Three Things Tuesday on James Sallis

I had a long flight over the weekend and I managed to get a certain amount of work done, but most of the time that wasn’t in fitful sleep, I was reading a James Sallis novel. I worked my way through two more novels from the Lew Griffin series: Black Hornet and Eye of the Cricketand started Bluebottle. 

Critics seem to suggest that Sallis’s Griffin series is more than a noir pot-boiler and strays deliberately into the murky category of “literature.” While I mean no disrespect to Sallis, I tend to agree. TheEye of the Cricket was (literally and vaguely) fantastic. (And fantastic for reasons other than one of the main supporting characters being named Sam Delany). Having immersed myself in the Sallis’ (and Griffin’s) world for nearly 20 hours, I can offer three observations (with vaguely archaeological overtones).

1. Home is Identity. Places of residence play a key role in Sallis’s novels and receive significant attention attention to detail. For Griffin, in particular, Sallis explores the tension between his sense of self and his sense of home. In the Eye of the Cricket, Griffin has to actually abandon the latter to rediscover the former as he moves from his comfortable home in New Orleans to search for his lost son. By allowing his sense of self (playfully displaced by a homeless man who at one point claims for himself the name and identity of Lew Griffin), to dissipate along with his comfortable, if solitary existence, he not only find his son, but comes to realize how much his family (and community) create his sense of place in the world both literally through individuals who come to live in his home with him when he returns and figuratively as Griffin finds his own sense of self by opening his space to others.

Sallis’s attention to detail goes beyond Griffin’s house and includes his attention to spaces where other lost souls found moments of peace. It is clear that Sallis is familiar with squats in abandoned buildings, the angular modernism of the 1970s, and the patinated shotgun houses and subdivided mansions of urban New Orleans. At the risk of being cliche, Sallis’s spaces are susceptible to a kind of literary archaeology of home.  

2. Food is Community. If homes stand in as detailed metaphors for self grounded in the rough realism of urban NewOrleans, food for Sallis represents a more utopian space. Griffin, who lives at the edge of poverty, never lacks for cash for food, drinks, (or information) in the novels. In fact, Sallis uses the conviviality of the southern table as a place to reconcile all sorts of racial, economic, and social disparities. In his novels, Black men and white men, criminals and cops, the poor and the well-to-do, activists and pacifists find middle ground where they share information, personal details, and meals. The use of meals in Sallis is almost certainly borrowed from Chester Himes whose laced his book with meals, but in Himes’s work, these meals are more often times for celebration or recuperation rather than in the thick of the action. In Sallis the orderly space of Himes’s meal gives way to the rather more tense conviviality at dirty bars, Griffin’s kitchen table, tired dinners, and sometimes even the levies and streets of New Orleans. Seemingly limitless hospitality, money, and soul food create the necessary lubricants both for Sallis’s narrative and characters.    

3. Time is Problem. For Sallis, time is an interesting problem. His narratives constantly fold backward and forward onto themselves leaving a tangled timeline that both tempts the reader to untangle it and manifestly resists untangling. Sallis laces each novel with so many references to the other novels in the series often by including the exact same phrases or even whole paragraphs to not only invoke, but re-narrate Griffin’s past in new contexts. The result are books that operate both in time, but also in a kind of timeless and recursive state.

The effect of this is to reinforce the patinated space of Sallis’s novels where New Orleans is both a timeless backdrop but also laced with Griffin’s personal history (and the narrative constructed by Sallis in his novels). This creates a kind of distinctive sense of being in a different time and place and has parallels with the arguments that Shannon Dawdy has made for New Orleans. Bereft of the illusory linearity of contemporary capitalism and its misguided sense of progress, New Orleans is a pastiche of utopians, lost souls, and timelessness. This seems like a worthwhile reason for any archaeologist to read these books.