SOURCE: "The Underheard Reader in the Writing of the Old Southwest," in Discovering Difference: Contemporary Essays in American Culture, edited by Christoph K. Lohmann, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 48-64.

[In the following essay, Justus examines the accuracy and politics of Southern humor writing, arguing that the fiction and the reality were far apart, and that the fiction maintained the social power of the literati who produced it.]

What we hear when we read humor of the Old Southwest is funny regional dialect. What we overhear, especially in the 1990s, is a system of cultural values that finds great comic turns in what we now understand as sexism, racism, ageism, and xenophobia—a cluster of biases that necessarily intervenes in both the comprehension and enjoyment of the humor. What we should underhear when we read humor of the Old Southwest is its literariness, the substantial noise of generic forms and the casual jumble of conventions. These texts, because they are so rarely subtle in their effects, test the boundaries of the liminal for the reader who responds only to what is heard and overheard. What is underheard may not be heard at all, but even if it reaches us only subliminally, it is the last of these hearings that makes an impression.

In reading this humor, when we become aware of repetitive narrative situations and character types, we tend to process them while responding to the dominant sounds of vernacular speech, deviant language that absorbs the niceties of motivation as well as our curiosity about the relational context of characters who use it. The aural reception of this kind of text is dominant because the specialized idiom appropriates those stable constituent elements that we think of as the glory of the novel as a form—plot and character. With the possible exception of George Washington Harris' yarns about Sut Lovingood, the typical humorous sketch in this body of writing shows no interest in the creation of complex characters engaged in complicated experience. This is true partly because the vehicle of this humor is not the novel but the anecdote, the joke, the tall tale, the piece that fits into limited allotments of newspaper space, but also because they more comfortably respond to the expectations of a related body of affiliated forms: the essay, the travel letter, the sporting epistle, even the "character," that seventeenth-century form that was designed to encapsulate idealized representatives of the human species (which in the Mississippi Valley rapidly became favorite high-profile stereotypes: the half-horse half-alligator; the backwoods innocent; the sexually omniscient widow).

[Mikhail] Bakhtin told us that to understand Rabelais we should be prepared to renounce all our deeply ingrained expectations of literary taste. That is, we should be alert to the eruptive presence of "inferior" dialects, disruptive argot, the despised demotic of resolutely nonliterary groups in the shaping of texts that are otherwise written in accepted styles. I would suggest that in the writing with which I have been most recently concerned, we see almost the reverse process. To understand the writing of the Southwestern humorists—that, too, of Mark Twain which was its culmination—we should be prepared to underhear the eruptive hum of respectable voices even in the flamboyant orality of backwoods roustabouts whose links are not merely with their inarticulate yeoman cousins but with the very custodians of literary taste.

Southwestern humor is a refraction of one region's demographic upheaval in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. The literary texts beginning a decade later are one version of that social instability, one in which power relations are oddly comported, an effect of rampant chicanery achieved by the simple device of wretched excess, a compositional habit articulated through obsessive recurrence, unnatural selection, and rhetorical overkill. While particular cultural traits and activities (boasting, say, or courtship rituals) are italicized—sometimes literally—others (say ordinary domestic life among all the classes) are subordinated or omitted entirely. The world of the humorists is specialized and stylized; it is also vulnerable because its cohesive familial and communal relationships are so frail. Fraternization, organization, bonding, groupings of all kinds are premised on expedience. The sketch offers us a condensed reenactment of the exercise of power in the actual geography it celebrates. The point of competition is to establish individual priority within and even despite those fragile group arrangements. There are always winners, which means that there are also losers, those who are "tuck in." From the practical joke to the swindling of widows, however, the winner's material take in all these competitions is always modest: psychological satisfaction and a few dollars to splurge on an oyster supper. The game is everything, because it is the model for the exercise of power. So pervasive is this pattern that the play of power itself becomes a convention.

What I would like to focus on here is a refinement of structure in the kind of sketch in which an educated, sophisticated, and cultivated man of the world confronts a backwoodsman who then recounts an episode out of his experience in the woods. If not exactly a gentleman, the narrator is a respectable, tolerant sort of individual willing to be amused—a stand-in for the author and, from the reader's perspective, "one of us." The backwoodsman—a yeoman farmer, a hunter, a boatman, anyone whose chosen sphere is the relative isolation beyond towns and villages—may be ignorant of some of the most basic kinds of information that the narrator takes for granted, yet he is savvy, tenacious, gregarious, and garrulous—and also willing to be amused. What adds interest to this kind of sketch is that its dynamics of winning and losing are somewhat more complex than those sketches with other structural patterns—the epistolary, say, as in Charles Noland's Pete Whetstone letters and William Tappan Thompson's Major Jones, whose letters to the editor comprise one single unmediated vernacular discourse. What we see in the sketch that features the encounter between narrator and backwoodsman is the textual representation of how the writer, committed to the values of social stability and civic order, participates in the competitive game of his time and place. As the later arrival on the scene, the narrator assumes all the conventional attitudes of the traveler in exotic newfound territory; the native figure he encounters is seen as a cultural primitive. What is prior is Other. Though the encounter may elicit some mutual good natured scorn, it is not hostile; and indeed that narrator goes out of his way to promote this individual of such different values and habits, opening a space in his sketch for the vernacular figure to become his own hero by taking over the narrative through the sheer stylistic energy of an alternative language.

The best-loved sketch in all the writings from the Old Southwest—and the one that lent its name to what was once perceived as the "school" of Southwestern humor—is Thomas Bangs Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas," the very model of this narrative pattern. The gentlemanly narrator, on his way upriver from New Orleans on a steamboat, finds his reading interrupted by a genial and voluble backwoodsman by the name of Jim Doggett, who entertains the passengers with stories of Arkansas, a state so naturally fecund that he has found it too dangerous to be a farmer: "'I had a good-sized sow killed. . . . The old thief stole an ear of corn, and took it down to eat where she slept at night. Well, she left a grain or two on the ground, and lay down on them: before morning the corn shot up, and the percussion killed her dead.'" He has accommodated himself accordingly: "'natur intended Arkansaw for a hunting ground, and I go according to natur.'"

The narrator hears Doggett before he sees him ("we were most unexpectedly startled by a loud Indian whoop" coming from the bar); with a "confused hum" of broken sentences and a "Hurra for the Big Bear of Arkansas," he verbally propels himself into the steamboat cabin and into the company of a larger audience. His one-liners, all windy tributes to "the creation State," are received with appreciative skepticism by the "heterogeneous" passengers who seem to be from everywhere but Arkansas. The narrator approaches the hunter:

[C]onscious that my own association with so singular a personage would probably end before morning, I asked him if he would not give me a description of some particular bear hunt; adding, that I took great interest in such things, though I was no sportsman. The desire seemed to please him, and he squared himself round towards me, saying, that he could give me an idea of a bear hunt that was never beat in this world, or in any other. His manner was so singular, that half of his story consisted in his excellent way of telling it, the great peculiarity of which was, the happy manner he had of emphasizing the prominent parts of his conversation. As near as I can recollect, I have italicized the words, and given the story in his own way.

What is to be noted is that Doggett's style is readily identified as the shrill bombast of the half-horse half-alligator figure, derived from an earlier phase of Mississippi River commercial life (that of the flatboats and keelboats), and whose most artful reconstruction is Mark Twain's rejected raftsman chapter in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; but here it is notably domesticated and humanized. The narrative focus is on the remarkable "creation bear" that the hunter declares was "an unhuntable bear, and died when his time come." Although Doggett typically undercuts his own predictable hyperbole—the champion hunter turns out to be a failure in his biggest challenge—that loss is compensated by the air of a mysterious supernature under whose aegis he operates, one which Doggett acknowledges by his "grave silence" when completing the tall tale and one which the narrator in turn also acknowledges by noting how the audience responds to the teller's awe with its own silence. Thorpe's variation on this pattern, reinforced by the tonal complexities arising out of it, makes "The Big Bear of Arkansas" distinctive among the other humorous sketches; but common to this family structure are (a) the accommodating relationship between the restrained, educated narrator and the garrulous backwoodsman, and (b) the ambiguous status of vernacular speech.

Although speech is a privileged mode according to certain theorists, it achieves that status after the advent of a text-centered culture. One of the fictions of the Southwestern sketch is the assumption that backwoods vernacular is rendered in a transparent medium meant only to reveal its spokenness. The celebration of oral culture is accomplished of course through writing. Further, it is not only second-hand (like any representation), its second-handedness comes from the same source as the blander rhythms of the narrator. The authority who complacently situates himself within a telling-and-listening context, who leisurely prepares for us a descriptive introduction to the kinetic show that is about to burst so theatrically upon us, is the same authority who stages and directs the show itself. What we are really getting from the narrator, and from the author whose mouthpiece he is, is a showy gesture of skill: I'm talking like him, now, which of course celebrates the I, not the him he mimics. And as "one of us," the narrator prepares for our reception of the Other, but the truth is, it is announced not by a shift in the sounds of English, but by a shift in the material look of the text on the page: the kinds of words or pieces of words (italicized), such as pre-haps and notiony; phrases of arcane import—ramstugenous, slantindickler; and clusters of odd syntax that compel attention if not understanding. Thus, the source of authority remains stable, however chaotic the local linguistic effects may appear to be or however disorderly the society depicted by those effects. There is finally no turning over of authority from a genteel narrator to a rawer, more immediately forceful storyteller.

Enfolded into the larger story of failure, Doggett's boasting mode is more perfunctory than functional, an anachronistic discharging of a debt to convention, as if this Arkansawyer must affirm his place in the Crockett/Fink "character," only to reinterpret himself in the westward declensions of another model—perhaps Jefferson's virtuous yeoman farmer, or the chastened James of [J. Hector St. John de] Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. To speculate so is not, however, to grant prior agency to the "Doggett" we see and hear but to grant some creative ambitiousness beyond the formal boundaries that contain him: the faint dissatisfaction with convention, the attempt to reformulate and reinscribe character, is Thorpe's own.

What we remember in the humorous sketch is the vernacular constructions of the narrative, not the substance. We know this in part because the authors of some of the mediocre sketches, ineptly believing that the done things of backwoods figures are what make them memorable, concentrate on summarized action with the said things unmemorably paraphrased. The best of the authors knew from the beginning that the said things—the way the backwoods men and women recounted their often less than spectacular deeds—were the primary interest. One of the great ironies of Southwestern humor is that a body of writing which purports to valorize speech only emphasizes writing itself as the originating mode. What we are expected to regard as an innocent transparency is a calculated, composed, hyper-conscious system that draws attention to itself as a vehicular agent. And the conductor of that vehicle is a writer—amateur or not—who draws upon a vast range of prior writings to render credible the illusion of a spoken English and, incidentally, the illusion of power-sharing.

The suggestion of [Claude] Lévi-Strauss—that the function of writing is to enslave—is too solemn by half, but there is no denying that in the competition to possess the Old Southwest, both the theoretical and the practical power were in the hands of the literate: those who recorded land grants, those who wrote regulatory laws in the separate legislatures, those who wrote judicial decisions in the courts at every level—and those who wrote comic versions of the confrontations between the privileged and the subordinated. It does not take great imagination to conclude that verbal authority among the Southwestern humorists is not necessarily committed to the aesthetic freedom of unending experimentation; it is a practical authority, one in which the luxury of time and tireless revision count for very little. What we know of the way so-called primitive types spoke depends almost entirely on these writers—amateur ethnologists, amateur folklorists, amateur anthropologists, but not, I think, amateur writers. They were derivative writers who relied on earlier texts to suggest the scribal means for articulating their experience of observation; their talents were synthetic, amalgamating, traditional, and (soon-to-become) conventional.

The writers of the Old Southwest were not merely literate; most of them were well read. If these preachers, doctors, lawyers, editors, actors, and planters could only incidentally parade their learning in the conduct of their primary callings, they were more than eager to exploit it when they took up their pen. Beginning with A. B. Longstreet in 1835, these writers produced a discourse that reflects less the raw, overheard, spoken language in the Old Southwest than an older turn-of-the-century written language, with its full arsenal of linguistic and rhetorical conventions. Many of the pieces retain the marks of utilitarian seriousness, as the narrating voice alerts us to the kind of information we might like to know: a geographical description (with relevant statistics about population, soil types, mineral deposits, flora and fauna); an anthropological account (with heavy emphasis on Native American culture and artifacts); a sporting episode (with personal experience of a recent hunting expedition); a sketch of a specific site (with notes on massacres, aborted settlements, pioneer trading camps, and other lore that in the 1830s pass for historical interest). But the putatively informational, which easily glides into the non-utilitarian, self-indulgent impulse toward the personal, is displaced by the expression of aesthetic needs: the topographical description, say, assumes romantic heightening according to the now-belated norms of the Sublime; the factual presentation of a hunting party is enlivened by emphatic profiles of backwoods guides and idiosyncratic hunters and trappers in the bush, an exercise in the exaggerations and summary quirks of the character out of (eventually) Webster and Overbury and (more directly) Addison and Irving.

By responding to their literary promptings through humor, these writers freed themselves from the great American cultural expectation that literature be socially responsible; yet their texts are dependent upon prior forms of respectability and prestige. Although the nature sketch, the topographical description, the essay, the public letter were all eminently flexible forms that allowed these authors individualized shaping, they also determined the gentlemanly style (allusive, balanced, complex, witty) with which the amiable amateur could maintain his authority without being an author. But the sway of convention governed not merely the "genteel" portions of the humorous sketch—those featuring the narrator as man of the world—but the depiction of the vernacular protagonist, especially the way he dressed and the way he sounded. Moreover, such convention governs the work now assigned the initiating place in this literary tradition, Georgia Scenes of 1835. The discoverer of the backwoods individualist is not A. B. Longstreet; the seaboard colonials in both New England and the South acknowledged his existence and described his eccentricities, and some, notably Timothy Dwight, even made an effort to render his odd speech in certain regularized linguistic forms.

Backwoods speech quickly becomes vernacular set-pieces: verbal displays of folk idioms, malapropisms, neologisms, so striking, so rhetorically revved up that they virtually become material objects. And the maker is an aural poacher, fashioning sounds into marvelous patches of wordplay. For all the editorial pieties from William T. Porter and other influential editors about cultural responsibilities to capture the flavor of natives before the natives disappear into a homogenized population, the native speakers themselves have no control over how they sound once their speech has been appropriated by the writer. What we read is a literary construct at least two removes from actual vernacular: Jim Doggett and Pete Whetstone of Arkansas sound like Jim and Chunky of Mississippi, Daddy Biggs of Alabama, and Yallow Blossom of Georgia. A few typographical tricks—the use of italic font, the apostrophe, phonetic spelling—serve equally for any of the fictionalized sites of the Old Southwest.

One of the inescapable conclusions about this process of conventionalization—which applies (with certain more discriminating provisos) to canonical writers of the nineteenth century as well—is the considerable extent to which even a third-rate contributor of funny sketches to his town's editor participates in the hegemony of social power. In the competitive games of the Old Southwest between the aggressive settlers and the less favored people whom they encountered in the drive to fill up the newly opened lands, the winners were always confident of their success. The squatters and marginalized settlers, the riverboat hustlers, the hunters poaching in Choctaw and Cherokee lands, even the reclusive and suspicious loners in the deep bush were, like their socially privileged betters, interested in their own economic survival; but unlike the settlers, they had no economic stake in seeing either the backwoods or the frontier space transformed into deep south versions of Virginia or Carolina. What these prior residents of the region were up against were determined and ambitious emigrants, the kind noted in travelers' accounts as go-ahead types. The term derives from Davy Crockett, that quintessential misfit whose "philosophy" was widely circulated: Be sure you 're right—then go ahead. The final clause became a universal recipe for action, even as the first clause was a burdensome condition to be ignored. Visitors to the flush-times cross-roads and villages applied the term to middle-class artisans, displaced professionals, and shrewd, socially gifted entrepreneurs, but especially to the restless, risk-taking planters trekking in from the old seaboard states, usually with an extended family and a slave or two. The competitive spirit in the backwoods was more modest—or at least it was played in a different key. The activities of rural Georgians that first prompted Longstreet to a writing career were by and large intramural competitions—eye-gouging, ear-biting fights; horse-swaps; bouts of marksmanship; practical jokes—a tendency we see in most of the sketches that followed Georgia Scenes.

We can speculate, I think, that one of the reasons why Longstreet, Alexander McNutt, John S. Robb, William C. Hall, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and many others found these activities so engaging was that they were not only largely confined to rivals within the same marginalized groups but they offered no threats to the planter and professional classes: their truculent deeds, their explosive games, their extravagant displays of independence were in fact shadow versions of the larger games ongoing among the privileged classes. There is of course no evidence that these backwoodsmen thought of their activities as a kind of surrogate, second-best version of those of the settlers—illiterates leave few records—but they were not stupid. They knew as early as the 1820s that the wielders of power were Indian agents, land commissioners, legislators, and judges—many of whom were also planters eager to expand their holdings. In the context of such larger games, mere bearhunts, fights, and courting rivalries must have been perceived by the participants as local and harmless and quaint—as they certainly were perceived by the authors. Even the backwoodsmen's hardy encroachment on and dispossession of the original inhabitants are half-hearted, frail, and desultory compared to the official program of dispossession undertaken by the shrewd moderns, the efficient and educated purveyors of governmental civilization.

The authors, who are also purveyors of that civilization, safely celebrate the games of a marginal people who will become even more marginalized in the years just before the Civil War. What these authors celebrate is the voice of the backwoods, but the celebration is on civilization's terms: writing rather than speech. The theater of the oral performance—on the decks of steamboats, in courtrooms, on village streets—has limited occupancy; the theater of the oral performance rendered in writing reaches beyond those shabby local sites into other shabby local sites, into law offices, parlors, smoking rooms, in every region of the country, into the offices of the New York Spirit of the Times, even into the salons of connoisseurs in England. The authority lies not with those primitives who speak with vernacular bite but with the moderns who mimic those idioms in writing.

In that writing the Southwestern author has the satisfaction of control over all the disparate elements of his world, if only in a symbolic way. He unobtrusively mimics the gentleman, even if he is only a hard-scrabbling newspaperman or an actor or a middling lawyer in a crowded field, just as he mimics all those vernacular heroes who are not as socially aspiring as he and whom he chooses to see as agents of disorder. Seeing himself in one light and the backwoods figure in another, he uses his power of literacy to assert the priority of order, measure, reason, the virtues of a civilized community, even when the text he produces is laced with irony, self-mockery, and the frequent temptation to succumb to the anarchic freedom he imagines the backwoods to be.

One of the strengths of his time and place is its inbetweenness. With the ejection of the native tribes by Jacksonian fiat, the Old Southwest is no longer one thing; and with the process of filling up still continuing, it is not yet what it is destined to be. In the meantime is his time, a transitional era of remaking, reformulating, repossessing; and his place, a transitional space of mobile boundaries and shifting landmarks in which making, formulating, and possessing are still provisional attempts. The Southwestern writer—himself an exile, an emigrant, committed to the party of civilization and tempted continually by the party of individualism—is defined by what historians once called the "frontier paradigm," with its "options and tensions between freedom and necessity, safety and danger, liberty and restraint, order and disorder." But these choices are never permanently made in the writing of these humorists. The in-betweenness is a psychic space as well as a geographical one, and within the flexible boundaries of that kind of frontier he plays out the game of his own moral amphibiousness.

The sketches from the Old Southwest are interesting to me not for their portrayal of familiar types along the swiftly changing southern frontier but for the revelation of character among the ambitious settlers, among whom the authors counted themselves. In the pieces that dramatize competition as the very linchpin of a society, the respectable authors and their narrators identify with aspiring go-aheaders. In passages of dialogue and in monologues that internalize and impersonate vernacular culture, the author-narrator is merely a mimic, but in the laws of rhetoric the mimic always remains superior to the speech imitated because he is both originating voice and mimicked voice. Even sympathetically generated dialect in the sketch is edged by parody, the inevitable mark of condescension, because any attempt to record a speech pattern different from one's own can never be a neutral enterprise.

But if in that process the writer most often betrays his self-consciousness, his awareness that in class and political persuasion he is superior to his marginalized hero, he also occasionally shows an often surprising capacity for unfeigned sympathy for him, a momentary suspension of judgment (ethical and political) that allows himself a kind of licensed entry into what he normally regards as the unrestraints of the Other. There is some evidence that this momentary elision of difference in the narrator functions similarly to daydream and fantasy in which transgression can be enjoyed without retribution. The very act of verbal subordination—in which the man of standard received English seemingly turns over control of his medium to one who wields a wild and deviant idiom—denotes attraction: immersing oneself in the pleasures of linguistic deviance is to enjoy the impulse of social transgression. But there is another sense in which the stylistic opposition between narrator and vernacular hero is not as radical or cleanly defined as we often suppose. If we accept the Barthian notion that it is language that speaks, not the author, then the text that constitutes the humorous sketch is a multi-dimensional field in which many "writings" meet and compete with each other. The author behind the narrator, who is also the author behind the backwoods voice, draws upon a vast pool of writings, none of which is original, all of which preexist as convention; and his role—his "only power," in [Roland] Barthes' words—is to mix those writings, countering one with another "in such a way as never to rest in any one of them."

It is often assumed that the narrator presents himself in a standard English that even in nineteenth-century usage comes across as pretentious, too stiffly formal, and fussily accurate—the better to throw into relief the deviant idiom of his subject. It is a reasonable assumption, but one unsupported by the texts. Here, from Thorpe again, is what a narrator's introduction sounds like:

Here may be seen, jostling together, the wealthy Southern planter and the peddler of tin-ware from New England—the Northern merchant and the Southern jockey—a venerable bishop, and a desperate gambler—the land speculator, and the honest farmer—professional men of all creeds and characters—Wolvereens, Suckers, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and Corncrackers, beside a "plentiful sprinkling" of the half-horse and half-alligator species of men, who are peculiar to "old Mississippi," and who appear to gain a livelihood by simply going up and down the river. In the pursuit of pleasure or business, I have frequently found myself in such a crowd.

While there is a pleasing rhythm in this highly controlled and balanced prose, it is more colloquial than formal; and its self-conscious emphasis on parallel substantives contributes to its pictorial density. Here is another example, from Solomon Smith's "The Consolate Widow":

Between Caleba Swamp and Lime Creek, in the "Nation," we saw considerable of a crowd gathered near a drinkinghouse, most of them seated and smoking. We stopped to see what was the matter. It was Sunday, and there had been a quarter race for a gallon of whisky.

This is an even more serviceable prose. The texture of such "gentlemanly" discourse is not significantly formal; it is not pretentious; indeed, it is a remarkably supple style.

I would suggest that the controlling authorial style, in its very engagement with the vernacular, loses some of the stark correctness that many mainstream writers of the time felt obliged to follow. In the juxtaposition of levels, the vernacular "degrades" the superior style. Orthographically, we do not even need the quotation marks around "plentiful sprinkling" in the first example to know that this process is underway; and in the second example, "considerable of a crowd" has neither quotation marks nor italics to proclaim its vernacular origins—it has already been effortlessly absorbed into Smith's own standard level. The reasons for this stylistic accommodation, I think, are both social and psychological. It is as if the author, while wanting to make clear the differences between his narrator and the backwoods character (a fact that is pretty obvious anyway), wants at the same time to bridge that social and cultural gap. When the narrator's style is ponderously emphatic, it functions as a blatant rhetoric of difference, satirically deflating the narrator himself. And if the purpose of a modulated standard English is to negotiate with the vernacular, to suggest a difference without grotesquerie, that function would actually reflect the situation in the communal life of the Old Southwest. The social milieu was one in which the mingling of classes and ranks was more the rule than the exception. It could hardly be otherwise in a time and place marked chiefly by demographic instability. We may imagine the young lawyer-narrator of Joseph Baldwin's Flush Times [1853] exclaiming to himself what a spectacle! what odd types are these in Alabama! But the words are usually unwritten, and the interacting levels of style are considerably less exclamatory; and what we find are the signs of mutual influence and pervasive accommodation in the heterogeneous mix of the region. In attributing motive to this stylistic accommodation, it does no harm to speculate that what the respectable man of the town wants from the unrespectable man of the margins is the sense of individual integrity and vitality behind the quaint artifice posing as self-confidence.

Despite many of the book titles (The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi; Georgia Scenes; Fisher's River Scenes and Characters), the humorous sketches only indifferently depict specific cultural customs or the topographical peculiarities of specific locales (a notable exception is Henry Clay Lewis' Stray Leaves from a Louisiana Swamp Doctor). Longstreet's Georgia is intended to represent the sparsely settled, raw, and morally unenlightened counties west of Augusta and Savannah; Baldwin's Alabama and Mississippi are geographically interchangeable; Cobb's Mississippi could be any of those states below the Ohio and north of Louisiana. Almost from the first the not-so-reluctant authors wrote and sent in their dispatches datelined Tuscaloosa; Greeneville, East Tennessee; Baton Rouge; Hawkins County, Kentucky; Little Rock, as if the geography mattered; but like many of the backwoods figures that the sketches celebrated, the woods and villages in which their verbal and physical exploits are set all look the same.

For the humorists, landscape is human geography, and the space meriting their attention has in defiance of actuality already filled up: there are too many people, especially lawyers and their clients, and raw nature seems uncomfortably circumscribed. Natural features such as trails, rivers, and canebrakes are as domesticated as cabins, stables, and churches. Landscape, both natural and man-made, is crowded with frolics, courtings, quiltings, faro games, oyster suppers, camp meetings. One curious effect of this symbolic density is not that the backwoods have suddenly taken on liveliness and diversity, those advantages that towns can boast, but that the mythic backwoods have been stripped of their natural definition and function and replaced by glut and disorder, the price that boomtimes exact for more sequenced development.

The world the humorists made is neither urban nor rural; and it is neither civilized nor primitive. It is an artful construct in which everything is foregrounded, people and objects simultaneously clamoring for attention. It is a world in constant motion: greasy playing cards, hunting dogs, steamboats stopping to wood and roaring to race, mourners' benches, trading scams, disappearing fritters, disappearing oysters, disappearing turkeys, bustled girls falling in hot mush, Sut Lovingood's legs. George Washington Harris' backwoods baroque is the culmination of a composed geography that had long ignored its minimal mimetic boundaries. The worlds of the humorists may occasionally differ, but they are all stylized. Baldwin's Alabama and Mississippi seem to be populated by nothing except judges, jurors, lawyers, and clients. Longstreet's Georgia, delineated when the state had already passed its frontier stage, is neatly divided between the social competitiveness of pretentious village matrons and the physical testing of males unmediated by charming creatures or any other carriers of culture. Johnson Jones Hooper's Alabama is a moving frontier where everyone except the Indians deserves victimization at the hands of a shifty rogue. Henry Clay Lewis' Louisiana is one extended swamp of albino blacks, dwarfs, panthers, corpses, and curious landladies.

In short, the world of Southwestern humor is crowded, busy, rowdy, noisy, and filled to overflowing with specialized humanity. Figures move with dispatch over a landscape crowded with other figures. It is, in the words of Melville's Redburn, "a moving world," and it moves in a stylized way. There is no boredom, as there often is in contemporary private documents, because there is no unused time. There are no dispirited stretches of loneliness, or to put it another way, there is no privacy because people are never alone. What we see are groups: two men come together, if only to swap items of trivial value, and they are immediately joined by an audience—to observe, commit, take sides, bet. Even in the hunting stories, the hunter stalks or is stalked by bears, panthers, wildcats in a nature that is as circumscribed and domesticated as Natty Bumppo's wilderness. Houses may be to live in, but they serve mostly as magnets drawing diverse people to their premises, where getting undressed and going to bed is as public an act as fighting or storytelling. Space and time are filled up, a metaphorical congestion that therefore requires self-sufficiency and a vigilant eye trained to detect the soft spots in others. Baldwin's lawyerly sensibility sees chicanery as the spirit of the times, which he deplores even as he profits from it, and chicanery requires the successful practitioner to develop a disposition ever at the ready with a strong nose, a keen eye, and, in Baldwin's phrase, "no organs of reverence." That disposition applies not only to the litigation artists in the Flush Times but also to small-bore swappers and traders, fight contestants, hunters, preachers, quilters, and yarn-spinners.

To what extent is Southwestern humor an accurate reflection of the actual world of the Old Southwest in the three decades before the Civil War? If it is social history we want, the patterns of migration, the quality of social organization, the influence of institutions, the growth of cultural life, and much more can be understood by reading contemporaneous accounts that need no spurious justification: records of travelers both foreign and domestic, those compendia of practical advice known as emigrants' guides, and the odd amalgams of autobiography and topography that we get in such striking volumes as Timothy Flint's Condensed Geography and Recollections of the Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi [1826] and J. J. Audubon's Delineations of American Scenery and Character [1926]. Even with firm authorial biases, these works depict a society of real dimensions whose exuberance and energy emerge from its variety, not from the intensification of the same phenomena. These accounts acknowledge the rawness of the new states, but they also record a potpourri of social graces and manners with their own integrity, a wide spectrum of talents both ornamental and useful, and an urgency for establishing a society just like that which had been left behind in the Atlantic South.

This image—or, better, these images—of a more normative society are also confirmed by the writing from the Old Southwest in modes never intended to be made public: commercial daybooks, family correspondence, business journals, and private diaries. If these private documents of the antebellum Mississippi Valley seem inert and placid compared to the public writing by the humorists (or even the published memoirs and travelers' records), it is because they exude an aura relentlessly domestic and utilitarian. The writers of letters and diaries never tire of recording fevers and menus, visits and ceremonials, texts for sermons and responses to them, weather reports and the yield of corn and cotton, the cost of muslin and lace, and laments about sickness, death, and financial failure of cousins and neighbors. But, interestingly enough, this literature of everydayness, however private its origin, also composes itself as written texts, which means that the same conventions learned from prior texts shape its articulation in much the same way as public writing.

One of the more remarkable private texts is a series of diaries by Caleb Goldsmith Forshey (1813-1881), engineer, surveyor, and amateur scientist whose time and place coincided with that of the humorists. Educated at both Kenyon and West Point (though graduating from neither), Forshey pursued his career with all the energy, ambition, and impatience of other go-aheaders who emigrated to the new lands looking for the main chance. At one time or another, he was a promoter of various railroads, a builder of a levee system for the lower Mississippi, a founder of a military institute, a designer of military defenses of the Texas coast during the Civil War, and an ardent advocate of scientific land reclamation in the Gulf South. He was both literate and literary, and he took himself seriously; and while he never relaxed long enough to write humorous sketches for the public's entertainment, he did contribute to respectable journals many technical essays for its edification. Beginning in 1845, he wrote pieces on Humboldt's Cosmos, climatology, the physics of the Mississippi River, the Indian mounds of Louisiana, the meteor showers of 1848-49, and what he calls genetic "depravity" in the children of polygamous Mormons. For obvious reasons, Forshey's extensive diaries are more interesting than his public writing: they reveal an intelligent mind that is assiduous without being innovative—just as the essays do—but they also betray a temperament that ranges with fascinating rapidity from, say, a mournful address to his dead wife to an impromptu voyeuristic letching for a sixteen-year-old backwoods girl.

In the 1840s Forshey settles just across the river from Natchez, in Vidalia, where Thomas Bangs Thorpe is postmaster and editor of The Concordia Intelligencer. As an official surveyor of public lands, Forshey lives more in the bush than the Big Bear man ever dreamed of, even when the humorist was assembling his sketches for his first book, Mysteries of the Backwoods. Each horseback expedition takes Forshey from ten days to two weeks; a hired guide serves as both companion and provider for campsite food, though Forshey always spends nights when possible with the semi-permanent residents in the remote areas on his route—backwoodsmen whose family, opinions, and eccentric habits provide materials for his daily entries. In towns, Forshey visits acquaintances whose collections of fossils and shells he is always eager to inspect; he sets great store by social affairs, for it is in these years that he is actively seeking another wife. The diaries offer Forshey the means for recording, for comparative purposes, the attributes of each available prospect, accompanied with meditations on each one, internalized debates about their merits and defects, and fantasized projections of what the future with each one might hold.

But Forshey's diaries are all-purpose documents. They are as necessary as his surveying tools for recording land measurements; they function as commonplace books into which he copies bad poems from the newspapers; they are a repository of his scientific observations: descriptions of geological strata, of water temperatures in wells, of wind damage at sites struck by tornadoes, of direction and frequency of meteor showers. He uses diary pages to draft official letters and to index names and dates of his correspondents. And for all personal matters, the diaries function as surrogate companion for absorbing his confidences. Their multipurpose importance is suggested by the title pages that Forshey devises for each:

Diary & Notes
of
Business, Science,
Caprice and Miscellany

Diary and Notes
of Business, fancy
Science &
Miscellany

Journal & Diary
of things & thoughts
by the way

Diary and Notes of
various kinds
Professional, scientific
and
Promiscuous

Diary and Notes
of Business,
of Fancies, & Thoughts
of Science
and Miscellany

Diary & Notes
Scientific & Promiscuous

It is probably needless to add at this point that Caleb Forshey in his private writing shares important traits with his contemporaries among the very public humorists. His racism and sexism are not virulent or especially disfiguring over the course of several years of sustained confessions, but they tend to manifest themselves directly rather than through dramatized anecdote. He shows a Whiggish distrust of poverty and the lack of enterprise he sees as its source; but he is a spirited democrat in his distaste for foreign dandies, snobbish ladies, arrogant gentlemen, and self-serving sycophants in offices of elected officials. And while there is a rhetorical directness missing in the humorists' sketches, he has read them as well as the prior texts they all share as formative models for literary expression: Scott, Addison, Irving, Cooper, Burns, and the ever-popular Romantic poets. The pull of nostalgia and the virtues of sentiment can be triggered easily and often, in "Sweet tears of remembrance [that come] gushing." Forshey pauses often, for two years after the death of his wife, to shed regulated tears, scaled as sobs, sighs, anguish, and melancholy, in a prose carefully structured to reflect those discriminations. Even though they are thoroughly private entries, his sentences show changes in diction, with appropriate cancellations. Sentiment can overpower him in nondomestic situations, as well. His patriotic sense tells him to weep when, upon visiting Mount Vernon, he finds the grounds neglected and overgrown with noxious weeds; and when passing the tomb of William Henry Harrison on an Ohio River steamboat, he records his response: "an involuntary tear [gushed canceled; dropped from my eyes canceled] trickled my cheek, as I thought of the virtues reposing there." And he resorts to his chilliest formal prose in reprimanding "a surly & selfish John Bull" who wonders aloud what Forshey could see in William Henry Harrison.

He carries his diary wherever he goes and in whatever degree of society he finds himself, self-consciously noting that saucy, flirty, black-eyed Sal is watching him write and speculating about what she must be thinking as he watches her watching "the stranger" write. Forshey also carries in his head a variety of styles of appropriate range to record his diverse entries. It is a solid, reportorial prose when he fills the pages devoted to "professional" or "scientific" matters; but for those pages where he can relax in "Promiscuous" or "Random observations," he draws upon his substantial knowledge of literature, history, classical mythology, and common lore. He shows no hesitancy in thinking of himself as a writer. Literary style for him is the respectable style of an earlier generation. In a word picture of his own sylvan grounds, he notes "the shark of fresh waters . . . devouring their neighbors of the finny tribe." On a journey into Missouri he falls impeccably into the literary mood: "Dawn upon the Prairies, away to the horizon[']s verge the meadows sleep in their pearly covering, & await only the cheering smile of the glorious sun to shake off the dew drops, and wave to the morning wind a fresh salutation—onward steals the morning Light." He sings matins and lays as his steed bears him through the almost pathless woods. He is prone to draw lessons from all kinds of spectacles he comes upon—lessons of value in the vein of Longfellow and Whittier—even when the incidents themselves are reported in straightforward fashion.

Caleb Forshey is probably no more representative of the conservative Whig of the Old Southwest than any other single individual in the planter and professional ranks. That his writing shows idiosyncratic traits as richly as it does generic ones makes his case a useful one for questioning the appropriateness of "gifted amateur," the term we continue to apply to the Southwestern humorists. We should not take at face value the humorists' own protestations that their writing was a youthful indiscretion or a hobby to pass idle hours. There were simply too many in this diverse group who persisted in their trifling avocation over a number of years for us to take such claims seriously. The skilled and the clumsy, the well-known and the obscure, the ambitious who published collections of their newspaper writing and the anonymous whose sketches lie forgotten in the files of the Spirit of the Times: they were writers, just as Caleb Forshey was a writer. And both the published and unpublished writings are the material residue of a culture of which they were a part just as fully as was the writing of self-confessed professionals like Edgar Poe and William Gilmore Simms. Which is another way of stating that the general climate of antebellum cultural aspiration, with its alternating urgencies of restraint and transgression, touched every person who set pen to paper.

What is to be remarked about the texts from the Old Southwest is not their obvious derivation from the oral folk tradition—the strenuous attempts from Longstreet to Harris to reproduce sounds of yeomen, not sounds of gentlemen, attest to that—but their promiscuous melange of literary influence. It is my thesis that this writing is not so much an exploitation of raw, overhead spoken language as it is the residual flowering of verbal transformations of an old-fashioned written language, some of which derives from canonical writers, some from their popular imitators, and some from those quasi-professional sporting authors of both England and America who carried graceful, indolent, and witty self-consciousness to the racetrack and stables in the towns and to fishing and hunting sites in the wild.

Because it projects a specialized and dense world, stylized and conventionalized, Southwestern humor is a fiercely made writing, self-conscious in both its enlargements and its elisions.

Though I think the reading of private forms of discourse—letters, journals, diaries, daybooks—of the same time and place helps very little to corroborate the social reality depicted in the humorous sketches, they do provide clues to the dynamics of class relations on the southern frontier and especially to the sense of verbal propriety observed by literate and literary men and women. The writers of personal forms—creatures of piety and propriety whose writing presumably departs only minimally from doing—inscribe themselves through convention even as they live by convention.

In the hands of the humorists, piety and propriety are filtered, diluted, spiked, and queered by their opposites so intensely, so repetitiously, that impiety and impropriety become the indispensable ingredients in the recipe. Having no organs of reverence is itself a convention. But the sketches are not unbuttoned writing: what holds up even the "inexpressibles" are simply different buttons. Unlike other influential editors in antebellum America, William T. Porter decreed that politics and religion were not appropriate subjects in his paper. Most of the humorists found it easy enough to abide by Porter's prohibition. While some of them did find capital fun in Methodists, in their sketches for the Spirit of the Times they generally refrain from specifying party affiliation of the quaintly ridiculous subjects: preachers are just generically hypocritical and lecherous and corrupt; local sheriffs and judges and politicians are just generally hypocritical and lecherous and corrupt.

But Porter's taboo subjects are only a minor indication of conventional restraints. What importantly shaped the humorous sketch was literary convention itself; though the writers may have satirized the pompousness of the sublime used so relentlessly to describe nature, very few of them in their straightforward moments are entirely weaned from that handy nourishment—not even Mark Twain, who made the most sport of it. Though the humorists knew how to use the approved standard literary style—allusive, balanced, complex, witty—for broadly deflating certain subjects, this was their "normal" style. And in depicting the backwoods protagonist, especially the way he sounded and the way he dressed, not much was added or changed after 1835, when Georgia Scenes began the fashion.

All this is not to diminish the achievement of the Southwestern humorists, who until recently have been diminished quite a lot already. It is to acknowledge their achievement as complexly conceived and effectively rendered pieces of writing—not spilled folklore.