The Year the Lights Came On (38 page)

And what is lost cannot be recovered. When Colin watches loving Megan sink into despair over his dissolution of their huddling, their relationship, he momentarily tries “to retreat back into [his] circle of isolation and protection, my boundaries of north and south, east and west, my boundaries of Black Pool Swamp.” Of course he cannot successfully retreat, anymore than he or Kay can truly regain the lost past through the nostalgic narrative comprising
The Year the Lights Came On.
That narrative is a form of walking backward, which reveals only where one has been. As an act of less dynamic retrospective imagination combining memory and art, Colin’s account is redeemed principally by the fact that what it recalls is the memory of a more primary and vital artistic act of the imagination: the prospective dreams of youth.

Colin’s memorial narrative might celebrate the wonder of these expansive prospective dreams, but finally it is bounded by time, or, more accurately, the fall of youthful imagination into time. Before 1947, for Colin and his buddies, “Time was bodyless, formless.” After the coming of electricity, of technological progress, “Time became placeable” for them. As his inability (when he dissolves his relationship with Megan) to retreat into the timelessness of the past and as his account relentlessly dramatizes, Colin is not able to emulate Dover’s “good sense to resist adulthood,” the stage
of human development characterized by the loss of the dynamic prospective imagination, by the deprivation of the capacity to dream. Whereas Dover (at least from the children’s disputable perspective) somehow apparently manages to maintain the ability to “not separate Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Colin falls into time.

Having fallen out of a timelessness in Eden County, Colin learns that in time nothing keeps: not summer, not youth, not innocence, not love, not (excluding, or insulating) boundaries, not prospective imagination. Nothing endures. There in fact had been hints of this characteristic of temporal reality in the seemingly timeless dreamy world of Colin and his friends. For instance, a sense of history (time and memory) abides in the apocryphal story about the haunting of Wind’s Mill by the ghost of a Confederate deserter who probably died in his hiding place. But Colin does not detect in this legend any intimation of the condemnation of the fallen human spirit in time; the story seems to him to be something apart, separate, even if the name Wind disguises the fact that originally the place was called Wynn’s Mill, suggesting a connection to Colin’s family and his own destiny. Appropriately, it is during a hayride to Wind’s Mill that Colin ends his romance with Megan and that their fall into time is completed.

Just as Colin and his friends turn a blind eye to the press of history upon their dream world, they ignore the implications of the very activity of the REA in their beloved swamp, that refuge into which Freeman Boyd successfully escapes and into which Colin (looking at despairing Megan) wishes to retreat. Nevertheless, the death of Colin’s oldest brother while hitchhiking to an assignment with the REA foreshadows the demise of Colin’s youthful imagination. Likewise, the fact that the right-of-way
crew of the REA literally “hacked through the swamp” in order to bring electricity to Our Side readily indicates the devastating incursion that progress, technological advancement, will make on Colin’s dream world. But Colin, whose surname ironically promises victory (Wynn, win) ignores such signs of inevitable loss.

With the fall into time, with progress and “progress[ing] forward” (maturation), comes the dissolution of former boundaries, those imagined borders which at once excluded and insulated Our Side. With this rupture comes a new perspective, an enlightenment corresponding to the acquisition of electric light. Primarily this enlightenment erases imaginary partitions, suppliants unique identity with commonality, and displaces the soft simplicities of the dream world with hard complexities.

One insight into this complexity includes the realization that perimeters are indeed imaginary and can be good as well as bad. Another includes the insight that in time nothing endures. Most significantly, however, this new sense of complexity reveals the paradox at the very heart of progress and maturation: that for every gain there is a loss.

In gaining the termination of purlieus, one loses a special kind of identity. In gaining access to the cold world at large, one loses the warm communal or family huddle. In gaining the technology of artificial light, one loses sunny nature—a fact symbolized by the devastation of the swamp. In gaining a new perspective
(temporal
enlightenment), one loses a certain kind of vision, the prospective imagination of youth. These and similar deprivations are significant, and Kay’s novel subtextually raises the questions of whether what was gained was worth what was lost. Loss, however, is inevitable.

With the demise of the prospective imagination, of youthful dream, comes the attainment of the retrospective imagination, adult memory. Memory is not as wondrous as the more dynamic earlier mode of imagination, Kay’s novel suggests, but like youthful dreaming it is aligned to art in its construction of pleasing aesthetic patterns. These nostalgic artistic designs of memory, of retrospective imagination, to some extent compensate for the privation of the glorious youthful dreams of the prospective imagination. As Kay’s novel intrinsically demonstrates, remembering is also a precious art.

Kay’s theme that the advancement of social technology and of personal maturation banishes imagination, in its most active and vital mode, is also a common Romantic concern of early nineteenth-century literature. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet: To Science” (1829), for example, laments the passage of the narrator’s youthful “summer dream” just as Colin’s story recounts the passage of his last summer as an innocent child with a visionary prospective imagination. Similarly, the “echo of the ax” wielded by the REA crew slicing through the swamp recalls the sounds of the axes of progressing civilization that drives Natty Bumppo farther and farther westward in James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Prairie
(1827). Poe’s representative concern with the atrophication of a certain kind of imaginative vision concerning one’s self and Cooper’s characteristic uneasiness over the destruction of a certain kind of vision concerning the natural and the rural combine in some late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American literary works focused on the declining West as a symbol of a diminished dream of an ideal America. Larry McMurtry’s
The
Last Picture Show
(1966)
is an excellent example but a precedent book also evocative of this loss, a book Kay’s novel time and again
calls to mind, is Samuel Langhorne Clemens’
The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885).

Clemens’ romance, like Kay’s, presents a dreamy summer world of youthful imagination that falls into time as Huck’s adolescent perspective changes when he crosses former imaginary boundaries to discover a new reality of loss of freedom (slavery), loss of innocence (maturation), and loss of vision (civilizational progress). The West, which was always from the first a creation of the American imagination, serves in Huck’s narrative as an elusive refuge from this fall into time, as do places like Black Pool Swamp in Colin’s narrative, which specifically speaks of Big Gully as “the West.” Just as in Big Gully the Our Side Gang imagines that “there were cowboys and Indians,” so too Huck and other members of Tom Sawyer’s gang dream of undertaking “howling adventures amongst the Indians, over in the Territory.” And just as in Kay’s romance the REA right-of-way crew cuts through the seemingly charmed landscape with axes and transforms it into civilization, so also in Clemens’ romance the wondrous land west of the Mississippi River has been trampled by Tom Sawyerish forces and has been civilized (in an ironic sense). Huck’s final assertion, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it,” is as forlorn a hope as is Colin’s wretched wish “to retreat back into…[the] isolation and protection…[of the] boundaries of Black Pool Swamp.” Neither can escape the fall into time, for in both instances the Territory, the Swamp, the West is receding fast before the march of civilization.

Colin’s association of the construction of electrical lines and the laying of “some east-and-west railroad track” suggests the corresponding imminent demise both of his youthful vision, objectified in his southern locale, and of America’s youthful vision, objectified by the land west of the Mississippi. The Territory, the Swamp, the West were always merely mental reifications, psychological terrains with imaginary boundaries, perspectives fashioned by the prospective imagination dreamily looking forward toward some vision of what might be. From the first, however, they were doomed by the inevitable fact of existence that nothing lasts; and what is gained from this demise is the less exhilarating, yet poignant, capacity for retrospective imagination. Both
The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
The
Year the Lights Came On
are acts of artistic memory nostalgically recalling the close of the West: that is, the curtailment of an active and vital creative vision represented in the idea of the West; a diminishing which finally signifies the close of the dynamic, prospective imagination.

One particularly noteworthy feature of the former vision of the West (the Territory, the Swamp), of the imaginative idea of an ideal of America, is the desire for an egalitarian boundarylessness not only between the “haves” and the “have-nots” (the Highway 17 Gang and the Our Side Gang) but also between races. In
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck discovers a new frontier in interracial relations as he discovers his affection for Jim, the runaway slave. In
The Year the Lights
Came On
Colin explores this same frontier as he discovers that “Willie Lee and Baptist were [his] friends.” If Huck finds something like a family relationship with Jim, from whom he learns much about human values, Colin bonds with Willie Lee and Baptist, who function as a loyal family for runaway Freeman Boyd and thereby demonstrate a lesson in human values. Similarly, whereas Huck learns of complexity by developing feelings, thoughts, and a conscience concerning Jim’s condition as a slave, Colin is introduced to complexity by Baptist.

Baptist counsels Colin and his friends, “there’s one thing you not learned about, and that’s people’s meanness. Mean? People are me-e-e-e-ean, boys.” That is a negative lesson introducing complexity into Colin’s world. A more positive lesson in complexity is expressed in Baptist’s statement about loyalty, “if it come down to a choice between takin’ up for Willie Lee or y’all in sayin’ that Willie Lee had helped him out, well, Freeman would take up for Willie Lee.” Stunned by the insight, Colin thinks, “We had never thought of a dilemma so complex, so threatening, so unsolvable.”

Whatever social bounds the Our Side Gang cannot cross in their own race until the coming of electricity, its members always transgress the equally imaginary borders between whites and blacks. They can do this in part because they have been marginalized by the Highway 17 Gang just as blacks have been marginalized by whites; they can do this in part because they are children whose imaginative unitive vision defies boundaries, even if (as it turns out) boundaries have some positive features. The Our Side children are like the half-bloods of the West who readily crossed the territorial, cultural, and mental borders separating white and Native American cultures, and who benefited as much as suffered from their own marginalized status in both cultures.

Willie Lee and Baptist doubtless suffer from their imprisonment behind the mind-forged social barriers white society uses to distance them, but they also benefit from such a partition by developing personal intracultural human values, loyalty, and bonding (huddling, so to speak). Kay’s book suggests that when the black community finally crosses the perimeters white perspectives have created for them, they might find, like Colin, that they have surrendered something in attaining access. Whether, like Colin, in retrospect Willie Lee and Baptist would feel that what has
vanished was greater than what was achieved, is not something we can predict. We can only know what Colin, the narrator, has learned about falling into time: that nothing can endure, that one loses the dynamics of the prospective imagination, that with every gain there is necessarily a loss, and that every such loss might in retrospect seem more valuable than what has been gained.

Kay’s
The
Year the Lights Came On,
like Clemens’
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Jack Schaefer’s
Shane
(1949), at first seem to be books suffused with the glowing natural light of the youthful world evoked by their respective young narrators. But there are shadows everywhere. In each of these books, meanness, abuse, and death haunt the fringes of the narrative. Each of these artistic acts of retrospective imagination ends on a dark note emphasizing the loss of something valuable never again to be regained, something symbolized in the imaginary terrain of a West which is at once the idealistic promise of America and the prospective promise of each individual self. In Schaefer’s
The
Kean Land
(1959), Ben Hammon, remembering when the Colorado land he stubbornly treasures once held visionary human value, in a sense speaks for all three writers when he describes this loss of the symbolic West: “Nobody to talk to. The kind of folks crowding in around here now aren’t interested in the old days. Too busy making money or trying to and tearing up and down that highway there in cars that aren’t ever full paid for because of always being turned in on new ones and worrying about meeting installments on all the billy-be-damned gadgets people think they have to have nowadays cluttering their houses and getting in the way of a decent living.”