SOURCE: Johnson, Don. “The Appalachian Homeplace as Oneiric House.” In The Poetics of Appalachian Space, edited by Parks Lanier, Jr., pp. 40-9. Knoxville, Tenn.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Johnson applies Bachelard's theories of “felicitous” space to the Appalachian experience, focusing on the work of Jim Wayne Miller's The Mountains Have Come Closer.

The exploration of “felicitous space” undertaken by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space becomes especially poignant when applied to the Appalachian experience. In Appalachia the oneiric house is frequently a rotting cabin in a remote “holler” that loggers or coal miners have abandoned. More often than not only a foundation or decaying chimney remains to mark a homeplace, or, lacking these easily recognizable artifacts, only a bed of daffodils or a hardy apple tree that the careful observer can identify as evidence of earlier habitation. “Abandonment” is a luxury peculiar...