The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South

INTRODUCTION: The Old South and Historical Causality

INTRODUCTION The Old South and Historical Causality Recent developments in critical theory haverelegated the chronological dimension of literary experience to a position ofmarkedly less importance in the scheme of things than it had once enjoyed. For those of us who concern ourselves with the literary imagination of the American South, what we do for a living has supposedly been rendered obsolete. The new dispensation has even dismissed as largely irrelevant, or at any rate partial and limited, the assumption on which is based not only the study of Southern literature but an important way that Southerners both literary and unliterary have tended to view their world, which is to say, historically. The custom of thinking that what something now is importantly involves the question of how it got that way has always been so deeply ingrained in the thought processes of most Southern writers that to identify the region's writings with the "historical sense" is little more than a truism. In that finest and most profound of all works of the Southern literary imagination, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, a young Quentin Compson fights a losing battle with his community's history. He would like to escape its hold, go off to Harvard University, and live unencumbered in the Time Present of the early twentieth century, but he ends up in a dormitory room in Cambridge, lying on his bed trembling and with his teeth chattering, not from the New England winter but from the realization that people and eventsof a half-century ago and more have irrevocably shaped and marked his own consciousness. If Absalom, Absalom! exemplifies anything about the South, both in the way of telling and the story told, it is that the habitof 2 THE EDGE OF THE SWAMP experiencing the present as if it were importantly andinescapably the outcome of the past is an attribute of consciousness itself, and not just a method of accounting for cause and effect chronologically . Where the usual historical novel—say, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind—begins at the chronological beginning and is recounted in linear fashion, Faulkner's tale opens in the thenTime Present, with a young man listening to an elderly woman telling him about events of the past, and simultaneously thinking about himself as doing so. It proceeds to show the impact ofwhat she and others tell him about the past, and what he thinks and feels about that past. As he learns more and more and develops his own conjectures about it, he is presented as becoming ever more involved emotionally in the accumulating moral revelation of the events and relationships being reported and deduced. Ultimately he is seen as being both awed and appalled at what he has learned—and it has been the telling of the story that has both caused that response and mirrored the process oflearning about it. Both processes are historical; but where the development of the story of Quentin's enlarging emotional response is presented in linear fashion, that of his discovery of the events of the longago past is spatial, or what is nowadayscalled "associative"—that is, events are being learned in juxtaposition with other events, existing simultaneously in vertical, or spatial, extension, affecting and being affected by each other. Events are then arranged to emphasize chronological causation, on the assumption that a proper understanding depends upon a chronological arrangement to make clear the causality—its moral implications, its underlying meanings, seen in terms of the responsibility for subsequent events. Such is the nature of historical consciousness. The student of the Old South and its literature, of my generation at least, finds himself in something of the position of Quentin Compson in Faulkner's great novel, and, to an extent, in the position of the author of a book like Absalom, Absaloml as well. For, if one was born in the South and grew up there, one not only heard and was taught a great deal about antebellum Southern life when one was young, but much of what one afterward learned over the years has distinctly modified, not just factually but in terms ofunderlyinginterpretative assumptions, the "truth" of the past. More than that, all of it mattered a great deal, indeed INTRODUCTION 3 still matters, for knowing it affects one's present attitudes. Andif any single thing is certain, it is that one's own experience of Southern history is "spatial" as well as...