived experience. Of how down there is also an emotional, cthonic state perpetuated by the sin of adultery and suicide. Of an underworld inside which both she and her readers are traveling through deeper and deeper layers of hell.
Wright especially leans into the cthonic reading of myth and ritual, and even in the third sentence lets the reader know that ‘down is not where’. It’s not a place, it’s a state. Shortly afterwards she tells us that place is hell. ‘If not Southern then gothic; grotesque, mysterious, desolate.’ It’s the underworld of Virgil and Homer, where the sepulchral shades of Wright’s recollections continue to haunt her decades later. Sometimes the sepulchral emotion manifests itself as ‘beautiful language’, other times as the raucous Dionysian intimations of satyrs and maenads. But how ultimately such states conclude in the ‘woeful telos of that love’. That the conclusion of the story, in this case through violent nocturnal suicide perpetuated by the discovery of an infidelity, is never truly in the past. How memory is always a state in the present. Wright continues this thought in positioning herself, like Hesiod, as both cipher of her own recollection and the scribe of Stanford’s legacy, but also as she who would render her foes into meaningless ciphers in such a pursuit. That she alone is equipped to articulate what really happened, and in doing so ‘not paper over the errors’. But ultimately, as she concludes in her own telos, her story is bathetic. One of unintentional anticlimax where all that’s left are powder burns and silence.
If an epilogue traditionally takes place long after the main story has concluded, Wright also uses it in the Ancient Greek sense of epilogos, a conclusion, a means of bringing closure both for her and for us. It’s down there as both past and present, moving back and forth in time where down means where, when, who and how. Stanford reads the living and the dead. Wright only reads the dead, and scrabbles ‘through the archeology of one’s shifting layers’ as she pieces together the sense-making she needs to bring closure to her lover’s death. This moving back and forth appears frequently through Wright’s epilogue. Recollections move in non-linear motion. Drivers, echoing our own reading, go ‘forward admirably’ but not ‘back successfully’, and how all of these memories take ‘a very long time to fell’. But that in the finish, in ‘a few forevers’, they would all be 'gnawing the roots of dandelions’ down there anyway, or as Stanford does today beneath a stand of yellow pines near the Arkansas River. Wright especially draws attention to the fluid motion of her own memory, and how ‘going back is not the same as not going back’. That she’s no longer the person she was, much as she is trying to recollect in her own epilogue to Stanford. As she confirms, ‘She remembers. She misremembers. She disremembers'. And how in doing so takes our hand as readers and reassures us that ‘what you remember is moving. Backward'.
We experience her epilogue in the present moving forward, and are transported into a deeply dissociative past. But much as it tries, one which cannot remove itself from the personal, emotional ‘down there’ of its own events. A thematic past of ritual, shade and sin as Wright ciphers the anticlimactic, unfulfilled end to her relationship, which abruptly ends in nothing but discomforting, deafening silence.
