The Accident of Imagination
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
This famous opening into Dante’s Inferno didn’t occur to me when I re-entered Alabama on Friday. I had, instead, great hope for my home state after it showed that progressive politics isn’t a journey meant only for New Yorkers or Californians. As of this moment, defeated Republican senate candidate Roy Moore has refused to concede the election last Tuesday to Democrat Senator-elect Doug Jones. Doubling down, the former two-time defrocked Alabama Supreme Court Justice Moore declared this past Friday that he will be sending a fundraising email asking his supporters “for contributions to his ‘election integrity fund’ so he could investigate reports of voter fraud” (“This Upset Had Many Elements, The Birmingham News, December 17.2017).
The White House has asked the CDC to ban seven words from its future publications. Maybe “integrity” needs to be added to the list, at least when associated with men like Roy Moore. Asking or believing that Moore could investigate fraud of any kind buggers the imagination. It would be like entrusting Leopold and Loeb with the care of a teenaged boy.
Still, anyone can be redeemed, which is the subject of the new graphic novel by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair, The Hunting Accident, A True Story of Crime and Poetry (First Second Books). A framed narrative, the story focuses on fathers and sons, abandonment, prison, redemption, and epic poetry.
Charlie Rizzo is caught up in the gangs of Chicago. Sent as a little boy back to the Windy City to live with his blind father after his mother dies, Charlie winds up following the wrong crowd. Caught in the aftermath of a robbery, he faces hard time unless he agrees to “rat” on his fellows. While he struggles with this decision, his father tells him his own story — a truth that has long been enveloped in lies. Charlie’s father Matt was blinded while committing a robbery. Caught, he spends several years in the Illinois State Penitentiary where he is befriended, reluctantly, by the notorious Nathan Leopold, whose lover and accomplice, Richard Loeb, has just been murdered by some of his fellow inmates.
Matt’s story is convoluted, full of secrets, and only his son Charlie is privy to these and the subsequent revelations that just might save his freedom and his soul. Telling the truth is not easy, though we make it out to be so. It is easy to tell other people to tell the truth, not so easy to abide by the urging yourself.
Right Roy?
Author Carlson admits that in his narrative, a story he learned from Charlie Rizzo himself, he had to take some liberties with dialogue and story details. Creative Nonfiction is like this, and authors are asked to maintain faith with their sources and memory. Carlson, I believe, has done so here. The story’s arc is concentric and complex, but its point never fails to penetrate the blindness, the darkness of hearts and minds.
To do so, Carlson employs the true story of Matt Rizzo’s relationship with Leopold. Leopold “saved” Matt by teaching him Braille, and one of the central texts they read together — Leopold also taught himself Braille — was Dante’s Divine Comedy. The circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno correspond visibly and graphically to the architecture of the prison itself. The interior structure is circular, with all cells facing a center that ascends and descends — an open space that attracts those who might consider leaping. Clearly, hope is not a commodity in great surplus in a maximum security facility. Still, Leopold and Rizzo instruct classes in the prison and teach the men Dante’s work. They ask their fellow prisoners to imagine the world Dante saw, the world Dante imagined.
It’s a strange thing, but the men clamor for more. And here is Carlson on the point of this framed narrative:
“Ever since the Enlightenment, the western world has increasingly relied on ratiocination as the best (and perhaps only) way to navigate the world we live in. Arts and music are the first things cut in education budgets. Efficiency is King. And yet the imagination is as authentic as any fact we can describe. This story is an effort to revive the magic and wonder of the human experience, if only for a few hundred pages.”
Graphic novels have grown even more complex themselves over the past 25 years. The Hunting Accident adds to the complexity, asking us to reconsider the works, the history, and the lives we thought we knew. Personally, I wish that “Captain” hadn’t died, but that’s true to the world he inhabited and to the humanity of those who loved him.
I often think that imagination, the ability to comprehend complex ideas and to feel complex emotions are the traits that make us the “higher” form of life, although I see these qualities all the time in my smart Carolina Dog, Max. Carlson and Landis’s work is a welcome antidote to the Moore’s of this world who, in their dearth of true imagination, mistake the words “integrity” and “fraud” regularly, abandoning the rest of us to the circle of despair.
And to combat the despair, I am grateful, eternally so, that I can turn to the beauty of literature, the paradise of souls who long for light and enlightenment.
