Southern Woe, Minority Lens: Ride with Woodrell-Schamus-Lee

Abstract

Southern Woe, Minority Lens:Ride with Woodrell-Schamus-Lee Sheng-Mei Ma Daniel Woodrell's woe to live on (1987), on the Civil War Mis-souri rebels, the bushwhackers, is adapted by Ang Lee as Ride with the Devil (1999) based on James Schamus's screenplay. Woodrell's South of deep woes comes to the big screen and the big world filtered through a minority lens of a Jewish American scriptwriter and a Taiwanese American filmmaker.1 From 1991 to 2002, Schamus and Ted Hope's production company Good Machine contributed to bringing to the mainstream audience a string of "minority" tales, "minor" or marginal ones that find their way into American culture, including Ang Lee's Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), The Ice Storm (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and Joan Chen's Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (1998). A New York Jewish sensibility, the "other" to Euro-American centrality, joins hands with the other "other" from across the Pacific Ocean. To conservative, "red-blooded" Americans, those of Jewish and Chinese descent are seen as hailing from afar, being part of America and apart from it. As printed words alchemize into filmic dialogue, qualitative changes occur. Take the titles for instance. The novel's title suggests a perspective from the one suffering from yet also sustained by Southern woe. The narrative voice and that woe are one. The film's title, by contrast, entertains a subjectivity several times removed: Which devil? The Devil or the Southern devils/rebels? If the latter, then who is riding with Southern devils—the extradiegetic viewers or the two diegetic protagonists with whom viewers identify? Both scenarios? For the [End Page 441] "Dutchy" Jake and the ex-slave Holt, perennially called by the racist N-word, riding with the devils may as well be riding along or even being ridden, being verbally abused and physically threatened by their bush-whacker comrades. The Jake-Holt minority or minoritarian viewpoint is the lens, the door to admit modern viewers with less overtly racist and possibly more progressive thinking into the other world—the South—during the Civil War. The minority lens allows the majority of millennial audience to see through the devil's eye and empathize with, feel for, devilry. Woodrell's novel ends with Jake and his surrogate family—Sue Lee, widow of his "near brother" Jack Bull Chiles (7) and now his wife, their baby girl Grace Chiles, and his "dark comrade, Holt"—leaving the war for a "new spot for life," which "might be but a short journey as a winged creature covers it, that is often said, but, oh, Lord, as you know, I had not the wings, and it is a hot, hard ride by road" (215). It is well-nigh poetry as the last phrase alliterates "h" in "hot, hard" and "r" in "ride by road." Taken as a whole, this concluding sentence encapsulates Woodrell's craft, yoking the conversational, the oral "that is often said" and "as you know," on the one hand, and, on the other, the evocatively biblical and archaic "but, oh, Lord … I had not the wings." A stylistic tightrope suspended between the informal and the incantational, between bloody war and blood bond, Woodrell has indeed executed a "hot, hard ride" from the 1983 eponymous short story in The Missouri Review to the 1987 novel to Schamus's script for Ang Lee's Western in 1999. The short story's final resting place is Woodrell's 2011 collection The Outlaw Album. The long trek of sixteen years, not counting the short story's revenant in the collection, charts a course as tortu(r)ous as the Missouri River. What follows seeks to trace the three-part river: its creative genesis in the fountainhead of the short story; its convergence/conversion into the main body of a Civil War historical novel; and its emptying into the sea of public consciousness through two minority artists invisible behind the camera. If only words could slice a stream (of consciousness and textuality) and freeze it into, in the order of appearance: The Fountainhead—"Woe to Live...