History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction. (Book Reviews).

Donaldson, Susan V.

History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, by Deborah N. Cohn. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. x, 248 pp. $39.95 cloth. $19.95 paper.

CARLOS FUENTOS ONCE WROTE THAT William Faulkner loomed so large in twentieth-century Spanish American literature because "only Faulkner ... in a closed world of optimism and success, offers us an image that is common to both the United States and Latin America; the image of defeat, of separation, of doubt: of tragedy." Building on similar pronouncements made by Spanish American writers including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Rulfo, Deborah N. Cohn demonstrates in this study the rich possibilities for "a new branch of inter-American literary criticism" by tracing "commonalities" in historical experience, regional identity, narrative experimentation, and representations of history and memory in selected U.S. Southern and Spanish American writers. The result does indeed point toward new directions in comparative Southern cultural and literary, studies and offers a host of valuable reminders that the American South is as much a part of the culture of the greater Caribbean basin as it is a region of the North American continent.

Part of the ongoing redefinition of the literature of the Americas, Cohn's study draws from earlier studies linking Faulkner with Garica Marquez in particular and with scholarly approaches developed by James Irby, Lois Parkinson Zamora, and Jose David Saldivar. But Cohn is far less interested in writing another study of literary influence than she is in forming a framework for "inter-American literary studies" focusing, in her own words, on "convergences, similar features and strategies that have developed as responses to analogous sociopolitical and historical circumstances." For Cohn, C. Vann Woodward's famous argument about the "burden of Southern history still rings true--that the American South shares with other cultures of the world experiences atypical for the American mainstream--that "of dispossession, of socioeconomic hardship, of political and cultural conflict, and of the export of resources to support the development of a `North.'" Indeed, Cohn argues that for both the American South and for Spanish America the plantation historically has served as a paradigm for socio-economic organization and as a lingering legacy of hierarchy, racism, patriarchy, and oppression, and that paradigm in turn has shaped the narrative responses of writers in both Souths who sought to define their local realities and cultural identities within literature.

Cohn excavates the "commonalities" of those narrative responses with a good deal of dexterity and sensitivity, and it is in the specific parallels/readings she offers linking selected literary texts--Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo--that her study unearths its greatest riches. Linking Faulkner and Vargas Llosa reveals not just Faulkner's long shadow on Latin American letters but the writers' common concerns with the fabrication of history and the elusiveness of historical truth. Pairing Allende and Ellison underscores what Cohn calls the "doubly marginalized perspectives of groups in peripheral regions that have been further disenfranchised by race and gender." Reading Porter and Rulfo together demonstrates the ideological uses of memory and its illusory, creations of lost plenitude in communities struggling to maintain identity. Above all, though, these pairings remind us that preoccupations with the construction of history, with oppression and subversion, and with the temptations of memory are hardly the sole possession of U.S. Southern literature--what we might call the exception to American exceptionalism--but rather significant bonds linking the American South with Spanish America, They are preoccupations that span cultural and linguistic boundaries and ultimately render those boundaries highly problematic--no small accomplishment when one considers how much questions about boundaries--like where and when the South begins and ends--have traditionally figured into debates, theories, definitions, and even the very language we use when we "tell about the South."

Those old debates and definitions die hard, though, and Cohn very nearly allows them to take over her discussion early on due to her heavy reliance on implicitly white definitions of Southern culture, identity, and literature developed by Allen Tate, Frank Owsley, and even Woodward to a certain extent, whose paradigm of defeat and failure does not take into account an African-American perspective of the Civil War experience as one of victory and liberation. Taking her cue from Owsley and novelist Caroline Gordon, Cohn argues that "official stories" of the South in the Civil War and Reconstruction were largely Northern in origin and that accordingly American Southern writers, like Spanish American writers, felt compelled to "reclaim their histories by telling their own stories." The fact of the matter is, though, that thanks to the Dunning School's interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction the white South's version of that period as one of conquest and exploitation largely dominated the national imagination, despite W.E.B. Du Bois' bitter rebuttal in Black Reconstruction, until the appearance of Kenneth Stampp's The Era of Reconstruction in 1965.

To her credit, Cohn subtly revises her argument in her last chapter on race and region, where she briefly discusses intersections between the American South and Cuba in the Spanish-American War and the silencing of African-American voices and histories in "official" stories of the American South. Citing Thadious Davis's examination of black reappropriations of Southern history and memory, Cohn observes that increasingly African-American writers are turning to the South and "its multiple meanings as a cornerstone of black identity" and that any study of the region requires an examination of external and internal marginalization. Both Spanish America and the American South, she concludes, "duplicate their own subordination in the dispossession by race, ethnicity, gender, and class that has created `fourth world' populations within their perimeters." That insight alone points toward exciting new possibilities for reading and linking the literatures and cultures of the two Souths, and Cohn makes a considerable contribution to Southern studies in leading the way.

SUSAN V. DONALDSON
The College of William and Mary