The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques Jacques Pothier (bio) The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques "Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless …" Eudora Welty, "The Wanderers" Danièle Pitavy-Souques needs no introduction to the readers of this journal. An internationally famous Welty scholar, she is the author of two books in French, La mort de Méduse: L'art de la nouvelle chez Eudora Welty (The Death of Medusa: The Art of the Story by Eudora Welty, 1991) and Eudora Welty: Les Sortilèges du conteur (Eudora Welty: The Witchcraft of Storytelling, 1999) and is well known for dozens of articles. Some of the chapters of the present book were originally contributions to this journal. When she died in 2019, she was working on a book-length collection of eight of her essays on Welty published between 1979 and 2014, with the addition of a new essay on "Flowers for Marjorie" and a short general introduction entitled "The Eye That Is Language." Pearl McHaney can be credited with completing this project in record time as a superb homage to her friend Danièle's labor of love and mind—McHaney's Preface begins with an overview of a career centrally devoted to Welty studies, but also to promoting the study of Northern American women writers—a scholarly powerhouse who also worked hard to empower women. It is common enough to praise Eudora Welty's visual talent and to refer to her experience as a photographer, as this title does. It is less common to point to Welty's training as a painter and to compare her approach with that of Matisse, told by his art professor Gustave Moreau to go into the streets and who remembered: "We were forcing ourselves to discover quickly what was characteristic in a gesture, in an attitude" (qtd. in Pitavy-Souques [End Page 165] 67–68). Pitavy-Souques points out that Welty's approach to photography was just the same: to catch "the moment in which people reveal themselves" (Welty, qtd. in Pitavy-Souques 68). Pitavy-Souques similarly trains her eye, and teaches the readers to train theirs, on the details of Welty's stories that she identifies as keystones to her modernist constructions. She does not explore the stories with a privileged theoretical approach but with a discipline, an ethic—close reading (39, 42, 140) as a way to face the challenges of a demanding art: "Welty's fiction, with unusually strong and complex texts that require close reading to apprehend their richness and endless narrative experimentation" (4); the text's "narrative functioning deserves the closest attention" (7); "a close study of the narration shows that it is just the reverse" (14); "Let us look closely at 'A Memory'" (22); "the contents are manifestly transgressive and as such deserve close attention" (40); "Close analysis reveals the working of Welty's creative imagination" (96); "Close reading invites one to read 'Flowers for Marjorie' as the bold dramatization of self-begetting" (119; all emphases added). This story, she explains in the last essay written with the present volume on her mind, along "with the title story, is the most intriguing text of A Curtain of Green" (39). Close analysis is indeed necessary to catch what makes Welty's writing tick. In this collection, Danièle Pitavy-Souques pays special attention to the volume The Golden Apples, "that great book about writing" (125). The first and seventh chapters ("Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" and "Eudora Welty and the Merlin Principle: Aspects of Story-Telling in The Golden Apples") explicitly deal with the story cycle, but in her quest for metafiction, she makes extended references to the rest of Welty's abundant oeuvre: her novels, photographs, and essays. What Pitavy-Souques particularly enjoys is unpacking the most challenging narrative structures in Welty. Although not indebted to a school of criticism, she draws extensively on an exceptionally wide intellectual background, just as she convinces the reader that Welty, a southerner by biography, trained in the North and an active traveler, was widely open...