A Space on the Side of the Road

Once I got past my frustration with Kathleen Stewart’s writing style (“imagine” this and “picture” that and the interwoven use of “re-membered” versus “remembered” repeated over and over again), I realize that she is simply trying to place the reader in the world in which she immersed herself. Perhaps this kind of writing is simply new to me coming from an art history background, but I did find Henry Glassie’s Passing the Time in Ballymenone easier to follow and easier to embrace the basic humanity and dignity of the subjects of his study based on how he presented the material.

Furthermore, Stewart’s tendency to string theoretical perspectives in one long sentence without seeming conclusion (as if she needed to prove she knew the canons of discourse) left me drifting from her point. However, once she started to relate the stories and offer her observations of their cultural meaning, I warmed up to her perspective. I suppose the main point I came to grips with is to suspend judgment about a people and their condition and instead focus on the patterns of narrative and how it relates to meaning—how these people structure their lives in order to cope with their distressed, oppressed, apparently futile condition. As Stewart suggests, “Imagine yourself caught in the space of story that opens when plans are interrupted by the accidental and the progress of time gives way to a graphic rumination through spaces of danger and desire, trial and transformation, self-extension and return.” (p.28) The people of this part of West Virginia have been stripped of their dignity in many ways, but their humanity is still there, as evidenced in their stories of lamentation over lost lives, lost opportunities, and lost health.

By Chapter 5 of Stewart’s book, I began to understand where my frustration with her topic is rooted. I am hopelessly middle class. I find her examination of the “Other America,” of the people of western Appalachia, uncomfortable because I have bought into the myth of “realism, progress, and order.” The narrative “space on the side of the road” that she describes is indeed one that is “against” what I strive for. As Stewart explains, “In the United States, ‘Appalachia’ became one of these ‘Other’ places and filled the bourgeois imaginary with both dread and desire.”(p. 118) I don’t feel the desire she mentions (although the desire she speaks of must be of a rural existence free from the concerns of urbanity?), but I do feel dread. Dread of the lives they represent—one failure piled on top of another failure and the ignorance and zealous religiosity that pervades their culture—keeps me from feeling the same kind of empathy, sympathy, and keen interest in understanding.

Stewart has come to understand this culture of poverty and she has suspended judgment of their lack to examine the narrative structures that hold their lives together. When she says, “Picture how in the camps the order of things is not a civilizing presence captured in well-tended lawns and balanced checkbooks, disciplined bodies, educated reason, and routinized careers but a conspiratorial threat,”(p. 123) I begin to understand my own biases and how my life embodies much of what those people must fear and disdain. Stewart’s examination bridges a gap of misunderstanding for me and looks beyond the surface of stereotypes to find meaning in what happens on “a space on the side of the road.”
-Julie Sasse