Writing Southern fiction

Literary Review, Summer, 1998 by Burton Raffel

If southern novels are a distinctive sub-genre of American literature, it is because the South as a region is distinctly different from the rest of the country. It is different in its geographical, climatic, and demographical features; it is different in its history and customs and, still, in many of its attitudes. But it is perhaps most of all different in its relative cohesiveness, the social frameworks that Southerners hand down, without thinking too much about it, from father to son and mother to daughter. I have no statistics on such societal inheritance, nor most probably does anyone else. But I would bet on the likelihood that in no other part of the country are there so many native-born folk, moved away by circumstance, who not only long to return, but eventually do return, to live out their lives in or near the places where they were born and raised.

Henry James (and others) long ago remarked, often bitterly, that the United States did not have the social patterning so marked in England and even more pronounced on the Continent. What James (and others) were complaining about, in my own opinion incorrectly, was not--though they often put it this way--that there was "nothing to write about" in the USA, but that the ways of writing about social cohesiveness, developed by the English and their European neighbors through centuries of masterful fiction, were not entirely, and certainly not easily, applicable to the loose-limbed, free-swinging American world. Whether urban or rural, Americans could and did move virtually at will, changing locales, professions, careers, and their own lives. Neither English nor European societies have ever equally encouraged such transformability (a better word here, to my mind, than "mobility" for it is not the mere movement from place to place that is most significant).

The effects of place and time, and indeed of all the various cultural forces (including language) operative in the shaping of fiction, and novels above all, are I think still under-appreciated. But it seems to me that no one who has read, say, the novels (written in Bengali) by Rabindranath Tagore, or the novels written (in Japanese) by either Lady Murasaki or Yasunari Kawabata, or the novels written (in Chinese) by Cao Xueqin, Li Yu, or the unknown author of the Chin P'ing Mei, can have the slightest doubt that fiction, as a cultural artifact, can no more readily be properly considered as divorced from the culture out of which it comes than a tooth can be considered as separate from the jaw out of which, equally literally, it springs. Paleontologists can often recognize the nature of a vanished animal by a single tooth. So, too, we can, and we should, distinguish full-length works of fiction in terms of the cultural forces which, again literally, give them birth.

Thus, the South tending to be more tradition-minded, so, too, will we find Southern fiction, as well as Southern folklore. Brer Rabbit, Huck Finn, and Aunt Jemima have been stewed in essentially the same pot.

Just as the South tends to be more place-minded, so, too, is Southern fiction. Faulkner's Mississippi, no matter what he names it, is in fact far more realistic than Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire. Future social historians are much more likely to learn from Faulkner, and can much more safely rely on his portrayals of both land and people than the wistful fantasy-land spun for us by Trollope can be taken for truthful picture-painting representations.

Because the South is more family-minded, so, too, will we find Southern fiction wound around and around with family history. Interlocking roles are described and analyzed for mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, intertwined (as in Southern social reality they are intertwined) with the roles of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandfathers, grandmothers, and even family members so long dead and buried that they cannot have any active roles except in memory.

As the South is more dynastic-minded, so, too, is Southern fiction. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, based on the life of Huey P. Long, is no more about American political life than is, say, John Dos Passos's USA. Though there is only a little more than a decade between their dates of publication, the books seem to come from worlds even farther apart than Chicago (Dos Passos's birthplace) and Kentucky (where Warren was born).

And as the South is at one and the same time more courtly and also darker, more secretive and shot through with all manner of quasilicit (and illicit) passions, similarly Southern fiction is far more concerned not only with the darker aspects of racial issues, but also with mental instability, violence, and almost Gothic-like skeletons hidden in mouldering closets. From what other region of the country could William Faulkner's novels have come?

Having spent only ten of my almost seventy years resident in the South, and having been raised entirely under the brick and concrete trees of New York City, where I was born, I write only as a concerned outsider. And although I have been moved to reflect on these issues, in some part, by watching my two youngest children grow up in semitropical Louisiana, my literary motivation stems from two recent novels, primarily William Baldwin's superb The Hard to Catch Mercy (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1993) and, somewhat less powerfully, John Gregory Brown's Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994). Even the books' titles seem to me pretty distinctively Southern--the one clearly framed in eccentric folkloristic terms, the other in almost pure Louisiana Gothic.