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Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon . Tison Pugh. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. ix+218.

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689377

1545-6951

Michael Kreyling,

American and British Literature Analysis

Previous article FreeBook ReviewPrecious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon. Tison Pugh. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. ix+218.Michael KreylingMichael KreylingVanderbilt University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTison Pugh’s work joins a gathering of earlier works reimagining the twentieth-century southern literary canon with gay and lesbian authors and subject material in the rotation instead of mutedly excluded. There are Gary Richards’s Lovers and Beloveds (2005) and Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009). Richards deals with the work of out and closeted gay southern writers: Truman Capote, Harper Lee, William Goyen, Lillian Smith, and Richard Wright. One theme of his work is that, acknowledged or not, same-sex desire churns in the engine room of the “southern literary canon.” Bibler deals with Margaret Mitchell, Ernest Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps. His locating device is the plantation (actual and represented) as a site that enables, if it did/does not actually foster, same-sex desire and its expression.Pugh deals with out southern gay and lesbian writers: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Florence King, Rita Mae Brown, Dorothy Allison, and David Sedaris. His coordinating structure is “humor,” though a structure that is notoriously shifty, circulating through camp, irony, dark, raunch, stand-up, pun, and scatology. On his circuitous route, Pugh hits some tight turns and potholes. Arguing that Dorothy Allison’s dark humor in Bastard out of Carolina (1992) should be reevaluated for the way it bolsters the traumatic themes of rape and sexual abuse might be a hard sell in classrooms where the novel is taught. Doggedly toiling through Rita Mae Brown’s work, tracking puns and her often lame recycled and borrowed jokes leads even Pugh to ask “But Is She Funny?” (111). He leaves the answer up to the reader, but if you have to ask, then you open up meme territory where Lieutenant Hauk in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) proclaims for the ages: “Sir, in my heart, I know I’m funny.”The discussion of camp in Williams’s plays locates it too confidently in the text of the plays, particularly the classics A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and the Kazan-directed anomaly Baby Doll (1956), which Williams adapted from his play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946). Streetcar and Cat have each been produced enough times that we can see that the camp emerges in performance, and that performance is keyed to time, cast, producer, director.The back-to-back chapters on Florence King and Rita Mae Brown could have been knitted into a single discussion of the fraught relationship between two white, lesbian, southern writers and the feminist cultural and political moments (1970s and 1980s US feminism) from which they were, or conceived themselves to be, estranged. Such a refocusing would have been particularly helpful in the discussion of King, who wrote mostly nonfiction political and cultural commentary; it would have helped to have had a larger portion of feminist voices she railed against. In her case it is true: You had to be there.Pugh acknowledges that including David Sedaris, who moved (from upstate New York) with his family to Raleigh, North Carolina, when he was eleven, but left the state after a brief stint at Western Carolina University, is a risk. He attempts to qualify Sedaris as a “postsoutherner” under the rubric used by Martyn Bone in The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005), but the fit is approximate at best. In fact, essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan has (arguably) done as much or more in dismantling the “southern literary canon” in a single essay, “Mr. Lytle: An Essay” (in Pulphead: Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011], 55–78) than Sedaris has accomplished.It seemed to me, reading Precious Perversions, that the “scope of work” was misjudged. “The southern literary canon” has not been hospitable to gay and lesbian members, but their presence, and more important, their precedent, is more instrumental in fixing Pugh’s chosen writers than he admits. Pugh mentions Walker Percy and his problematic relationship to gay and lesbian southern writing (3–5), but he is silent about Percy’s uncle William Alexander Percy, whose poetry and memoir Lanterns on the Levee (1941) captured a closeted, gay, southern voice with humor and pathos that hasn’t lost its echoes yet. Another omission, crucial to any critic seeking a degree of comprehensive engagement with this topic, is the work of Reynolds Price: his homosexuality, open championing of the traditional literary canon (but not always the southern version), and command of several genres (essay, poetry, fiction, drama) would seem to make him the pivot of any study of the area.Pugh reserves his comments on literary canons for a brief afterword (162–69). Indeed, the argument he sketches could easily be longer and more complex, for he implies that canons are both hindrances and necessities. “Many marginalized readers,” he notes, “perceive canons not simply as lists of aesthetically sanctioned texts but also as a necessary means of providing cultural visibility” (163). That is, if we did not have canons of literary monuments, we would probably have to invent them. And Pugh further implies, that is what we do: “The canon is formed anew with each syllabus assigned, with each anthology published, with each essay and monograph written, and with each award bestowed” (163). Coming late, as this musing does in Precious Perversions, it cannot shape and ballast the arguments of the body of the work. These are predominantly self-referential—that is, expository readings of the six authors’ works selected for perceived humor and played off the sounding board of Pugh’s loosely woven definition of that controlling concept, “humor.” The result is an ambitious project that seeks to connect three powerful literary energies—humor, sexuality, canonicity—but suffers too much of the energy to escape through gaps of imprecision in theory and narrow scope in practice. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 4May 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689377HistoryPublished online February 20, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.