Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism. (Book Reviews).

McKee, Kathryn B.

Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problem of Regionalism, by Richard Gray. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. 535 pp. $75.00 cloth. $34.95 paper.

RICHARD GRAY'S LATEST CONTRIBUTION to the body of Southern literary criticism is enormous, not merely because it numbers 535 pages but also because of its sweep--he begins with Edgar Allan Poe and ends with Ernest Gaines--and because of its aim: the investigation of Southern literature both as an aberration from the national norm and as a complex body of writing whose traditional premises are deviated from as often as they are upheld. Gray's interest is in what it means to belong to a particular place, especially "what it implies for certain Americans to call themselves Southern" (p. ix). He has no intention of offering any neat rubric of interpretation, he maintains, given that his emphasis "is on variance and pluralism: how a culture ... is made up of resistances, conflicting interests, and internal differences" (p. xii). Gray studies this process of Southern self-definition through careful and insightful readings of a number of individual texts and authors, readings that are coupled with sophisticated references to a diverse body of literary and cultural theory. The result is anything but an aberration from our expectations for Gray's work: Southern Aberrations is a well-researched journey through the varieties of Southern literature, positing at its close new approaches for reading and interpreting current literary production.

The reader has to do some work along the way, however. Gray's stated interest in the South's variegated self means that the hardest task a reviewer could set herself is offering generalizations about what Southern Aberrations says or accomplishes. (Several individual chapters exceed 100 pages, and one has a subtitle as unrestricted as "Versions of the Mountain Folk [and Some River Folk] Between the Two World Wars and Beyond.") In many ways, the book reads more like a collection of essays or short studies than a singular argument, but as a result offers a multitude of avenues for future discussion by the scholars who will undoubtedly pursue the various threads Gray can only briefly identify here. One difficulty in neatly summarizing the book's thesis comes from Gray's use of "aberration," a term which he acknowledges "is a function of discourse rather than a matter of fact" (p. xiii); thus the existence of an aberration depends upon the existence of a culturally accepted norm from which deviance is possible. Gray has devoted a number of books to identifying forces at the region's literary center--conflicts between yeoman farmers and aristocrats, the power of Southern self-consciousness as exhibited by Faulkner--but the splinters that fall away from that center can be hard to fit together. "Aberration," then, is limited as a unifying concept. It can signal the relationship of a Southern writer to established regional or national practice, but the transgression itself remains individualized.

Gray begins his study with two relatively short chapters about writers who would appear to have little in common: Edgar Allan Poe and Ellen Glasgow. Yet Gray finds both harboring a sense that life is elsewhere, "a secret sense of cultural marginality" (p 34). Southerners have insisted on an intrinsic, undeniable difference, Gray reports, at the same time that they have been needled by a feeling of separation from "the site of literary power"(p. 35). Thus Southerners, Poe and Glasgow among them, find themselves as subjects of national narratives that they are both resistant to and dependent on for the formation of their own regional identity.

Gray's third chapter traces the self-conscious study of Southern literature from its construction by the New Critics to what he understands as its pluralization in The History of Southern Literature (1985). Perhaps responding to Michael Kreyling's pointed critique in Inventing Southern Literature (1998), Gray counsels that we respect the critical achievements and standards that have preceded our own time by situating them historically and culturally within theirs. We can now readily identify the Agrarians as conscious ideologues, but we have seemed less able, until recently, to plumb the cultural moments that have given us the central texts of the study of Southern literature, books such as Louis Rubin's and Robert Jacobs's Southern Renascence (1953) and their 1961 volume, South: Modern Southern Literature in Its Cultural Setting. In the first, Gray maintains, Rubin and Jacobs suppress the anxieties triggered by a South changing rapidly in the wake of World War II. But the promise of greater attention to context offered by the subtitle of their second collaboration goes largely unfulfilled. Rubin and Jacobs mention the works of African-American writers, for instance, but ultimately rule them outside of the study's purview because they are of social, rather than literary significance. The editors acknowledge the limitations of their earlier volume, but end up, Gray suggests, largely redeploying the same belief system. The construction of the Southern canon, then, raises issues about the intersection of fiction and politics and about the linking of a particularized set of themes and values to a regional norm.

In his fourth and fifth chapters, Gray reveals the extraordinary breadth of his knowledge of Southern literature by cataloguing authors and plots many scholars have begun and ended entire careers without ever hearing. Of course, that is Gray's point: here are bodies of work about the South that have never fit the established paradigms of the region's literature and so have gone largely unnoticed. Chapter four, perhaps Gray's most successful effort to see outside the canon, focuses on writing by black and white writers about the rural poor, beginning and ending with discussions of Erskine Caldwell and his drive to explain the real-life forces reflected by the characters of his fiction. Chapter Five deals primarily with the fiction of Southern Appalachia. At the center of the mountaineer's appeal, Gray contends, is his marginality, his isolation from historical tendencies that grants him immunity from the industrializing and urbanizing tendencies that threaten the larger South's distinctiveness. Gray begins his discussion by tracing the fictional mountaineer's appearance back to antebellum romances and moves forward chronologically to chart increasingly sophisticated uses of the mountaineer figure to explore the clashes of rural and urban society.

Gray's final two chapters commence with a helpful overview of the social, political, and demographic changes the South has experienced over the past thirty years, resulting in "the edgy, protean character of the contemporary South" (p. 374). Between Southern culture and the global marketplace, Gray suggests, is a fertile bed of contradiction and uncertainty that writers are finding to be rich imaginative fuel. Gray guides readers through contemporary literature by proposing five "writerly practices" that allow us to classify what we encounter: "Housekeepers and Household Chroniclers," "Mavericks and Rebels," "Taletellers and Talkers," "Expatriates and Exiles," and "Returners and Revivalists." Gray's approach in each section is similar: he begins by outlining the writerly practice he is describing, lists multiple authors who might be so classified and their variations on the model he has just proposed, and then selects one or two examples for extended discussion. Thus he is able to consider at varying lengths the work of Josephine Humphreys, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, Jayne Anne Phillips, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Walker, and Ernest Gaines, among others.

In a brief concluding chapter, Gray pulls back from his observations about individual kinds of texts to suggest that the breadth of literature he has been examining works together to demonstrate three things about the South: the region has consistently identified itself against the historical tide and has remained conscious of, if not at times insistent on, its own marginality; warring narratives of Southern self-definition are an essential part of Southernness; and the homogenizing force of the global marketplace has deepened and intensified regional self-identification at the same time that it has threatened Southern distinctiveness. Southerners continue to create themselves, then, out of a basic human need--what Gray calls "an aboriginal impulse" (p. 504)--to name themselves, their place, and their community, even if those locations and the people who inhabit them mean something different for each namer. Thus Gray offers a way of thinking about and explaining persistent Southern self-identification in a world that supports Wal-Mart as a multinational corporation.

But in some ways, Southern Aberrations illustrates the very dilemmas it identifies. How do we avoid reaffirming the authority of the center in the process of studying what falls outside of it? How do we say what Southern literature is without saying how it is connected to--or even separate from--classic definitions of it? How do we stop using Faulkner as a benchmark? How do we stop saying the South and really mean it? These are among the questions a number of recent scholars have taken up, among them Patricia Yaeger in Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (2000) and Michael Kreyling in Inventing Southern Literature (1998), whom, disappointingly, Gray chooses not to engage, despite Kreyling's controversial reading of the canonization of Southern literature. The reader has the sneaking suspicion that "Southern literature" is still what it always has been: Faulkner, the literature of the Renascence, and the set of characteristics for Southernness extracted from that body of writing. By page fifteen, traditional hallmarks of regional identity reveal themselves in Poe's fiction: "a sense of evil, a distrust of `meddling' and change, a preoccupation with the past, a rejection of the ideas of perfectibility and progress, a hatred of abstractions, a belief in hierarchy." Not even the "expatriate and exile" Cormac McCarthy can escape the iron bars of Southernness. "[H]is is a story of the South craftily secreted in a story of the West" (p. 462), writes Gray; McCarthy conflates the lone cowboy "with a sense of the immanence of the past in the present that is perhaps the signature, the distinguishing mark of Southern texts" (p. 453). We may be ready to dismantle and study individually the bricks that have built the house of Southern literature, but the greatest challenge will be stacking them up in a different order. To do that, we may have to stop knowing what we are looking for before we begin, a supremely difficult task.

Pluralizing Southern literature will finally require that we look also with sets of eyes that see the center from the outside, that gaze at it from the "aberrant" position of marginality, as Gray begins to do in his study of literary agrarianism, a chapter that includes black and white, male and female voices, some of them speaking directly out of personal experience with the land. The questions multiply. What does it mean to a black American to call himself a Southerner? Does writing by Southern women bridge the gaps of race and gender, galvanized by its opposition to historic paternalism? How do large Hispanic populations complicate notions of American Southernness? If Gray is right, and people continue to name themselves "Southern" in this new century, we will have to confront such issues. And the center may not hold.

KATHRYN B. MCKEE
University of Mississippi