In 2009 The Oxford American polled 134 Southern writers and academics and put together a list of the greatest Southern novels of all time based on their responses. All save one, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were published between 1929 and 1960. What we think of when we think of “Southern fiction” exists now almost entirely within the boundaries of the two generations of writers that occupied that space. Asked to name great American authors, we’ll give answers that span time from Hawthorne and Melville to Whitman to DeLillo. Ask for great Southern ones and you’ll more than likely get a name from the Southern Renaissance: William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe—all of them sandwiched into the same couple of post-Agrarian decades.
The two waves of Southern writers that crested in the wake of the Agrarian-Mencken fight, first in the 1930s and ’40s, and then in the ’50s and ’60s, didn’t build upon the existing tradition of Southern letters. They weren’t conceived of as new additions to the canon, but as an entirely new canon unto themselves, supplanting the old. They remade the popular notion of Southern literary culture, obscuring predecessors who had, in their time, seemed immortal.
“Southern,” as a descriptor of literature, is immediately familiar, possessed of a thrilling, evocative, almost ontological power. It is a primary descriptor, and alone among American literary geographies in that respect. Faulkner’s work is essentially “Southern” in the same way that Thomas Pynchon’s is essentially “postmodern,” but not, you’ll note, “Northeastern.” To displace Faulkner from his South would be to remove an essential quality; he would functionally cease to exist in a recognizable way.
It applies to the rest of the list, too (with O’Connor the possible exception, being inoculated somewhat by her Catholicism). It is impossible to imagine these writers divorced from the South. This is unusual, and a product of the unusual circumstances that gave rise to them. Faulkner, Lee, Percy, and Welty were no more Southern than Edgar Allen Poe or Sidney Lanier or Kate Chopin, and yet their writing, in the context of the South at that time, definitively was. There’s a universal appeal to their work, to be certain, but it’s also very much a regional literature, one grappling with a very specific set of circumstances in a fixed time, and correspondingly, one with very specific interests: the wearing away of the old Southern social structures, the economic uncertainty inherent in family farming, and overt, systematized racism (which, while undoubtedly still present in the South today, is very much changed from what it was). (...)
Put a character in a tobacco field and give them a shotgun and an accent and it will evoke, without fail, a sense of the South; this is true. If they pop off with a “Hey there, y’all,” it will sound fitting, correct, like the accordion bleats that mark transitions between stories in a public radio program; useful in pushing you toward a desired emotional state, and fun to listen to when done well. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t mean anything. If this is, in fact, “Southern fiction,” then it is becoming as stale as it was a century ago—updated only in that, instead of regurgitating the Lost Cause ethos, it is now Faulkner’s South that’s subjected to the regional nostalgic impulse, a double reverberation.
There is nothing wrong with these writers because of this. It’s not that they’ve failed somehow to keep up, or are stupefying readers, or anything of the sort. It’s that this kind of writing is no longer reflective of the South—or, it reflects a South that is no longer. We wouldn’t think of someone writing whaling novels as quintessentially “New England” anymore, either. The South isn’t so homogenous a culture as it once was, and the societal tropes that Faulkner and Welty and even Barry Hannah grew up with and explored in their fiction are, in large part, gone. The rise of industrial-scale agribusiness, rapid suburbanization, the death of traditional industries like textiles, the corresponding growth of high-tech industries, a major increase in the Hispanic population: all these things and many more have contributed to a wildly different South than the one summoned in what we casually call “Southern writing.”
by Ed Winstead, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Alec Soth
The two waves of Southern writers that crested in the wake of the Agrarian-Mencken fight, first in the 1930s and ’40s, and then in the ’50s and ’60s, didn’t build upon the existing tradition of Southern letters. They weren’t conceived of as new additions to the canon, but as an entirely new canon unto themselves, supplanting the old. They remade the popular notion of Southern literary culture, obscuring predecessors who had, in their time, seemed immortal.“Southern,” as a descriptor of literature, is immediately familiar, possessed of a thrilling, evocative, almost ontological power. It is a primary descriptor, and alone among American literary geographies in that respect. Faulkner’s work is essentially “Southern” in the same way that Thomas Pynchon’s is essentially “postmodern,” but not, you’ll note, “Northeastern.” To displace Faulkner from his South would be to remove an essential quality; he would functionally cease to exist in a recognizable way.
It applies to the rest of the list, too (with O’Connor the possible exception, being inoculated somewhat by her Catholicism). It is impossible to imagine these writers divorced from the South. This is unusual, and a product of the unusual circumstances that gave rise to them. Faulkner, Lee, Percy, and Welty were no more Southern than Edgar Allen Poe or Sidney Lanier or Kate Chopin, and yet their writing, in the context of the South at that time, definitively was. There’s a universal appeal to their work, to be certain, but it’s also very much a regional literature, one grappling with a very specific set of circumstances in a fixed time, and correspondingly, one with very specific interests: the wearing away of the old Southern social structures, the economic uncertainty inherent in family farming, and overt, systematized racism (which, while undoubtedly still present in the South today, is very much changed from what it was). (...)
Put a character in a tobacco field and give them a shotgun and an accent and it will evoke, without fail, a sense of the South; this is true. If they pop off with a “Hey there, y’all,” it will sound fitting, correct, like the accordion bleats that mark transitions between stories in a public radio program; useful in pushing you toward a desired emotional state, and fun to listen to when done well. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t mean anything. If this is, in fact, “Southern fiction,” then it is becoming as stale as it was a century ago—updated only in that, instead of regurgitating the Lost Cause ethos, it is now Faulkner’s South that’s subjected to the regional nostalgic impulse, a double reverberation.
There is nothing wrong with these writers because of this. It’s not that they’ve failed somehow to keep up, or are stupefying readers, or anything of the sort. It’s that this kind of writing is no longer reflective of the South—or, it reflects a South that is no longer. We wouldn’t think of someone writing whaling novels as quintessentially “New England” anymore, either. The South isn’t so homogenous a culture as it once was, and the societal tropes that Faulkner and Welty and even Barry Hannah grew up with and explored in their fiction are, in large part, gone. The rise of industrial-scale agribusiness, rapid suburbanization, the death of traditional industries like textiles, the corresponding growth of high-tech industries, a major increase in the Hispanic population: all these things and many more have contributed to a wildly different South than the one summoned in what we casually call “Southern writing.”
by Ed Winstead, Guernica | Read more:
Image: Alec Soth
