Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial, and Existential South (review)

For over a decade Southern literary studies has been poised at a crossroads, caught between the traditional New Critical practice of what has been termed the “Rubin generation” and the cultural studies and theoretical approaches of younger scholars such as Michael Kreyling and Jefferson Humphries. The dramatic changes wrought by this shift within one of the more historically conservative fields of American literature are reflected throughout Jan Nordby Gretlund’s latest book.

A career-spanning retrospective of the Danish scholar’s engagement with the South and its literature, Frames of Southern Mind collects three decades of lectures, interviews, and correspondence in which Gretlund explores the pervasive themes of history, race, and existential anxiety in Southern letters. Gretlund argues that despite radical changes in narrative form and social perspective, these issues have been continuous concerns in twentieth-century Southern literature, linking such disparate writers as Madison Jones and Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison and Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Humphries and Eudora Welty. In stressing that “there is a continuity rather than a discontinuity in the treatment of ethics, prejudice, and existence in Southern literature,” Gretlund operates in familiar theoretical territory, close to the notion—a mainstay of Southern critics—of an “organic” South. Yet the inclusion of writers outside the ideological sphere upon which that consensus was formed (primarily those of African American and blue collar backgrounds) prevents Gretlund’s book from becoming merely another iteration of critical orthodoxy. Elsewhere Gretlund’s thesis is borne out solidly enough to accommodate the rather sweeping foundation of his argument. His correspondence with Walker Percy, for example, is replete with Percy’s richly resonant references to “your compatriot S. K.” (Kierkegaard) and what Percy calls “my favorite topics of stoicism and old Southern romanticism.” Particularly in these letters and in the pieces on Welty, Gretlund’s interpretation succeeds in uncovering philosophical attitudes that seem inherent to the Southern artist’s temperament.

Although one could argue that newer fiction such as Larry Brown’s calls for a radically fresh critical model suited to its working-class origins, Gretlund’s best pieces proffer eloquent evidence for the continuing relevance of close readings. Considered together in the book’s chronological organization, however, the chapters have further value in reflecting, through the span of Gretlund’s career, the profession’s general movement away from the practice of New Criticism. Gretlund’s most recent work qualifies his early assertion that “the conservative nature” of Southern literature requires a similar critical approach, as he considers a range of authors (Mary Hood, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barry Hannah) whose relation to the Southern consensus is hardly as fraternal as their forebears. The younger writers with whom he concludes the study are “trying to find their place in a tradition that is already crowded with achievement.” In Frames of Southern Mind we see the same process taking place for the critic: Gretlund’s impassioned exploration of the South is also the record of an expanding scholarly vision, of getting out from under the shadow of the critical past.