Paulette Jiles, from the Ozarks to Canada to some of the finest novels set in Texas...
The essay "Paulette Jiles and the 'Aura' of the News" was originally published in the San Antonio Review. Jiles was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in fiction for her novel News of the World.
John Graves and Larry McMurtry wrote about the continual interactions of past and present. Paulette Jiles gives us precise and beautifully created images of these interactions: characters, language, emotions, and landscape--all in motion yet organic and interrelated, as is the dynamic process of existence. Other writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, have created characters whose streams of consciousness reflect this process. Considered experimental writers at the time, their narratives were often difficult and complex, appropriate to their ideas of modernity.
But Jiles incorporates the world in her characters and her characters in the world within the framework of an accessible, engaging narrative that is more Dickensian than overtly complex. For her, stories are carriers of the deepest truths, just as they were for indigenous people and the ancients.
A relatively brief excerpt from the lengthy essay is below. The essay tries to explain the organic authenticity of her poetry, memoirs, and especially her novels Stormy Weather and News of the World. 932 words.
I.
Long before he was a reader of the news, and decades before he owned a press that printed it, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a natural runner, carried messages for the army at the age of sixteen, his strong legs and lungs having been seasoned in the north Georgia mountains. He jogged through south Alabama and South Georgia, down to Pensacola and back to Mobile, dodging British patrols and Red Stick Creek warriors. For two years he carried maps and reports for General Jackson, maps that only showed directions but couldn’t feel the ground. It was the running, the fast traveling that he loved. He missed the Battle of New Orleans; it would have been anticlimactic.
“He always recalled those two years with a kind of wonder,” writes Jiles, describing the protagonist in her novel News of the World. “As when one is granted the life and the task for which one was meant. No matter how odd, no matter how out of the ordinary. When it came to an end he was not surprised. It was too good, too perfect to last.”
Wounded at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, though not so severely as another young man on the field that day, Sam Houston, Kidd returned to Macon when the fighting was over and learned the printing trade. In the 1830s he went to Texas, during the Republic, and settled in San Antonio. “He loved print, felt something right about sending out information into the world. Independent of its content.” It was the work itself, the process, that he relished.
Another decade passed; another war pulled him in at the age of 48. The Army wanted him to print orders for General Taylor, who was leading American troops in the Mexican War. Using only a small hand press, Kidd not only printed what the general needed but found himself in charge of couriers, sometimes including Texas Rangers and their like, born to ride their fast, rudely tamed horses. Young men, bold, even cruel, they still needed reassurance from a blooded soldier. “They wanted some wisdom, some advice. You can get hit and not know advice. You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another.”
Sending out information into the world? It was wise counsel he gave directly to the Rangers. Earned wisdom. The printing work he did, not the wisdom, brought him to the brevet rank of Captain. And a Captain he remains in the story.
“Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay, vital facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.”
And then he had come to think…after the Civil War, indescribable in its horror, that he could offer the world some tales, dressed up for their consumption, and somehow curative. And therein Jiles hints that the authentic stories of the world have the potential to be “curative” only if they make their remoteness immediate, and their mystery alive. In them are moving parts far more complex than those of the machines that seek to render them for consumption. These are the stories that Jiles creates, almost in the manner of ancient oral traditions. If there is healing, it is within and of the story, not at a destination.
What Jiles strives for is similar to what the late philosopher Walter Benjamin referred to as the “aura” of the work of art: “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.” (Jiles first read Benjamin in college; even recently she has mentioned his writing on her website.) The here and now of the story is not static; rather it arises from a “strange weave of place and time,” based above all on the interplay of people in motion and adapting, or not, to their world. Here and now only appear to be the present, for the “present” is organic and dynamic, a compound of what we think of as past present and place, all in motion, always carrying the cusp of the future. This view of art—and of reality—resembles that of William Faulkner and many philosophers, with one important difference. Faulkner was keen to present the process as it was experienced internally by his characters, using stream of consciousness, most notably in The Sound and the Fury. Jiles chooses the way of the traditional storyteller, featuring people “on a trip” with “something to tell about,” and that “something” is embedded in the trip itself. Her goal is to place us with them, and them with us, all moving together. For in her created world, that is as close as it gets to authentic existence...
Read more at The San Antonio Review.
John Graves and Larry McMurtry wrote about the continual interactions of past and present. Paulette Jiles gives us precise and beautifully created images of these interactions: characters, language, emotions, and landscape--all in motion yet organic and interrelated, as is the dynamic process of existence. Other writers such as Faulkner, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, have created characters whose streams of consciousness reflect this process. Considered experimental writers at the time, their narratives were often difficult and complex, appropriate to their ideas of modernity.
But Jiles incorporates the world in her characters and her characters in the world within the framework of an accessible, engaging narrative that is more Dickensian than overtly complex. For her, stories are carriers of the deepest truths, just as they were for indigenous people and the ancients.
A relatively brief excerpt from the lengthy essay is below. The essay tries to explain the organic authenticity of her poetry, memoirs, and especially her novels Stormy Weather and News of the World. 932 words.
I.
Long before he was a reader of the news, and decades before he owned a press that printed it, Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a natural runner, carried messages for the army at the age of sixteen, his strong legs and lungs having been seasoned in the north Georgia mountains. He jogged through south Alabama and South Georgia, down to Pensacola and back to Mobile, dodging British patrols and Red Stick Creek warriors. For two years he carried maps and reports for General Jackson, maps that only showed directions but couldn’t feel the ground. It was the running, the fast traveling that he loved. He missed the Battle of New Orleans; it would have been anticlimactic.
“He always recalled those two years with a kind of wonder,” writes Jiles, describing the protagonist in her novel News of the World. “As when one is granted the life and the task for which one was meant. No matter how odd, no matter how out of the ordinary. When it came to an end he was not surprised. It was too good, too perfect to last.”
Wounded at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, though not so severely as another young man on the field that day, Sam Houston, Kidd returned to Macon when the fighting was over and learned the printing trade. In the 1830s he went to Texas, during the Republic, and settled in San Antonio. “He loved print, felt something right about sending out information into the world. Independent of its content.” It was the work itself, the process, that he relished.
Another decade passed; another war pulled him in at the age of 48. The Army wanted him to print orders for General Taylor, who was leading American troops in the Mexican War. Using only a small hand press, Kidd not only printed what the general needed but found himself in charge of couriers, sometimes including Texas Rangers and their like, born to ride their fast, rudely tamed horses. Young men, bold, even cruel, they still needed reassurance from a blooded soldier. “They wanted some wisdom, some advice. You can get hit and not know advice. You can get hit and not know it, he said. So could the man next to you. Take care of one another.”
Sending out information into the world? It was wise counsel he gave directly to the Rangers. Earned wisdom. The printing work he did, not the wisdom, brought him to the brevet rank of Captain. And a Captain he remains in the story.
“Afterward, late, when he was alone and the fire of mesquite wood was dying, it came to him that he should take on the task of dispensing these interesting, nay, vital facts gleaned from the intelligence reports and the general press. For instance, the struggles going on at the top levels of the Mexican Army. If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information. And he, like a runner, immobile in his smeared printing apron bringing it to them. Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.”
And then he had come to think…after the Civil War, indescribable in its horror, that he could offer the world some tales, dressed up for their consumption, and somehow curative. And therein Jiles hints that the authentic stories of the world have the potential to be “curative” only if they make their remoteness immediate, and their mystery alive. In them are moving parts far more complex than those of the machines that seek to render them for consumption. These are the stories that Jiles creates, almost in the manner of ancient oral traditions. If there is healing, it is within and of the story, not at a destination.
What Jiles strives for is similar to what the late philosopher Walter Benjamin referred to as the “aura” of the work of art: “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place.” (Jiles first read Benjamin in college; even recently she has mentioned his writing on her website.) The here and now of the story is not static; rather it arises from a “strange weave of place and time,” based above all on the interplay of people in motion and adapting, or not, to their world. Here and now only appear to be the present, for the “present” is organic and dynamic, a compound of what we think of as past present and place, all in motion, always carrying the cusp of the future. This view of art—and of reality—resembles that of William Faulkner and many philosophers, with one important difference. Faulkner was keen to present the process as it was experienced internally by his characters, using stream of consciousness, most notably in The Sound and the Fury. Jiles chooses the way of the traditional storyteller, featuring people “on a trip” with “something to tell about,” and that “something” is embedded in the trip itself. Her goal is to place us with them, and them with us, all moving together. For in her created world, that is as close as it gets to authentic existence...
Read more at The San Antonio Review.