Inventing Modern Southern Fiction: A Postmodern View
1990; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoThe possibility I want to explore, (1) that in modern Southern literature the sense of place takes on a role better played by a sense of self, arises from my irritation with a popular anthology of modern Southern short stories. The anthology, Stories of the Modern South, is a useful collection, as a supplement to novels or to a major anthology. It helps especially, we will see, with current writers like Doris Betts, Elizabeth Spencer, David Madden. But when I come to the selection for John Barth, I pause. And I become irritated. Not rageful, for reasons we will understand when we talk about rage. But not merely peeved either. Irritated. For the John Barth I want to teach is the postmodern Barth of tales like Menelaiad or the three novellas that make up Chimera, which may be the finest postmodern book yet written by an American. I want to teach John Barth both as a Southern writer and as the major American postmodernist. But the Barth story in the anthology is Water-Message--an episode from the eastern-shore Maryland boyhood of Barth's autobiographical character, Ambrose Mensch. Out of a perversity of memory I find myself referring to it as Story, which is, in fact, the title of the James Agee selection preceding it in the anthology. This slip, I think, is significant. For Barth's Water-Message is very much a 1928 story. It is the sort of memory of childhood that the major Southern novelists were writing in 1928. 1928 was a year when Thomas Wolfe was assigning his memories to Eugene Gant, a year when William Faulkner was wrestling with the boyhood of Quentin Compson, a year in which Ellen Glasgow was between the girlhoods of Dorinda Oakley and Jenny Blair Archbald. When I remember these great models, I take the title of the anthology literally. These are stories of the modern South, and by 1928 Modern Southern Fiction had established itself as the type of writing that it has, in large part, remained. Given the anthology's title, then, the fireworks and magic of the major fiction of John Barth would probably be out of place. Moreover, when we consider the popular success of contemporary realistic Southern writers like Anne Tyler and Bobbie Ann Mason, we have to concede that the odds of Barth's postmodernism cutting significant roads into the domain of Modern Southern Fiction seem slim indeed. And thereby, I think, hangs a historical tale. If we look back to the beginnings of Modern Southern Fiction between 1890 and 1930 or so, we find that although Ellen Glasgow had considerable help--from Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfree, Kate Chopin, and many others--she, as much as anyone, set the form that Modern Southern Fiction has followed during the past sixty years. For that reason, the pattern of her literary development bears on any discussion of the invention of Modern Southern Fiction. The phases of her development also point the way to alternatives latent within the tradition. Glasgow began publishing in the late 1890s when the old models of local-color writing--Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Noailles Murfree--were losing their appeal. Although she learned from the local colorists, she began as a literary revolutionary. Her first two novels were bursting at the seams with allusions to the scientific thinkers--Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley--who inspired the American literary naturalists of the 1890s. Her early novels are, in fact, first cousins of the naturalist fictions of Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. With her third novel, The Voice of the People, her first set totally in Virginia, she began to soften her programmatic naturalism and to settle into the mainstream of realistic American fiction that runs from Howells and James to Cather, Anderson, Lewis, Fitzgerald, and others. There she remained, with some excursions outside, for two-and-one-half decades. With Barren Ground (1925), however, she took up a major modernist theme, sexual repression, along with modernist techniques for exploring the unconscious mind. …
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