Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches

“Bawn in a Brier-patch” and Frontier Bred: Joel Chandler Harris’s Debt to the Humor of the Old South

[ 60 ] “BAWN IN A BRIER-PATCH” AND FRONTIER BRED Joel Chandler Harris’s Debt to the Humor of the Old South grEtcHEn Martin JoEl cHandlEr Harris’s Most WEll KnoWn cHaractEr, Uncle Remus, has been and continues to be a critically polarizing figure in American literature, and the Uncle Remus collections have dominated scholarly attention to Harris’s work. While Alice Walker condemns Harris as a cultural thief and refers to the Uncle Remus character as “a creature,” other scholars like Ralph Ellison and James Weldon Johnson commend Harris for recognizing the aesthetic artistry of black folk tales. Yet Harris was also familiar with and indeed drew from another important antebellum literary tradition, southern frontier humor, praising in particular Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes and William Tappan Thompson’s Major Jones’s Travels in his book Stories of Georgia (250). Throughout his work, including but not limited to his Uncle Remus collections, Harris employs a wide range of the literary and aesthetic techniques commonly practiced by frontier humorists, such as double-ended narrative frames, dialect, and wit rather than formal education used to demonstrate a character’s exceptional intelligence. Harris’s short stories are also largely indebted to frontier humor, as is evident in his depiction of various classes, particularly his sympathetic treatment of non-elite whites and his regard for the cultural values of the plain folk. And, like many frontier humorists, Harris is also often critical of ruling class planters, particularly of those who abuse their power. In this essay, I explore Harris’s intertextual negotiations of a range of antebellum southern literary traditions, black and white, and contend that Harris’s work demonstrates quintessential aspects of southern literature. Harris’s work is a literary hybrid committed to the artistry of the story, told from many angles, in many forms, with sensitivity to voice, perspective, humor, but above all, the dignity of his featured characters. JoEl cHandlEr Harris’s dEBt to tHE HuMor of tHE old soutH [ 61 ] The hybrid nature of a text is, as Roland Barthes notes, “plural” and “depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically , the text is a tissue, a woven fabric)” (1328). Julia Kristeva explains that intertextuality is not simply a matter of textual or authorial influences , but involves a “transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (59–60), a particularly important “transposition,” given that various signifying systems evident in Harris’s work are cultural and oral signifying networks and thus lack definitive sources. Indeed, as a newspaper editor, fiction writer, avid reader—and perhaps most importantly—an attentive listener, Harris was uniquely knowledgeable about the culture and discourses he often covertly criticized. Several of his short stories are set prior to the war, but function to allegorize many of the problems of the post-Reconstruction period—particularly the shift from the conservative racism prevalent in the antebellum era to a highly charged and often deadly radical racism. Other stories are set during the war and offer the perspective of the backcountry plain folk, “many of whom supported the Confederacy with great reluctance, if at all” (Hahn 45). As several scholars have demonstrated, Harris was highly influenced by the black oral tradition as well as by the antebellum plantation tradition , and his Uncle Remus tales have been regarded as a frame combining these incompatible literary genres. Robert Hemenway contends that Harris utilized “a medium that he could mimic but never fully comprehend (30–31), whereas Ashleigh Harris claims that Harris completely isolated the Brer Rabbit tales from their present AfricanAmerican context as well as from the historical trajectory from which they originated. Through providing a depoliticized, decommunalised , deracialised and emasculated narrator, Harris’s tales fundamentally changed the social and political significance of the Brer Rabbit tales . . . . Harris caricatures African-American plantation and slave identity and culture, and this in turn ridicules and distorts the significance of the characters and narratives of the stories . (66) These scholars suggest what Kenneth Lynn describes as the predominant narrative structure of the frontier humor tradition, a cordon sanitaire [ 62 ] grEtcHEn Martin separating the narrator from the antics of the characters featured in the embedded tales (64). While many scholars have challenged what the cordon sanitaire separation implies or asserts, as a narrative device the frame would become representative of the genre, as well...