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  • Inheriting the Renaissance:Three Writers of the Post-War South
  • Douglas Mitchell
Madison Jones' Garden of Innocence. Edited by Jan Norby Gretlund. Odense: UP of Southern Denmark, 2005. 207 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City. By James Panabaker. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2004. xviii + 238 pp. $32.00 cloth.
The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. By Georg Guillemin. College StationTexas A&M UP2004. 170 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The generation of writers who came of age after World War II had the unenviable task of following the Southern Renaissance. As Flannery O'Connor famously said of Faulkner, "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." Three writers who had to come to terms with inheriting the Renaissance, both in their self-conception and the minds of their readers, are Shelby Foote, Madison Jones, and Cormac McCarthy. For Foote and McCarthy, it was moving beyond Faulkner, and for Jones the Agrarian vision of Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. This movement out from under the Renaissance, so to speak, is the subject of three recent books devoted to these writers.

Jan Norby Gretlund's volume, the most traditional of the three, treats the most traditional writer. Madison Jones has been sadly neglected by critics, but he is a fine novelist and easily the major heir of the southern [End Page 158] Agrarians. Gretlund provides a solid introduction, laying out Jones' importance as a transitional figure between the Renaissance and contemporary southern literature, and he has included a valuable collection of commentary and criticism from a range of major critics and writers, among them Lewis Lawson, George Garrett, Hans Skei, and Richard Gray.

Several themes run through all the essays, as they do in Jones' work, such as the destruction of the traditional order of the family farm, and the ineradicable presence of evil. Further, what the essays all make clear is that Jones, as a second generation Agrarian, possesses a fully developed sense that what destroys the traditional order is latent within that order itself. Each critic has his or her own way of getting at that problem, and the difficulty of any simple notion of return. The two strongest essays are those by Hans Skei on Season of the Strangler and Richard Gray on Herod's Wife. Both of these reveal Jones' technical mastery, with Skei taking on the question of unity of form within the short story sequence and Gray looking at the implications of a shifting narrative form. Both come to grips with one of the strongest traits of Jones' writing: a kind of potent indeterminacy when confronting the mystery of human evil. The most valuable portions of the book, however, are by Jones himself, including his acceptance speech for the T.S. Eliot Award and an interview with Gretlund. On the whole, the collection is a start toward putting some solid criticism of Jones on library shelves to complement what is scattered in the journals.

James Panabaker, in Shelby Foote and the Art of History: Two Gates to the City, traces Foote's movement out of the shadow of Faulkner and southern modernism and into his own distinct aesthetic. Faulkner himself said of Foote at the University of Virginia that he "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Panabaker rightly focuses on Foote's attempt to order the chaos unleashed by modernist relativism through aesthetic form. Foote works, Panabaker writes, "by placing his own sense of modernist relativism within clearly demarcated, almost classical, narrative structures—an approach I call his aesthetic of limitations." Panabaker, in his two opening chapters, begins with Foote's heritage and the problem of Faulkner, then moves to his effort to reenvision the South in the mythic landscape of Jordan County. His middle chapter, on the aesthetics of limitation, deals with Foote's creation of an adequate form to treat the vagaries of memory. The final two chapters are largely devoted to Foote's magnum opus, his Civil War narrative. [End Page 159]

For Panabaker, Foote's greater distance from the marked cultural shift...

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