Pride and Shame

Page 5 November–December 2008 Pride and shame sean Bernard White American audiences—most audiences, really—are often drawn to tales of the “other,” those exotic yarns about folks who are clearly not us. This is nothing new. A couple of centuries ago, Charles Dickens’s stories of poor working Britons were sensationally popular in the States, and Americans likewise swooned over Natty Bumppo’s frontier adventures. Even if “other” literature sometimes amounts to little more than letting us all know that the folks in Katmandu or wherever are just like you and me, that’s often enough; it’s nice to be reassured. And hey, if they turn out to be cannibals as in Herman Melville’s Typee (1846), so much the better: they’re not only different—they’re damn far away! Obviously, this type of cultural de-masking also happens within current American literature. We’ve a wealth of ethnically branded authors: Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edward P. Jones, Lan Samantha Chang, Sherman Alexie. Even within “white” American literature, we find strains of otherness: in contemporary grime-under-fingernail writers like William T. Vollmann and Richard Lange, in the military works of Tobias Wolff and Tim O’Brien, in the girl-coming-of-age fiction of Curtis Sittenfeld and Julie Orringer. Want sports? Check out George Plimpton and Buzz Bissinger. Feeling libertarian? Pick up Walden (1854) or Into the Wild (1996). Need to get high? Denis Johnson and Hunter S. Thompson can help. American literary-otherness shows the places we’ve escaped from—addiction, poverty, other countries—and the places to which we can still flee. We sit at home, cozy and warm, sipping bourbon or tea or warm milk, and we’re whisked away into tales about people who are both a part of our national landscape (we’re connected, how nice!) and yet aren’t too similar to us (we’re not too connected, how nice!). This is voyeurism in a very safe form. There can be a problem with it, though: when the “others” aren’t clearly separate from us, when they look too much like us and sound too much like us. The separation blurs, and we suddenly feel uncomfortable: are we looking at someone else, or is that us in the mirror? If it is us, why do we look so stupid? This is the conundrum of Southern fiction. Celebrated Southern fiction characters like Barry Hannah ’s Ray or the Bundrens or the grandmother in a “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are all whiteAmericans, and they’re also poor, and they talk strange, and they do pretty stupid things. This is tough on readers who like having a clear distance from “other” characters: it makes us ill at ease, unsure if we’re supposed to laugh or feel ashamed. Being a Southern author is a challenge—do you accentuate the eccentricities of your neighbors, or do you smooth out the wrinkles? Should you abandon regionalism or embrace it? A new anthology of Southern fiction and poetry, Surreal South, gives its own answer: both. At first, it seems that the editors want the distinctly unsettling South. In the introduction, they write, “The South…is a dream of the nation within the nation, the uneasily slumbering mind of the U.S., a cupboard filled with the country’s dark dreams.” Unfortunately, many of the included works aren’t precisely Southern—the biggest influence at times seems more George Saunders than William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor. There are stories about futuristic theme-park attractions, robot children, women driven to suicide when their hands turn into birds, and even a dated out-of-place Joyce Carol Oates piece about a not-quite-forty-year-old virgin. These stories aren’t distinctly Southern in any way we’d define Southern fiction, but that’s not to say some aren’t individually successful. Chris Offutt’s “Decirculating the Monkey” features a white trash assassin who gets one-upped by his target, a very chill, weapons-trained simian: “The monkey pressed the heel magazine release and the clip dropped into his other hand…[He] pulled the slide to check the chamber, slammed the magazine back...