Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South by Bryan Giemza (review)

Bryan Giemza’s Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South aggregates the lives and literary outputs of Irish Catholic writers of the American South in an effort to highlight the role authors so located have played in the (ongoing) process of “southern ethnogenesis” (22). Notwithstanding his exemplars’ common disavowal of one or more of the points of identity he constellates in order to delimit the group, Giemza treats literary personages ranging from obvious choices – like Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell, and Father Abram Ryan – to lesser-known (e.g. Adam Douglass) and surprising luminaries (e.g. Cormac McCarthy) on the basis that the literary biographies of each evince the legacy of Irish ancestry and its attendant outsiderness, “a meaningful remnant of Catholicism” (27), and southernness “where it counts”: either “in the landscape of the mind” (23) or in an affinity for the representation of dead mules.

The introductory chapter details Giemza’s rather capacious principle(s) of selection and usefully enumerates the complex of interests that has worked against the isolation and explication of Irish Catholic southern writers, which comprises the critical predilection for the “Scots-Irish” in Southern literary studies, Irish Catholic southerners’ assimilationist tendencies, and the prejudicial neglect of Catholic writers. Subsequent chapters exercise Giemza’s stated methodology – “I usually begin by considering various axes of identity and posing basic questions: How southern was this writer? How Catholic? And finally, how Irish?” (161) – either in thematically-arranged group portraits or in longer engagements with single authors. In an example of the former case, Giemza’s third chapter reads Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin, William Marion Reedy, and Lafcadio Hearn in the service of detailing the slippery rhetorical construction and valuation of “the Irish” (and, most especially, “Irish Catholics”) with and against that of black Americans during the nineteenth century. Regarding the latter strategy, perhaps the most compelling chapters are those that feature sustained treatments of O’Connor and McCarthy, and Giemza’s thorough explication of McCarthy’s anti-Catholic, or negative, Catholicism. Representatively, Giemza argues that McCarthy’s “work confronts the fear that Catholicism’s cosmology offers an inadequate response to the mystery of evil and to a world where belief itself seems a kind of travesty when an interventionist God seems far too remote a possibility” (230).

Giemza’s ascription of Catholic identity to McCarthy despite McCarthy’s apparent unbelief, however apt, suggests one difficulty with the project, which is that the terms of inclusion keep shifting to accommodate the writer under study at any given moment. Giemza addresses this meaningfully (see, e.g., p. 23), but the effect is that the broader thesis about these writers’ role in the “invention of the American South” occasionally takes a back seat to the work of dressing them for the category. To wit: the critical and popular imputation of Irishness to Joel Chandler Harris despite his apparent lack of Irish ancestry, while interesting, seems as data for another argument. That being said, the treatments of Harris and McCarthy are illuminating, and they join Giemza’s needful extrication of Margaret Mitchell’s critique of southern romanticism from the nettles of her reception as a champion thereof, which is a product of the film adaptation of Gone With the Wind rather than of the book itself, as highlights of this multilayered literary biography of the South’s Irish Catholic literati.