Lewis Simpson--The Fable of the Southern Writer (1994)

(I'm still reading while I'm plugging away at my exams.  I lost almost a week between anxiety over the storm and a migraine--but I'm back at it!)

Simpson opens this work by connecting the history of the South with the larger history of the United States—particularly its textual history with regard to both government documents as well as the Protestant Bible—and concludes that “southerners, more than the generality of American citizens, have been people who live and die by the text” (17).  In fact, Simpson emphasizes the literary nature of history itself, observing that “all compelling interpretations of history are verbal or rhetorical artifices resulting from an imaginative critique—a literary criticism—of the possibilities, mundane and fantastic, of history” (21).  The South is such a textual region, in fact, that Simpson points out that “the African slave, having been placed in the context of a society that had been invented in the written texts energized by the dynamic idea of the sovereignty of the whit (Anglo-Saxon) democratic self, needed only to attain literacy in the language of his master (sufficient reading and writing skills in English) in order to become a Frederick Douglass and assert the presence of a black selfhood in American history” (47).  Simpson links this textuality to the Enlightenment ideal of “the awareness of mind as the creating source and model of American history” (56).

Simpson’s focus is primarily on the Agrarian understanding of the Southern Renascence; he has two chapters on Faulkner, one on Allen Tate, and a couple on Robert Penn Warren.  In his occasional jabs at the growing ubiquity of theory and multiculturalism, it seems a bit dated now—especially the odd epilogue titled “A Personal Fable: Living with Indians,” in which he details several generations of his family and the surprising revelation that he has Cherokee blood in his family.  I think the purpose of this epilogue was to emphasize the Faulkner truism that the past is never past, but it seemed an odd way to end the text.  Just before the fable is his chapter on Walker Percy, where he finally discusses an author who asks, “What happens when you find yourself in the second half of the twentieth century with all this history behind you?  And then you have to figure out how to live in the here and now?” (197).  Interestingly, Simpson ties Percy’s South back to Tate’s South, one in which the South is the last real Europe.  However, he also hears warning bells in Percy’s work, as he sees that Percy “brings to the relationship between Is and Was the sense—intimated in Warren and Tate, yet more strongly intimated in Percy than in either—not only that this relationship is losing its meaning in the South but that this loss symbolizes the general loss in Western civilization” (206). 

Oddly enough, I finished this the same day that I looked over the brand new Grit Lit anthology which recently arrived in the mail, and I’m curious what Simpson would make of it.  Certainly, it draws upon the kind of multicultural work which Simpson was so suspicious of (even expanding its boundaries-would Simpson consider Missouri part of the South?).  There’s a different kind of historical inheritance in that collection—more the kind of Red Neck Manifesto inheritance than the Quentin Compson kind of inheritance that more monolithic understandings of southern literature seem to only be able to see.  What happens when our inheritances are class-based, or race-based, or money-based?  Those are different kinds of ghosts than Quentin’s, and yet we act as though all ghosts are the same.

Michael Kreyling--Inventing Southern Literature (1998)

Despite the fact that I'm knee-deep in exam-writing (and full of hurricane anxiety), I'm still reading to finish up my lists.  This book in particular is coming in quite handy.  However, because I'm focusing on exam writing, this summary is not up to my usual standards of summaries--I just wanted primarily to get the significant quotes recorded.

Right now, I'm at 28 days before the essays are due!

Kreyling’s book is “a consideration of the ways and means by which southernness has come into being and been sustained there, along with the attempt to measure how and why the meaning of the term has changed over time” (169).  He relies upon Benedict Anderson’s concepts of nationhood in order to explain how the South understands itself.  Unlike Patricia Yaeger’s later work, in this work he says that this text is “not a counternarrative that seeks to dynamite the rails on which the official narrative runs; rather, it is a metanarrative, touching upon crucial moments when and where the official narrative is made or problematically directed” (ix). 

In his discussion of the Agrarians and the formation of the southern canon and southern studies which put Quentin Compson and Faulkner at the center, he notes that putting Quentin at the center is the result of “the legion of white males who have assumed responsibility for inventing a style for thinking of the South.”  I’m particularly interested in his discussion of feminist responses:

Feminist critics are not unanimous on an alternative to the Quentin thesis.  Some, like Carol S. Manning, might he called moderates: Manning points  out the defects in the Quentin position but wants to preserve the status quo  long enough to modify it for the admission of southern women's fiction (Manning   i-i2). A little to the left are critics like Susan V. Donaldson and Anne  Goodwyn Jones, who would like to modify the meaning of "history" in the  prevailing southern formula (usually along lines of Foucaultien "genealogy")  and, thus, run southern women's history into the mainstream at an angle”  (Donaldson i77ff). 

He goes on:

More extreme is the position of southern lesbian critic Mal, Segrest, who  would have community admit neither men nor their history: "For there have  always been Southern women who knew that they did not want to join the  white men in Mississippi for anything; who have known that WE did not  lose the war" (Segrest 29-3o; emphasis in original). Segrest's view represents  the most radical denial of the Quentin thesis, and it is not merely a matter  of polemic. Her reading of the figure of the spinster (like Jones's reading of  the southern-woman-as-author, but more radically) breaks the hold of the  consensus in thematic literary readings: "The other terrible absence in male-dominated   fictions is the absence of female community, or even its possibility. In all the stories I described [Ahsalom, Absalom!, "A Rose for Emily,"  "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," and "Good Country People"[, the spinster was  ;clone, set apart from both amen and married women. The small-town communities   within the fictions showed complete lack of support for female self-identification.   Without either respect for female solitude or the presence of  female community', of course spinsters were seen as freaks (Segrest 35).

Segrest's critique fractures the ideal of community by alleging that representations   of it have been unreflectingly male As I have argued just above,  Simpson's reading of Roberts could fall under this indictment. If Segrest's  image of community is as narrow from the feminist side as any might he from  the male, it is nevertheless provocative. In her "fable" of becoming it southern   writer, exclusion from "the community" is double. She dates her initiation   to the moment when she spied, from it distance, the black children who  were integrating her school in the Alabama of George Wallace: "I have it  tremendous flash of empathy, of identification, with their vulnerability and  their aloneness inside that circle of force Ithe white males of the Alabama  Highway I'atroll. Their separation is mine" (Segrest, 20). Segrest, establishing   another ideological center, uses the vocabulary of the former center-race   and community identification-to make herself it southern (woman)  writer. Extending and "outing" Lillian Smith's deconstruction of the southern   imaginary, Segrest links southern women writers in shared consciousness  of exclusion from it constructed center.

What the Quentin-based canon formation leads to is blindness to the kinds of female community which exist in the work of southern women writers, and the kinds of women who are estranged from these communities.  I particularly like Kreyling’s observation that while Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the centrality of Faulkner to southern studies originally referred to him as the “Dixie Limited,” her comment was quickly changed to be understood as the “Dixie Special.” 

If one looks at the work of southern women’s writing, one sees different kinds of commentaries on not only community, but the work of race within these communities:

Eli:abeth Jane Harrison reads the "other" narrative as a version of the  more familiar pastoral. Her reading of recent fiction by southern women,

black and white, arrives at it kind of utopian community: "Despite difficulties   in overcoming the harriers to sex and race equality, female friendship  and cooperative communities become an important part of the new southern   garden for these women authors" (Harrison i4-15). Harrison's guide is  Nina Auerhach's Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (tg78), it work  that is both about utopian communities of women in fiction and the product  of the author's own personal experience of "a model community of women  Ithe Radcliff Institute and its Fellows] who gave a local habitation to the  Utopias I read about" ("Acknowledgments," n.p.). Female textual utopias  exist, for Auerbach, in it ghostly relationship with the male, public community   of history: "The communities of women which have haunted our literary   imagination from the beginning are emblems of female self-sufficiency  which create their own corporate reality, evoking both wishes and fears" (5).  These wishes and fears are sexual, political, social, and historical; they are  "voiced" in a "code" that, unlike the male code, is "a whispered and it fleeting   thing, more it buried language than a rallying cry" (y). For it lesbian  critic like Segrest, burial is deep and the code sexually complex. For critics  like Donaldson, Manning, and Jones the "silenced" voices are still audible in  the Quentinian din.

As Segrest suggests in her memory of identifying with the black children  who integrated her school, experiences of racial exclusion may serve as metaphors   of sexual exclusion. The historical trajectory of African-American  women's writing, from the slave narratives of the nineteenth century to their  "recovery" by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, suggests a common  cause. The household, sexual politics of slavery produced in the community  of women, across racial boundaries, a lively code, open to many and sometimes   contradictory meanings. As Harriet Beecher Stowe would have it in  Uncle Tom's Cabin, black and white women-though unequal- conununi-  cated in the channel of domestic management and sentiment. Chloe and  her mistress bond against Mr. Shelby's purely economic decision to sell Tom  and Eli:a and her son. Eli:a Harris and Mrs. Bird openly conspire to circumvent   the public code-the Fugitive Slave Law thematically presented as a  male language. In texts by African-American women who were slaves, Harriet   Jacobs being the most prominent example, conversation within sexual  territory but across the racial barrier is more subtle. Sometimes, in Jacobs'.  narrative, the lines hold, and sometimes they Freak down.

Solid or breakable, conversation in overlapping racial and sexual channels  is vital to an understanding of the African-American woman's image of community as well as to the white southern woman's imagined community. The  classic of the first half of this century, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching  (;od (1y37), is almost universally acknowledged as an encoded text on the  formation of an African-American woman's community evolving from heterosexual,   social dependence on black men into a very strong community of  women that, according to Marjorie Pryse, "recreates the tradition of female  friendship and shared understanding and heals the lingering impact of separation   imposed by slavery and sexism" (t 5). Rather than attempt to occupy  the discourse of history, from which black American women have been excluded   even more thoroughly than white women, African-American women  writers (with Hurston as the twentieth-century leader) have unearthed the  buried languages of African-American folk traditions and community (2-4).  The result, for its late in the century, is that in African-American women's  writing, history is nearly abolished. Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982)  is the most famous text in which "black history becomes firmly rooted in the  network of female friendship" (Pryse 20) and, thereby is removed from male  control.

Kreyling’s analysis of Smith’s Oral History does a good job of showing how this novel exemplifies these differences.  For example, he observes that, “Dory is horn at the center of it community   the male literally cannot register because that community is in its  very constitution beyond his "history." (loc 1775-6)  Also, “Oral History signifies on traditional images of the origin and nature of  southern community in history, even as it pleads for a redefinition of community   in the woman's register.” 

Kreyling’s discussion of race in this work is quite interesting.  He says that, “bypassing of the traditional reading of the tragedy of race in the southern  narrative and suggests that it might always have been, as Welty', feminine  eye had seen in Delta Wedding, it learned pattern of male imitation, not an  essential tragedy of the community as it living whole.”  Even more importantly is his observation that “Lillian Smith, before Fried Green Tomatoes, and Dorothy  Allison in Bastard out of Carolina ( 1092) since, have used the same coupling  of sexual abuse with racial terrorism to stigmatize the male community.”  He also looks at the centrality of women’s lives to history; in Jill McCorkle’s work, for example, “pregnancy and birth  are shown to be at the center of the process of identity making. Men are irrelevant   after impregnation.”

Ultimately, he concludes that

What is powerful in the fiction of contemporary white southern women is their common, if not concerted, challenge to the Quentin thesis. It is not  that the prevailing literary historical and critical apparatus is or must he, in all instances, totally dismembered but rather that it must be seen as man-made,   the product not only of a time and a social condition (though that  would he had enough When the assertions are of "transcendent" meaning)  but of gender too. Through the heyday of "modern" southern writing, from the 1920s, of the renaissance, through various announcements of its end, to  the prophecy of a second rebirth by those who look to the African-American  male writer as savior rather than propagandist, the canon has been presented   as essentially linked to an ideal of southern community conceived in  history but transcending the materialism of historical circumstances. The  emergence of southern women's writing, however, makes that literary orthodoxy   seem partial, at best. What is emerging in southern literature, to confound   the critical attempts of traditional defenders to extend the hegemony  of renaissance ideology, is a body of work by white women writers that calls  up "forgotten" meanings of precursor texts and proposes a new configuration  of southern "community." The more defenders try to stretch the Quentin  thesis to fit historical/social change, the more the thesis thins at its weakest  seams.

Ironically, after all of this, Kreyling then spent two chapters discussing Faulkner—although his discussion of Faulkner is one in which he identifies Faulkner as suffering from an anxiety of his own influence.

Fred Hobson--Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983)

Hobson traces what he calls the “rage to explain” which he sees as a constant in writings by those from the American South since before the Civil War.  According to Hobson, “the Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something to explain, to justify, defend, or to affirm” (3).  Interestingly, he observes that not only do they often feel that they need to defend the South’s inferior status, but that many take pride, “a sense of distinction, of superiority, stemming from this inferior status.  The Southerner, that is to say, wears his heritage of failure and defeat as his badge of honor” (12).  Hobson breaks up the authors in his analysis into three large historical groups: antebellum writers, those writing “after Appomattox,” and those writing during and since the Civil Rights era.  Those writing before the Civil War were generally defending the Southern way of life—specifically, a way of life centered around race-based slavery.  After the Civil War, writers defended the southern way of life they saw destroyed by the War and particularly by Reconstruction, and many mythologized the lost way of life.  However, there were some, like George Washington Cable, whose work began to be critical of the South, especially in its racial policies.  By the twentieth century, writers became much more proscriptive in their work, culminating in the work of the 1920s and 1930s, which saw the publication of I’ll Take My Stand by the Vanderbilt-based Agrarians as well as the sociology-based work of writers such as Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina.  According to Hobson, the Agrarians saw the South’s major problem as one of public relations, while the North Carolina school writers were more concerned with addressing the problems of the South such as poverty, disease, and racism.  By the Civil Rights era, writers either tried to explain the myth of the South, or encourage the South to give up segregation.  By Hobson’s writing, in the wake of the Civil Rights era, the mythic South had given way to the progressive “Sun Belt,” and writers were now “focusing on the picturesque, on the South as cultural museum of charms and oddities.

W. J. Cash--The Mind of the South (1941)

Even in retrospect, Cash’s text still remains a rather cogent masterpiece in describing the history and emergence of the “mind of the South” as he saw it in 1941.  Keeping in mind the caveats noted in the 1991 introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, especially that of his audience—which was generally an audience of like-minded, white, middle class-to-affluence southern men—Cash sketches out the evolution of the current state of the South, at least from his vantage point.  Cash’s definition of the South is based on the Civil War: “roughly delimited by the boundaries of the former Confederate States of America, but shading over into some of the border states, notably Kentucky also” (xlviii).  One of the most significant reasons why Cash thinks the South has developed so differently from the North is that he sees it as kept in a series of frontier stages—pre-Civil War frontier, post-Civil War destruction and Reconstruction which returned the South to a frontier status, and then finally a burgeoning industrialization period (under the leadership of Henry Grady and those who shared his vision of a South who will beat the North at their own game), which when compared to the North continued to keep the South in a kind of frontier status (especially the poor whites, who were used as mill fodder, just as they were used as cannon fodder during the Civil War).

This continuing frontier status allowed the South to keep values more in keeping with frontier communities: fierce independence, romanticism, and violence.  This self-reinforcing values combine with what Cash identifies as gyneolatry.  After making an argument that the South has long been viewed as a quarantined area of sexual deviance (an argument which Gary Richards quite convincingly makes in his 2007 Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction), he then explains that the southern white woman grew to represent the South itself, and any attacks against her were understood to be attacks on the very traditions of the South itself: “the Yankee must be answered by proclaiming from the housetops that Southern Virtue, so far from being inferior, was superior, not only to the North’s but to any on earth, and adducing Southern Womanhood in proof” (86).  His discussion of the threat of sexual violence in the South is unsatisfying: in contrast to the white southern woman (which he does not even identify as “white,” assuming that the descriptor of “Southern woman” as sufficient (84)), and even more so in his discussion of black female sexuality: “Nor…must we overlook the specific role played by the Negro woman.  Torn from her tribal restraints and taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons, she was to be had for the taking….For she was natural, and could give herself up to passion in a way impossible to wives inhibited by Puritanical training”(84).  I find “taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons” a troubling euphemism for “raped.”

While his discussion of the contemporary race relations seems a bit naïve (or at least overly optimistic) for 1941, one of the most significant aspects of his discussion of racism and lynching in the 20^th century South is his insistence that it is not simply the province of the lower classes.  Rather, Cash important observes that “the major share of the responsibility in all those areas where the practice [of lynching] has remained common rests squarely on the shoulders of the master classes” (303).  He makes similar assertions about the KKK, claiming that they were made up primarily of lower class and poorer whites, though “its blood…came from the upper orders” (336).

Additionally, his discussion of the threat of sexual violence against white women by black men is equally troubling.  While he admits that “It is true that the actual danger of the southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro has always been comparatively small,” he maintains that “if the actual danger was small, it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held of,” because of the fear and terror of white women, the “neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls”(115).  Cash scapegoats pretty much everyone for the southern rape complex—everyone, that is, except white men, of whom  there is plenty of documentation of perpetrating actual rapes (though as most of these are against slave women, I’m dubious if Cash would have characterized them as rape).

Cash claims both that the South has had a hierarchical class system, and yet is a much more democratic system than the North; the backbends of logic he undertakes to support this is rather ludicrous.  First he gives a rather essentialist depiction of class, locating class status as a biological (perhaps even genetic) characteristic: when describing the lazy type of the white trash southerner, he describes it as manifesting in a “distinctive, physical character—a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and mis-shapeliness of head and feature, a peculiar sallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar  and not less sallow faded-out colorlessness of skin and hair” (24).  Despite his subsequent claim that it is impossible for even the best southern stock to have been diluted with inferior blood, and the fact that quality southern folk still abound disprove the validity of such a genetic basis for character, his argument rings rather false to me.  Rather, the analogy that he makes in his “Of Time and Frontiers” section regarding how a family of brothers can, within a few generations, result with widely disparate social conditions—to the point that relatives with the same name will no longer be aware of their own kinship—seems a weak example of social Darwinism (albeit one which is echoed in Gone with the Wind) (27).

It is in the post-bellum South that Cash claims the real myth of the aristocratic Old South took hold (124).  Such mythology was reified by characteristics of the South which Cash throughout his text identifies as its primary values, across the entire South: sentimentality, politics, and love of rhetoric characteristics which were present in the antebellum period, but which only grew stronger under the torture of Reconstruction (126).  Importantly, though, one of the most important aspects of the South’s struggle under Reconstruction was its tragic dependence on cotton as its key crop: not only did such a one-crop strategy deplete land already unsuitable for the crop, depleting the land of its fecundity, but it also meant that the “yeomen and poor whites” who were “converted to cotton culture…no longer produced provender enough at home to take care of themselves and their animals form crop to crop, and must, therefore, somehow manage to secure it from outside” (147).  Further, once the South began to pursue technological progress, Cash importantly points out that the mill system was at heart another plantation: “the Southern mill factory almost invariably was…a plantation, essentially indistinguishable in organization from the familiar plantation of the cotton fields” (200)—because “Progress depended upon the cheapness of labor was a new and powerful block upon any possible advance en masse for the lower classes in the South” (203).  The South’s pursuit of progress encouraged a return to individualistic thinking, and the plantation/factory system meant that poor whites, needing a scapegoat for their poverty, were encouraged to view blacks as their enemy.  Loyalty, instead, grew to the twinned giants of Progress and Religion, which were considered the be-all saviors. 

Interesting to my own work is Cash’s brief description of another “type”: the “Yankee schoolma’am who, in such numbers, moved down upon the unfortunate South in the train of the army of occupation, to “educate” the black man for his new place in the sun and to furnish an example of the Christian love and philanthropy to the benighted native whites.  Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand….if she not was not an intellectual, the South, with its vague standards in these manners, accepted her as such.  It saw her, indeed, as a living epitome of the Yankee mind, identified her essentially with Northern universities, read in the evils springing abundantly from her meddlesome stupidity categorical proof that Northern ‘theory’ was in toto altogether mad” (137).  Though he makes a brief aside to blame the northern journalist as well, it is clear that he lays the majority of the blame on meddling northern women.

He then discusses the seeming paradox that the South during Reconstruction, as it became more religious and anti-intellectual, began to for the first time develop a real literature of its own.  However, he explains the paradox that much of the literature, with the exception of Sidney Lanier, was quite propaganda-esque in nature, in its nostalgia for the Old South, noting Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and George Washington Cable (the Grandissimes in particular) as examples.  I’m a bit confused by this last characterization—while Cash notes that the The Grandissimes is “so predominately a piece of sentimental glorification that it goes mainly unread nowadays, yet had so many flashes of untrammeled insight, so many sudden lapses into realism, that his countrymen actually denounced it as libel” (143).  Certainly, The Grandissimes relies heavily on sentimentalism, but I don’t see how the story of Bras Coupé (or of Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c.) can be considered “sentimental glorification.”

Interestingly, he points to Ellen Glasgow as the first example of a writer in the South who was “approach[ing] the materials of her world almost exclusively from the viewpoint of an artist” (144).  He then gives her as an example, along with James Joyce, of authors to which educated southerners turned in the 1920s instead of traditional southern authors such as Thomas Nelson Page (325).  In his discussion of the flowering of southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, he points to Barren Ground (1925) as “the first real novel, as opposed to romances, the South had brought forth” (374).  He considers Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner together with Thomas Wolfe, deeming Caldwell and Faulkner “romantics of the appalling” (378).  The success of these generations of authors in creating a truly southern literature, according to Cash, was their ability to stand “intellectually at least, pretty decisively outside the region,” no longer writing about the South as “Never-Never Land” (379).  In his analysis of the rise of the Vanderbilt Agrarians in the wake of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart,” he says that, “These men were mouthpieces of the fundamental, f sometimes only subterranean, will of the South to hold to the old way: the spiritual heirs of Thomas Nelson Page.  And their first joint declaration, I’ll Take My Stand, was, like their earlier prose works, essentially a determined reassertion of the validity of the legend of the Old South” (380).

Twelve Southerners--I'll Take My Stand (1930)

            The Agrarians were a collection of writers primarily from Vanderbilt University, an offshoot of a poetic movement who called themselves the Fugitive Poets.  The Fugitives sowed the seeds which would become New Criticism, which valued organizational unity and paradox at the center of poetry and eschewed focusing on authorial intention or emotional response.  In their focus on close reading, the New Critics made philosophical assumptions about the purpose of reading: for them, form was key.  In their attempt to distinguish the study of literature from that of literary history, they emphasized preserving the authenticity of literary discourse—and in fact, were quite defensive about this.  They came from a point of view which saw the existence of literature as being threatened—this point of view was easily transferred to their disdain for technology and industry as similarly threatening allegedly traditional ways of life.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the evils of industry.  It posits that there exists a southern way of life which is different from and better than the rest of the country, primarily because it’s based on an agrarian foundation.  It claims that people are happiest when their work is meaningful, which an agrarian society allows, and an industrial one does not.

John Crowe Ransom—Reconstructed by Unregenerate

Thesis: The South is unique on this continent for having a culture founded on European principles of culture.  It champions the “English” model of farming.  To Ransom, man and nature must work in a relationship of mutual respect.  Ransom also includes a quite sexist discussion of male versus female ambition. 

Donald Davidson—A Mirror for Artists

Davidson argues that industry can’t play Maecenas—the arts require a slow civilization, one that’s agrarian based and still connected with nature, to flourish.  Industry is a devil’s bargain with art—the only art which is profitable is bad art.  Art for Davidson should be in the romantic tradition, and he sees modernism as directly linked to the Romantics, only more fully fulfilling their mission.  To Davidson, art must be beautiful.  Davidson champions lyric poetry, specifically that of the 18^th century which had a larger public role than that of the 20^th century.  In the 19^th century, poets were marginalized and became personal and subjective.  He claims that to succeed in the 20^th century, the poet must be alienated or else he becomes commodified.  Here, his work echoes that of Walter Benjamin, who saw that art was no longer part of a whole; mechanical reproduction deprived modern art of any “aura.”  

Frank Lawrence Owsley—The Irrepressible Conflict

            Owsley discusses the Civil War with strongly romantic tones, describing the subsequent peace as one “unique in history,” because it was a peace with “no generosity” (62).  The racism in this essay is quite appalling (especially considering that he was a history professor at Vanderbilt), as it describes the freed slaves as “some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh, and the bulk of them hardly three generations  removed from cannibalism” (62).  He condemns northern abolitionists and industrialists as hypocrites and Pharisees who campaigned to impose their corrupt culture upon an agrarian South.  Interestingly, Owsley does address slavery, though he claims that “Slavery had been practically forced upon the country by England—over the protest of colonial assemblies” (77).

John Gould Fletcher—Education, Past and Present

            Beginning with a view of education as bringing out an individual’s potential—which does not necessarily require formal education—Fletcher connects the growth of American education to the changes in American which began with the growth of industrialism.  Fletcher does not see this as a positive thing.  Instead, he wishes to “return” to education based on eighteenth century principles—education “on a sound, historical, and conservative basis” (95)—which had as its goal to “produce good men” (95).  He opposes the public school system, because he feels that education’s goal is to produce an educated elite—something which a democratic public school system cannot do. 

Lyle H. Lanier—A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress

Lanier critiques progress "as a slogan and a philosophy." (p.122) Even though critical of John Dewey's conclusions, Lanier uses Dewey's theories in an argument for balancing industrial and agrarian impulses. He argues that there are limits to industrial employment, an argument generating new force in contemporary social literature.

Allen Tate—Remarks on the Southern Religion

            Tate explains that he approaches the task of commenting about religion in "the spirit of irreligion." Tate laments the loss of the class of "professional men of religion." These men used to be highly respected by laymen and unbelievers alike, and when they spoke, no one questioned whether they had the authority to speak about the "Higher Things." He laments the loss of the kind of religion professed by those in the antebellum South, which he notes as “highly illuminating,” that the Southerners had a religion which they “never profoundly believed,” but they “acted as if they did” (174).  In fact, despite Tate’s own professed atheism (a religious atheism, however), he claims that the South would not have been defeated had they “possessed a sufficient faith in its own kind of God….had  it been able to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics” (174).  In other words, I think what Tate is saying is that the South must find a way to live paradox in order to survive—ironically, this theme of unattainable paradox seems to be a common undercurrent of many of these essays.

Herman Clarence Nixon—Whither Southern Economy?

Nixon covers the changes in the South's economy-with the proposal that one must balance the agrarian and industrial economic pressures. Employing positively a negative memory, he concludes "it is possible for the South, which has had experience with slavery, to subordinate industrial processes to the status of slaves, not masters.... From a dull industrialism Southern civilization should bepreserved with its supporting agrarian economy." (200) Onewonders, however, about the receptivity to these arguments in the socialsciences today because the agrarian option continues to be swallowed byeconomic shifts, even in the South.

Andrew Nelson Lytle—The Hind Tit

            Lytle uses military language mixed with an odd attempt at vernacular speech.  He idealizes the yeoman farmer and disregards the existence of slavery.  He gives a detailed description of a household which is sexist and condescending. 

Robert Penn Warren—The Briar Patch

            This is one of the few essays in the collection to make an attempt at addressing race issues, especially those after the War.  He supports Booker T. Washington’s vocational solution.

John Donald Wade—The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius

Taking the form of a biographical sketch, the essay is based on the life of Jacob Walter Frederick, Wade's maternal uncle and a man who embodied the "southern way of life" as defined by many of the book's other contributors. Frederick (fictionalized as "Cousin Lucius") is described as hard working, self-reliant, learned, and tradition bound. As he grows older and times change, Cousin Lucius sees the new generation of young people leaving for the city and recognizes that they desire and expect "without effort, things that have immemorially come as the result of effort only." Wade vividly but dispassionately dramatizes Frederick's life, avoiding the temptation to comment on its lessons until the final two sentences of the essay: "And all who wish to think that he lived insignificantly and that the sum of what he was is negligible, are welcome to think so. And may God have mercy on their souls."

Henry Blue Kline—William Remington: A Study in Individualism

This essay is about a young man named William Remington, who moved about the country trying different jobs and locations and groups of friends. Finding himself eventually back in New Orleans, he develops a group of friends who think of themselves as pioneering individualists. Apparently, their individualism consists in major part of a suspicious attitude toward Yankee materialism and a pleasing feeling of superiority to the average person, which they call "median man." He describes their grand historical perspective this way; don't zip by part in which Communism may be worse than "capitalism gone progressivist", i.e., their presumption is that the two are at least equally bad. It's not clear whether "race" here means white people or the human race.

Stark Young—Not in Memoriam, But In Defense

            Author of So Red the Rose, the novel of Confederate Mississippi, in this essay, Stark states, “If anything is clear, it is that we can never go back, and neither this essay nor any intelligent person that I know in the South desires a literal restoration of the old Southern life…. But out of any epoch in civilization there may arise things worthwhile.” Young endeavored to show in his fiction and in this essay the “worthwhile things” that should survive out of the Southern tradition. Among them were, in his words, “a certain fineness of feeling, an indefinable code for yourself and others, and a certain continuity of outlook.” He also insisted upon the individual’s self-control, fairness to others, obedience to law, and respect for the social order. The essay was both a summary of his philosophy and a premise paper for So Red the Rose.