Via Syntax of Things, I read this quotation from an interview with Allen Gurganus about the 2006 edition of New Stories from the South, a quotation that would have driven me to tear my hair out if the stylist at Supercuts hadn’t already made me look like a pedophilic Bible salesman:
“All stories are about resisting loss. All stories are about people in trouble. Having lost a war that we started, I think we’re uniquely qualified to talk about what losing really means. In narrative, winning comes out of losing, and so we have an edge.”
For Pete’s sake. You know, I actually like the idea of taking “loss” as a starting point for understanding southern literature. But to suggest that the Civil. Freaking. War. is the primal experience of loss for contemporary southern writers, or contemporary southerners (other than neo-Confederate dumbasses), just makes me a little nuts. There is loss a-plenty in our modern South, but I suspect it has more to do with disparities of income and education, the sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, always palpable influence of pernicious ideologies of gender and race. Some of these, you could persuasively argue, are legacies of the Civil War and the post-Reconstruction era, but that doesn’t seem to be what Gurganus is getting at here. Nor does Gurganus seem to be talking about the culture of nostalgia that exists in some parts of the South for an era of antebellum splendor and gentility that never was.
(Walker Percy excelled at sending up this sort of historical myopia; in Love in the Ruins*, the showplace of Paradise Estates, an all-white Louisiana suburb, is a perfect replica of Tara built from the “original plans”—that is, the original set designs for Gone With the Wind. And never forget the genius of Barry Hannah’s “Bats out of Hell Division,” a story that overinflates and thereby explodes every cliche about the Civil War in general and about the Confederate army’s storied endurance in the face of starvation and disease in particular. The story is narrated by a scribe who has lost all his limbs except for his “writing arm,” which he uses to record observations such as these: “Some of us in that last long entrenchment, I noted, are so narrow against the wind they suffer the advantage of disappearing as targets. One man cuts and eats his own bunions. Corporal Nigg was still in his place, frozen upright, long dead but continuing as the sentry. Who can fire him? Who has time for clerical work? Nigg is present, accounted for, damn you, a soldier’s soldier” [44].)
Anyway. To return to my rant, my suspicion is that when we talk about southern writers dealing with loss from now on, what they’re dealing with has more to do with the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast by Katrina and by inept and/or corrupt politicians and developers than with J.E.B Stuart and Robert E. Lee. It is only because this seems to me so utterly self-evident that I am so dismayed that the public face of southern literature this year doesn’t seem to get it.
And let us not leave out the question of who the “we” who started and lost this war is supposed to be (tabling, for the moment, the question of what this “we” actually “lost” in this war). Running throughout this interview is the unsettling sense that, like the earliest canon-makers of southern literature, Gurganus sees “southern” as as specifically “white” category, since obviously the “we” who started and lost the war does not include the legions of African American southerners whose culture is as southern as anyone else’s. Lest you think I’m reading too much into that “we,” here’s Gurganus on the centrality of race to southern letters:
“It may be the great subject of American life,” Gurganus says, “beginning with how we treated the native population in order to get what we wanted, and then began to import other types of people to do work for us we didn’t want to do. All of these things make Southerners uniquely qualified to tell the American story.”
Sigh.
I haven’t read the Gurganus-edited New Stories volume yet. I’m sure the stories he has included constitute a volume that is as diverse, contradictory, and confusing as the South itself. I’m quite fond of his story “Blessed Assurance,” in which he takes on some of these issues in a much more complex and insightful manner. So I don’t doubt that Gurganus sees the South, and southern literature, as diverse, contradictory, and confusing. But his reliance on time-worn shibboleths and creaky cliches to account for the South’s distinctiveness is disheartening.
*If Love in the Ruins is a novel that you know well and enjoy so much so that you decide to teach it one semester, remember that there’s a stretch of about ten pages early on that is entirely about dildoes. It’s the sort of thing you don’t take especial note of when you’re reading on your own, but having to discuss that passage with a class full of undergrads can make for some mildly awkward moments.
You know, when I read “Having lost a war that we started,” for a second I I forgot the subject of the your post and thought the “we” was the current American government and its supporters, and the “war” was Iraq.
Yeah, that’s because that’s the only interpretation that makes sense, Sue! Nobody in my family was even in America until the very late 19th c./very early 20th. Prof., your note that Gurganus apparently equates “Southern” with “white” is exactly the problem: the things that make one Southern in the ‘06—or for me, growing up in ‘Bama in the eighties—were often shared between both whites and African-Americans.
I have eight million more things in common, and to talk about, with a black guy from Birmingham that graduated high school in ‘91 and whose dad was a pipefitter than I do a white guy from Jackson who went to JA and Ole Miss. Gurganus somehow seems to miss that socioeconomic factors are gigantically powerful in shaping who we are.
I am, shall we say, haughtily annoyed by Mr. Gurganus’ statements, but I would likely be haughtily annoyed by anything spoken by a man my father’s age born in North Carolina, which has the very word “north” in the title, for God’s sake. His oeuvre is preocuppied—often heroically, in the case of his public dust-ups with the addled Sen. Helms—with race, a noble pursuit for any person regardless of birth.
It just feels like the new anthology ought to be called “White Stories about Things We Enlightened Whites Care about,” which evokes not a small bit of guilt from me, since the anthology I want to put together is about as diverse as a bag of flour.
Yeah, that emphasis on class is important—well said, Gorj. In Gurganus’ defense, I do think the stories in the anthology are a fairly diverse lot, in terms of race/gender/class and of aesthetics, too. What’s interesting to me is that even in the face of such diversity, Gurganus is falling back on the same old worn-out language to try to capture what’s unique and distinctive about the South.
As Sue notes, perhaps our ongoing blunder in Iraq will further prove the Malcolm X/Marcus Gandy assertion that “America is Mississippi now.” (Of course, at least the Confederate glorifiers can latch on to the Union Army’s enormous advantage in terms of infrastructure, troop numbers, and weaponry as a reason for the Confederacy’s loss, to see themselves as a David wrongly felled by Goliath; the US now has no such similar excuses.)
Wow! I’m at work right now and can’t study this. But I will do just that tonight. I am trying to figure this all out and know this will be helpful.
When I hear the word loser in my head it’s with a New jersey twang, “Loo-sa.” So, it’s a bit pompous of Gurganus to maintain that Southern writers are quintessential “connoisseur(s) of disaster.” Of course loss is essential to literature as is moral meaning, but not, I think because of a war that ended in 1865 or the presence of churches on every other corner, but because we all face death inevitably, we age and look awful, naked, in the mirror, we ache for vital relationship, we suffer the angst of inadequacy, and we say, loudly or secretly, “Is there more than this, is there a God.”
That said, this Southern literature thing is interesting. Why does it even exist? There is a driver for it and it seems identifiable, like a taste or a smell. The hearkening back to aristocracy/civil war/racial composition and identities is curious.
My great surprise when I moved to the South, having thought very little about the Civil War, was finding that the debate still raged with Southerners of all ilks ready to straighten me out and tell me the War wasn’t about slavery, but states rights, with the Klan still suited up and meeting on the steps of the Courthouse in Decatur, and high school students still carrying confederate flags to football games shouting, “Go Rebels.” Something is still going on that informs the literature of Dixie. I’m just not quite sure what it is.
*In regard to teaching challenges, how do you address the jerking knee of Will Barrett inThe Last Gentleman?
I’m not from the south but I live here (northern Mississippi, to be exact); I’ve been here just shy of three years. There were a lot of things that I encountered that I wasn’t expecting, the big one was the Civil War thing. Not the Civil War debate, I knew that existed, but the Civil War thing: how deep the feelings regarding the Civil War were and how defensive some people were about it. When I would hear or read the about the Civil War thing I never knew how to react. And what got me was how many people seemed to hold me almost (but not quite) personally responsible for the Civil War. Telling them my family wasn’t in the US until around 1890 didn’t seem to make a difference, I was still a Yankee and I was guilty by association.
Little by little I have begun to understand the South. And one of the things that has helped me get a feel for the South and its complexities is this blog. So, I wanted to thank you both for helping me make a little more sense out of southern culture.
Gorj…is it hard for you to read about someone’s take on southern ____ (writing, culture, etc)? i’ve always thought your objection reflex is pretty quick to act when you hear anyone talk about ‘the south’. whereas, it is a different story when someone talks and you just know or assume that they’re talking about the south…i mean, because, whatever else WOULD a southerner be talking about? right?
Add that to the fact that Gorj thinks (like me) that there are 4 southern states in the US and then whatever the hell else those others wanna call themselves. I know my tolerences are pretty low.
Perhaps it is telling that the word Southern tends to mean ‘white’ in the very region that has the most black people in the US…particularly when everything interesting about the south is tied to blackfolk in some way.
Polly, I’m interested in what you are saying but I’m not sure I’m getting it. Are you making a distinction between the geographical region “The South” and a mind-form that is “The South” and an cultural base of experience that is “The South?” What is this objection reflex you are speaking of and what sets it off?
well, as for the geographical reference, we joke that the ‘real’ south is made up of four states. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. I suppose some people would trade Louisiana for South Carolina on that list, but i’m sorry. New Orleans alone is more a part of the south than the entirity of South Carolina. everything else is like some sort of border state amalgam.
being perhaps overly protective (i can lump myself here too, gorj is just more reactionary) of the South, Gorj is sensitive to those who want to talk about, or rather disect the south. reading too many writers from Nebraska or NYC telling us what the south is ‘like’. too many southerners obscuring the good we have here. too many non-southerners unwilling to see it.
I was kidding Gorj. because he can seem to tune out a non-southerner when they start talking about ‘us’ down here (and remember, there are only 4 southern states!). to him, its like hearing a white Mormon from Utah tell us about what it’s REALLY like being black. Thanks but No thanks. That being said, it’s hard to imagine Gorj. getting hyped up about Gurganus had to say about the south.
I know this isn’t really what you’re asking about Brd, but its really more of a conversation or an essay too long for this comments log. Gorj, you know what i’m talking about. maybe you should elaborate.
It’s a funny thing how we can hurt each others feelings, sometimes unknowingly, with comments that strike close to home, whatever that home may be. With a look or a word we can either categorize each other or alternately exclude each other. (I think this is happening a bit in relation to the Muslim community too.) No one is prototypically Southern or Northern really, but we do guard our roots. And I’m interested in the roots, they are important.