Andrew Hoberek

Department of English
University of Missouri-Columbia
hobereka@missouri.edu

 

Review of: Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998, and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

 

At first glance, nothing seems less postmodern than southern literature, a body of writing simultaneously dominated by the legacy of Faulknerian modernism and associated with an embattled critical and institutional conservatism. The study of southern literature still seems locked in an ethos of depth, seriousness, and monocultural integrity not only at odds with the postmodern world of surfaces, free play, and global multiculturalism, but indeed designed to defend prophylatically against this world.¹ Yet there’s a moment about two hundred pages into Patricia Yaeger’s groundbreaking new study of southern women’s writing, Dirt and Desire, that suggests how much those of us outside the field of southern literature have to learn from a renewed attention to southern writing. Yaeger quotes Adorno on the “incommensurab[ility]” of artworks “with historicism, which seeks to reduce them to a history external to them, rather than to pursue their genuine historical content” (182-183). Such reductive historicism, Yaeger suggests, has been the legacy of the critical tradition dominated, for the last sixty years, by the mythmaking sensibilities of Faulkner and the Agrarians: “In making history monumental,” she writes, “what is lost is a sense of its unintelligibility in the flux of experience: its rawness, its presentness” (183). This judgment, delivered almost off-handedly in the midst of a reading of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, deftly reorients our understanding of the contemporary culture wars. Complaints about critics “reduc[ing artworks] to a history external to them” issue, as we all know, from traditionalists seeking to defend the autonomy of literature from historical and political concerns. While by no means uninterested in history and politics, Yaeger’s Adornian gesture toward the specificity of the literary object suggests the extent to which some southernists have themselves sacrificed literature on the altar of their own essentialist narrative of southern history. What’s important here is not simply that Yaeger identifies the cultural right’s strategic hypocrisy. What’s important is the way her account suggests the buried kinship between southern literature and other, more recent, literatures intertwined with the politicized construction of subcultural identities. We are used to imagining identity politics and multicultural literature as products of the 1960s; could it be that these developments, so crucial to the political and aesthetic history of the twentieth century, actually have an earlier origin in the rise of a distinctly southern identity? This is the question that Yaeger’s book, and Michael Kreyling’s Inventing Southern Literature, compel us to ask, although neither formulates the question quite this way. Yet to ask the question this way–to ask whether southern literature might be understood as the origin of American multiculturalism and identity politics–not only reframes the genre but also our sense of multiculturalism and identity politics as political and literary-political phenomena. Taken together, these two books, despite their significant differences, mark a key shift in the study of southern literature, a shift that has important implications for the study of twentieth-century literature and culture more generally.

 

Kreyling’s book addresses the question of southern identity and its construction within and through the southern literary tradition from “the inside,” as it were. Invoking the locus classicus of an embattled southern intellectualism–Quentin Compson’s ambivalent defense of the South to his Harvard roommate, the Canadian Shreve–Kreyling refuses to side entirely either with Quentin’s defensiveness (“If one must be born in the South to participate meaningfully in its dialogue, then there is in fact only a monologue”) or with Shreve’s disdain (“On the other hand, Quentin’s roommate is no cultural prize either”; xviii). Instead, he chooses to foreground the debates and disagreements that have made up the southern critical tradition, belying the seemingly hermetic coherence that this tradition sometimes presents to those outside the field. Citing Gerald Graff, Kreyling argues that “teachers and students of southern literature have a world to gain from foregrounding the ‘conflicts'” that have shaped the study of southern literature (57). Kreyling casts his account in the form of a series of such conflicts: among the Agrarians; between their conservative legacy and the liberalism of Louis D. Rubin, Jr.; between the white, male tradition and subsequent generations of African American and female authors; and so forth. In this respect it is fitting that a book called Inventing Southern Literature addresses the period from the 1930s to the present; this is precisely Kreyling’s thesis, that southern literature is continually reinvented at each new moment of conflict and questioning. Kreyling’s narrative is not, however, one of simple assimilation. He recognizes the ways in which the hegemonic narrative of southern identity has foreclosed options for critics and creative writers alike. Indeed, in what is arguably his best–and certainly his most inventive–chapter, he claims that the first victim of the Faulknerian legacy was Faulkner himself, who “had to live at least the last decade of his life in the crowded company of representations, projections, avatars, ghosts of himself–many of which he [himself] had summoned” (130). Likewise, Kreyling asks, in his chapter on African American literature, “What interest could exist that might persuade a black southern writer that his [sic] identity is to be found in an ideology so consistently exclusionary and prejudicial to him and to images of him?” (77). This is a good question, and for the most part Kreyling doesn’t oversimplify the answer. His willingness to pursue the intersections between African American and southern literature leads him, among other places, to a powerful rereading of Ralph Ellison as–contrary to both Ellison’s own claims and the critical consensus about him–Richard Wright’s inheritor and defender (81-88).

 

Kreyling’s avowed partisanship is both his strength and his weakness. Yaeger contends that Kreyling’s goal of critically rereading the southern literary tradition is “unevenly achieved” (34), and it’s possible to read his ambivalence as of a piece with–rather than critical of–this tradition (recall Quentin’s “I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!“). At the same time, Kreyling’s willingness to wrestle with the question of southernness, rather than simply to dismiss it, leads to an account of southern identity as an ongoing historical project, one that is unevenly performed and frequently the site of explicit debate. Although he does not cite her, Kreyling provides a version of southern identity that enacts Diana Fuss’s model for identity politics in Essentially Speaking: he avoids rigid dichotomies between authenticity and inauthenticity; he understands southernness as historically constructed but none the less materially real. Kreyling’s book implicitly asks us to think about the ways in which the project of southern identity has influenced similar projects in late twentieth-century America. It may also help us to understand these latter-day forms of politically-motivated identity in ways that avoid the authenticity trap, that foreground relationships (positive and otherwise) among different identities, and that don’t flinch at uncomfortable politics–and here is where Kreyling’s subject matter may have the most to teach us.

 

Yaeger criticizes Kreyling’s approach by way of distinguishing her own, which is, she says, not to problematize “the official narrative along which the Dixie Limited has been bound” but rather “to dynamite the rails”–to go beyond the “mystifications designed to overlook the complexities of southern fiction” and to recover the narratives that exist alongside and behind the standard ones about place, patriarchy, and the past (34). In order to do this she sidesteps what she calls “the Faulkner industry” (xv, 96-97) and other frequently canonized male authors, focusing instead on an array of white and African American women writing in and about the South: Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Ellen Gilchrist, and Toni Morrison, to name just a few. Likewise, she replaces the standard thematics of southern literature with a range of new categories–“crisis and… contestation” (38) instead of community, neglected children instead of family, labor instead of miscegenation. In doing so, Yeager also refurbishes traditional categories, such as the grotesque.² Yaeger’s willingness to simply disregard the standard texts of southern literary history is bracing and edifying. “The central thesis of this book,” she writes,

 

is that older models of southern writing are no longer generative, that they don’t yield interesting facts about women’s fictions, about the struggle of some southern women to make sense of a society seething with untold stories, with racist loathing; nor do they help place this fiction within its “American” context. (xv)

 

Thus her response to Kreyling’s query about what interest the southern tradition could have for African American writers is simply to reverse the equation: Yeager insists that “We need to get over the idea that writing by African Americans has to fit a certain mold before it can be considered ‘southern'” and calls us to deploy African American literature to “change our definitions of what southern literatures are” (44).

 

Yaeger’s aims are, perhaps, not quite so far from Kreyling’s as she claims. She does, after all, maintain the category of southern literature, even if it looks completely different by the end of her book. Her admitted obsession with the grotesque remains, likewise, a distinctly southern obsession, and her prose demonstrates a propensity (familiar to readers of southern fiction) for empty adjectives like “lustrous” (xi) and “lush” (279 n. 2). Finally, she too begins by claiming for herself Quentin Compson’s inability “to refuse a lingering passion for the South” (1). In the end, her contribution lies in her weariness with the accepted stories about the South–“I’m tired of these categories,” she writes in her prologue (ix)–and in the two-way traffic she opens up between southern literary studies and other fields. Yaeger worries about who will read about southern literature outside the field of southern studies; her (hopefully successful) strategy for reinvigorating the field is to bring wide-ranging theoretical expertise–in black feminist studies, in whiteness studies, in body studies–to the table, in order to change the kinds of questions that we can ask about and through southern writing. Her use of Susan Tucker’s Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South as a touchstone, for instance, leads both to stunning readings of scenes of African American labor in southern writing and to speculations on literature’s role in maintaining or questioning the normative invisibility of such labor. In moments like this, Dirt and Desire enacts a powerful paradigm of creative destruction, teaching us to remake identity categories by attending to what isn’t discussed or debated and has remained until now out of bounds.

 

What may be most apparent about these books to those interested in postmodernism is the fact that while Kreyling and Yaeger both address contemporary writing, they do so more in terms of continuity than of rupture. For both of these critics, recent literature is best understood in relation to a tradition dating back to the 1930s. One response to this might be to conclude that southern literature really is a backwater, trapped in outmoded paradigms and thereby having nothing to tell us about postmodernity. Yet this would be a hasty conclusion. Michael Bérubé has recently recommended skepticism about our received language for discussing postmodern fiction, in which “we acknowledge that modernist fiction is fragmentary, experimental, and self-reflexive, but that postmodern fiction is, um, well, more so” (B4). In place of this increasingly untenable distinction, he proposes that we turn from formal categories to historical ones–in particular, the striking globalization of fiction in the second half of the twentieth century (B5). Bérubé’s advice is well taken, although it may be that globalization alone does not exhaust the ways that we can distinguish what comes after modernism. One other phenomenon that we might note is a kind of internal globalization, in which the stable canon of modernism that everyone is expected to know gives way to multiple canons with specialist readerships or constituencies. It’s possible to argue that the creation of southern fiction as a distinct category initiated this phenomenon. If this is so, then thinking about southern literature becomes crucial to understanding how the advent of postmodernity transforms the production and consumption of literature and other cultural artifacts.

 

For one thing, we might note that southern fiction comes into being as a distinct category during the Depression, when the South becomes visible as a particularly symptomatic site of national economic transformation; and that it achieves its highest cultural prominence in the 1950s, when its stereotypical “backwardness” suddenly provides enormous cultural cachet amidst concerns about suburbanization and national homogenization. John Aldridge was not the only critic in the postwar period to contend that “the South…, aside from certain ailing portions of the moral universe of New England, happens to be the only section of the country left where… there is still a living tradition and a usable myth” (143). Several decades later, Irving Howe underscored the connection between regional and ethnic difference, and located both as responses to perceived cultural homogenization, when he argued that southern fiction, like Jewish fiction, came to prominence at mid-century as the representative of a “subculture [which] finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment that it approaches disintegration” (586). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, meanwhile, the answer to Patricia Yaeger’s inquiry into “the diminished place of the South in the academic marketplace” (250) may be that the South is simply no longer different enough. As Yaeger herself notes, “the horrors of racism have migrated,” with the result that “everywhere is now the South” (251). Nor is it simply the case that the entire US now resembles its own erstwhile stereotype of a politically intransigent South, although this is true (and not just as far as racism is concerned–the execution record that once would have qualified George W. Bush as a classic example of the southern grotesque, for instance, now makes him into presidential material). Perhaps more importantly, the South has become more like the rest of the nation, with the Sunbelt now vying with the Pacific Rim for the country’s economic, social, and political leadership. As a result of these changes, we now look elsewhere for cultural difference. As we seek to write the history of our recent past, however, southern fiction’s rise and fall may have much to tell us about the conditions that have motivated a general interest in cultural difference–and how to think about these conditions without sacrificing the specificity of particular traditions. For this reason, those of us who don’t consider ourselves southernists have much to gain from turning to America’s first multicultural literature.

 

Notes

 

1. Joshua Esty has recently proposed that we replace the modern/postmodern divide with a tripartite division in which the first and final thirds of the twentieth century share similar anxieties about the international dispersal of people and capital, and thus have more in common with each other than either does with a middle third marked by the relative power and stability of the nation-state. Within this scheme, the publications of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and the Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in, respectively, 1929 and 1930 might be seen to bring southern literary nationalism into being as a response to the transnational (and regionally imperialist) modernism of the twenties.

 

2. For another brilliant revisionary account of the southern grotesque that bears affinities to Yaeger’s, see Adams.

Works Cited

 

• Adams, Rachel. “‘A Mixture of Delicious and Freak’: The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers.” American Literature 71.3 (1999): 551-583.
• Aldridge, John. In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity. New York: McGraw, 1956.
• Bérubé, Michael. “Teaching Postmodern Fiction Without Being Sure That the Genre Exists.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 19 May 2000: B4-B5.
• Esty, Joshua D. “National Objects: Keynesian Economics and Modernist Culture in England.” Modernism/Modernity 7.1 (2000): 1-24.
• Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, 1976.
• Tucker, Susan. Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South. New York: Schocken, 1988.