BRAD VICE University of West Bohemia Spirals of the Self: Barry Hannah’s Autobiographical Method THE NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER BARRY HANNAH HAS BEEN depicted as a postmodern heir to Faulkner by many critics such as Martyn Bone and a postmodern romantic by Ruth Weston; however, there is a lingering sense of insufficiency about these descriptions. 1 Indeed, Hannah testifies to being a romantic in his craft essay “Mr. Brain, He Want a Song,” anthologized in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop collection The Eleventh Draft.: “I do not think process is interesting, but I believe what brought a writer to the table might be. For me, that would be romance, big and little letters, failure, and the pissed off conviction that almost everybody of my era had gotten everything wrong” (71). This angry conviction mixed with a drive for romantic quest is palpable in Hannah’s Geronimo Rex (1972), a desultory, picaresque debut novel whose youthful protagonist seeks out romantic experience in a sublime, yet sometimes bitter, rush of sex, violence, and music. Much of Geronimo Rex is set at Hedermanserver College, a thinly veiled version of Hannah’s alma mater Mississippi College. In a 2004 interview with the Paris Review, Hannah was asked about the novels that influenced him the most in his university days. He replies: “The Sun also Rises, Catcher in the Rye, and then, best of all, Tropic of Cancer.” Critics most often compare Hannah to J. D. Salinger due to their voice-driven narratives and protagonists who tend to prevaricate. But Hannah’s considerable debt to Henry Miller as a stylist has remained unexplored. Hannah is a writer of fictions that reflect the self, and this feature of his prose has been left neglected for a long time, not only because of the theoretical enthusiasms of past decades, but also because his autobiographical stance is strikingly unusual. Like Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (1934), some of Hannah’s work does not neatly fit into the genres of fiction or memoir. Miller’s autobiographical maneuvers can help us understand Hannah’s ambitions as a writer at many junctures. 1 See Bone, Perspectives on Barry Hannah; Weston, Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic.