River Sing Out, by James Wade

A tragedy without catharsis.

A tragedy often involves a journey during which the tragic protagonists are confronted with emotional upheaval, suffering, misfortune, death and other manner of human suffering. Along the road situations change, moral and ethical forks are followed, and an emotional crisis presents itself. In Waiting For The Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee, the journey occurs well into the story when the Magistrate takes a girl, a Barbarian prisoner, out into the territory of the Barbarians in order to find her family. The travails during the journey have all the elements of a Greek tragedy, but the modern tragedy occurs during the chapters after the Magistrate’s return from his visit to the Barbarians, when he becomes the prisoner. In Devil’s Peak, by Deon Meyer, the journey’s are metaphorical. There is not a crossing of a dessert as there is in Waiting For The Barbarians, and there are several protagonists, an honorable man seeking revenge for a murdered son, an alcoholic detective trying to put his life back together after his wife leaves him, and a young prostitute whose daughter is threatened by a drug lord. Their paths cross during violent events, each struggling for meaning in the actions being taken, and each crossing moral borders in desperation, as the monstrous culmination of their acts approaches. In River, Sings Out, James Wade brilliantly takes these structural elements of a tragedy to a higher level.

In River, Sing Out, the tragic protagonists are all poor, living close to the banks of the Neches River in a rural part of East Texas. Unlike Waiting For The Barbarians, these characters have proper names–Carson, Jonah, and River–but they are more often than not referred to simply as the old man, the boy, and the girl (who in fact has a real name that the reader doesn’t learn until near the end). Two villains are always addressed by their names–Curtis and Wade. And then there is the “thin man,” who is harder to characterize, except perhaps symbolically as “death.” These characters cross paths frequently during the story, although their journeys are metaphorical in large part, similar to Devil’s Peak. And the events pile up during the story into a looming apprehension, much the same as in the tragedies of Shakespeare. Although the reader desperately wants Jonah and River to reach the ocean in the end, hope is dashed when a reckoning born of the confluence of the hopeless everyday lives of the characters mixes with the evil acts of the villains.

Foreboding is always present during the novel. Wade brilliantly accomplishes this with imagery. The reader is introduced to Jonah at dusk, when “The sun set and the world died another small death, and those upon it the same, and all growing closer to what ends may be met.” The thin man is introduced at a sunrise, where he views life as through a prism showing “the existence of those around him . . . as a great plague upon the earth.” On the journey to Redtown late in the story, Jonah and River come upon a family of wild boars, and Jonah shoots a charging father to save River from harm. But he feels only injustice over his action, noting that the hog was only trying to protect his child. He observes, “The hog lay lifeless, tongue lolling, soaking in the mud and the blood and the coming dawn. Buzzards begin to circle.” It is an event and an image befitting the society in which Jonah and River live.

River, Sing Out is a story full of futility. It is the background on the story’s canvas. The reader learns through backstories about the death of Carson’s family, and in a similar way Jonah is told by his abusive father how his mother left because she didn’t like her son. Similar backstories paint the earlier lives of Curtis, Wade, and River. It is a hole from which none of the them can climb out, as evidenced by their observations. For Carson, “The world is not what we make it, as told to the children, some unmolested canvas upon which to create a future worth living. No.” At one point in the novel, Jonah and River exchange stories about their earlier lives, and there is a glimmer of hope in their thinking that they might overcome what life has saddled them with. But after Jonah tells River the story of Jonah and the whale, River’s reaction brings the reader back to the inevitable futility of their circumstances. “That’s how people are, kid, they’re . . . . liars. They’re all out for themselves. They get caught doing something and . . . . they’re so sorry about it but turn your head for two seconds, and they’ll be at it again.” A short time later they dream of escape from their world by going to the ocean together. The reader desperately wants them to make it at that point. But the proffered escape plan is but a building block to the looming tragedy. The die is cast by their life circumstances and their escape from it is not to be.

At the end of the tragic journey a reader comes upon despair, or in Aristotle’s words, pity and fear, after which there is catharsis. But River, Sing Out is not an Aristotelian tragedy for it’s tragic heroes are not ones of elevated social standing, such that the catastrophe’s that befall them are made worse by who they are, as was the case with Randall Dawson in Wade’s first novel, All Things Left Wild. The tragic protagonists in River, Sing Out are nobodies, and what happens to them is of little consequence generally to society. The story is a modern domestic tragedy that involves poverty, addiction, alcoholism, abuse, violence, and social stigmatism. Perhaps there is a catharsis in what happens to Curtis, that he gets what is due him. But that’s a stretch. As he himself remarks early in the story, “the world is full up with bad men. . . . And how do you conquer bad men? You become one.” If there is a catharsis of any kind in River, Sing Out, it is not from a pain that awakens something pleasurable in the reader, such as a hope that a person may overcome social adversity or that god punishes evil doers. A reader finds such a catharsis in Christine’s character in Devil’s Peak. Not so for River in Wade’s story. The novel is full of references that there is no god. It is the very lack of a positive catharsis that makes River, Sing Out such a powerful and well written modern tragedy. A river does sing out during the story, both from a character by that name and from the ever constant flow of the Neches River. But despite the singing, the world doesn’t change; it only ends and begins again.

For more about James Wade, visit his website at https://www.jameswadewriter.com.