Harris the Irrefutable Literary Talent
The reputation of Joel Chandler Harris began rising toward its peak in 1888 when he joined Mark Twain as charter members of the American Folklore Society. By the time of his death two decades, he eulogized as “the most beloved man in America.” Since then, it has been a long, slow slide toward Harris being a notorious footnote in American literary history. While his approach to content is beyond redemption, one must not overlook the fact that purely on literary terms, Harris could produce some quite beautiful prose such as the following metaphorical imagery from the story “Azalia.”
"The music, without increasing in volume, suddenly gathered coherency, and there fell on the ears of the listening group the notes of an air so plaintive that it seemed like the breaking of a heart. It was as soft as an echo, and as tender as the memories of love and youth."
Free Joe
The final sentence of the first paragraph of the title story describes the character known as Free Joe in curious and peculiar using metaphor:
“He was a black atom, drifting hither and thither without an owner, blown about by all the winds of circumstance, and given over to shiftlessness.”
The mystery of why Free Joe would be described as a black atom does not take long to be made clear.
Sanitariums and Sea Serpents
That same story, “Azalia,” is also the location where Harris manifests a not inconsiderable talent for sloganeering and mottoes of the kind that would have netted him quite a lucrative career in the advertising industry about to burst into big business not long after his death. Upon Dr. Buxton’s recommendation to a woman suffering ill effects that she spend time recuperating in Florida, the woman scornfully replies that the people she’s seen from that state just below her own possess “something in their attitude and appearance seemed to suggest that they had seen the sea-serpent.” The doctor’s reply to that is to suggest a local alternative: “nature's own sanitarium, the pine woods of Georgia.”
“Trouble on Lost Mountain”
The entire long paragraph which opens this story is devoted to characterizing the titular mountain through lush imagery which all work inexorably toward the final concluding lines in which the imagery transforms into metaphor and the mountain becomes personified.
"The flowers and the trees could speak for themselves; the slightest breeze gave them motion: but the majesty of the mountain was voiceless; its beauty was forever motionless. Its silence seemed more suggestive than the lapse of time, more profound than a prophet's vision of eternity, more mysterious than any problem of the human mind."
Harris the Deeply Problematic Literary Talent
While the portly, inoffensive Joel Chandler Harris may well have been the most beloved man in America at the time of his death and while he irrefutably displayed a talent for putting words together, almost none of that matters in an America so comprehensively different a century a later. Despite the fact that a certain word that simply would never be found in the writings of a man deemed the most beloved in America was unaccountable more prevalent in everyday discourse when Harris writing, the fact that the word recurs more than thirty times in the volume would be enough to warrant revision of the status of Harris. And even if the sheer volume of its presence was still deemed understandable, there is the particularities of its individual use. The following simile occurring at the end of the quote below is, therefore, forwarded as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for why Joel Chandler Harris’ popularity peaked at early and is almost non-existent today:
"It's a book that speaks for itself any day in the week...it's a history of our own great conflict—'The Rise and Fall of the Rebellion,' by Schuyler Paddleford. I don't know what the blamed publishers wanted to put in Rebellion' for. I told 'em, says I: 'Gentlemen, it'll be up-hill work with this in the Sunny South. Call it "The Conflict,"' says I. But they wouldn't listen, and now I have to work like a blind nigger splittin' rails.”
