Relocating Southerners in the West

Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West. By Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. Athens: The U of Georgia P, 2000. xvii + 130 pp. $28.00.

Robert Brinkmeyer's subject is large, and his space is of necessity small since the book is structured by the three lectures he presented in 1998 at Mercer University as part of the Lamar Lecture Series. Like other Lamar Lecturers, Brinkmeyer was expected to bring a fresh dimension to the study of southern values and literature. He did not disappoint; Remapping Southern Literature is a worthy addition to the distinguished critical literature that has emerged from the Lamar legacy.

Anyone paying much attention to contemporary southern fiction has been aware that the American West looms large in the work of numerous southern writers, challenging older assumptions of the meaning of place in the southern psyche. In place of the North-South axis dominant in pre-World War II days, many contemporary southerners have tended to a South-West juxtaposition. Indeed, some of these writers have become much more identified with the West than with the South: Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barbara Kingsolver. McCarthy (who started writing fiction set in his native Tennessee) and Kingsolver (who grew up in Kentucky) respectively now live in Texas and Arizona. Both writers have earned chapters as western writers in Updating the Literary West (1997), a volume published by the Western Literature Association. Although Mississippi-born and now living half the year in New Orleans, Ford resides in Montana the rest of the year, and only his first novel is set in the South. Discussions of his work--like that of McCarthy and Kingsolver--are frequent at annual meetings of the Western Literature Association. In the more transitory West, one can quickly earn designation as a western writer; many of its brightest stars have originally come from east of the Mississippi.

Southern presence in the literature of the West precedes these towering contemporary figures. Mark Twain is the most obvious example--poised as he was with a westward look even if he did write his greatest fiction depicting a southern heritage. Huck Finn was not the only southerner to light out to the territory. In film (Shane, for example) and fiction (one thinks of such western masterpieces as Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident [1940] and A.B. Guthrie, Jr.'s The Big Sky [1947]) the transplanted southerner became a staple. Sometimes he had fled the South of Reconstruction and harbored deep attachment to the Lost Cause (Ernie Wright of Shane and Major Tetley of The Ox-Bow Incident). Sometimes, as with Boone Caudill of The Big Sky, he fled the encroachment of civilization, Leatherstocking style.

Space would prevent Brinkmeyer from exploring such linkages. He begins his study with a look at the Southern Literary Renascence, which he describes as so grounded in a sense of place that movement in any direction, but especially westward, "is characteristically viewed with distrust and suspicion." The Nashville Agrarians set the tone for the Renascence in their declaration supporting a "Southern" as opposed to an "American" view, preferring an agrarian against an industrial culture, a traditional rather than a changing or "moving" culture. Ransom, Faulkner, Gordon, Tate, Welty, Porter, and Warren provide the examples for developing the thesis. Missing from the discussion is attention to the role of African American writers. How, one might ask, would Richard Wright respond to Brinkmeyer's statement that "even when pointing out the dangers sometimes found in uncritically accepting place and tradition, writers of the renaissance never stray too far from celebrating the healing and wondrous power of a settled life, of a life 'in place'"?

"Bleeding Westward," the second chapter, arrives at the post-World War II South. The chapter makes clear that Brinkmeyer's West is pretty much the West of the popular Western as described by Jane Tompkins in West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. In the past two decades...