Figures of Violence in Ron Rash’s The World Made Straight

Abstract

In The World Made Straight, Ron Rash’s writing, faithfully anchored in the Appalachian territory, takes the form of a temporal maelstrom, in which times reverberate and history mingles with stories. The violence of past events—in this case a bloody episode of the American Civil War—is repeated in the present of narration, which evokes the rampant drug culture in the 1970s. From one period to the next, though its motivations have changed, mimetic violence invariably hits the members of the same community. Strikingly enough, the omnipresent figures of violence in Rash’s fiction are likely to adopt circuitous representational strategies. Their evocative power is reinforced by repetition, their inscription in ordinariness and the poetization of details that conceal as much as they reveal the multiple causes of violence.