does this count as "giving your work away"?

Part I:

Failure of critics in X way

Not inaccurate but deals only in parts

Both texts do individual and collective trauma

The traumas are in relation to

--“mystic” time: that the lived experience is felt in segments/fragments, through

repetition and circular experiences, flashback and such in Meridian, circularity and ancestry in the Salt Eaters, and through symptoms

--linear logic/narrative

Telling the story through nonlinear forms works to narrate things in a way that is more true to the experiences of injury but also to the logic of healing, which asks you to step forward ethically into the present

Both of these, especially linear logic of recuperation, are meant ot be healing but they pile narrative upon narrative, injury upon injury, ignoring in some cases the

--historical actuality

And also the

--unreconcilable/ghosted/nonlinear portions of this experience

Both novels describe, and to some extent make the reader experience, a nonlinear time, and here’s how:

Meridian stops time through Meridian, the crossing point, the line at which the world is locked in a moment, in the responses and questions and tactics of the past. To adapt to this moment, Meridian must answer the question posed to her by the black power activists, her question is the question of violence; but then she moves away from the cap, leaving the symbol of the revolution for Truman to wrestle with, as his trauma, the remembrances of Lynne and the confusion about what should be done to heal racial injustice still linger in his narratives. The novel concludes with a spiritual gesture but it is healing through embeddedness in the world, a pragmatic solution to move ahead by staying grounded in time as it marches onward, accepting that traces reappear but that the present always recurs, again and again, cannot be denied, must be privileged. Meridian must move into the present, asking what is the question that she must answer or address now in order to heal, stop being ill, and take an ethical and non sick place in the world.

The Salt Eaters moves in through cyclical time, invoking the reader with the opening question and continuing to push against our expectations of the material world, asking us to understand or agree that it is possible for bodies to occupy two spaces at once. The exchange that Minnie has with the Old Wife is the perfect illustration of this suspended disbelief, which is not only magical realist—it is traumatic healing, it is an acknowledgement that the spiritual life, the spiritual plane, is the true space of trauma recovery. The novel asks the reader to suspect and gradually to believe that the world of the material sufferings and struggles, of Velma’s self-involved disturbances, is not the only world, that there is another world possible, and that it is work, struggle, effort, to live in that world. The question: “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well” is a real question: “are you sure?” because there is a lot of work to be done once you decide, choose, submit to being well.

Both novels urge healing from civil rights trauma, but their different strategies suggest the complications of a trauma and healing model: healing, suggesting that the trauma can be past, the symptoms can disappear. But the world is constantly damaging, it doesn’t go away, so one healing strategy doesn’t work for all time, it must be sacrificed, and a new healing strategy must be adapted,strengthened, and Truman must begin that same journey to figure out how he can heal himself in that first round: what is his question? Accepting parallel worlds is one solution; also to maintain the recognition that healing is important but so is being in the world at the same time, to maintain this awareness even as you sequester in a particular moment of trauma.

The healing honors what’s come before and so does the moving on.