Redemption Falls

Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls (2007) is a not-really sequel to O'Connor's Star of the Sea, with the connector being teenager Eliza Duane Mooney (daughter of one of the earlier novel's protagonists).  The more significant connection between the two novels, however, is narrative form.   The novel consists of popular ballads, Dickinsonish poetry by key protagonist Lucia-Cruz McLelland-O'Keeffe, transcripts of oral and written interviews, letters, government reports, trial transcripts, journals, and photographs, all held together by an "editor," Jeremiah McLelland; this same editor, who tells us that he is Lucia-Cruz's nephew, also contributes some biographical prose and, more importantly, limited third-person narrative chapters that link the fragments together.  McLelland remarks proudly that "[m]y pursuit has been to collect as much as I can nose up of James O'Keeffe and the boy Jeddo Mooney, those long-forgotten actors from America's Civil War, who somehow contain in themselves, so it seems to their collector, everything larger of war" (442), and the novel flourishes its documents in deliberately overstuffed profusion.  This obsessive accumulation of texts and objects quickly threatens to slip from historical documentation into historical parody--not least because, as McLelland admits, "[m]y collection includes forgeries--I suppose that is inevitable--but only a couple and even those are not entirely without interest" (443).  But McLelland does not mark the forgeries within the narrative, just as he does not mark off his fictional interpolations from the "historical" documents, or treat the transcripts as much different  in kind than the ballads.  Matters become even more complex when we consult the acknowledgments and realize that the photographs reproduced here are real Civil War photographs, some of which are inserted in the narrative as representations of fictional characters.  Like Star of the Sea, which at first glance seems deceptively conventional, this novel's structure looks, Janus-faced, in two directions: it fictionalizes the processes of acquiring, editing, selecting, and annotating historical documents in the service of history; and it also fictionalizes those same processes in the service of historical fiction.  The novel's ultimate fiction is that it is somehow unfinished, not quite fully assembled.

The narrative's deconstructed--or, perhaps, decomposed--state is an apt figure for the post-Civil War United States.  The Civil War may be over, but its conflicts simply slop over into postbellum relationships.  There's nothing especially "ex-" about the ex-Confederates,  nor has anything improved much for the emancipated slaves.  Redemption Falls, where much of the action takes place, proves to be a deeply ironic name, given that the novel practically welters in destruction.   (The jacket blurb drags out the dreaded "Dickensian" to describe the story; in this instance, Cormac McCarthy might have been a better choice.)   James O'Keeffe, once a famed Irish rebel who became a celebrity after he narrowly escaped execution and then fled from Tasmania to the United States, has declined into a nearly-mad drunk; a disaster as a commanding officer, he still stews in guilt over his desertion of his aboriginal wife (and for another reason, not revealed until the end).  His marriage to the dramatic Lucia-Cruz has similarly imploded.  She, meanwhile, has carried on an affair with the obsessed Allen Winterton, whose face was horrifically burned under mysterious circumstances (also not revealed until late; we never actually know what Winterton looks like).  Winterton, who praises the American ability to "resume one's story over if the plot does not thicken to one's taste" (290), turns out to be not quite what he appears.    O'Keeffe's marriage is not appreciably strengthened by the arrival of a strange runaway boy, Jeddo Mooney, a former army drummer psychologically twisted by his firsthand participation in warfare; Jeddo's potentially deadly eccentricities provide one of the novel's most significant mysteries.  And Jeddo leads us back to Eliza, from whom he has run away.  Her horrific trek across country, which twice climaxes in apocalyptic violence and ends in devastation, seems to gather together all the horrors of postbellum lawlessness.  Her quest for Jeddo rings some particularly nasty changes on the picaresque.

What are the implications, then, of Jeremiah McLelland's attempt to impose some sort of narrative order on this textual and physical mess? I'll have to give away a secret in order to answer that question, so the rest of this post will go below the fold. 

At the  end of the novel's first segment, in which Eliza sets out on her journey, the narrative suddenly switches from third person to first: "She is an ant on a map.  She talks to herself as she walks.  And I cannot face her.  I cannot face her.  For this walk is for my redemption" (16).  But who is talking? As it turns out, Jeremiah McLelland is Jeddo Mooney.  After all the mayhem for which he is directly and indirectly responsible, he is eventually tamed and educated not by Eliza, but by Lucia-Cruz, the woman who had originally rejected him.  For Jeremiah, the true sign of his transformation is his shifting relationship to language:

By the time he was eighteen he had French enough to make a way, could read a children's psalter in Spanish, conjugate simpler verbs in Latin.  Gradually he lost the drawl and whaang of Lousiana; his vowels became flatter, and he came to speak like a princeling.  He still could be eccentric, although, as with many eccentricities, Jeddo Mooney's, if considered, spoke volumes.  Somewhere along his path, he began to refer to various members of his adoptive establishment by fondly familiar designations.  (450)

Jeremiah, who has not quite "claimed" himself yet at this point in the narrative,understands this "path" explicitly as a route to civilization.  Lucia-Cruz is the good angel "guiding that boy from the darkness he inhabited" (449).  The violence associated with the half-wild, vengeful sister he cannot "face" gives way to the European linguistic culture associated with Lucia-Cruz--the woman who, he thinks, must have undertaken this process out of a desire to "forgive" (449).  Or does she? Without any written traces of her thoughts, Jeremiah cannot know, although he wishes to believe it; his archive cannot provide the closure and certainty he seeks.  Nevertheless, language promises some sort of control.  Jeremiah both renames himself in order to banish the legendary weight of his past and renames others to form his makeshift family, both acts which suggest a second Eden (he's the new Adam).  Earlier in the novel, in a wry metafictional moment, "Lucia-Cruz" warns that "spelling a character's dialogue phonetically" often signals to the reader that the characters "are somehow not as human as their creator" (192), and one senses that despite including this quotation in his collection, Jeremiah does not quite heed this warning.  Except that the dehumanization in question may apply to his own younger self, not just the others in his life.  In his new, "princeling" form, Jeremiah seems to be embarking on a fairy tale, one that takes him from bestial youngster to his elite place as a Columbia University scholar. 

In that sense, story-telling takes on a new imperative: by ordering and reordering everything in this new, cultured language, authorized by scholarship (the book has footnotes), Jeremiah tries to turn the confused detritus of his past into the organized narrative of how he came to be redeemed.  Despite some occasional resemblances to his Biblical namesake (as well as to Oskar from The Tin Drum, one of the oblique and not-so-oblique literary allusions that occasionally float to the novel's surface), though, Jeremiah learns less from his life story than might meet the eye.  He edits this collection in 1937, as his Jewish wife, intrigued by cinema, anguishes over the rise of a "puny Austrian thug" (440).  Jeremiah contemptuously dismisses this man as one of "these hate-filled nobodies" (440).  As he tries mightily to wrap up his story as a tale of redemption--good wrought out of evil, civilization salvaged from the wild darkness--Jeremiah makes the mistake of reading his own happy ending as an ending.  He may have been redeemed, but his world has not.