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Page 93

memories of abuse, but also for the process of re-vision itself. While Lear attempts to draw borders across his kingdom, Smiley makes the reader aware of the divisions that her narrator perceives within the landscape: a vertical demarcation that extends down beneath the horizontal, flat surfaces of her father’s farm and into a dark and uncertain world located beneath it. Ginny’s description of Zebulon County as the “center of the universe” at the beginning of the novel gradually gives way to her imaginative descriptions of an alternative landscape underneath the soil. Once a swamp-like sea of reeds and small animals, Larry’s farm rests on a network of drainage tiles, a system used by farmers to transform the land from swamp to arable soil. These tiles were laid down by Larry’s parents, Sam and Arabella Davis; and although the landscape has been reworked to meet the needs of their descendants, Ginny is perpetually aware of the “sea beneath the soil,” the repressed and swampy spaces that once made up the face of the land and now lie hidden underneath the tiles:

One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of myself in a red and green plaid pinafore, which must mean I was about three, and Ruthie in a pink shirt, probably not yet three, squatting on one of those drainage-well covers, dropping pebbles and bits of sticks through the grate. The sound of water trickling in the blackness must have drawn us, and even now the memory gives me an eerie feeling, and not because of the danger to our infant selves. What I think of is our babyhoods perched thoughtlessly on the filmiest net of the modern world, over layers of rock, Wisconsin till, Mississippian carbonate, Devonian limestone, layers of dark epochs, and we seem not so much in danger (my father checked the grates often) as fleeting, as if our lives simply passed then, and this memory is the only photograph of some nameless and unknown children who may have lived and may have died, but at any rate have vanished into the black well of time.

(Smiley 1991:46–47)

The seemingly secure world of Chapter 1, with the farmers at its center, gives way to an evocative image of the unknown abyss above which life functions—a dark hole underneath the carefully tilled and controlled landscape. Throughout the novel, the contrast between these two powerful spaces—the “filmiest net” of the farmland and the “dark well of time’’ on the underside—comes to characterize Smiley’s re-vision of King Lear. In trying to extricate herself from

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