A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

Journal of Southern History, August, 2009 by David A. Davis

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature. By Richard Gray. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, No. 50. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2007. Pp. xii, 283. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3005-1.)

Southerners, according to regional stereotypes, love to talk. Richard Gray believes that they talk even when they write. In A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, he argues, "The history of southern writing is ... a history of creative, dialogic conflict" (p. 3). Gray draws from a number of theoretical viewpoints to frame his discussion--including Michael J. Oakeshott's notion of the great conversation, Benedict Anderson's idea of imagined community, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of social dialogue--but the book depends primarily on Gray's own voluminous knowledge of southern literature and his remarkable ability to discuss multiple texts simultaneously. His imagination, in other words, shows as many signs of heteroglossia as southern literature.

Gray traces three conversational threads he sees in southern literature. First, he follows the literature of defeat, and he intentionally complicates C. Vann Woodward's idea of the burden of southern history. "The southern experience of defeat, like the South itself, is not a monolith," Gray writes (p. 26). He explains that several lines of defeat converge in southern literature. The legacy of the Civil War, of course, figures prominently, but Gray places that sense of defeat alongside the African American sense of "soul murder"--a phrase he borrows from Nell Irvin Painter (p. 31)--and he extends the conversation into the recent literature of the Vietnam War, specifically Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry collection Dien Cai Dau (1988) and Bobbie Ann Mason's novel In Country (1985). The second conversation Gray follows concerns the convoluted legacy of pastoralism in southern literature. The English settlers who wrote about the colonies portrayed them as an Edenic space where the land yielded abundant crops. This fecund image has persisted in southern literature, whether warranted or not, from Thomas Jefferson' s writings about the yeoman ideal to the twentieth-century work of the Nashville Agrarians and Wendell Berry. Gray focuses particularly on Berry, whom he sees as engaging in a conversation that spans from the age of exploration to the age of globalization. The third thread Gray follows relates to the intertextuality of three literary conversations: Eudora Welty's use of fairy tales in The Robber Bridegroom (1943), Toni Morrison's implicit and contentious engagement with William Faulkner, and the problematic southern identity of recent immigrant populations, especially Vietnamese refugees, in the South.

Gray's criticism usually builds associations between multiple texts, so his approach in this book flows naturally from a career-long critical project, as in his landmark book Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge, 2000). Because he follows several discrete dialogic threads, however, A Web of Words lacks a sense of overall cohesion, although he warrants that a critical work engaging the entirety of southern literature's conversation would be impossible. Yet Gray's perceptive readings have significant merit to scholars of southern culture, and he establishes a useful and transferable framework for understanding the great conversation of southern literature.

DAVID A. DAVIS

Mercer University