Barry Hannah was born in Clinton in 1942; Richard Ford was born in Jackson in 1944. Given their Mississippian background and—for all that Allen Tate first declared the “Southern Renascence” dead when little Barry and Richard were still in diapers—the ongoing obsession with the fortunes and “future of Southern letters,” it is hardly surprising that many critics have focused upon the “Southernness” of Hannah's and Ford's fiction. Ford began his career with a novel which he hoped “nobody would ever recognize as being southern”—yet A Piece of My Heart was dismissed as “neo-Faulknerian” by Larry McMurtry in the New York Times Book Review. Even though Ford subsequently made a “totally conscious decision to get myself out of the South,” critics have continued to suppose some significant relation between Ford's fiction and his birthplace.¹ Hannah's work has received more subtle appraisals accounting for its parodic relation to canonical “Southern literature”; for example, Michael Kreyling cited Hannah's debut, Geronimo Rex, when formulating his theory of “postsouthernness.”²

However, when we assign the prefix “post” to the foundational or naturalized “Southern,” thereby emphasizing what distinguishes Hannah or Ford from Faulkner or Welty, we do not fully efface the etymological or ideological traces. Postsouthern literary critical discourse generally remains related to, if no longer rooted in, 1) the social geography previously known as “the South”; 2) the “Southern” literary tradition. To be sure, the two books under review here usefully highlight the fictional and theoretical shift within “Southern literature”—the postsouthern turn, if you will. However, the most striking aspect of Ruth Weston's book on Hannah is the use of eclectic theoretical approaches which transcend the present scope of (post)Southern literary criticism. In the case of Huey Guagliardo's collection, the most successful essays suggest that critics of Ford's work must look beyond the parochial boundaries of some neo-Faulknerian postage stamp of Mississippi soil.

In an immediate confession which might well chime with other female readers of Hannah's work, Ruth Weston admits that, “as a woman and a feminist,” her early excitement at Hannah's “virtuosity with language” was tempered by horror at “his depiction of, and his characters' treatment of, women” (p. 1). Yet this gendered dynamic between author and critic seems to usefully inform Postmodern Romantic's deeply considered, highly perceptive assessment of Hannah's flawed male protagonists. Building upon an essay which appeared in this journal in 1991—itself perhaps the best piece of Hannah criticism previously published—the first chapter observes that Hannah's men are pathological liars.³ However, Weston shows that such seemingly juvenile lies are actually tragic attempts to live up to masculinist “cultural mythologies of war and heroes” (p. 11). Weston ingeniously and convincingly argues that the lying rage of the archetypal “American manchild” is expressed in the very episodic nature of Hannah's plots: the narrative fails to develop because Hannah's males themselves fail to develop from boys into men.

Subsequent chapters maintain the overall concern with masculinity while encompassing other thematic aspects of Hannah's fiction. Chapter Three emphasizes the link between lying and storytelling itself—both in oral traditions and in contemporary, self-reflexive fictions. A brilliant reading of Hannah's postmodern tall-tale “Evening of the Yarp” crystallizes both perspectives. It is also in Chapter Three that Weston advances the central, titular argument that, for all Hannah's postmodern irony, he is finally “a romantic writer—nostalgic and possessed of a great sadness,” yet more optimistic than “most postcontemporary writers” (p. 102). There are echoes here of Michael Spikes's thesis that Hannah is less a “Southern writer” than in the American Romantic grain of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.⁴ The fourth and final chapter considers Hannah's “comic vision,” tracing it back to “southern and southwestern humor” (p. 106) and Hannah's stylistic appropriation of the rock ‘n’ roll “riff.”

In Chapter Two, Weston begins by considering Hannah's characters' search for selfhood within the “Southern” context. Having made the routine references to Southerners' quest for self-identity since the Civil War, Weston considers how Hannah's contemporary men are caught between traditional, regional ideology and “the new moral consciousness engendered by the civil rights and women's movements” (p. 42). As the established Southern code of honor comes under pressure from these alternative perspectives, Hannah's male characters “do battle with the code by both aspiring to and struggling against its mythic, heroic ideal” (p. 47). In particular, Weston considers the Southern male mythos of war, as complexly expressed in Hannah's postmodern conflation of the Civil War and the conflict in Vietnam. In both Airships and Ray, the epistemological “literature of memory” is superseded by a postmodern, ontological confusion of “past war experiences and present reality” (p. 49). Some of this territory was covered nearly a decade ago by Kenneth Seib.⁵ As such, the truest value of Weston's own work on Southern men and war emerges when she turns to Hannah's more recent collections, Bats out of Hell and High Lonesome. There is a particularly fine reading of the relationship between the chaos of war and the repetitive, fragmented incoherent narrative in “Bats out of Hell Division.”

Weston's take on the “Southernness” of Hannah's work is not always so fully developed. “Nicodemus Bluff” is rightly identified as “a parody of that quintessential southern story of a boy's initiation into manhood—Faulkner's ‘The Bear’” (p. 24). However, Weston stops short just as she seems poised to explicate Hannah's postsouthern, parodic relationship to the Dixie Limited himself. And when Weston comments that “Interestingly, the theme of the alienated watcher is important to other southern writers, including Walker Percy, and most recently, Richard Ford” (p. 93), one is left wondering why “Southernness” is important or even interesting here. Are alienation or voyeurism really “Southern” themes? Are Percy, Ford, or Hannah “southern writers” at all?

Weston does not take the explicitly postsouthern turn explored by Lewis Simpson, Kreyling, and Scott Romine; indeed, a footnote acknowledges the rather different influence of Louis Rubin. Yet Postmodern Romantic takes Hannah's work beyond the existing scope of Southern literary theory through the sheer range of Weston's critical approaches, and her eye-opening associations between Hannah and other, non-Southern writers. Regularly engaging with short-story theory, Weston also utilizes Bakhtin and Barthes, and reaches back to earlier American literary critics like Leslie Fiedler and Richard Chase for valuable insights. There are frequent illuminating comparisons between the short stories of Hannah and Hawthorne; Salinger and Stephen Crane are cited to dazzling effect; and Weston even claims that Hannah's postmodern “reservoir of styles and genres” is “perhaps surpassed only by such intertextuality as is found in [Sterne and Joyce]” (p. 88). If this seems an outrageous claim, it is a tribute to the persuasive brilliance of Weston's intertextual associations that one is prepared to countenance the possibility. Only occasionally does a passing theoretical reference to Lacan or Derrida seem to need unpacking, or a litany of intertexts running from Shakespeare through Byron to Thomas Wolfe seem rather too freewheeling. Ultimately, it is Weston's ability to read the work within these larger literary fields which takes Barry Hannah—and Postmodern Romantic—beyond any limiting sense of “Southern literature.”

Turning to Perspectives on Richard Ford, one should first thank Huey Guagliardo for commissioning the first critical essays devoted to Ford's less celebrated works: A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, and Wildlife. We should also be grateful to Guagliardo for collating most of the useful criticism which has so far been published on Ford. (Though I would immediately qualify that English novelist Nick Hornby's graceful chapter on Ford in Contemporary American Fiction [1992] is conspicuous by its absence, even from the bibliography.) Academic criticism of Ford's work began in 1990 with Edward Dupuy's essay on The Sportswriter. A decade on, one is struck by how Dupuy anticipated those numerous other critics who have related Ford's work to Walker Percy's.

Indeed, only a year later, Fred Hobson situated Ford within a Percyan Southern literary tradition. Hobson's piece remains an inventive close reading of Ford's novel; however, its theoretical failings are more evident now than they were when the essay first appeared in The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (1991). Though otherwise barely revised. Hobson's essay is retitled “Pest-Faulkner, Post-Southern?” The answer to that question remains “no,” if not immediately so. Considering that Southern shibboleth, “place,” Hobson starts from the skeptical position that the expatriate Mississippian, Frank Bascombe, provides a “postmodern definition of place” (p. 84). Yet by the end of the essay, Hobson concludes that Bascombe's “great desire … to link with place, whether the place is suburban New Jersey or Detroit” (p. 91) is somehow essentially “Southern.” It is worth considering what might have happened had Hobson updated his argument to encompass Independence Day. My feeling is that the flawed “Southern” approach simply could not hold with the second Bascombe novel. Assessing Independence Day, it is almost impossible to identify textual evidence which might support, even obliquely, “Southern” notions of “place” or “community.” Rather (as I have argued elsewhere), Bascombe's new job as a “Residential Specialist” enables him to understand that “place” and “community” are contingent upon the finance-capitalist production of space as real estate.⁶ Even more than The Sportswriter, Independence Day seems to me to be a book about postsouthern, late-capitalist America, not some Agrarian-rural or even Percyan-suburban “South.”

When I took a preliminary glance at the list of contributors to Guagliardo's volume, I did sense some kind of Southern academic and institutional investment in Richard Ford. The book is published by the University Press of Mississippi; all but one of the contributors is affiliated with a Southern university (three of them, including Guagliardo, are in the English department at LSU, Eunice); even Jeffrey Folks, the only “international” contributor (he works in Japan), is a Southern literary scholar. Happily, my preconceptions regarding Ford's unhappy relationship with the “Southern” conundrum were banished by the newer essays; following Ford himself, most of the contributors abjure regional and theoretical restrictions. It is true that Robert Funk seems obliged to begin by pointing out that, while Ford “is frequently included in the canon of southern writers, he picks most distinctly unsouthern locales” (p. 53). However, Funk's essay itself vindicates the non-Southern approach to Ford's work, considering The Ultimate Good Luck (set largely in Mexico, after all) within the generic context of detective fiction. The benchmarks here are Hammett and Chandler, not Faulkner.

A similarly innovative approach is offered by Priscilla Leder in her essay on gender relations in Rock Springs. Leder's brave thesis is that, for all that male voices dominate the narrative in Ford's short-story collection, the limitations of those men became all too apparent; women, by contrast, exhibit strength and mystery in their very silence. I call this a brave thesis because other critics have been far more skeptical regarding gender relations in Ford's work. In particular, I recall a review in Brightleaf by Doris Betts which expressed concern that, in both Independence Day and Women with Men, “several women … struggle for two-way communication with males.”⁷

Elinor Ann Walker begins her article on “Great Falls” and Wildlife by disavowing Hobson's “Southern” perspective, and noting that “Ford is much more apt to quote Sartre than Faulkner” (p. 122). Indeed, Walker's essay turns upon Ford's fascination with such existential concepts as being, knowing, and nothingness. Walker's essay is the most theoretically sophisticated expression of what Guagliardo calls the contributors' collective tendency to “place Ford's texts within the framework of the literature of alienation” (p. xii). Considering Ford's whole canon, this is a plausible organizing theme. However, I had serious reservations about the ways in which some contributors conceived “alienation.” Repeatedly, I came across generalizing references to “the individual's sense of displacement in a chaotic modern world” (Funk, p. 53) or “the isolation and loneliness of modern experience” (Leder, p. 97). In the failure to situate Ford's characters in relation to specific socio-economic processes, there emerges a tendency towards vulgar existentialism—what Edward Soja calls “pure contemplation of the isolated individual,” and what Henri Lefebvre, assessing Sartre's early work, once termed “excremental philosophy.”⁸ Most of the essays never consider that the alienation of Ford's characters might result from capitalism's role in “the [post]modern world.” Perhaps late Sartre might have been useful here; maybe, rather than invoking a vague idea of “alienation,” George Lukács's theory of reification could have been applied.

If one danger of vulgar existentialism is the tendency to generalize the individual's sense of alienation as “an inevitable part of the human predicament” (Guagliardo, p. 4), this tendency seems particularly apparent in Guagliardo's opening essay. Guagliardo proceeds from the premise that “Everyone is marginal,” as gnomically uttered by the Mexican lawyer Carlos Bernhardt in The Ultimate Good Luck. This worldview approximates Michel de Certeau's belief that “marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive.”⁹ Yet such a sweeping conception of marginality fails to make even the most basic socio-economic distinctions. Hence, Guagliardo uncritically equates Harry Quinn, an ugly American if ever there was one, with the Mexican-Indian “Marginales” scavenging for their very existence on a waste dump on the edge of Oaxaca. Even used “metaphorically” (p. 3), the concept of “marginality” descends into relativistic banality (“in a sense we are all homeless nomads” [p. 23]).

Part of the problem here is that Ford himself sometimes seems to push a pessimistic and vulgarly existential worldview—a worldview which can also spill over into the “grim nihilism” which Hornby sees in A Piece My Heart, or the agentless naturalism expressed in the oft-quoted last line of “Great Falls.” By contrast, the two Bascombe novels more clearly deal with “the individual's alienation from society” (p. xii)—contemporary capitalist society. William Chernecky's “Isolation and Alienation in the Bascombe Novels” successfully assesses Frank's battle against solipsism, his struggle to balance “self” against “public responsibility” (p. 166), and usefully considers each character's “socioeconomic footing in the great American crowd” (p. 168).

However, the most impressive piece of Ford criticism yet published remains Jeffrey Folks's “Richard Ford's Postmodern Cowboys.” “Postmodern cowboys” are those men in Ford's fiction who have been made into “transient laborers with few loyalties or social ties” (p. 147). Folks cites Jack Russell's “temporary and dissociated” (p. 145) labor, thereby reminding us that the tragedy of “gender relations” in Wildlife only comes to the fore when Russell loses his middle-class position at the local golf club and takes a seasonal fire-fighting job away from Great Falls (Russell later dies in an oil-field accident in Nevada). Folks rescues the socio-economic meaning of “marginality” by considering individuals struggling within a specific marginalized culture—the “provincial working-class culture” (p. 149) of the West—and by mediating the concept through Deleuze and Guttari. First published in Folks's own collection Southern Writers at Century's End (1997), “Richard Ford's Postmodern Cowboys” rather belies that book's title. For Folks shows just how completely Ford has turned away from Faulkner's Mississippi and towards Montana, Michigan, and New Jersey—away from “Southern writing” in the Agrarian grain and towards “the social and economic dilemmas of America as a whole” (p. 143).

Notes

1. Richard Ford quoted in Dick Ellis and Graham Thompson. “An Interview with Richard Ford,” OverHere: A European Journal of American Culture, 16 (Winter 1996), 114.

2. See Michael Kreyling, “Fee, Fie, Faux Faulkner: Parody and Postmodernism in Southern Literature,” Southern Review, 29 (Winter 1993), 1-15.

3. Ruth Weston, “‘The Whole Damn Lying Opera of It’: Dreams, Lies and Confessions in the Fiction of Barry Hannah,” Mississippi Quarterly, 44 (Fall 1991), 411-428.

4. Michael Spikes, “Barry Hannah in the American Grain,” Notes on Mississippi Writers, 23 (1991), 25-35.

5. Kenneth Seib, “‘Sabers, Gentlemen, Sabers’: The J. E. B. Stuart Stories of Barry Hannah,” Mississippi Quarterly, 45 (Winter 1991-92), 41-52.

6. Martyn Bone, “New Jersey Real Estate and the Postsouthern Sense of Place: Richard Ford's Independence Day,” American Studies in Scandinavia (Fall 2001, forthcoming).

7. Doris Betts, “Lost in Translation,” Brightleaf. September-October 1997, p. 14.

8. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 131-132.

9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xvii.