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.

Robert Penn Warren--All the King's Men (1946)

            Published in 1946, All the King’s Men won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.  While many descriptions of the novel focus on Huey Long, the inspiration for Willie Stark, the novel’s central character, I think that such a focus really does a disservice to the novel.  Told from the perspective of Jack Burden, who becomes a key player in Stark’s administration, I see it as a much more general story of twentieth century, Freud-inflected American masculinity.  Nested narratives telling the stories of Jack Burden, his distant nineteenth century ancestor Cass Mastern, and Willie Stark’s own rise himself and loss of his son, the novel explores the evolution and interdependence of character necessary for these American men. 

Highly informed by oedipal conflicts, the men in these stories—Burden, Willie and Tom Stark, Adam Stanton, Cass Mastern, Judge Irwin, Sugar Boy, and the Burden’s various father and stepfather figures primarily identified by their occupations (the “Scholarly Attorney,” for example)—demonstrate in varying degrees the competition, struggle, and interdependence between fathers and sons in their struggle for identity.  Jack Burden’s sexualized relationship with his mother seems to be part Oedipal and part Hamlet, as he’s both put off by her hypersexuality as well as paralyzed by her when she turns her charms on him.  Willie and Tom Stark provide another tragic father-son dyad, as Tom’s drive to live up to his father’s expectations lead to an out of wedlock child and his own ultimate death from a football injury.  Finally, Burden’s own contribution to the death of his own father overtly plays out the Freudian interpretation of the Oedipus story.

Burden’s background as an academic historian provides a useful framework for allowing him to analyze and speculate on the nature of the stories he’s telling.  It allows the nested narrative of Cass Mastern, his ancestor who inadvertently contributed to the death of his beloved’s husband, echoing Burden’s own involvement in the death of Judge Irwin, whom he discovers is his biological father, as well as the murder of Willie Stark, certainly a central father figure in the novel.  Neither Jack Burden, Cass Mastern, or Tiny Duffy actually pull triggers in these deaths, but in Burden’s analysis are as responsible for these actions as those who held the guns.  Ultimately, Burden’s story is of his search for meaning—or, more specifically, for first causes and responsibility. 

That his very name is “Burden” underscores the difficulty which he finds his own very existence to pose.  Burden’s first explanation is the theory of the “Great Twitch,” which he develops on a spontaneous trip west he takes after discovering that Anne Stanton, the love of his life, has slept with Stark.  The "Great Twitch" is a particular brand of nihilism that Burden embraces during this journey westward: "all the words we speak meant nothing and there was only the pulse in the blood and the twitch of the nerve, like a dead frog's leg in the experiment when the electric current goes through."On his way back from California, Jack gives a ride to an old man who has an involuntary facial twitch. This image becomes for him the encapsulating metaphor for the idea that "all life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve."  In other words, life is without meaning; everything is motivated by some inborn reflex action and nobody is responsible for their choices or even their own destiny. The emotional distance permitted by this revelation releases Jack from his own frustration stemming from the relationship between Anne Stanton and his boss, and allows him to return to circumstances which were previously unbearable. 

Subsequent events (including the tragic deaths of Governor Stark, his lifelong friend Adam Stanton, and Judge Irwin, Jack's father) convince Jack that the revelation of the "Great Twitch" is an insufficient paradigm to explain what he has seen of history. "[H]e saw that though doomed [his friends] had nothing to do with any doom under the godhead of the Great Twitch. They were doomed, but they lived in the agony of will."  Ultimately, he grows to accept some responsibility for his part in the destruction of his friends' lives.  His reward for this acceptance of responsibility is marriage to Anne Stanton, with whom he has retained an alternately problematic and apathetic attachment to throughout the novel.  Especially when he is enmeshed in his family romance role with his sexualized mother, his behavior with Anne is seen to evolve without his conscious participation: they assume they will marry, though make no overt plans.  Physical consummation of their relationship is interrupted when an emotional connection is made.  As long as Burden does not see other people as people, but as roles, titles, or actors, he is fine; it is when their common humanity is acknowledged, he is paralyzed. 

It took me a while to warm up to this book: I have an aversion to narrators such as Burden, who read to me as mid-century, Freud-influenced, white men whining about their unhappiness.  Women in this book are two-dimensional and hypersexualized, a common characteristic of this type of book which bothers me.  However, I admit that the nested narratives and the ways in which they commented on each other did eventually win me over.  Warren’s command of language is at times hilarious and at times beautiful.  And the novel’s grasp on such a large scope of its interwoven stories is ultimately successful.