Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative (review)

In Cultural Values in the Southern Sporting Narrative (2002), Jacob F. Rivers III has produced a promising volume on the relationships between Southern American traditions and values and the narratives and discourses of Southern sport, specifically the aristocratic sporting tradition, in canonical and non-canonical Southern American texts. Beginning in the Antebellum American South, Rivers traverses one hundred-fifty years of southern sporting narratives that encompass works as diverse as William Elliott’s biographical account of hunting and fishing in Carolina Sports by Land and Water and William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, and throughout Sporting Narrative Rivers does an excellent job of expounding upon and delineating the intellectual and philosophical traditions that unite such seemingly disparate texts and examining how the aristocratic southern sporting tradition becomes reworked and reinvented throughout its history.

Rivers’s goal in Sporting Narrative is to explain the Southerner’s reaction to the changing culture of the South and how Southerners attempted to reconcile their changing world with their traditional aristocratic values. Rivers writes in his preface that:

The truly remarkable thing about these authors whose work brackets the chronological scope of our study is that they came to the same fundamental conclusion: In the course of their life’s experiences while hunting and fishing in the South, the principles underlying the aristocratic code of southern sportsmanship provided an excellent cultural framework within which to think about and to articulate the negative changes they saw in their respective societies.

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Rivers’s literary analysis moves chronologically from Elliot’s pre-Civil War era sporting tales to Williams Gilmore Simms’s ante-bellum stories to the twentieth century texts of Faulkner. Alongside of his historical assessment of these texts, Rivers situates Jose Ortega y Gasset’s philosophical treatise on hunting, Meditations on Hunting (1972) as a unifying, ahistorical, theoretical apparatus. Presented as a theoretical understanding of “man’s” relationship to nature and the hunt, Meditations on Hunting allows Rivers to make universalizing theories about hunting and sport to compliment his specific historical and literary analysis.

By far the most impressive aspects of Sporting Narrative are the detailed readings that Rivers gives each of his representative texts. This is particularly evident in his chapters on Elliott, Simms’s The Cub of the Panther and “How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife,” and Faulkner. Rivers displays a tremendous knack for enlivening these various texts and bringing out excitement inherent in the action described by the authors. In relating Eliott’s chapters on “Devilfishing” and “A Wild-Cat Hunt,” Rivers shows Elliot’s dedication to re-capturing the fast-paced and dangerous action of the hunt and the chase, but he also carefully deconstructs the text to examine how the action that Elliot recounts is always bound up in preserving the honor of the aristocratic southern gentleman. Rivers claims that:

The ideal sportsman we find in the first half of Carolina Sports is a brave and generous man, intensely aware of his close ties with the natural world that surrounds him and duty-bound to fulfill his obligations both to that world and his fellow human beings.

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Rivers seamlessly carries his analysis of southern sporting ideals from Elliot’s pre-Civil War stories into Simms’s post-bellum texts.

Rivers’s analysis demonstrates the continuation of the aristocratic sporting ideal into post-bellum sporting culture, but it correctly points out the lament that post-bellum writers like Simms felt in their perception that the “old” ante-bellum South had disappeared and that the “noblese oblige” of the aristocratic sporting figure was an antiquated notion that was lost among the present sporting participants.

Not surprisingly, the enforced cultural decadence and Simms’s personal and professional losses are clearly reflected in the ways in which he portrayed the southern sportsmen. Struggling against grinding poverty and the oppression of northern occupation, Simms and the postbellum sportsmen he presents in his later works have altered their perceptions of hunting from a sport to...