Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South

111 Ex Machina Reading the Mind of the South [T]he machine was obviously going to pieces. . . . The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the Bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles. —Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? —Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Recently, meditating about poetry and about issues of personal and cultural history generally and class in the American South particularly, I had an urge to look back at W. J. Cash’s classic The Mind of the South. But when I went to my bookshelf, I found that the book, like so many others, had unaccountably vanished. 112 The Muse in the Machine “Oh, no,” I thought, “The Mind of the South is lost!” Convinced that The Mind of the South could be bought cheaply, I went to a large used bookstore and asked for it. “The Mind of the South,” said the helpful cashier. “Would that be folklore?” Badoom-boom went the vaudeville drummer who works the comedy club at the back of my medulla oblongata. But in the small city in western Oregon where I was then living, only I heard it. “No,” I told the cashier, suddenly caught in my own Spenglerian irony, “The Mind of the South is history.” And that is where I found it, on the shelf with Devoto’s Course of Empire, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Gary Wills’s Under God: Religion and American Politics. But yes, I kept thinking, The Mind of the South would be folklore: would be, would be. Pointless to bring up any of this with the cashier; it takes a connoisseur to blush at classism as subtle as that. Since I was born and reared in the southeastern region of the United States of North America—and since my people, as they say in those parts, were born and reared there too, and their people before them—I am part of what we talk about when we talk about the mind of the South. My father is a Mississippian; my mother is a Mississippian displaced from Louisiana. My father’s family, past and present, is made up of people who are intelligent and not proud of it, inflexible and not worried about it, with minds at once narrow and deep; below-out-of-sight serfs, they immigrated from farms in Bavaria in the late nineteenth century, bought farms cheap in the United States, married farmers, and gave birth to farmers. My mother’s people, on the other hand, are bright, mercurial failures; having lived southern for generations out of mind, they possess a history of lost minor wealth, a present of white-collar jobs, a future of inertia, and a keen sense of irony. By the late 1930s, when my parents met, it was clear enough that my father’s family had transcended its origin and was rising toward middle class and that my mother’s family was in gradual, but considerable, decline. Their marriage inscribed a neat intersection of socioeconomic Ex Machina 113 graph lines, and at that particular statistical crossroad, I was conceived and birthed. Histories, bloodlines, appropriations, decline, fall, earth: Any meditation about poetry and class in the South has to start in such rhetorical territory. For me, the central question is whether it also has to end there. Thinking about things southern makes me irritable ; my eyes narrow, and my skin begins itching. I do not like to revisit these issues. I do not like to resurrect these conventions. If I say, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, that I do not hate the South, that is supposed to signify its opposite. What, then, if I say of the South that I do not love it? And yet, when I meet the automatic assumption—mechanical, bourgeois, sublime—that the mind of the South can only be folkloric , that Br’er Rabbit is the South’s best spokescreature, I begin to itch in other ways. Like anyone, I can pretend to ignore my history only at my peril; at the same time, I cannot afford to be simpleminded about it. Particularly among white southerners such as myself , however apostate, southern-think is a...