Friday from the Archives: “Ron Rash’s Serena and the “blank and pitiless gaze” of Exploitation in Appalachia” by Joyce Compton Brown with Mark Powell from NCLR 19 (2010)
Our 2024 Feature of “Disability Literature of North Carolina” introduces us to new, emerging, and long-overlooked writers and subjects living with various disabilities. One of the new pieces looks at ’24 NC Literary Hall of Fame inductee Ron Rash’s novel: “Fechtwunde: Wounding Flesh and Nature in Ron Rash’s Serena“
by Taylor Hagood.
We’ve published many pieces about this novel over the years, like Joyce Compton Brown’s in-depth look at the use of Appalachia as place, language, and theme for the book, from our 2010 issue. “Serena is at once a novel of the Appalachian past and of the American present. Set in 1929, the book chronicles the historic
struggle of the timber barons, who were shearing off the mountain forest, against the preservationists, who were trying to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But Rash wrote the novel with a sense of our own present, aware that we still have both invaders and protectors of our Appalachian landscape…”
Rash commented, “What’s happening in the Appalachians is very similar to what happened in the Southern Renaissance of the ’20s and ’30s. And a part of that is what Faulkner talked about, [Allen Tate’s] ‘the backward glance’ – seeing that culture disappear. The Appalachia I knew as a child has been transformed. There’s a sense of seeing it lost. Sometimes we don’t notice our places until they start to disappear, and art comes out of that tension of seeing a world disappear and being aware of that change.”
Literature continues to illuminate (inform, remind) readers of what can happen with different choices or in different contexts. Serena serves as reminder of what unchecked ambition can look like and the destruction it renders. “As Mark Powell has elsewhere remarked, Serena stands “as the current apotheosis of Rash’s fiction,” but the total body of work reveals “a growing recognition that we are fast destroying nature, and with nature go the last ties that bind us to a recognizable humanity.” Brown wrote.
Read the entire essay on ProQuest [The article contains many plot spoilers] or purchase a copy of the 2010 issue featuring “North Carolina Appalachian Literature.”
