The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

Preface

Preface It is a truth universally acknowledged among southern literary scholars that “the South” and “southern literature” have been characterized by a “sense of place.” By 1996, the Natchez-born novelist Ellen Douglas could note, with a slight air of both bemusement and skepticism, that “Southern writers of fiction and poetry and the critics and academics of the literary world have been talking for a couple of generations about ‘Place’ and ‘the Sense of Place.’” Indeed, “Place, Sense of” has been so integral to southern literary and cultural discourse that it was deemed worthy of its own entry in the monumental Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989). Historian Charles Reagan Wilson made a valiant attempt to explicate this ubiquitous but usually underdefined concept.1 In The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction, I take a historicalgeographical materialist approach to the capitalist production and literary representation of “place” in the American South between the 1960s and the 1990s. I begin, however, by taking a lengthy backward glance at the Agrarians. This might not seem altogether original, given that southern literary critics have so often discussed the Agrarian group and, almost as frequently, distilled their own arguments through Agrarian ideas. But it is precisely the way in which the Agrarians and their neo-Agrarian literarycritical acolytes defined—or, to paraphrase Michael Kreyling, invented— southern literary “place” that interests me.2 In Part One of this book, I suggest that, even now, the standard southern literary-critical conception of “place” derives substantially from the Agrarians’ idealized vision of a rural , agricultural society. But more importantly—and more interestingly— I also want to recover an aspect of Agrarian theory that has been ignored or 1.EllenDouglas,“Neighborhoods,”inMarionBarnwell,ed.,APlaceCalledMississippi:Collected Narratives (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 456; Charles Reagan Wilson, “Place, Sense of,” in William Ferris and Wilson, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1137–38. 2. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). suppressed in later southern literary criticism: what historian Paul Conkin has called the Agrarians’ “proprietary ideal.” In Chapter 1, I reveal how, after 1930 (that is, after the publication of their most famous manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand), the Agrarians increasingly conceived southern place as agricultural real property, apotheosized in the subsistence farm. John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, et al. believed that the rescue and wider realization of this proprietary ideal o≠ered the South’s last best hope of surviving the vicissitudes of modern (finance) capitalism. This increased emphasis upon the economics of place—upon the relationship between “capitalism and land,” as Ransom once termed it3 —had serious repercussions for the fate of Agrarianism itself. Increasingly between 1931 and 1936—the year that they contributed to Who Owns America? a second symposium that has received only a fraction of the attention scholars have lavished upon I’ll Take My Stand—the leading Agrarians tried to transform their proprietary ideal into a social, political, and economic reality. However, this programmatic turn was ambushed by the actual farm policies of the New Deal, and the Agrarian movement disintegrated. Yet despite, or even because of, the resounding failure of practical Agrarianism, recognizing and recovering the original Agrarians’ focus on the relationships among capital, land, and place have profound implications for our contemporary understanding of the invention of “southern literature,” and the conventional practice of southern literary criticism. For the logic of the proprietary ideal implies that, if subsistence farming fails—if the South’s agricultural society capitulates to a money economy, finance-capitalist land speculation, and large-scale realestate development—then the South’s unique sense of “place” expires too. In the second half of Chapter 1, I assess Allen Tate’s southern literary criticism between 1935 and 1959, demonstrating how it is informed by exactly this sense that, as contemporary capitalism displaced agricultural real property in the 1930s, so both “the South” and “southern literature” were doomed. This is not to say that, after Who Owns America? the ideal of the agricultural South disappeared entirely from social debate, or from literary narrative. I discuss William Faulkner’s representation of Eula Varner in The Hamlet (1940) in terms of its distinctly Agrarian fantasy that the small-farm South’s supposedly virgin land would remain impenetrable to the voracious forces of capitalist land speculation and real-estate development. I show, too, how Robert 3. This was the title of an unpublished manuscript written by Ransom in...