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“PLUCKED UP BY THE ROOTS”:THE NOSTALGIC TRAJECTORIESOF THE SOUTHERN AGRARIANS
- University of Virginia Press
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* * * * “PLUCKED UP BY THE ROOTS”: THE NOSTALGIC TRAJECTORIES Of THE SOUTHERN AGRARIANS * * * * * * * * * * * “It is out of fashion these days to look backward rather than forward,” admits John Crowe Ransom at the start of the opening essay in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1). For Ransom and the other Southern agrarians, looking backward was a radical, if not a fashionable , way to counter a modernity they accused of breeding alienated individuals who had lost touch with community and place. These writers found an ideal “extended metaphor” in the American South, home of “a society, they felt, in which leisure, tradition, aesthetic and religious impulses had not been lost in the pursuit of economic gain” (Rubin xi, viii). Along with Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson , Ransom was one of the “Nashville Fugitives,” a group of writers at Vanderbilt University who began publishing poetry and criticism in the Fugitive and other publications in the early 1920s that lamented the debased state of life and the fine arts within an increasingly industrial and materialistic nation. The Fugitives joined forces with the Southern agrarians—writers, teachers, and other “men of letters”—to publish I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 (Rubin xi). The agrarians constructed Southern tradition out of two basic principles : first, a respect for nature—coded as white—and second, an explicitly anti-industrial and anti-national political agenda. Writing against what they saw as an “industrial regime,” the agrarians prized a regional culture that valued “regard for a certain terrain” (the Southern landscape ); tradition, identified with white European cultural heritage and tied to the aristocratic South; leisure, the presumed result of cultivating 52 / RECLAIMING NOSTALGIA tradition; and labor, which should take place in nature and proceed “leisurely ” (1). The South was a “lost cause” that was worth fighting for, even if it was likely to be a difficult, even unwinnable battle (2). Most notably for my study, I’ll Take My Stand yokes nostalgia to a highly racialized ideal of nature as it sounds its call to arms in support of “the Southern tradition” (x). In his provocatively titled essay “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” Ransom recommends physical and cultural “rootedness” as the best prescription for a country sickened by industrialization . He decries progressives as having lost touch with traditional values by obsessively looking forward. According to Ransom, “The progressivist says in effect: Do not allow yourself to feel homesick” (6). Thus, nostalgia—feeling homesick—becomes, for Ransom and the other agrarians, a necessary corrective to progressive values and, as such, an inherently conservative emotion and narrative. Ransom defines nostalgia as follows: Memories of the past are attended with a certain pain called nostalgia . . . . Nostalgia is a kind of growing pain, psychically speaking. It occurs to our sorrow when we have decided that it is time for us, marching to some magnificent destiny, to abandon an old home, an old provincial setting, or an old way of living to which we had become habituated. It is the complaint of human nature in its vegetative aspect, when it is plucked up by the roots from the place of its origin and transplanted in foreign soil, or even left dangling in the air. And it must be nothing else but nostalgia, the instinctive objection to being transplanted, that chiefly prevents the deracination of human communities and their complete geographical dispersion as the casualties of an insatiable wanderlust. (6) For Ransom, nostalgia operates as both a narrative tool—to manipulate readers into sharing the author’s political beliefs—and a collectively shared sentiment, which readers might choose to adopt. Ransom recovers nostalgia as a productive emotional experience that grounds an individual or a culture in the conservative values of home, family and community . He presumes nostalgia will “cure” victims of progress by causing them to appreciate the values of staying, or returning, home. More than that, his definition links nostalgia with mobility: Ransom posits nostalgia as a much-needed antidote not just to progress itself but also to the migrations—both actual and symbolic—that unchecked progress spurs. Ransom picks up on nostalgia’s historical meanings—its original “diagnosis” in soldiers and exiles—when he describes the emotion as [54.160.133.33] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:39 GMT) “PLUCKED UP BY THE ROOTS” / 53 a homesickness felt by displaced people. Yet there is a strange paradox embedded in his definition. How can this “growing pain” be both the result of an alluring “march” toward “some...