Raintree County IV 1-16-21

 Influences on Raintree County - My Views

James Joyce

In Raintree County, I think Lockridge did a good job in adapting his influences.  I knew of the James Joyce influence when I was a teenager, I had already read Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I knew shortly afterwards that Joyce's Ulysses took place in one day. I suppose then I wrote off Lockridge as an American imitator of Joyce. Having now read Ulysses, I cannot write him off as a mere imitator. Yes, they both use the dash instead of the quotation mark, they both have an interest in history, the protagonist of both novels is a writer, and both are erudite. However, Joyce wants to escape history and Lockridge runs right into it; I think Joyce's erudition is far more on display than with Lockridge.

Other Obvious Suspects

The other influence I recognized at my first reading was Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Great Stone Face", Now, I am wondering if Lockridge plays any straighter with that source than Joyce did with The Odyssey,

Other influences I see now include Shakespeare and Walt Whitman and Thomas Carlyle and William Faulkner. Then its scope - the run-up to the Civil War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the beginning of the Populist era - made me think of Tolstoy's War and Peace [No, it is not that great of a novel as War and Peace.]  

The character of the cynical interlocutor brings to mind Ambrose Bierce, or Mark Twain without the theatrical dress.

He raises the problem raised by Thomas Wolfe about being able to go home again, and raises the stakes by one of the returnees coming back from the dead.

The Less Obvious Influences

Lockridge even tips his hat to Booth Tarkington with two references to The Gentleman from Indiana while writing a novel far, far from removed from that writer's talents, inclination, or world.

Reading the December 27 New York Times Book Review, I now wonder if the idea of making Shawnessy [the protagonist] a school teacher did not come from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

The interest in time and the meaning of life leaves me thinking of Marcel Proust while also being a hemisphere away from Proust's world.

sch

Postscript/Updated Opinion

[Since writing this while in prison, I have read some of the critics of the novel, and they think Lockridge did not digest Whitman or Wolfe well enough. I will disagree. I think any obviousness of influence exists to make an authorial point. That is my opinion, anyway. You can search my blog for the earlier articles, which actually come after writing the above, by using the query "Raintree County".]

[To be continued.]