Critical Survey

In 1971 Albert Murray published South To A Very Old Place. Commissioned by the editor of Harper’s magazine, Willie Morris, to write about ‘home’ in a series of articles, the African American writer produced much more: South To A Very Old Place is memoir, travelogue, social commentary. Orchestrated as a jazz and blues composition, it is a meditation on the American South. Taking his title as our starting point, in this issue of Critical Survey we have gathered contributors who continue the work of critically and creatively mapping the American South, a region that exasperates as it inspires definition(s). Murray’s blues forms are open-ended and improvised so the blues metaphor and the jazz form are key in a collection called ‘South To A New Place’. It begins to chart connections with ‘other’ Souths in ways that open up spaces and places from which we might read the South as a site of exchange – the South of Italy in Michael Kreyling’s essay; the South as shaped and commodified by the best-selling magazine Southern Living in Amy Elias’s essay; and the literary South of Walker Percy and Richard Ford’s making in Martyn Bone’s essay, for example.

Of the several stock answers to the perennial question ‘What is southern literature?’, the importance of ‘place’ (or the presence of ‘sense of place’) surely ranks near the top of the list. Immediately we are faced with a paradox: How can any regional literature be distinguished on so ambiguous a basis? Places are, after all, found everywhere and in all literatures, and it is doubtful that even a rigorous poetics could reliably identify a ‘sense of place’ that is distinctively southern. To complicate matters, ‘sense of place’ often seems to imply being located not merely in a distinctive region, but in a distinctive way; the term connotes something that is not just geographically different (a southern variation of a thing that exists elsewhere), but qualitatively different (a thing distinctive to the South). ‘Sense of place’, then, serves as both a description (southern literature has it) and a distinction (southern literature has more of it than other literatures). For my purposes here, it precisely the nebulous content of ‘place’ that makes it so useful as a point of entry into examining how critics have defined and practised southern literature; because of place’s conceptual instability, what stability it does possess can be ascribed almost exclusively to how it has been used. Arguably, the location of ‘place’ is not so much in the South or in southern literature as in the critical discourse about those things.

Most of us in southern literary studies have taken for granted the idea that southern literature is grounded in a ‘sense of place’, but questions about the meaning and significance of that sense of place have been troubling, particularly when linked in U.S. literature (as seems always to be the case) with the idea of ‘regionalism’. Is a literature ‘grounded in place’ necessarily a ‘regional’ literature? Many – including Eudora Welty – would say that it is not: ‘“Regional” is an outsider’s term’, she writes, which ‘has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing about life …’ Nevertheless, for Welty, ‘Location [italics mine] is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course’.1 ‘Place’, in other words, is a matter of ‘location’, of ‘situation’, a ‘conductor’ of the currents that move and move through a literary text; and unlike ‘region’ as it has usually been understood, ‘place’ and ‘location’ are subjective, experiential, insiders’ terms. If this is so, why has the sense of place been so closely linked with regionalism in U.S. literary history? It is especially odd when one considers that the sense of place suggests something that ‘centres’ whereas regionalism evokes ideas of the periphery, so that the literatures of the periphery are often said to be ‘centred’ in that famous ‘sense of place’, whereas those literatures of the ‘centre’ are presumably unplaced. The answer probably has something to do with the fact that Americans imagine change and possibility in terms of a flight from, or liberation from, place. This has been one very powerful version of the American Dream. But change and possibility, those forces that move narrative, might be more accurately imagined as a transfiguration of – rather than as a flight or liberation from – place.

Both nations were ‘made’ in the 1860s. One was proclaimed on March 17, 1861; the other began a doomed civil war for its autonomy on April 12, 1861. The architect of Italian unification, Count Camillo Cavour, did not live to see the national reality; he died a few months after the proclamation. Abraham Lincoln died before national unity was reclaimed. As a policy of unification, the victorious North dissolved monasteries without anticipating negative effects on employment and social services for the poor. The victorious North dissolved the slave labour system in the defeated states without adequately anticipating the effect on employment and social services for the poor and black. In the southern regions of Italy the primary organisation for agricultural land use was a large holding, usually owned by one family, and rented to peasants: latifundia. In the southern regions of the United States the primary organization for agricultural land use was a large holding, usually owned by one family, and worked by slave labour: plantations. Southerners in the new Italy tended to view their civilisation as separate from the new nation, ‘an ancient and glorious nation in its own right’.1 Southerners in the US tended to view their civilisation as separate within the nation as a whole, ‘ancient’ by New World standards, and ‘glorious’ by virtue of its traditions.

In 1980, Lewis Simpson published an essay entitled ‘The Closure of History in a Postsouthern America’. Simpson coined the term ‘postsouthern’ to denote the emergence of a new literary moment in which a central concept of southern renascence writing, ‘the history of the literary mind of the South seeking to become aware of itself’, no longer appeared to operate. Though Simpson’s initial definition of ‘postsouthern’ was tentative and particular, the neologism introduced into southern literary and cultural criticism an imperative to reassess the legitimacy of other established tropes, beliefs and constructs. Hence, Michael Kreyling has suggested that ‘Simpson characteristically had picked up on the symptoms of the postmodern/postsouthern before the rest of us.’ As it has been extended and reapplied by subsequent critics such as Kreyling, ‘postsouthern’ has been ‘an enabling word’ – similar to and synonymous with ‘postmodern’– with which to reassess the meaning of such foundational terms as ‘south’ and ‘southern’.

On January 5, 1999, the evening news programmes in Birmingham, Alabama reported that the upcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. Day might be marred by civic unrest. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had spent the 1998 King holiday inciting riots in Memphis, Tennessee, and this year, they were apparently going to focus on downtown Birmingham. Newscasters such as the urbane African American female anchor from Channel 13, Malena Cunningham, featured clips of Birmingham’s five-term, African American mayor, Richard Arrington, saying gracefully and with a hint of condescension that constitutionally the Klan had the right of public protest but that Birmingham’s best strategy would be to pay them no mind. The Klan was coming to Birmingham, Alabama.

In her essay, ‘Place in Fiction’, Eudora Welty describes place as identity.1 We put a poetic claim on, give a name to, a part of landscape that has put a claim on us. Place, therefore, is space to which meaning has been ascribed2 – as Scott Romine expresses it ‘a network of imperatives, codes, norms, limitations, duties, obligations and relationships’.3 As we name, therefore, we create, as Welty describes it, a crossroads, ‘a proving ground’.4 That place is the South, and the South is the ground of the novel. Yet, so often, as Barbara Ladd reminds us, place can become ‘something phantasmagoric … something longed lost and longed for … a locus of desire’ – a dream rather than a reality. Can place, she asks, function, become viable, dynamic and vital?

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998. paper ISBN 0-8139-1833-2.

Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution by Richard Godden, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 288. ISBN 0521- 56142-6 (hardback), £37.50.

The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction, by Louise H. Westling. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8203-2080-3. paper £14.50.

Inventing Southern Literature, by Michael Kreyling. Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 1998, Pp. xviii + 200. $17.00. ISBN 1-57806-045-1.

Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures Richard H. King and Helen Taylor, Eds. London: Pluto Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 242, ISBN 0 7453 0958 5 (HB), 0 7453 0957 7 (PB).

Literature, by PeterWiddowson. Routledge £8.99 ISBN 0-415-16914-3

The Feminine Political Novel in Victorian England, by Barbara Leah Harman. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998. ISBN 0-8139-1772-7.

Nature / Culture, New Orleans Haiku Gathering Around the Jackson Barracks Penitentiary. RICHARD GODDEN

Soneone Else’s Face JOHN MOLE

Kew JOHN GREENING

The Middle Way The Eel STEPHEN WADE

Notes on contributors

Notes for Contributors