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59 pages 1 hour read

Jeff Zentner

In the Wild Light

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021

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Symbols & Motifs

The Künstlerroman

Cash arrives at Middleford a scared and timid kid from the Appalachian Outback. But he closes his first year at the school a feisty and dedicated young poet ready to grow into his role as artist, ready to corral words to clarify his emotions into what matters: poetry. In this, the novel is a particular genre of the coming-of-age narrative, the Künstlerroman (German for artist-novel), in which a character, usually an adolescent, grows into the awareness of the importance of art and then makes a commitment to pursuing the life of an artist.

Analyzed from this perspective, In the Wild Light thus paints the quintessential portrait of a poet as a young man. When Cash arrives on the campus of Middleford Academy, he has no background in poetry and tells his academic adviser he has never been much of a poetry guy. However, under the mentorship of Dr. Atkins and by drawing on the life lessons he learned from his dying grandfather, Cash comes to embrace the power of poetry and begins to craft his own verse. Key to Cash’s emotional and psychological evolution into a poet is the extra assignment Dr. Atkins gives him after class early in the fall term: read a collection of poetry by nature poet Mary Oliver and then write a verse of his own about Sawyer.

Reading the poems alters Cash. “Something happens. A slow daybreak inside me, the first rays of a new sun peeking over the gray horizon” (197). Although he struggles with the phrasing and the diction, Cash feels intuitively the power of words recreating the ordinary things he loves and knows—“rivers, fireflies and the formations of geese and deer and rain” (197). He begins to write his own poem and realizes the effort, the discipline, the courage transcribing his own experiences into words requires. He too quickly decides he is no poet. Only through the patience and guidance of Dr. Atkins will Cash come to see the opportunity poetry offers to sort through the world, its beauty and its sorrows, its agonies and ironies, and turn such revelations into the powerful there-ness of a poem.

In his farewell poem to Dr. Atkins after she tells him she is departing Middleford, Cash encapsulates what he learned about poetry and indicates his commitment, to sharing the myriad experiences of his life and his emotions honestly through the craft of poetry. In a poem he writes and entitles “Genesis” (403), a word that means “beginning,” Cash appropriates the image of nothing less than the Creator-God of rural Christian upbringing to define his role as poet, for poetry grants the humble and ordinary poet an opportunity to feel that power, to share complex emotions, to create, which he likens to God’s creation of humanity itself, the “calling forth / of breath from stone” (403).

Bucky Barnes

When Cash first meets the entrancing Viviani, she is sporting a Captain America t-shirt. Vi, who plans to be a video game developer, is a die-hard fan of the Marvel universe. As part of their conversation, the two discuss their favorite Marvel characters and name the characters with which they most identify. Cash chooses James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes, the so-called Winter Soldier, the World War Two Army infantry soldier who becomes the sidekick of Captain America and in turn helps the Allies to win the war. When Vi asks why he chooses Bucky Barnes, Cash points out that the character has no magical power and lives entirely “in the shadow of his best friend” (141).

In this selection, Cash reveals his perception of himself in his first days at Middleford. He is painfully aware that he does not belong at this prestigious academy. He is there only because of the insistence of Delaney, already an internationally recognized STEM celebrity known for her discovery of a new strain of penicillin that will reset the global fight against bacterial infections. In the first days, thanks in part to his insensitive and loutish roommate, Cash feels apart, alone, a stranger in a strange and vaguely hostile environment. Unlike Delaney, whose celebrity and facility with lab work quickly grant her a reassuring sense of belonging, Cash remains an outsider in the school’s social structure. In his Zoom chats with his dying grandfather, in his classes surrounded by some of the most gifted students literally in the world, and even at his crew practice where he realizes he has no real qualification for the sport save his love for the river, Cash feels himself to be exactly like Bucky Barnes. He defines himself entirely through his friendship with the brilliant Delaney, the new campus superhero.

Much as with the narrative of Bucky Barnes, who in the Marvel narrative comes into his own only through surviving harsh experiences and finally joining Captain America not as a sidekick but as trusted and empowered ally, Cash also comes into his own by the end of the novel. In his feud with Delaney, he comes to appreciate his own character and, through his discovery of the power of poetry, realizes his own kind of fortitude, revealed later when he protects a classmate from sexual assault. Poetry is no magic power but rather an expression of Cash’s realization of the power of self-expression and the reward of sharing.

Penicillin

The journey into awareness for both Cash and Delaney begins inauspiciously. The two friends are exploring a cave outside Sawyer when Delaney, entirely through serendipity, notices a peculiar mold growing on one of the slick walls of the cave. Intrigued, she scrapes a sample and discovers in turn that the mold kills “every known antibiotic-resistant superbug and does so with a ferocity that makes it almost impossible for the bacteria to evolve to withstand it” (43). The novel juxtaposes poetry, a symbol of the appreciation for the complexities and mysteries of life, with penicillin, an antibiotic designed to contain and control the complexities and mysteries of life. Admiration or control, humility or pride: the choice defines the characters of Cash, the emerging poet, and Delaney, the promising bio-researcher.

Despite or perhaps because of her difficult childhood, Delaney Doyle, gifted science “geek” and trivia “nerd” ever ready to spice up conversations with fun factoids, is certain that the world, complex as it, comes with answers and can be contained, controlled, and directed by diligent effort. Although her unsettling habit of gnawing and picking at her thumbs reveals her uncertainty and anxieties despite her confidence that the world can be understood, her valiant campaign to promote the newly discovered mold reflects her core belief: that no illness, no virus, no malady is beyond the reach of healing.

The drama in the hospital room reveals Delaney’s faith in her yet-to-be-developed antibiotic. In her too-eager embrace of the power of science, she demands that the shocked nurses administer her untested Penicillium delanum to the dying Papaw as though it is the ultimate cure-all. “He’ll die if you don’t let me give him this” (317), she screams, and when the nurses refuse, Delaney declaims, “I’m a genius” (317). As she is escorted from the hospital room by security, angrily mocking the hospital staff for their inability to appreciate her gifts and her miracle cure, the novel reveals the unsettling egoism inherent in the hubris of scientific discovery. In this moment, Delaney-the-scientist could learn much from Cash-the-poet. In Cash’s slow-motion epiphany in the weeks after his grandfather’s death, he realizes his humble role as observer of the world and all its mysteries and embraces the fragile, slender hope that the world might yet yield some insight or modest truth that he can share through his poetry.

Adélia Prado

Vi explains to Cash that Prado is one of the most lauded Brazilian poets when she gives him a copy of Adélia Prado’s poems for Christmas. Although Cash, returning to campus from his stay in Sawyer, was hoping for an outright declaration of love from Vi, the collection of poems is in fact a different kind of declaration: one of Vi’s friendship and respect for Cash and his burgeoning interest in the power of poetry. Vi understands poetry in a way that Cash will only later come to terms with: its value as an expression of the honest exploration of the world all around.

In her poetry, Adélia Prado celebrates her unabashed and unapologetic love of the ordinary moments of the day, moments that she elevates into poetry and in turn endows with majesty, importance, and purpose. Indeed, the title of the collection that Vi gives Cash, The Alphabet in the Park, testifies to that tenet: the park yields its own revelations, and in those revelations the poet finds an entirely new use of language itself, a new alphabet.

For Prado (and for Cash), any topic is fit for poetry, for poets live in anticipation of enchantment. Poetry, Prado argues in her essays, is like a curtain pulled back, a vehicle for revealing what is there but gifting it with the grace and elegance of language. Much like Cash, who comes to trust his initial writings in his ever-present notebook, Prado openly disparages the value of constant revision and redrafting—she trusted her initial expression of words to make clear the emotional lightning bolt that inspires her. And like Cash, who feels the urgent need to jot down a poem, Prado famously quips that poems come to her uninvited, unaccounted for, and that she moves through her day always prepared for the revelation of the moment, which is exactly the advice that Dr. Atkins (and Papaw in his own way) both give Cash.

Indeed, Prado’s stature as one of Brazil’s most gifted, lyrical, and popular poets has a special impact on Cash. Prado herself did not turn to poetry until her mid-thirties and was not published until she was in her forties, testimony to the gradual evolution that makes a poet a poet. Prado then symbolizes the majesty of the ordinary as recorded by the open and grasping sensibility of the poet who, without fretting over the fine-tuning of lines into impressive and ornate language, reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary and, in turn, elevates the most common emotions into art.

The Dead Bird in the Road

It is a moment early in the novel, a moment of passing significance. Delaney and Cash leave the convenience store where they bought gas and had a nasty run-in with the town’s drug dealer, who wants Delaney to work for him. As the two discuss the offer from Middleford and the implications of leaving Sawyer, Cash recollects an extraordinarily ordinary image. “I once saw a bird that had been run down on the road” (19), he begins. He proceeds to tease that image of roadkill into a perceptive analysis of Delaney herself, pulled between the dead-end world of Sawyer and the promise of Middleford where she might at last become the gifted scientist that Cash knows her to be. The roadkill bird had been pulverized, almost beyond recognition as a bird. What Cash recalls, however, is how the wind caught two feathers off the bird and lifted them gently “free of the destroyed body, breathing life back into them” (19). Cash remembers watching those two feathers, black against the blue sky, dancing in the wind, “such unexpected grace amid ruin” (19).

The argument of the novel is that long before Cash enrolls in Dr. Atkins’s poetry class, long before he reads the nature poems of Mary Oliver, and long before Vi gifts him the volume of Adélia Prado’s verse, he is a poet—he simply does not realize it. Before he is taught the magic of the world about him and the importance of drawing on that engagement with the world to create the enchanting spell of poetry, Cash reveals his own eye of the poet and his intuitive ability to engage the world all around him for its rich, layered suggestiveness. The two bird feathers, in turn, suggest that Cash and Delaney themselves are about to begin their own journey of redemption and promise, rising from the death and ruin of their adolescence in the dead-end world of Sawyer. The feathers suggest Delaney’s own struggle to free herself and to manage the pain of her family-in-ruins, symbolizing hope along with the tantalizing nearness of redemption and the stubborn will to survive and thrive.

The important thing is not that this dead bird and the dancing feathers mean one thing or another—but rather that Cash, long before he reads a poem or attempts to write one, has the soul (and the eye) of a poet. He is able to derive profound abstract meaning from an otherwise neutral and easily forgettable image. In symbolizing so much, suggesting so many layers, Cash’s recontextualization of the dead bird’s larger meaning proves that before he ever leaves Sawyer, he already has the heart of a poet.

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