The Web and The Root
Thomas Wolfe
INTRODUCTION TO
The Web and the Root
The first three chapters of The Web and the Rock return to familiar, if slightly disguised, Wolfe territory, Asheville, now called Libya Hill; the Blue Ridge Mountains; and some familiar characters, now sporting new names or relationships to the central figure of the novel. That new figure, grotesque in body but potentially beautiful in spirit, supplants Eugene Gant as a surrogate character. He is called George Webber and must accept, willy-nilly, the nickname “Monk” because of his simian features. The territory may be familiar and the characters readily identifiable with ones Wolfe created for Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, but the subject matter, tone, and literary traditions differ significantly from the earlier novels.
Launching a frontal attack on the warped values of the Blue Ridge area, especially among Baptist members of the Joyner side of George’s forebears, Wolfe dwells sarcastically on the hypocrisy of Bible-quoting but scripture-disobeying members of that flock, Aunt Mag Joyner being the chief offender. She shares the opinion that drinking whiskey is a greater moral vice than committing murder. Like other members of her Baptist kin, she thinks that divorce is unforgivable. Morally intolerant as she is, she’s not above abusing children in her care, and her kin fail to act when mining companies despoil the landscape to dig for mica. In pointing to this rape of mountain property, Wolfe takes a place as an early eco-minded writer.
True to his conceptual plan for moving to a more objective way of writing, Wolfe took measured steps to leave behind the trappings of a Byronic hero, or a Shellyean rebel out to reform the world with idealism so compelling that even the yokels of the world would see the errors of their way. Rather than satisfying himself with a pinprick, he most often struck with heavy hammerblows. This new tone, rigorous in its denunciation and damning in its charges of hypocrisy and accommodation, underscores Wolfe’s expressed ambition to be more satiric and probing in this new cycle.
In large measure, Wolfe doffed Joycean and Whitmanesque garb in a revealing letter leading up to his attempt to present an avatar more representative of his maturing vision of American society. Pointedly, he wanted to leave behind the “wounded faun,” his portrait of a young American author misunderstood and undervalued by his countrymen, to strip his projected protagonist of what he labeled “Eugene Gant-i-ness.” Even though he liked the feel and look of a bardic mantle, he was moving inexorably towards Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Mark Twain, and those penetrating observers of the dark side of American culture: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner. Lyrical outpourings would diminish as social criticism, satire, and dramatizations of human propensity to evil boiled to the surface of his fiction.