The civil war--with a small "c": The Battlefield of Southern Scholarship

Inventing Southern Literature. By Michael Kreyling. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. xviii + 200 pp. $45.00

Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South. By James C. Cobb. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1999. x + 251 pp. $40.00

War and battle, sacrifice and valor, anointed kings and high priests strutting the battlements, casualties of conflict and of the joust--blood everywhere: these are the conceits of scholastic chivalry worthy of recurring consideration, especially when talking about southern literary scholarship. Enter Michael Kreyling--who has, in the apt metaphors of war, engaged the literary and scholastic history of the South in his book, Inventing Southern Literature. Kreyling embraces the language of battle to delineate the turf wars of southern literary history and demonstrate how, over the decades, the various players have parried, retreated, and then attacked--ideologically and politically--to forge the literary canon. He argues with force and reason, but in clarifying the battle positions of the various combatants, he effectively joins the fray--and with a crusader's conviction.

His book is provocative on several counts but useful primarily as a reconsideration of the Agrarian movement, particularly the dark side, and its effect on southern literary scholarship, past and present. His oratory over the bones of the Agrarians does not praise but rather explores how the Agrarian campaign slanted the canonical development of southern literature and sought "to make their system the template for a regional or national culture." His parlay is accurate that the current trend in southern letters should continue toward "reinvention"--by which he means more inclusivity of gender and race that celebrates African Americans, women, and others. These voices should be heard. He argues ominously that the new canon further liberated than it is now will tax the value and validity of the old one: "The orthodox canon do[es] not walk hand in hand" with the new.

Certainly these are perceptions worth acknowledging, as is his further point that Faulkner has long been the dominating Colossus of Oxford who has eclipsed the creative sunshine of many a southern writer. Those who followed Faulkner have been obliged to step with sure intent to establish a distinctive voice. Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Walker Percy, and Raymond Andrews are noteworthy examples of such writers. During the Agrarian age and the decades following, Kreyling observes, scholars and critics would often simply compare other writers to Faulkner: sufficient resemblance in style and theme brought the stamp of approval, and a new name was struck to the burnished canon. The point is well taken, and yet after Kreyling makes much sound and fury about how overly exalted Faulkner's position is in Southern Letters, he then indulges in a chapter-long, full analysis of Faulkner and his novel A Fable. This tactic ironically undercuts the credibility of his argument that Faulkner might not remain as important as southern scholarship has traditionally held. The chapter thus seems contradictory, diversionary, and disconnected from what has gone before, suggesting that Faulkner's stature is not in question, even in a book that purports to question it. Ernest Suarez's argument recently in The Southern Review is apt: literary beauty should be the essential arbiter of achievement in writing. If Faulkner is the South's best writer, purely in terms of artistic accomplishment, then his reputation endures.

Kreyling's discussion of early editions of southern literature anthologies leads to other problematic arguments. These early anthologies were comprised of "overwhelmingly white literature"--this much is indisputable. He contends, rightly, too, that The Literature of the South, ed. Beatty, Watkins, and Young, is in this sense, by today's standards, "politically incorrect." The southern literary scholars who edited this volume, and others of the era, were, he points out, a rather clubby circle of gentlemanly white males. That The Literature of the South and other such books should be predominantly comprised of white...