The Prismatic Past in 'Oral History' and 'Mama Day.'

The past exerts a distinct and powerful influence in most of southern fiction. This is no less true in the works of contemporary women writers who are southern themselves or whose works fall in the realm of southern fiction. In the hands of Lee Smith and Gloria Naylor, the past becomes a multi-dimensional, prismatic entity that shapes familial, community, and cultural history. In Oral History by Lee Smith and in Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, the concern is not so much with preserving the past, but with examining, deconstructing, and ultimately redefining the past. These novels represent two diverse aspects of southern culture and experiences of the past. Oral History focuses on white Appalachian culture, while Mama Day focuses on rural black island culture. Despite the differences of race and culture, these two novels share remarkable similarities in their treatment of the past and in the importance of individual voices in revealing the past. Smith and Naylor use similar narrative techniques to relate familial and cultural histories. Taken together their novels yield a portrait of the past that is prismatic and yet, at the same time, strangely unified. To complicate matters, the worlds and voices that Smith and Naylor each creates in rendering the past stand as metaphors for the Other Indeed, characters from Oral History and Mama Day (as well as the authors themselves) are the gender and racial representations of the non-canonical which stand in opposition to "traditional" white male Western literature. Place also figures significantly into this: Smith's Hoot Owl Holier and Naylor's Willow Springs are isolated communities that serve as the repositories of memories and experiences of the Other. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that race (and, by extrapolation, gender) has been "an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence" in the study of literature (2). In defiance of this, Oral History and Mama Day come together in their presentation of the Other as a vital and explicit element infusing each work. In both novels the Other is manifested in several ways and is central to the mystery at the center of the past. Women's voices and racial and cultural histories inherent in each work constitute the force of the Other. The reliance on orality in conveying the past further enhances the Other's presence. However, this emphasis on orality rather than on the more traditional written word makes the past far more difficult to comprehend. In trying to decipher the past in Smith or Naylor's novel, one is like "the inquiring anthropologist, who must learn the language, listen and report, with all the implicit risks of distortion involved in the child's game of telephone" (Miller 286). In this process of revealing the past through multiple narrators, Smith herself emphasizes that "no matter who's telling the story, it is always the teller's tale, and you never finally know exactly the way it was" (qtd. in Arnold 246). While distortion may be inevitable and the truth about the past never fully known, all of this is part of a complex process that reveals the rich and prismatic quality of the past in both Smith and Naylor's works. In Oral History the past is presented as a family and cultural history which is in sore conflict with the present. Through the narratives of different characters, the rich Appalachian past of the novel is conveyed in the recitation of stories, folklore, and legends as they pertain to Hoot Owl Holler and the Cantrell family. In this process, Smith incorporates the perspectives of such characters as Mrs. Ludie Davenport, Jink Cantrell, Ora Mae, and Little Luther Wade. In all, Smith utilizes nine voices, including what appears to be a community voice, to reveal Hoot Owl Holler's history and the Cantrell family saga. These various narrators share the same community history and participate in the same collective memory. However, each character has a different perspective and experience of these things. …