Inhabiting Contemporary Southern and Appalachian Literature: Region and Place in the Twenty-First Century

2. One Writer’s Place: The South of George Garrett

2 One Writer’s Place The South of George Garrett Place is not located in a pre-given space, after the manner of physical technological space. The latter unfolds itself only through the reigning of places of a region. Martin Heidegger, “Art and Space” Well-worn and much-maligned, the interdisciplinary concept known as globalization generally espouses the vision of a borderless world dominated by multinationals and markets, vanguards of a homogenized culture shaped by Western values and a grand narrative of reason. However , beneath this imagined oneness reside a number of lingering, though perhaps doomed, systems and paradoxical elements. For example, the concept of nationalism continues to present itself as a complex sociopolitical phenomenon, constantly in formation, deformation, and reformation in response to various other catalysts of change. The dominant state form over the last five centuries or so, the nation-state emerged on a broad historical canvas out of dramatic processes of social change that incorporated empires, city-states, tribes, and feudal lords. Often taking the defensive in light of its tenuous mutability, the nation-state usually is portrayed by globalization proponents in terms of its narrowness, selfishness , and exclusiveness. Delving deeper, beyond nationalism, we spy the stubborn, familiar phenomenon of regionalism, nearer to each of us though sometimes more difficult to perceive. Often depicted by globalization thinkers as a smaller, meaner, more nostalgic form of nationalism, regionalism perpetuates a collective set of visions and values aimed at the establishment of a local system, formal or informal, within a specific geographical area. Yet, for all its backward provincialism, the regional context finds itself attracting increasing recognition from observers of 52 · Part II. A Matter of Context: Region and Place international relations, international political economies, and international development, as well as by governments and other stakeholders in civil society and the private sector. Increasingly, economic and cultural leaders find themselves searching for regional solutions to the problems and challenges presented by national and global forces. As a result, much energy is now being devoted to studying how regional processes relate to globalization, including how regional trade arrangements may be stumbling blocks or stepping stones to ever-increasing free trade and whether regional integration, economic as well as cultural, can be understood as a way of negotiating nationalism and globalization or as a way of creating a social buffer against these forces’ potentially disturbing effects. As strange as it might seem, these issues and revelations are not particularly new or unrecognized in the literature of the American South, a regional genre of writing long conversant with the pressures and complexities of national and, increasingly, international discourses and economies. After all, with the notable exceptions of university presses and marvels such as Algonquin Books, it is to the large (inter)national presses and the still-dominant literary region of the Northeast that southern writers continue to turn, and often move into, in the hopes of garnering publication and reputation. This long-standing diasporic intellectual trend—lamented by writers as far apart in chronology and sensibility as William Gilmore Simms and Lee Smith—also manifests itself on the international level as witnessed by Faulkner conferences in China and the odd phenomenon of Christine Chaufour-Verheyen’s work of criticism William Styron: Le 7e jour appearing in France as a mass-market paperback and outselling hosts of novels. * * * Although many writers have commented knowledgeably on the shifting place of southern literature in national and international literary contexts, the single figure who invested the most time and ink examining the tension between southern writers and the national publishing scene over the past half century was George Garrett, who, up to his death in 2008, ranked as one of the region’s few remaining distinguished men of letters . Editor, translator, dramatist/scriptwriter, Poet Laureate of Virginia, award-winning fiction writer, teacher, and mentor, and wide-ranging reviewer and essayist (whose work regularly appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and Sewanee Review), Garrett—by turns donning the One Writer’s Place: The South of George Garrett · 53 armor of poetry, prose, or spoken rhetoric (his father was an admirably hard-nosed and uncompromising lawyer)—consistently waded headlong into the issues at hand, be they aesthetic, historical, social, economic, political, or otherwise. Over the years, the South and the publishing dilemma for southern writers remained particular and constant points of interest: from his first two published essays in 1957, dealing respectively with the work of...