Understanding Jim Grimsley by David Deutsch

Author:David Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Cities and Suburbs

While Grimsley’s early novels focus on a rural or small-town South, he has long maintained an interest in southern cities, particularly those with exotic, grandiose, and often terrifying histories. Never portraying abstract urban landscapes, when Grimsley writes about Atlanta, Savannah, or New Orleans he attends to unique spaces and to monuments, as well as to local legends and customs. Although he acknowledges the increasingly important phenomenon of largely homogeneous suburbs, as in his novel Forgiveness (2007), he writes most often about the hearts of cities and their arteries, such as Esplanade Avenue and Royal Street in New Orleans, as in his play Mr. Universe (premiered 1987, published 1998) and his novel Boulevard (2002). Grimsley demonstrates how these places draw in diverse races, classes, desires, and professions, as long-term residents bring in friends and lovers, forming new family structures, new bonds of kinship that loosen, tighten, or simply force a reassessment of conventional familial relations. Some cities, as Grimsley implies, are more open and welcoming than others, whether by tradition or by necessity, and their economic and social opportunities draw in an eclectic mix of adventure seekers and social outliers who come to find a home, whether a temporary or a permanent one. Although some of these spaces are more inviting than others, even the most prestigious squares of historic Savannah, as we saw briefly with regard to Comfort and Joy, turn out to have rigid but not impermeable boundaries, and this is even truer of the less socioeconomically exclusive but still historic urban spaces in which Grimsley tends to linger.

In addition to representing the changing populations of and domestic arrangements in these spaces, Grimsley also demonstrates how streets, buildings, even explanatory placards, so much denser and concentrated in cities than in rural areas, provide a means to explore how myriad historical identities composed of complicated nationalities (such as African, French, Spanish, American), genders (male, female, transgender), sexualities (homosexuality, heterosexuality, pansexuality), and loves, loyalties, and betrayals (of all varieties) can inform and shape the present. Walking through historic districts offers opportunities for sightseeing but also opens up a rich archive for those who can learn to read the appropriate verbal and behavioral natural and architectural signs. Such signs often reveal insights into the past, present, and future of a city and its inhabitants, inspiring reflections on racial cruelty, sexual oppression, religious intolerance, class division, and poverty, as well as on tolerance, respect, a nondogmatic spirituality, and the tarnished triumphs of the sheer will to survive as one’s own self. A city, then, can offer a critical cultural education in how the oppressions and freedoms of the past influence contemporary ones. Learning to live in cities helps to distinguish between secondhand and experiential knowledge of the past, as well as between more modern attempts both to survive the past and to transform it. This is true even in contemporary cities overloaded with cheap art, escapist television and film, and advertisements designed to distort any semblance of an ordinary day-to-day life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.