Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Introduction: A Time of Excellence in Southern Fiction

Introduction: A Time of Excellence in Southern Fiction “The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium; and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them” (Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners,146). From 1607 until today the South has been a center of literary creativity. But we have always had problems deciding just who is a “southern” writer. Should birth be the criterion? Or is it qualification enough for someone to have stayed and published in the South, however briefly? In the eighteenth century Joseph Brown Ladd of Rhode Island wrote some poems in Charleston then went home. Although he did not play a significant part in creating southern literature , he was awarded space in Rubin’s History of Southern Literature (1985). Were he and, say, Caroline Howard Gilman southern writers? Is it their choice whether they should be claimed for the South? Or is it perhaps the critic’s choice? Many contemporary writers are regionalized, whether or not they like it. Some writers, such as Richard Ford and Maya Angelou, started out by disclaiming their southern background but later celebrated it. Some writers become southern through historical events. Mark Twain became “southern” in literary history in the 1950s, and his work does not appear in a southern literary anthology until 1970 (Gretlund 2008). Some writers from West Virginia, such as Jayne Anne Phillips, want to be, and yet do not want to be, southern. Anne Tyler, from the Baltimore / Washington, D.C., area wants to be southern and yet clearly is not. Ralph Ellison, who was from Oklahoma, is included in many southern anthologies with various explanations. Percival Everett is not included, although he was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Others, such as John Jakes, the fiction-writing historian , and Mickey Spillane, master of crime fiction, claim southernness because they stay in the South so often. What does regional branding reveal and to what extent is it political? Does literary regionalization matter? It is obvious to me as a European that regional identity still matters in the lives of Americans. Academics may question the importance of the local and 2 Introduction regional in their cosmopolitan world, but try having your Sunday grits in the Waffle House, attending service in the local Baptist church—followed by a dinner at the family-style Golden Corral—then shopping in a rural Wal-Mart or Piggly Wiggly. The people you listen to and talk with have no doubts about their identity as southerners. To seriously question the existence of a southern identity, you will have to be purblind to many facts about living in the South. The novels analyzed in this collection depend on these everyday facts as their material for fiction. To call anybody a “southern writer” is more than to place the person geographically . In many readers’ minds “southern writer” is a special category. The categorization is, of course, a qualification of “writer” and may even be understood as a limitation. But like most limitations it is also, as Flannery O’Connor wrote in a comment about Eudora Welty, “a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have,” because it serves as “a gateway to reality.” What Welty always knew was that her imagination was bound to the reality of life in her southern state. Her fiction had come out of a particular landscape and was based on her familiarity with its people. As editor I asked the authors of the essays in this book to choose writers who have spent most of their lives in the South and have published fiction after the year 2000. I also requested that they examine whether the subjects of their essays are faithful to the reality of the life they see about them today or if they cater to us with stereotypes and propaganda of the sort that belong in Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird in both the novel and movie versions (possibly because they imagine their readers demand the two-dimensional world of the screen). Fortunately the southern writers of the new millennium are not homogenized mainstreamers and are not immune to the great changes in their region. For more than a decade now Inventing Southern Literature by Michael Krey ling has had quite an impact among literary critics...