Searching for the Garnet Pin:Confluence as Narrative Technique in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding Alison Graham-Bertolini, Independent Scholar In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty writes, “I’m prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer has any weight, testifying to the pattern … of human experience” (947). For Welty, confluence, or the coming together of disparate individuals, experiences, and ideas, is the key to understanding the inner life of her fictional characters. Confluence is a guiding motif in Delta Wedding, as the idea of “wedding” indicates. However, the text is not simply a story about the marriage of Dabney Fairchild to Troy Flavin. Rather, “wedding” has layered meaning that applies to the coming together of contrasting people and ideas within the plot and also to Welty’s narrative technique, which relies on surrealist free association, non-chronological order, and dreamlike sequencing. Confluence is rife in the moments of nonlinearity and distortion that occur throughout Delta Wedding. Welty literally weds tradition with modernity, past with present, and dream with reality to achieve a much closer approximation of human experience than realism alone might achieve. More importantly, we realize through Ellen Fairchild’s confluence of experiences and reflections that although the passage of time is inevitable, no person, relationship, or experience is ever truly lost. The novel is complex, so I limit my reading to the experiences of Ellen Fairchild, whose search for her missing garnet pin provides particularly strong examples of how Welty distorts the precepts of linear time and space to achieve moments of insight for both Ellen and the reader. Amidst the chaos and confusion of wedding planning, Ellen realizes that she has misplaced a garnet pin that has special significance for her because it was a gift from her husband, Battle, during their courtship. Preparations for Dabney and Troy’s wedding have reminded Ellen of her own courtship and wedding day, jogging her memory and calling the pin to mind. Thus, while on one level the garnet pin functions as a tangible object that for Ellen represents her courtship and youthful sexuality, on another level, the pin can be understood as a figurative symbol that transcends time and space. It is a [End Page 95] conduit that helps Ellen to re-experience and recover “lost” moments, and thus helps her to come to terms with aging and her changing role within the family. The search for the pin is often metaphoric, for just as the pin is lost and recovered throughout the novel, the pursuit of the pin causes Ellen to lose and recover fragments of her own experience. Surrealism, an artistic movement launched in France in 1924, aimed to “revolt against all restraints on free creativity” to “ensure the unhampered operation of the ‘deep mind’ … the only source of valid knowledge” (Abrams 205). Perhaps it is just a coincidence that Delta Wedding is set in 1923, just one year before surrealism was established as a movement in France; however, this seems unlikely. In “South of South Again: Eudora Welty’s Late Surreal Lament,” Stephen M. Fuller argues that Welty’s literary influences are much greater than many critics have given her credit for and establishes that Welty had indeed assimilated the core principles of Bretonian surrealism, as first envisioned by André Breton when he published Manifestoes of Surrealism in 1924 (2). Breton writes, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (qtd. in S. Fuller 40). Fuller convincingly argues that Welty draws from surrealism to “harvest an abundance of literary fruit” (40). Similar to this, Ruth D. Weston argues that “Welty draws from the aesthetic traditions of many artistic media, blending the most affective narrative techniques of these forms” (13). Ellen’s belief in the power of her dreams, which I will explore in further detail, is just one example of how Welty incorporates surrealism into Delta Wedding. It is my contention that Ellen’s journey to...