From “Water Liars” to Yonder Stands Your Orphan: Pastimes, Sports, and Games Inside/Outside the Frame of Barry Hannah’s Eagle Lake Stories

Abstract

For most of his career, Mississippi author Barry Hannah was deemed the postmodern heir to William Faulkner and is best known for the short fiction in his landmark collection Airships (1978), which begins with the muchanthologized story “Water Liars.” Like many of the meta-fictionalist masters of the 1970s (Barth, Coover, etc.), Hannah stepped inside/outside the frame of his fictions, often in his case by using highly elevated language, and syntax to depict a rogue’s gallery of down-and-out characters, as well as the construction of numerous autobiographical personas, which wink and wave to his initiated readers. Thus, Hannah’s fiction is not only funny, it is playful, as if to invite the reader into some fictional game.