Introduction to The Future of Southern Letters
[In the following essay, Lowe discusses new directions in contemporary Southern fiction, including a reexamination of history, a more central treatment of popular culture, and a greater presence of women authors.]
It is never, as one knows, the subject, but only the
treatment that distinguishes the artist and poet.
Friedrich Schiller, “On Matthison's Poems” (1794)
We talk real funny down here
We drink too much and we laugh too loud
We're too dumb to make it in no northern town …
We got no-necked oilmen from Texas
And good ol' boys from Tennessee
And college men from L.S.U.
Went in dumb. Come out dumb too
Hustlin' 'round Atlanta in their alligator shoes
Gettin' drunk every weekend at the barbecues—
We're Rednecks, we're rednecks
And we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground.
Randy Newman, “Rednecks” (1974)
When Randy Newman's “Rednecks” came out two decades ago it seemed to speak for a moment when the South had one foot in its moonlit, magnolia-scented, but racist past, and the other in the age of pickup trucks, Sunbelt cities, and country rock. Today, even that moment seems dated. Although the racial agonies the song also speaks of still exist in all areas of the country, the southern “good old boy” has had to make room for professional women, educated African-Americans, and new immigrants like the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Haitians. The rural past has been eclipsed by an ever-expanding urban present, centered on high-finance, high-tech wheeling-dealing, which takes place in high-rise postmodern skyscrapers, hub airports, and gigantic shopping malls. At the same time, the South still seems haunted by the gothic ghosts of its past, and religion's sway is as strong as ever, despite the development of a new southern hedonism. Maybe that accounts for the heavy irony in Newman's voice, as he initially seems to accept the stereotype; later he appears to be fighting it tooth and nail, waging a double-front deconstruction, first on the mythology of the South (much of it self-generated) and next on the secondary mythology, much of it negative, that continues to widely circulate in other regions of the country and abroad as well. And yet Newman, like most of our writers, finds much to celebrate too, even as he criticizes, and he seems to think that this cauldron of symbols and markers, bubbling over with a new brew of southern identity, offers much vitality, humor, and hope.
Newman's song attracted attention when it came out, sometimes not so much for what he was saying as for how he said, sang, and accompanied it. Perhaps Schiller's general principle about style fits many readers, including Newman's; it isn't the South they care about so much, but the stylistics of those who make it their subject. But I would hazard a guess that most of the writers in this volume, at any rate, and most southern readers, if not the majority of general readers, would quarrel with that. Content, when it has a stranglehold on the heart, does matter. What Newman is really addressing is the age-old southern rage against hypocritical attacks on southern culture, a rage surprisingly shared on occasion by southern women, African-Americans, and Jews, who have all on occasion risen to defend their region.
A SOUTHERN GRAMMATOLOGY
The most prominent voices in this debate have always been those of the South's artists. Subject and style are somewhat dictated by the times and the culture, but artists make conscious choices. Such a gift is accompanied by responsibility, so as dedicated South-watchers and aficionados of the literature that reflects it, we should continually ask this question: who writes down—or makes up—the image of the South for us today? Is it simply mirrored back to us from the ever-slicker news reports of our local TV station? If, as some suggest, the best images are found in the narratives of our native writers, are these authors faithful to the reality of life as we know it, or are they catering to the stereotypes they think a national audience (including southerners themselves) requires? Finally, who will be writing southern literature tomorrow, and about what, and why?
This volume seeks to answer these and other questions by letting many of our younger and more interesting writers speak for themselves, and for a region and a people whose contours and ticks they feel a need to chart. They may have other, more prominent concerns, too, but this charting and mapping of the culture inevitably follows, as a matter of course, because of who these writers have been, are, and will be: southerners. We also take some looks backward, at our joint past, which, despite the modernist and postmodernist zeitgeists, all too often dictates the future.
Books like these of course have to ponder definitions. Superficially, there has always been a debate about what states qualify as southern. In the nineteenth century, Maryland certainly would have been included; today, probably not. Most would be content to say the South consists of the former Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, but we're still asking ourselves, is Texas part of the South? If not, are we willing to deny the profoundly southern qualities of the thoughtful and intricate writing in the novels of Beverly Lowry, the plays of Horton Foote, or the epics and bittersweet comedies of Larry McMurtry?
Then there's the question of permanence. Is being southern a category fixed for life? What do you do with the southern writer who leaves the South, both physically and in her fiction? One might ask, for instance, whether Richard Ford is really a southern writer. Most of his works unfold in distant places and concern easterners or Rocky Mountain folk. Nonetheless, does he—do they—speak under this patina with a southern nuance? Are the places they inhabit really metaphors for southern climes? Then there's the case of James Wilcox, a gifted comic writer who's been compared to Chekhov. His first four novels were set in Louisiana, but he's been using New York for most of his locales since then, probably because he's been living in Gotham for some time now. Yusef Komunyakaa now writes poetry in Indiana, not Louisiana. Cormac McCarthy recently won the National Book Award for his wonderful All the Pretty Horses, but much of it is set in Mexico. Gail Godwin has been confusing label-pasters for years with her shifting subjects and locales. Southern or not?
This is an old debate, after all; we've driven out some of our best writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and many others, and most of them began to write some non-southern narratives. Others, however, seemed relatively unaffected. Warren, to cite the most salient example, spent much of his life in Connecticut, but would anyone challenge the profoundly southern essence of his writing? But even those who chose to stay put can and do venture outside “southern” waters. What then? Do we include these texts in surveys, anthologies, and studies of southern literature? It seems likely we'll see many more examples of this syndrome in the future, as Americans in general and writers, perhaps, in particular, become more mobile and less fastened to their cultural bases. No doubt, however, as always, we'll see just as many writers returning to their “roots.” Tony Kushner, a Louisianan, won the Pulitzer Prize for Angels in America, but there is little that is southern about the play. But does that necessarily mean that Kushner's future works won't be about the South? Other recent dramas have proved the vitality southern subjects have for the region's playwrights, such as Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Tom Dent, Robert Harling, and Alfred Uhry, yet many of them have slipped easily in and out of southern themes.
Similarly, we have to ask ourselves what we mean when we say “literature.” Does it include popular but definitely schlock productions—sex-grits-and-sky-scrapers paperbacks with titles like Atlanta or B'ham Ala? Typically, a blurb for the former reads, “The inside story of the thundering emergence of a city of glass and steel—the men who built it, the women who bathed in its glamour, and loved in its shadows, and the shocking power-play that threatened to engulf their glittering dreams.”
More problematic are the compelling narratives by talented storytellers that all the same seem calculated for a mass audience, especially in their obliging redecking of old stereotypes in new guises. I am thinking here of the work of Harry Crews, Pete Dexter, or, distressingly, much of Pat Conroy's wildly popular Prince of Tides. Catering to an audience-determined formula? Looking for the movie contract? Or are these necessarily compromising factors? What about novelist Lee Smith's recent foray into Nashville's music scene, surely one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary southern culture? A sellout, or an expansion of her natural canvas? And how does it compare with Harry Crews's similar mining of another musical realm in The Gospel Singer, a novel that garnered the praise of a master craftsman of the old school, Andrew Lytle?
One thing seems certain: most of today's southern narratives, highbrow or low, aspire to mirror a culture in the throes of dynamic and dramatic change, a condition that has often led to some of the greatest achievements in southern literature, such as Cane, The Sound and the Fury, All the King's Men, and Meridian.
As the outpouring of books like Atlanta reveals, however, not all of our musings on change have been of this gravity. In addition to the page-turners, what are we to do with the vastly popular books of southern good-old-boy humorists like the late Lewis Grizzard and Roy Blount Jr.? Their witticisms grew out of the fertile soil of change too; do such writers have any affinity with, or (gasp!) an actual influence on, “serious” comic writers like Clyde Edgerton, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Lewis Nordan, or Allan Gurganus? And for that matter, the new southern woman has a comic persona too, in the delightful fictions of Alice Childress, Ellen Gilchrist, Fannie Flagg, Rita Mae Brown, and Kaye Gibbons. Do we draw a strict line of separation between them and more commercially thinking women writers? And the debate still rages about John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces; can such a popular, wildly funny book really be any good?
Once again, this is hardly a new conundrum. Southern readers and critics have always wondered what to do with “popular writers,” especially when their works indubitably satisfy basic human yearnings for warmth, humor, and tenderness, without necessarily providing great art. The frontier humorists had to wait outside the academy for some time, and so did their heir, Mark Twain.
Popular women writers must face the charge of being melodramatic, sentimental, or both. This charge has its most obvious example in Margaret Mitchell, but one sees it again today in the chilly critical reception of a work such as Olive Ann Burns's runaway best-seller, Cold Sassy Tree. The current holder of the “popular” southern historical novel crown, however, is surely Anne Rivers Siddons, whose Peachtree Road not only limns her own native culture but also sets out a basic pattern (some would say formula) followed in her other romances, such as The Outer Banks, about North Carolina. Yet on reading V. S. Naipaul's interview with her in A Turn in the South, one is struck by her honesty, her concern for justice, and her constant examination of the implications of being southern, female, and an artist.
Burns and Siddons clearly loom far above the many hack writers who combine ample portions of sex and glitter with southern stereotypes. But again, how do we draw the line? Quo vadis, southern writer?
RESETTING THE TABLE
As my remarks already suggest, the future of southern letters won't lie entirely in the hands of white male southerners. The greatest change in southern letters has come in with the new canon. Without question, many of the very best and/or most popular contemporary writers from the region are female, African-American, or both. Ernest Gaines and Alice Walker are surely candidates, along with Reynolds Price, for recognition as the greatest currently active southern writers.
But as always, the living canon—our current supply of active writers—shifts regularly, in unexpected ways. Most obviously, we never know when commanding or merely intriguing voices will be stilled, either by premature death, illness, or writer's block. We lost Henry Dumas, John Kennedy Toole, John O. Killens, and Raymond Andrews all too soon. Many regret that Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, and others never followed up their brilliant first novels with others.
Some of the greatest writers in the tradition have continued to write well into old age; surviving and productive figures here include Elizabeth Spencer, Reynolds Price, Albert Murray, Shirley Ann Grau, Wendell Berry, David Madden, Maya Angelou, and Mary Lee Settle, and one devoutly hopes that our literary future will include new works by them. Often, writers we think we know well astonish us with something entirely new, unexpected, and utterly true, as in Peter Taylor's magnificent Summons to Memphis, or Douglas's Can't Quit You Baby. So even when our writers die after a long, productive career, as was the case recently with Taylor, Robert Penn Warren, Etheridge Knight, Walker Percy, and Frank Yerby, we wonder if they took a final manuscript with them. On the other hand, other great living writers, such as Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker Alexander, have seemingly halted their production.
The current state of southern letters, despite the losses mentioned above, is strong. The announcement of the 1993 Pulitzer Prizes in fiction and drama to two Louisiana natives follows the honors awarded to Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All and Pete Dexter's Paris Trout. Ernest Gaines just received the prestigious MacArthur Award and, for A Lesson before Dying, the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Such acclaim and attention can only encourage and challenge developing and struggling writers of the South to press on.
Writers of the contemporary South differ dramatically from their predecessors; how could they not? In their lifetime the region has changed more than it had in all its previous history. But somehow southern writers, moving with the flow, see some kind of constant, enduring presence in southern settings. Place, despite dramatic changes, still casts the same old spell in many ways. New Orleans, in the works of poet Brenda Marie Osbey, novelist John Kennedy Toole, or short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, seems eternal and unique. The rippling fields and forests emerge with a contemporary menace but an ageless essence in the works of Cormac McCarthy, while Louise Shivers finds a sensual, smoky setting for her tale of contemporary passion in the North Carolina tobacco country. Charleston has never seemed so hip, so vibrant, but yet so traditional and tropical too, as in the fiction of Josephine Humphreys or Pat Conroy. Other writers from other places have added to this tradition recently. Peter Matthiessen's brooding, brutal, and beautiful depiction of the Florida frontier in Killing Mr. Watson reminds us that transplanted “Yankees” have frequently added to our store of verbal landscapes. Who can forget Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's equally compelling vision of her beloved Florida?
Resetting the table has meant playing with some recipes as well. An often-overlooked component of Faulkner's continuing influence on southern letters has been evident in the experimental nature of much of southern fiction of the last few decades. One of the most impressive achievements here has been Jack Butler's Jujitsu for Christ, to my mind one of the true classics in the tradition. Another writer willing to take on almost any aesthetic dare is Barry Hannah, whose real achievement sometimes gets obscured by his occasional, inevitable failures. The women's movement and its focus on gender has undoubtedly encouraged writers to experiment in exploring issues that matter to their opposite sex, often in that sex's voice. Clyde Edgerton's Raney, Reynolds Price's Kate Vaiden, Ellen Douglas's Rock Cried Out, and Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland all fit this welcome pattern and seem to promise more to come. Writers have shown a willingness to cross ethnic and racial boundaries: Robert Olen Butler's Good Scent from a Strange Mountain concerns Vietnamese-Americans; Shirley Ann Grau has returned to the literary scene with her striking new novel Roadwalkers, about African-Americans caught in the Great Depression.
Similarly, recent attention in society at large to abused children and children's rights has coincided with a new interest in child narrators and characters in southern fiction; imaginative rethinking of southern classics such as Huckleberry Finn have lately emerged in works such as Padgett Powell's Edisto, Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster, and Dori Sanders's Clover.
As this collection's several essays on southern poetry demonstrate, innovation and experimentation continue to vitalize southern poetry. I would add that the lyrical tradition of poetry lives on, especially in Louisiana, where one finds Pinkie Gordon Lane, Mona Lisa Saloy, Tom Dent, Brenda Marie Osbey, and many others. Louisiana now also boasts Dave Smith, whose muscular, dark, and brooding work brings a contemporary resonance to an equally venerable tradition of masculine poetry, epitomized by Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, James Dickey, Jerry W. Ward Jr., Fred Chappell, Alvin Aubert, and, of course, Robert Penn Warren.
The elegant patterns of malaise charted by the late Walker Percy have found a more pedestrian expression in the recent and creative neorealism of writers such as Bobbie Ann Mason, Valerie Sayers, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, and Josephine Humphreys. And yet one of our contributors, Jack Butler, claims that the most uninteresting literature of all is that which seeks to expose the “essential meaningless and vapidity of life,” a sentiment others surely share. Clearly, although certain threads appear to run in common through southern texts, attitudes and approaches toward them differ widely.
At least one sign of the newly catholic nature of southern studies may be found in the emerging courses, anthologies, and critical studies that reflect the new canon of southern literature and cultural studies. The History of Southern Literature (1985), edited by an older generation of scholars, offered the first proof of the paradigm shift. A more dramatic example, in the broader field of southern cultural studies, emerged in the best-selling and widely honored Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, which attempted to honor every aspect of the region's life and thought, from hushpuppies, kudzu, possums, and air-conditioning to architectural styles, dialect, recreation, and women's lives. Although the hundred-page section on “Black Life” is impressive, references to African-American culture appear throughout the many entries. Even more space is devoted to “Ethnic Life” and “Folklife.” One is surprised and disappointed to find that only three of the forty writers identified as “major” in the folklife section are African-Americans. But the study as a whole constitutes a watershed in rethinking what southern “culture” is, incorporating much previously scorned material and peoples, and placing folk culture's value much higher in our collective consciousness. The Encyclopedia in many ways reflects a sea change in the academy, where the South's peoples and cultures are studied in inter-disciplinary, multicultural ways undreamed of only a few decades ago. Within literature, previously dismissed genres such as diaries, journals, cookbooks, autobiographies, work songs, spirituals, and the like now are studied alongside long-revered poems, novels, plays, essays, and sermons. The Encyclopedia's writers and other “New New South” scholars practice a revisionist history, one that looks with a jaundiced eye on the old accounts of southern history while eagerly seeking out documents, photographs, maps, and any literary artifacts that point to a broader portrait of our past than we have previously suspected. This scholarship, with its attendent panels, symposia, festivals, and the like, which often involve the region's writers, has gradually fed into the creation of a new southern literature and will surely continue to have its effect in the decades to come.
REACCENTUATING THE PAST
The future of southern letters will always be partly dependent on our changing perceptions of its past. Twenty-five years ago, most southern literature courses focused on white male writers; even Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor were considered “minor” writers and not worthy of study, and the only black writer who made the list from time to time was Booker T. Washington, for obvious reasons. One often heard the argument that this was simply the result of an aesthetic evaluation; the “best” writers just turned out to be male. But of course literary hierarchies, which in turn led to literary histories, paralleled the old patterns of history. The record of the past was assumed to be a linear progression of “great events,” which inevitably starred “great men.”
Sweeping change in historiography, partly brought about by European historians such as Febvre, Bloch, and, most important, Braudel, has made history less a stitching together of great events than a mining of what Braudel calls “the structure of everyday life.” Coincidentally or not, seismic forces operating in literary studies have had much the same effect. In 1996, southern literature courses often devote at least a third of their syllabi to African-American writers, and many works by women, black and white, have been brought into the classroom as well. The list of previously unknown—rather than merely neglected—writers grows apace. The remarkable Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan has not only presented us with a memorable voice from the past but has also radically reshaped our sense of important moments in southern history, notably the Battle of Baton Rouge, the Battle of Port Hudson, and the Siege of Vicksburg. Morgan's reportage contrasts dramatically with Mary Chesnut's and complements the important work currently being done on the role women played in mourning practices, southern art, and the cult of the Lost Cause, a subject that has been brought to our attention in the important The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause, which in turn extends the ground-breaking (and somewhat opposed) work of Charles Reagan Wilson's Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, and Gaines Foster's Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South.
These works of course represent only a fragment of important new studies coming out of southern history, women's studies, multicultural studies, American art history, and many other dynamic disciplines. One might argue that southern writers are unlikely to read such academic texts, but they certainly know when the public's tastes are being steered back toward regional literature, history, and culture, whether directly or indirectly, through a kind of “trickle-down” effect brought about by local newspapers, book reviews, or even magazine articles in Southern Living, Southern Accents, and the like.
One of the things that needs to be said here is that despite the changes listed above, the South in many ways continues to be a very conservative region, and it would be foolish to pretend that conservative elements in southern literature—and, indeed, literary criticism—have disappeared. Several of the essays in this book reflect that reality—particularly Fred Hobson's and Jefferson Humphries's.
Certainly many writers native to the region and from outside it have been turning to historical fiction lately. Many African-American writers have done so; southerners Margaret Walker Alexander and Alex Haley paved the way with Jubilee and Roots, respectively, following the lead of Frank Yerby, whose Foxes of Harrow ought to have been seen in that light too, and would have, if more people had realized that its author was black. All three of these novels went back in time to examine slavery from a black perspective, a venerable tradition that of course began with yet another southern genre, the slave narrative. In our time this tradition, recast in the historical novel, has found one of its greatest expressions in Ohio's Toni Morrison, in her Pulitzer Prize—winning Beloved. Another non-southerner, Sherley Anne Williams, preceded Morrison in searching out another vision of southern slavery in Dessa Rose. Nor is slavery the only time frame subject to inspection. Georgia's Alice Walker chose the 1930s (The Color Purple) and the 1960s of the civil rights movement (Meridian) for examination under her literary microscope. Similarly, Ernest Gaines has set most of his work in the past, most obviously in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which examines both of the heroic epochs (emancipation and the civil rights movement) through the life of its title character. His magnificent new novel, A Lesson before Dying, goes back to a 1948 execution to help us ponder why so many young, black American men continue to be warehoused and put to death in today's up-to-date prisons. Gloria Naylor, who is no southerner but was conceived, she reminds us, in Mississippi, went to the legendary Georgia/South Carolina coast for her hit novel Mama Day, a book that shuttles easily between the legendary past and a disillusioning present.
Rita Mae Brown's Civil War novel High Hearts is a key example of how a writer associated with one school—in this case, comic “feminist” fiction—can easily switch gears in order to mine and rethink a classic southern genre. Something rather similar may be found in various pieces by the good-old-boy enfant terrible of southern letters, Barry Hannah, particularly in his justly famous short stories involving Jeb Stuart.
In his recent study The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, Fred Hobson has made an interesting observation about Bobbie Ann Mason, who has frequently been criticized for writing a kind of “Kmart” realism, even when ostensibly pondering historical issues, such as Vietnam, in books like In Country. Hobson gives Mason credit for engaging such matters; argues that she shouldn't be expected to write historical fiction the way Warren or Faulkner would; and, most revealingly, notes the difficulty of coupling what he calls a “minimalist” style with historical subject matter. Hobson suggests, “Perhaps mythology—and a way to order one's life—can come from M*A*S*H as well as The Golden Bough” (Hobson 19-20).
Hobson seems on the verge of proclaiming folklore the successor of mythology. One of the great things about the rediscovery of Zora Neale Hurston and her work has been a renewed respect for southern folk culture (heretofore labeled “low culture”), and not just that of African-Americans. High-minded critics such as Mencken and others always blasted the South for its lack of “high culture”; recent literary criticism—certainly of African-American southern literature, but also of women's writing in the South (like that focused on Augusta Jane Evans in the nineteenth century, for instance, or the work of Ellen Douglas or Elizabeth Spencer in our own time)—has revealed a rich vein of folk culture that runs prominently through classic and little-known works of southern literature. One finds it in unexpected places, as in the description of the way southern belles fastened the buttons of Confederate soldier's uniforms onto their dresses in Thomas Nelson Page's Reconstruction novel, Red Rock, or the lovingly detailed quotidean rituals Welty provides in Delta Wedding, or the African-American folklore one finds in Raymond Andrews's or John Killens's fictional small towns. Will critical appreciation of these neglected aspects of southern writing encourage more of it?
NEW SOUTHERN DIALOGICS
All these issues and many more are taken up by the authors we have assembled here. In our lead essay, James Applewhite reveals the prominence and significance of the unsatisfactory father motif in southern letters; surely one extension of his theory would be that many of today's southern artists find the old approaches and stereotypes of their literary tradition moldy at best and are constantly seeking to replace outworn symbols with newer ones, while simultaneously trying to restore that sense of fidelity to the South's body and mind that originally animated the old symbols when they were generated.
In his apt metaphor describing the differentiation between writers and critics, Jack Butler suggests that the critics map the coastline, while the writers are the coastline. But this image also suggests that the real way we define the body of the South and its culture is through its boundaries and what they touch, a theory quite similar, in fact, to Fredrik Barth's formulation of what constitutes an ethnic group: not content but boundary, a constantly shifting line. And as Jefferson Humphries asserts in his essay here, any regional or national identity stems from at least two conflicting needs—the desire to create a narrative from within that codifies identity but also by the narrative constructed without that the first narrative inevitably responds to.)
Butler proclaims the need to be not just southern but “southern modern,” to bring a novelty into the equation of rendering the New New South. But he, like Applewhite and many others in this volume, conjures up that old genie William Faulkner in the same breath, blending the present and the past to cast a new formula for southern writing, albeit set in his own vital language: “We think of a place; we think of the darkness and splendor of families; we think of a way of talking; we think of the Bible; and we think of black and white locked into a mutual if inharmonious fate.”
And yet, as our writers constantly demonstrate, most of the changes—even the seismic eruption of postmodern southern humor have antecedents. Stephen Smith's jaunty ride through the trickster show of our literary humor demonstrates that that other rude, irreverent South, just back of the big house, lives on and on and on, even if it has to pitch its sideshow tent in Kmart's parking lot. His open eye for popular culture's role in this ongoing carnival makes for some joyful reading and some careful rethinking.
The ubiquitous presence of humor in southern discourse finds ample display in two other pieces in our collection. Fred Chappell's hilarious sendup of books such as this one displays, if nothing else, the boisterous survival of southern academic humor. He also wickedly skewers the expectations we and publishers have of southern writers. The fact that “Wil Hickson” speaks to us from 2001 (a “South Odyssey”?) confirms not only that there will be a future for southern letters but also that the quest for it will remain ever elusive, endless, and, one hopes, joyful. Ole Wil's short history of the Appal Lit Insurrection furnishes a kind of microcosm of the broader history of the set it seeks to separate from—“Grit Lit,” southern literature itself.
Similarly, Jim Wayne Miller resurrects the legendary and irreverent Sut Lovingood to poke fun at our academic landmark, The History of Southern Literature, which is eloquently defended elsewhere in this volume by Fred Hobson. Nobody ever said that southern writers and scholars tend to agree!
The hip-flip mask of Chappell finds its counterpart in the dramatic jeremiad of Rodger Cunningham, who makes a startling application of postcolonialist theorists such as Edward Said to help us posit a different kind of future for Appalachia. In reaching out to the methodologies of other fields, Cunningham encourages us to remap what we think is familiar terrain.
Poet Kate Daniels employs a luminous prose to demonstrate how the post-modern writer's identity stems from a personal task: commemorating one's family. For in her brief memoir of a Richmond childhood, she locates the origins of narratives in the structures of everyday life, as they pass, as Zora Neale Hurston might say, from “mouth almighty” as it whiles away a summer's night on dimly lit front porches. Daniels shows us how these voices helped her both write and read poetry years later, in the North (where, like many, she finds out what it really means to be southern) and, later, in Louisiana.
Fred Hobson and Jefferson Humphries offer varying views of our subject from very different academic perches. Hobson, once a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and for many years an editor, teacher, and historian/scholar of southern literature, provides us with a shrewd and true-to-the-bone assessment of what the patterns mean in the long history of the southern literary canon. Among its many other virtues, Hobson's essay demonstrates decisively that academic critics have an extremely important role to play in identifying, supporting, and, yes, criticizing future southern writers. Understanding the errors of past scholars (especially their racism and sexism) plays a key role here, but Hobson takes pains to temper some recent and, he would say, unwarranted attacks on the elder generation's critical legacy. Hobson's even-handed and courageous approach skillfully untangles some knotted clusters of aesthetics and ideology, and coincidentally equips us with some valuable clues about how best to examine similar knots in our critical and literary discourse about contemporary and future writers. His piece is also a tribute to magnificent scholars such as Louis Rubin and Lewis Simpson, who in transforming their approaches to southern letters—most memorably in their seminal History of Southern Literature (1985)—helped steer us toward the multicultural, inter-disciplinary position the field now seems to favor. Hobson's essay offers a reminder, too, that no consideration of the South's literary future will be successful in effacing its past.
Jefferson Humphries appears to contradict much of what some other essayists here have written in his emphasis on the South as story, as idea, but in fact he usefully complements many of their pronouncements, particularly those of Fred Hobson. Humphries uses an adroit blend of contemporary theory and literary history (much of it drawn from the nineteenth century) to create a surprising congruence between Old South intellectual activity and recently fashionable theories of narrative. His employment of “narrative exigency” ties together many apparently disparate observations in this collection, and like Hobson and Olney, Humphries mines the past in order to understand the future.
No section of this volume speaks more eloquently of the continuing hold of place than the interview with Brenda Marie Osbey. Her comments on New Orleans offer proof of at least one area of traditional southern resonance that continues to pulse with generating, creative power. And yet Osbey speaks perceptively about the “quilt” of the South, noting the other distinct “patches” that have also retained a certain unique quality. She sees religion, a preoccupation with death and loss, remembrance, and a love for the land as common threads that hold the quilt together.
Osbey's meditations and wry comments find a contrast in Robert Olen Butler's conversation with Michael Sartisky. Butler provides fascinating insights on how it feels for a southern writer to achieve virtually overnight fame, as he did when he won the Pulitzer Prize. He also offers up quite a detailed autobiography, one that explains why writing about “the collision of cultures”—especially those of Vietnam and America—comes naturally to him, as it does for many southern writers. Readers pondering the question of who actually belongs in this latter group, or what makes an outsider a “southern writer,” will find a compelling case study in Butler, who grew up in St. Louis, lived in New York for years, and then went to Vietnam. Ultimately, when his interviewer asks him to name the “place” that he identifies with most closely, he names Louisiana, his home for the last eight years.
Butler's musings on the influences and patterns in his life suggest the importance of autobiography in southern letters. James Olney brings his impressive expertise in this field to bear on the peculiarities of the southern “life narrative.” His essay also typifies some of the most encouraging comparative work now being done, particularly in his pairing of works by a black man and a white woman—Mississippi's native son and daughter Richard Wright and Eudora Welty.
Olney's remarks may seem to address only the past, yet they are especially apropos now, when the personal memoir has been coming more to the fore of southern letters. Surely the civil rights-era witnessing of James Farmer, Anne Moody, Howell Raines, and many others has played a large role in establishing a contemporary version of the venerable tradition of the classic slave narratives, Washington's Up from Slavery, or Mary Chesnut or Sarah Morgan's Civil War diaries. Writers such as Reynolds Price, Maya Angelou, Albert Murray, and the many others collected in anthologies such as A World Unsuspected continue to write in this genre. Fiction itself has adapted this mode in make-believe memoirs, such as Gaines's memorable Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, or Allan Gurganus's best-seller, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. We can hardly speculate about the future of these traditions without meditating at length on their origins.
Dave Smith's musings over the problem of defining a “southern poet” rehearses many of the issues raised here by his fellow versifiers, James Applewhite, Fred Chappell, Kate Daniels, and Brenda Marie Osbey. But Smith also profitably zeroes in on a kind of “attitude of obligation, of piety, of something like a sacred respect” that one indeed notices both in the poems of this group and in their pronouncements about those poems.
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS IN SOUTHERN LETTERS
This discussion would be incomplete without word of some exciting developments in southern letters that complement the suggestions of the writers in this volume. Jefferson Humphries's ongoing task of employing contemporary, frequently European criticism toward a rereading of southern letters is by no means unique. The dynamic Society for the Study of Southern Literature's bulging and informative newsletters offer eloquent testimony to the exciting new approaches to the field now being mounted by feminists, African-Americanists, Marxists, Hispanic-Americanists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, and all other types of critics.
But much work remains to be done. Several essayists in this collection chide critics for neglecting Appalachian literature and culture. Someone should concurrently urge southernists to pay more attention to the South's French and Spanish legacies, especially the Cajun and Creole cultures in Louisiana. And then what about the new literature now being written by recent immigrants to the South from other countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, Haiti, and, more recently, China and India? Miami's scintillating Little Havana has already produced some original new writers, such as Virgil Suarez, and the Hispanic-American Renaissance in Texas, typified by the writing of Rolando Hinojosa, has been thriving for some time. More is sure to come as other groups coalesce and find their “southern” voice. One preliminary effect has been the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Louisiana's Robert Olen Butler, a group of stories centering on Vietnamese Americans on the Gulf Coast. Surely this community will be speaking in its own voice shortly, and we will need critics who know how to properly hear it and integrate it with the broader dialogic of the region.
These “emerging southerners,” after all, are undergoing a more severe form of the “future shock” all southerners are experiencing, and all southern writers, regardless of their other affiliations, must come to grips with the literary traditions of the past that continue to inform and influence the future. As I have suggested, this has meant rethinking and reinventing all the subgenres of southern writing, including the historical novel, a subgenre explored by Rita Mae Brown, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and others. This too is nothing new; as Mikhail Bakhtin usefully tells us,
Every age re-accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation. Thanks to the intentional potential embedded in them, such works have proved capable of uncovering in each era and against ever new dialogizing backgrounds ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. Likewise their influence on subsequent creative works inevitably includes re-accentuation. New images in literature are very often created through a re-accentuation of old images, by translating them from one accentual register to another (from the comic plane to the tragic, for instance, or the other way around).
(Bakhtin 421)
Richard Wright, in detailing the development of an authentic and southern African-American voice, affirmed the validity of Bakhtin's observation in a particular sense—that of liberation:
We stole words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Land, who did not want us to know too many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had; we proceeded to build our language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by flourishing our hands, by assigning to common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enable us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Land without their being aware! Our secret language extended our understanding of what slavery meant and gave us the freedom to speak to our brothers in captivity; we polished our new words, caressed them, gave them new shape and color, a new order and tempo, until, though they were the words of the Lords of the Land, they became our words, our language.
(Wright 40)
In another passage, Wright suggested that this process demanded of African-American southerners the qualities always exacted of “mighty artists.” I do not wish to subtract one iota from the specificity this observation must continue to have in relation to the struggles of African-Americans; but the broader ramifications of dealing with a view imposed from outside a culture has been a problem for all southerners for some time now. Secondly, Wright's reference to “mighty artists” powerfully indicates the connection he sees between aesthetics and ideology. Many southern critics—most notably the Fugitives, but including many critics writing today—have denied this link. It is time, though, for this artificial barrier to come down.
This book attempts to demonstrate our own time's attempt to reaccentuate our traditions, while simultaneously building our own language and literature to fit today's needs and realities. Thankfully, the walls separating southerners from one another have been tumbling down; those that remain may be breached, paradoxically, by embracing each other's “secret language,” by learning to listen on all the broadcasting frequencies. Our writers have preceded us in this endeavor; one of the things this collection proves is that southern writers read each other avidly and appreciatively. No “Melville never meeting Whitman” here. Praise gets heaped on quite a number of writers we weren't able to corral for this gathering, such as Lewis Nordan, Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, Clyde Edgerton, James Alan McPherson, Louis Rubin, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Morgan, Ernest Gaines, Cleanth Brooks, David Bottoms, Charles Wright, William Styron, Gayl Jones, Willie Morris, Alice Walker, Barry Hannah, Bobbie Ann Mason, Lewis Simpson, and, especially often, Lee Smith, whose work places her in several camps.
What do writers look for in their peers? No doubt sheer pleasure and wonder lead the list, but they also find warnings of things to come, things hidden, things festering, that may be just beneath the surface of their own work as well. Writers prophesy to each other as well as to their general readers.
During his first presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter sounded a refrain that he had utilized frequently during his dynamic stint as governor of Georgia: namely, that the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s was the greatest thing that had ever happened to the South. Equally dramatic change followed as the nation experienced its first military defeat in Vietnam, bringing it in line with the South, which until then had labored under the heavy penumbra of a civil war that in many ways should have been forgotten. “The defeated South,” already flexing its Sunbelt power, was now part of a “defeated” nation. As James Applewhite remarks in this volume, “Much tragedy is encoded, for the South and for the nation, in that allegiance beyond logic, beyond reason.”
And now in the 1990s, with another southern president in the White House, with African-American mayors in place in most large southern cities, and a woman newly elected in her own right to the Senate from Texas (which already, like Kentucky before it, had elected a woman governor), the South, relocating its mythical allegiences, indeed sets many standards for the nation to follow. A space-age Atlanta—presided over by Ted and Jane, the postmodern Rhett and Scarlett—prepares to host the Olympics. Florida's boom into the power-state category was only slightly slowed by Hurricane Andrew. Southern-hatched crazes have swept the nation, including Cabbage Patch dolls, the mania for Arkansas-born Wal-Mart, and the appetite for Cajun and Tex-Mex food, Vidalia onions, and pickled okra. Nashville has become the nation's music and recording center, for southern music—gospel, jazz, blues, rock and roll, bluegrass, zydeco, country—has surely become not only America's only unique cultural product but the music of the sphere itself.
And yet the proud new cities also harbor the homeless; newly affluent citizens may well be drug addicts, alcoholics, philanderers, and worse. Environmental and governmental scandals proliferate, and oil busts, plant closings, urban blight, and substandard schools continue to breed tragedies worth writing about. The news from the New New South isn't all good. But whatever the story, the South's special trappings give it a unique appeal and an opportunity to mount messages of national concern through compelling regional metaphor and narrative.
For despite the oft-bemoaned homogenization of the nation, the South continues to have a special identity quite apart from the rest of the nation, even when that identity sometimes seems just as different from the South's own past. To choose only one of many subjects, today, as much as ever, change, loss, and an effort to limn the contours of a vanishing world appear to be vital impulses for many southern writers. The difference lies in the subjects “lost”: not just the old plantation but also the plantation quarters (Ernest Gaines); not just the isolation of the mountains but also their crafts and customs (Lee Smith); not just Old New Orleans but also its decency and honor (Nancy Lemann). And charting a world of loss, of course, goes all the way back to George Washington Cable, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, and Katherine Anne Porter, to name but a few of our elegists. No doubt we (or more likely, our grandchildren) will someday hear about the vanished world of Houston's fabled Galleria, or Miami's Fontainebleu, or Charlotte's Coliseum.
To take this subject of loss to a broader dimension: if Fred Hobson is right that a certain power has been lost in southern letters, is that because the old agonies of the South—particularly those connected with race—have somewhat abated? Or is it merely that what used to be seen as local tragedy has passed into the realm of the nation? To put a more positive interpretation on it, perhaps southerners have at long last accepted what Richard Wright asserted long ago, in an utterance that has even more relevance to southerners in particular than to Americans as a whole: “The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which we all have traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims” (Wright 146). As other barriers that divide us to continue to fall, and as long as our writers continue to travel this road of hope and to see the South as both a legacy and a challenge, there will always be a future for southern letters.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Hobson, Fred C. The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1991.
Wright, Richard. Twelve Million Black Voices. 1941; rpt. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1988.
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