Between History and Aesthetics: Dirt and Desire in Dialogue with Affect Theory and Paul Ricoeur

First, a memory. I remember reading, fifteen years ago, a sentence from the second paragraph of Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire—“When I open a story by a southern woman writer I find figures and ideas that astonish” (ix)—and thinking jadedly, “So I’m to be astonished. Surprise, surprise.” Although Yaeger was complaining with much justification about the “rather ordinary expectations about the South and what we will find in southern literature” (ix) that had previously held sway in southern studies, I suspected that on the basis of her title and her opening salvo alone, I could anticipate many of her critical commitments and touchstones. Even if these commitments and touchstones had not yet been fully naturalized within southern studies, they could seem “rather ordinary” to a scholar coming of age in the 1990s, and the moves that they might entail in southern literature could seem rather predictable. Continuing through Yaeger’s text, I was repeatedly struck by the apparent divergence between, on the one hand, the richness of her close readings and the explanatory utility of her thematic coinages (I found “throwaway bodies” and “white detritus” particularly resonant) and, on the other hand, the familiarity of her reference points, many of which I was indeed able to predict. The Bakhtinian grotesque and carnivalesque? Check. The unruly power of desire, “the body,” and dirt, proffered as subversively material and as a corrective to an earlier emphasis on discourse über alles? Check. Trauma, melancholy, and abjection? Check. The figure of the freak as read through the lens of queer theory? Check. Ostentatious worry about one’s own complicity with oppressive power structures, especially with respect to race? Check. Even the presence of the two works that Yaeger subjected to her most sustained readings—Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding—seemed overdetermined, and the frequent expostulations that everything she examined was “incredible” and “astonishing” served only to fuel my cynicism. (I was later gratified to see that at least some of the readers who admired the book the most had a similar reaction to this rhetoric.)¹ I closed the book with appreciation for her sustained efforts to consider both black and white writers under the rubric “southern” (though, as she acknowledged, Thadious Davis had begun charting this course some years before) and with genuine admiration for her interpretive skill—but also with a sense that the book’s accomplishment was more modest than had been promised.²

In short, I wasn’t astonished. Nevertheless, I also thought that the book was destined to have a significant impact in southern studies. After all, there had been a slow crescendo building against the Agrarians, Louis Rubin, their descendants, and the whole southern-exceptionalist complex for some time, and the moment was propitious for someone to proclaim, “Enough of this patient tinkering around the edges—I will be the one to burn it all down.” Though I didn’t foresee the speed with which a new southern studies and its institutions would coalesce in the coming years, the influence of Dirt and Desire on the movement was openly acknowledged from the beginning—it is already present in Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s and Dana D. Nelson’s clarion call from June 2001 in the pages of American Literature (231–232). Perhaps Jay Watson’s Reading for the Body stands as the most compendious and inventive work to date that extends and builds upon Yaeger’s project.

Although my original response to Dirt and Desire may have been glib and unfair—perhaps attributable to the insecurity and envy of one who had just defended his dissertation, had no tenure-track position yet, and was (hypocritically?) not above borrowing from Yaeger’s playbook in his own nascent projects—I had not, until recently, really changed my mind. I still remain convinced that rhetorical overkill in critical work quickly proves self-defeating, that we can acknowledge a work’s importance and invention without needing to believe that it will Utterly Transform Everything or...