Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.

 

Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. - based on lectures given as part of the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures series.

As someone not all that familiar with the literature of the American South, this book was an eyeopener. And good news: I enjoyed reading the book's 120 pages over the course of a weekend. Although the author is a seasoned and much published academic, the language is clear and accessible, free of jargon and technical terms.

The book contains three chapters: 1) Embracing Place; 2) Bleeding Westward; 3) Regeneration through Community. Also included: a forward, two prefaces and an epilogue. By my eye, here's a key from the Preface to the First Edition:

"It is the Southern writer's foray into the West, it seems to me, that most crucially extends and reinvigorates the Southern imagination; even more importantly, that foray, in its challenge to ideals and myths of the American experience, offers a way to extend and reinvigorate the American imagination, a reconfiguration desperately needed in these increasingly dark days of global misunderstanding and conflict."

So, the first question the author addresses is what makes the Southern imagination and Southern literature unique. The answer we're given revolves around the "Southern Renaissance" and is outlined in the first chapter, Embracing Place, as when we read:

"Almost all the literature of the Southern literary renaissance is so powerfully grounded in a sense of place that movement itself - in whatever direction, but particularly westward - is characteristically viewed with distrust and suspicion. A Southerner's nightmare might be Gertrude Stein's characterization of America: "Conceive a space that is filled with moving"; and the ongoing Northern bias against the South no doubt in part rests in the Southern celebration of place, Americans associating freedom above all with mobility."

References are made to a number of authors pivotal to the Southern Renaissance, including Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty and, of course, William Faulkner. From my own reading experience, anybody seeking a deeper appreciation and understanding of the nature of place in Southern literature couldn't do better than read about William Faulker's fictional Snopes family in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi in such novels as The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion.

For me, the next chapter, Bleeding Westward, was especially fascinating, a chapter speaking to Southern authors writing Westerns. "In writing Westerns, Southern authors are not seeking refuge from the problems of post-modern (and Southern) life but are instead seeking vantage points for exploring those problems."

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. sites Cormac McCarthy novels to underscore his points, novels such as Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Likewise Madison Smartt Bell's Zero db and Other Stories.

However, before delving into the Westerns themselves, there's an analysis of Southern authors using a Southern setting to explore themes more associated with the West, specifically in James Dickey's novel Deliverance. Here's a quote central to the investigation:

"We're the law. What we decide is going to be the way things are." Lewis's logic, asserting the validity of whatever "law" is necessary for survival, mirrors that repeatedly used by American society to justify the killing of Native Americans in its expansion westward into new frontiers - the same logic that was conveniently discarded once the settlements were in place and the natives were gone. History was rewritten to cover up society's savagery."

Now that's a critical insight: the rural folk in Georgia displaced by urban sprawl runs parallel to Native Americans being displaced by the white expansion throughout the West under the banner of manifest destiny. If readers are not familiar with Deliverance, please read James Dickey's novel sooner rather than later, one of the most powerful novels ever written.

In the final chapter, Regeneration through Community and the book's Epilogue, we're given an overview on how contemporary Southern authors might enrich and expand our national identity. I'll conclude with a direct author quote:

"In their vision of community balancing place and space, contemporary Southern writers of the West in a sense merge Southern and Western mythologies, creating a new frontier mythology more humane and just than either the Southern or Western mythology alone. intriguingly, this blending of imaginative visions seems to be also at work in the Western literary tradition, which appears to have lately been becoming much more Southern in feel and vision."


American author and scholar Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., born 1951