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A “Southern Renaissance” for Texas Letters JOSÉ E. LIMÓN I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. T. S. Eliot . . . Home to Texas, our Texas That slice of hell, heaven Purgatory and land of our Fathers. Rolando Hinojosa The foremost of the few critics of “Texas Literature” has come to believe that there is no such worthy thing. Larry McMurtry started out on his path to judgment with his 1968 essay “Southwestern Literature?,” which really dealt substantially only with Texas literature defined as the books “native in the most obvious sense: set here, centered here, and for the most part, written here.” (McMurtry defines literature as not only fictive writing but history, social analysis, and the essay; I too am speaking of literature in this broader sense.) Most of these Texas books were also contemporary, for, critically speaking, McMurtry saw “no point in going back beyond the thirties.” Some thirteen years later he decided fully to answer the question in his title with a new essay whose subtitle explicitly tells the whole story. In “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literature,” McMurtry arrives finally at a harsh judgment. The entire enterprise has been largely an exercise in literary failure from its start with Webb, Dobie, and Bedichek to the present-day efforts of their literary sons and daughters. There is more judgment than explanation in McMurtry’s account, but he seems to find at least two major reasons for this failure: a lazy overindulgence in a Texas version of the pastoral and a related apparent reluctance on the part of Texas writers to read broadly and deeply. These two factors come together in a disastrous mix, producing “a limited, shallow, self-repetitious literature” dealing with “homefolks, the old folks, cowboys, or the small town,” a literature “disgracefully insular and uninformed.” Texas has a literary culture, but one more akin to a biologist’s sense ♦ ♦ ♦ 10 ♦ José E. Limón of that term, for in McMurtry’s estimation, this culture has become “a pond full of self-satisfied frogs.” There is an old Mexican saying, “Silencio ranas, que va a cantar el sapo” (Be silent, frogs, the toad is about to sing). Yet even as I inject my voice into this discussion, it is not really to dispute McMurtry’s critical claim, which, frankly, I endorse, albeit with an endorsement based on a more limited knowledge of the subject. Rather, I want to explore the possible reasons for this failure from a cultural anthropologist’s perspective; I also want to point to one Texas regional/ ethnic area not included in McMurtry’s discussion, an area that might be an exception to his general indictment. Let me begin with McMurtry’s notion of the “here,” for he suggests that it is the Texas writer’s obsession with the rural Texas sense of time and place that vitiates this literature. Two questions emerge. First, is a concern for the “here” really the source of the problem, and second, is a significant literature of the “here” possible? I submit that McMurtry has made a too simple association between the “here” and bad literature, that the two are not necessarily correlated. Another American region with a distinctive literary identity might provide a useful comparison. I refer to the South, and specifically what scholars call the “Southern Renaissance”—that great flowering of literature between the two World Wars that included Faulkner, Wolfe, Warren, Welty, Tate, and Ransom. In The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South (1963) Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has this to say about that period and its literature: “A time and a place have produced a body of distinguished writing. No one would think to explain the nature of that distinction merely by examining the time and the place. . . .” However, he cannot finally deny time and place—a sense of the “here”—for, while great art is in one sense transcendent, “even so, when one looks at William Faulkner and his contemporaries, observes their sudden arrival on the literary scene when before them there was very little, notices the many similarities in the way they use language , the way they write about people, the kind of life that interests them, one is convinced that literature grows out of a culture, and that theirs has grown out of the twentieth-century South, and has its roots in Southern history and life.” Another perceptive student of the South has carried further what Rubin implies about Southern history...

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