The dark side of Arcadia

The ballad is a musical and lyrical genre native to American popular culture that tells stories of love and loss, murder and betrayal. Ballads are sung by ordinary people, have a choral nature, and combine seemingly placid life with the emergence of death and tragedy. Ballad of Holt, of Kent Haruf (1943-2014), we find all this. As a Odyssey Inverted, Jack Burdette, an old and popular neighbor, former high school football star ("we had learned to expect unusual things from him"), returns one day to the town he had fled years before after having perpetrated a collective betrayal. This hated Ulysses is recognized – he is beaten and imprisoned – when he returns to Holt, his Ithaca, where his Penelope still lives. Now, Jessie is the partner of the voice that narrates the story, Pat Arbuckle, owner of the local newspaper.

This internal point of view in the story, with a witness narrator who ends up being the protagonist, is the first difference we find in Ballad of Holt, which was Haruf's second novel (and the one that was yet to be published in Catalan by Periscopi), compared to the later and better known one Holt Trilogy –composed of Song of the Page, Sunset and Blessing-. The Trilogy It has a dry, dialogic and scenic omniscient point of view. In the Ballad, Instead, Pat acts as an emotional and unreliable narrator.

The renunciation of the omniscient gaze has an explanation: Haruf has no moralizing interest. Misfortunes happen, but not as a result of any action, but because life turns out to be a well-oiled shredder. There are no heroes, no one to be proud of. The strongest bondIn Haruf's first novel, which featured the imaginary Holt County, Colorado, we found that dry land that makes dry people, yes, but also a nature that framed and dissipated the tragic fog: the mountains, the balm meadows. In this one, however, we don't leave the town, we don't see the mountains.

The rhythm of the narrative, however, does imitate the behavior of the waters that tumble down the mountain toward the Colorado plain: the plot first grounds us in stories of light and plenitude of the characters—happy couples, friendships, plans for the future—but illuminates their details. Suddenly, the current plunges downhill and everything is fury, foam, and whirlpools: accidents, suicides, deaths. This narrative pattern—we are living beings made for death—is very recurrent in the novel, to the point that in the last third it makes it predictable. Haruf explores the dark side of the Arcadian myth, so deeply rooted in American tradition since Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Holt is unwelcoming; he's cold and inhuman; justice is practiced as a twisted form of revenge. The protagonist, Jessie, understands this all too well and offers herself to him as an atoning sacrifice.

A valuable addition

But the characters, perhaps as a result of this recurrence in the plot, are flatter and more static, outlined with a thicker line than what Haruf has accustomed us to. Jack is a dark antagonist and he is so without any flaws, unlike the narrator, Pat, good without contrast. Jessie is, however, a more complex and dynamic character, surprising. As for Haruf's treatment of the secondary characters (the lazy and fat sheriff, the chard girlfriend), the novel leans more towards a satirical tone.

Periscope complete with Ballad of Holt The publication in Catalan of Haruf's entire work, a valuable addition to an international catalog perceived by readers as courageous and prestigious. Haruf's silent writing is a good example of this. And what it tells us: that we live as we dream, alone.