Tragic Glory: A Bright Tragic Thing

Chapter 2 of Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film (University Press of Kentucky, 2000)

 

If I am still of this earth, it is the earth as history and the earth as dust. L. D. Clark, A Bright Tragic Thing

 

L. D. Clark’s novel, A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas, is a fictionalized account of the Great Hanging in Gainesville, Texas, in 1862, when Unionists were executed under the barest pretext of law in the early Confederacy. A great-grandson of one of the hanged, Nathaniel Miles Clark, L. D. Clark feels this history deeply; moreover, his grandfather wrote memoirs about the hanging of his father, which Clark has edited and published as Civil War Recollections of James Lemuel Clark. The protagonist of A Bright Tragic Thing, Todd Blair, is a fictionalized version of Clark’s grandfather. The novel is a Bildungsroman: it focuses on Todd’s precipitate coming of age through the crisis of the imminent hanging of his father, Nathaniel Blair, who, like his fellow Unionists, is a maverick in north Texas, refusing to accept Texas’s vote to secede, refusing to accept slavery itself.  The Cross Timbers section of Texas borders on the Red River, beyond which lies a no-man’s-land of Indian Territory between South and North. Like the “Border States” during the Civil War, it is a site of contending ways of life and ideologies—of cultures, if you will. The mantle of maverick on this border descends from father to son onto Todd, whose every instinct is toward violent rebellion against the tyranny of the Confederate faction in Milcourt (Gainesville). Yet Todd realizes that the enemy is his own people, and ironically he falls in love with the niece of the leader of that tyranny. Todd eventually is forced into a literal crossing of the no-man’s-land between Texas and the Union, but his most significant crossing is his ability to negotiate, without necessarily making fully conscious his own Oedipal guilt, the inevitable death of the father that enables the succession of the son.

     The title of Clark’s Bright Tragic Thing comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, part of which serves as Clark’s epigraph:

Glory is that bright tragic thing

That for an instant

Means Dominion.

The key to the meaning of Clark’s novel lies in the juxtaposition of glory with the tragic, a juxtaposition that yields a profound existentialist vision. That vision transcends Christianity, particularly of the evangelical kind, and focuses on the power of the individual to create his own meaning through words, stories, recollected history—a meaning not that wrests glory from the jaws of tragedy but that accepts the tragedy inherent in glory, the loss that fuels the brightness.

     Throughout his introduction to his grandfather’s Recollections, Clark uses the word “tragedy” to refer to the Great Hanging, as the aging Todd Blair does in the fictional account (12). That he uses the term with meaning beyond that of common parlance is suggested by both extrinsic and intrinsic evidence. A veteran of World War II, Clark attended Columbia University on the GI Bill and earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees. In the mid-twentieth century tragedy was a hot topic, from neo­Aristotelians especially at the University of Chicago to European existentialists. As he has informed me in private conversation, Clark took a year-long course in Greek literature and engaged in extensive conversations about the nature of tragedy.

     In A Bright Tragic Thing the tragic manifests itself in a number of ways. First the inescapability of the "curse” of slavery (76) as Nathaniel Blair crosses the Red River only to discover plantations in north Texas: “a danger you could not escape, wherever you went” (24). "Six or so years later, eighteen-year-old Todd Blair wishes "we’d never come to the Cross Timbers in the first place, especially when I recalled how Pap had looked on this part of the world: his notion of settling in a frontier place out of the way of secession and slavery troubles—and how I’d suspected from the start [... ] that those troubles could track you down in the Cross Timbers as well as the next place” (41-42). As he rides home after his father's arrest as a Unionist, Todd narrates: "Comanche’s hooves beneath me, and Old Prince’s behind me, clopped along steady and sharp on the road, through this country I’d ridden over so many times within the peace of that sound, only to have it contending now with the rhythm of despair. And still I wished, and still I wondered, why Pap and the rest of us had ever delivered ourselves years ago to this disaster" (42). Another aspect of the tragic in the novel is closely related to this inescapability: inevitability. Todd remembers an abolitionist’s “declaring that no matter how rich and fine a plantation might appear, any social structure with slavery at the bottom of it lay under a curse, and like the house built on the sand that structure would fall, and great would be the fall of it." (76). Todd sees this inevitable conflict in terms of us and them—plantation owners and farmers, slavers and nonslavers, some, at least, as the previous quotation hints, with abolitionist sympathies. As he visits Colonel Oldham, the figurehead the slavers use to legitimate their cause and set up their mock jury and trial, to enlist his aid, Todd comes to a startling insight, one we would today call “postcolonial." Watching the young women on Oldham's plantation, Todd comments:

“Here we sat, a young man and an old man, enthralled by three young ladies on what passed for a fashionable stroll. [...] What we were truly contending about lay framed in the picture before us, in the setting and the manner of the girls in walking through it—a world sustained by the fine tall house behind us, with its fluted columns and its cluster of slave cabins in the rear, and spreading out from it around us and the girls the out-buildings and the tended fields. [...] [E]verything lying before our eyes in the scene completed by the girls walking through it was at stake in what was going on this moment in Milcourt and beyond that in what was ripping the nation to pieces.” (75-76)

 

     What is at stake is an elitist, aristocratic way of life for a few built on the backs of masses of human cattle. Son of a dirt farmer looked down upon even by the aristocracy’s slaves, Todd reflects further that the setting was made for the girls, and they for the setting: they exist to reproduce it, to reproduce the ruling class and its leisure as the basis of its culture. It cannot last. Yet at an earlier moment Todd, waiting for other Unionists to gather into a force to liberate the prisoners, has another insight that militates against an us-and-them dichotomy:

“I saw peopling the darkness other faces collected around [Peg Madill’s]. None of them resembled Peg’s except in this small feature or that tint of complexion, or in nothing at all—beyond what was everything: the kinship of ancestry, of race; the profiles of men in my own isolated community gathered from the far-flowing human stream of those who had left the villages of Britain and landed on wilderness shores to migrate west, west, west. It was the face of my people, but suddenly the face worn by friend and foe alike—and that was the terror, [...] I was out to kill men of my own blood, and they were out to kill me.” (52-53)

     The great tragedy of the Civil War is that it pitted like against like, brother against brother. For the Unionists, the other was not radically other. And ironically, the curse of slavery is not extraneous to the Blairs themselves. Even though they refused slaves as wedding presents (22), Nathaniel carries with him a wife who is herself the daughter of a plantation owner. Seeing Colonel Oldham’s "honest-to-God plantation mansion out here on the wild rim of Indian country" (66), Todd reflects, “[T]his house recalled one in Kentucky I’d never seen, only heard Ma describe, the house where she was born and spent her girlhood” (66). Why does this realization make him “uneasy”? Perhaps because of what Freud called the unheimlich, that strange or foreign frightening thing that turns out to be heimlich, at home in us, the dark truth we have suppressed. Was the other in the Civil War just a mirror image of the self? As history repeats itself in “Delta Autumn,” Faulkner’s aging Uncle Ike discovers that you cannot really repudiate the past.

     Todd never consciously pursues this uneasiness. Instead, he focuses on the inevitability not in some psychological inscape but looming on the larger horizon: “It terrified me, this certainty that I was losing Pap to an immensity of time never to be crossed” (37). Falling into a Romeo and Juliet love affair with the niece of the real leader of the Confederate oppressors, Colonel Ticknor, Todd laments, “Yet crying out and kicking against the barriers before us could not make them fall. As I knew. As I knew. [...] The many obstacles that divided us—the what and the who—made defeat seem inevitable” (217-18). The “what” is secession and the struggle over an economic system based on fundamental immorality; the “who” is the class difference that separates the Blairs from the Ticknors—and ultimately Todd from the niece of his father’s murderer.

     Like Northrop Frye, Todd associates this inevitability also with the seasons, with the tragic season of autumn:

“For here was this familiar yet mysterious delay of autumn, forcing itself on me as a premonition of death. With an uncontrollable quaking in my soul I knew that from now till Sunday [the day his father was supposed to be released by the jury] I’d be in terror that the first blight of winter would arrive before my father could be freed: decreeing the end of his life as well as the dying of the year—cold to wilt the leaves, to strip the limbs, and by fate dire and unfathomed to pluck my father out of this life.” (220)

The physical, seasonal life force deterministically decrees tragedy, the death of the father. Todd’s analysis becomes positively metaphysical, moving beyond “fate dire and unfathomed” to entertain “the suspicion that all things including this [Romeo and Juliet] passion were ruled by a universal injustice all the more horrifying for being inevitable: a diabolic, indifferent urge for the perpetuation of generations, a passion that required the death of my father in the operation of its natural and merciless law” (220). He sees the life-force as not benign but "indifferent” to the “injustice” inherent in its determinism, a tragic necessity that “require[s]” the death of the father. Like most humans faced with such cosmic indifference, Todd here cannot face such absurdity and hence demonizes the life force into the "diabolic.”

     Tragic inevitability reaches its climax when Colonel Oldham, traveling with Todd to Milcourt to ensure that the jury’s word will be kept and Nathaniel will be released, fatally encounters bushwhackers coming from Milcourt (hence it could not have been an ambush by Unionists, an interpretation that prevails both in fiction and history [Recollections 36-37]) and is assassinated. As a result, the jury’s clemency is rescinded, and the remaining Unionists are given quasi-trials. Most, among them Nathaniel, are executed the Sunday they were to be released. Clark is at his absolute best in making us feel the agony of this tragedy: in Todd’s last fracturing interview with his father, in his mother's finally standing up out of stupefaction to watch her husband hang.

     Yet even here, at the moment of the killing of the two benevolent patriarchs, the Unionist Nathaniel and the Confederate Colonel Oldham, the tragedy is not reduced to melodramatic Manichaeanism. Nor does Clark leave the etiology of tragedy totally deterministic. For Todd’s apocalyptic dream reveals not a Christian vision of final justice but an existentialist, psychoanalytic nightmare:

“I saw Colonel Oldham slumping in the saddle, smeared, flowing yet crusted with blood, while I tried frantically to hold him up, while he went on sinking, sinking, slipping through my arms. —But no! he was not acting this out as true dying, rather as a ghastly pretense, a game: mocking also, playing the corpse and laughing in scorn at my stricken seriousness. And then! hearing the shots I’d fired, seeing a figure lurch and tumble from a horse—and that was also Colonel Oldham over there lurching and tumbling. —Besides, the Spencer was coming to pieces in my hands, and I couldn’t make it fit back together. [...] Why, I too was at last infected with the mockery of the people passing, passing—all in play, all in play. And in horror every hope faded: any hope [ ... ] in this game of apocalypse.” (250)

     The fragmenting of the Spencer repeating rifle marks Todd’s castrating realization of his own Oedipal implication in the absurdist endgame of the killing of the father: Colonel Oldham dies twice in his dream, once from the shot of the bushwhackers, once from shots from Todd’s own rifle. We remember Todd’s inference that he resembles the son Colonel Oldham wished he had (74). Yet like Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, in his waking state Todd never becomes fully conscious of the unheimlich horror of his implication. He never seeks absolution—from his father or from us readers—for his guilt in the death of Colonel Oldham: if Todd had not sought him out one more time just to hedge his bets on his father’s release, Colonel Oldham would not have accompanied Todd toward Milcourt and toward his murder. The encounter with the bushwhackers may be fate or may be the random chance of absurdity; Colonel Oldham’s presence with Todd is not. Through what Aristotle would call his hamartia, his mistaken judgment, Todd is tragically responsible for the death of both his fathers, surrogate and real.

     Intermixed in the novel is a glory that will not be eclipsed. Glory in the pulse of the land itself that the aging Todd refuses to leave: “a cadence, a rhythm, the rise and fall of life in this place, this land itself" (13). Glory in solitary oneness with the land: “All my life, off and on, I have found myself in some strange place where I sense, if only for a little while, that the land itself understands my solitary presence, and that a silence out of the earth responds to a silence in me” (65). Glory in his horse Comanche’s precision pursuit of a buffalo: “[H]ow glorious that shone in my heart” (143). Glory through the notch in the hills behind his home Todd plans to use for his and his family’s escape, an escape he can finally take only alone: “Ever since I’d first seen it that notch had told me of some great and wonderful place lying beyond it, a spot never to be reached except by passing through that notch—a passage waiting to be taken someday in assurance of a glowing future—” (210). And above all, the glory of Jenny Ticknor. In an image that tempers the association of autumn with tragedy, Todd compares the color of Jenny’s hair to the “bronze light that streams unexpected some morning in the glory of autumn’ (137). Their love-making catapults Todd into another realm: “When the culminating instant of panting release came, it was like a transformation into fire, like being wrapped in one flame with Jenny, a flame that burned us out of present existence and left us helpless and still and silent for a little space but in sure knowledge that soon we would rise up newborn, never to be the same again” (216). This positive image of regeneration at least tempers Todd’s later depiction of it as “a diabolic, indiffent urge for the perpetuation of generations” (220).

     And leavening the tragedy is the Bildungsroman aspect typical of Clark’s novels. Despite his nightmarish subconscious guilt and his macabre fear that all is a game, despite his theory of inevitability, Todd matures to become capable of significant agency. Early on he calls out the mob leader, Harley Dexter.  When Harley contemptuously dismisses him as a “boy” and suggests he’s out of his league in dealing with matters of “treason,” Todd retorts, “I'll make you think ‘treason.’ And I’ll make you think ‘boy,’ you bug-eyed sonofabitch, if any harm comes to Pap” (33). But this is just youthful bravado. Much more significant is his attempt to appeal to Colonel Oldham, an appeal that might have succeeded if not for either fate or chance. Todd saves Jenny Ticknor from bushwhackers and saves his mother and siblings from further persecution at the hands of the Confederates. Most significant is his standing up to Colonel Ticknor and Harley Dexter, the two leaders of his enemies.

     Though Todd contemplates assassinating Ticknor, he stands up to him more impressively by articulating in his teeth his father’s and the Unionists’ position: "It ain’t a crime, I reckon, to want to bring back the Union when they didn’t vote to leave it in the first place” (195). Ticknor’s Calhoun-like response—"The Union is over and done with. Texas is now the biggest and strongest state in the Confederate States of America—and it always will be. Texans decided this question in a free and fair election. The ones that voted the other way will have to abide by that decision" —is not unarguable. But Ticknor’s fanaticism finally manifests itself in his rejection of Todd’s ultimate appeal that, after all, he had saved Ticknor's niece from rape and murder: “YOU DID YOUR DUTY AS A MAN. I MUST DO MY DUTY FOR MY COUNTRY. SEE THAT YOU DO THE SAME” 260). Whatever Ticknor knows in his heart of hearts, he has allowed himself to become a “madman [...] gone insane for his cause.” He is an essentializer to the point of being a fascist.

     Instead of enlisting in the Confederate army, as Ticknor had threateningly urged, however, Todd prepares to strike out for Union lines. He has no immediate revenge in mind.  But when Harley Dexter gets the drop on him, his Spencer apparently unloaded, Todd rises to the occasion, tricks Harley into a gunfight, and kills him with the remaining chambered round. Todd and Comanche escape north, join a Union cavalry detachment, and return years later victorious. Out of tragedy Todd has forged a meaningful existence, a self capable of mature, defining action.  Out of the mixture of tragedy and glory, then—Todd calls the Great Hanging episode in his life “that enthralled existence in the ordeal of slaughter and glory” (296)—comes possibility. Even at the moment of Pap’s hanging, Todd is moved by the juxtaposition of the father he can’t watch and the vision of his stolid mother behind to push to the verge of that possibility: “That sight [of Ma] and the quivering of the giant limb with it tore my heart loose and swept it away through the terrible world holding us prisoner to where maybe that world came to the frontier of— what? If not of hope at least of a pause, an arrest, on the emptiness of the future” (267). Such emptiness has no absolute meaning. It is a boundary situation.

     Toward the end of the novel Todd lays over his experience narrative emplotments designed to fill the void, to make sense of his experience. Over the cave he hides until his family is safe and the time is propitious for his escape north Todd lays this interpretation:

“Because this entering and leaving the cave seemed to mean that I was in a tomb myself: just as Pap was—as the Lord had once been—I too biding time till the resurrection, and as though my own at least was at hand. This last, this ancient act beginning in despair and ending in victory, brought a glimmer of solace in contradiction to the fright of my dead father’s presence: as if having Pa and the Lord with me could bring me one day out of this cave to stay, and into a new life—.” (271)

Clark teases us with this Christian rhetoric, as if we are headed for a reaffirmation of its metaphysic. After having killed Harley, Todd throws his body in that cave from which he himself has emerged, and then rolls “a big rock over the mouth of the cave” (281). To the metaphor of resurrection Clark adds the Christian rhetoric of "remorse” (296), employing the traditional conceit of tomb/womb: “remorse entangled with the regret that I’d buried him so near my father's grave, and also with a new and strange sense of fellowship created between us by the sharing of that cave: a tomb for him, for me a place of symbolic death and resurrection.” (296).

     "Being near that spot once more, with war gone from the world, in course of time I had another change of heart, coming to wonder why I’d ever regretted killing [Harley]. Instead, I now felt entitled to the consolation of that sacrifice performed by my own hand: and that the worst of the lynchers, in paying for my father’s blood with his own, had in a sense died for his cohorts as well, and even expiated the crime the whole town was guilty of for allowing the massacre to take place. Let that, I concluded at last, be sufficient to keep me at peace with the bones of my father." (299-300)

Lurking within this apparently Christian rhetoric of consolation, however, is the troubling return of the repressed: that Harley Dexter, trammeled up with the corpse of Todd’s father, is himself like Colonel Oldham, a double for the father, a negative version of the authoritative superego. In killing him, especially after his making fun of Todd for seeming to “jack off on his play-purties” (274), Todd commits a displaced version of Oedipal rebellion—in this instance, killing the dark side of the father.

     Yet, uncrippled by the return of the repressed, Todd effects a crossing, a negotiation of conflict, His final vision eschews Christian for an existentialist metaphysics that combines both the psychoanalytic and the sociological, as well as both tragedy and glory. Employing, to borrow a phrase Clark uses anent Todd’s and Jenny’s vows, “those best of all words” to tell his story, his history (218), Todd comes to the realization that, “gleaming as visions of immortality,” the glorious moments of his life are finally inseparable from the dark ones, “the torment inseparable from the rapture” (301):

“I realize that I cannot long to recreate the marvel of that life without simultaneous consent to seeing my father subjected to a hideous death. [...] My blood courses to a deeper conviction that I need not after all shut my eyes to the immolation of my father in order to value the brightest splendor of existence: that indeed life of this intensity cannot exist without acceptance of the immolation; and on the verge of delirium I discover in myself the ability to reconcile the contradiction of such acceptance. It may be that this endeavor comes to no more than pitting my will against the inexorable laws of circumstance, never to be actualized in time, yet in these rare moments I glimpse a silence outside time where I have the power to offer up myself in my father’s place. It comes to me as a great consolation, this ever potential surrender of my own life, this willingness to submit to vicarious sacrifice. This and this alone, in brevity but in mightiness, inspires in me consent to a boundless universe where the father and the son must each be willing to yield up life in perpetual sacrifice to redeem the other.” (301)

“It may be” that such an “endeavor” is meaningless, Todd admits, but he chooses a vision of a "boundless universe" where the acceptance of tragic “immolation” and the willingness to undergo it in a reciprocal Oedipal sacrifice has the “potential” to redeem existence from meaninglessness precisely because humans—not some transcendent or even immanent god—choose to endow such words with meaning, with glory. Such “Dominion,” to return to the Dickinsonian epigraph, is tenuous indeed. But Todd’s “consent” to it is a Nietzschean gay/tragic affirmation: if he had to journey through it all over again, says the aging Todd, “Oh yes, I would go!” (302). Todd’s affirmation is the logical culmination of Clark’s fiction about the Cross Timbers, a story that is his story, too, if not strictly history. If it is also about “the earth as dust” (300), then Clark has created an existential quintessence for us to wonder at.

     Todd Blair, as opposed to Ike McCaslin, finds a rhetoric of adequation that enables crossings. Having literally crossed over no-man’s-land, that border between South and North and for Todd between tyranny and freedom, to join the Union cavalry, Todd returns to Milcourt triumphant but still vengeful. Nevertheless, his coming to accept Harley’s death as redemptive sacrifice (perhaps even for his own suppressed guilt) allows him to bridge self and other in civil war, to bridge generations, to bridge over loss. At the heart of his rhetoric is the trope of sacrifice, a willing surrender of both father and self to an immolation that is endemic to existence, that enables endurance, that accepts the transience of glory as sufficient transcendence. How can the son substitute himself for the father at whose death he becomes the new father, head of the household? Clark, a product of his own time, offers refuge in another trope, one celebrated by the New Critics of his graduate school years, paradox. Paradoxically, Todd’s gesture of substitution resolves the Oedipal crisis inherent in his dream of Colonel Oldham. Paradoxically, the sacrifices of the Civil War made the country stronger, eventually strong enough to resist Axis aggression, to survive the cold war, to realize the ideals of the Civil Rights movement. Clark’s novel looks backward but reflects back on his own time. As in Faulkner’s fiction, Clark’s perspective as a southerner, through the final “trope” of Todd’s forgiveness, offers a way to negotiate a crossing that perhaps can only be made by an insider.

     If so, Clark is an unsentimental insider who recognizes, at least subconsciously, that all rebellions are Oedipal; and that thus we are all interimplicated in them; that they, like the glorious passion of love, like the tragic season of autumn, require the death of the father “in the operation of” a “natural and merciless law.” Moreover, the aging Todd Blair’s accommodation with Milcourt, with its Confederate veterans—at a distance—and his finding the words to tell his story represent a crossing achieved at great cost. The tragic death of Jenny means that they will not embody reconciliation in a marriage and long life together: a reconciliation between slave owners and dirt farmers that would have symbolically resolved issues of race and class that festered for another hundred years and linger yet in the deep South.  And the tragic death of Todd and Jenny’s son means that the issue of Oedipal rebellion—of son against father, of sons against patria— is not resolved either. Like Uncle Ike, Todd merely escapes the cyclic return of the Oedipal crisis because he remains a maverick to the normal pattern, “grandfather to everybody and nobody, childless, my wife dead for years” (10). Yet Todd’s story (the childless Clark’s novel) is perhaps the offspring that offers a vision of reconciliation through pendant and provisional tragic glory.

 

J. DOUGLAS CANFIELD is Regents Professor, Department of English, University of Arizona

 

Works Cited

 

Clark, L. D. A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas. El Paso, Tex.:  Cinco Puntos Press, 1992.

 

A Charge of Angels. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1987.

 

The Dove Tree. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.

 

The Fifth Wind Tucson, Ariz.: Blue Moon Press, 1981.

 

Is This Naomi? and Other Stories. Tucson, Ariz.: Blue Moon Press, 1979.

 

ed. Civil War Recollections of James Lemuel Clark: Including Previously Unpublished Material on the Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, in October 1862. College Station, Tex,: Texas A&M University Press, 1984.

 

© 2000 J. Douglas Canfield