The Extra 85
“Recontextualizing” the canon of American literature stirs once again the question of southernness and its part in the rhythm of inclusion and exclusion, “of discontinuity, disruption, dissensus” that Sacvan Bercovitch sees as our “distinctive form of expression” (p. 101). The publication of HSL in the midst of the dissensus controversy reveals how deeply the study of southern literature has been sequestered in consensus, how far we have strayed from the relational ideals of the “fathers,” how dangerously untouched by the practice of our colleagues in American literary study we really are.
II
The orthodox study of southern literature labors in service to an “immemorial” mimesis. An analogy with Erich Auerbach’s study is helpful toward an understanding of what I mean by mimesis in this context. Auerbach proposed a transcendent reality, the omega of history, toward which mankind is moved, a transhistorical reality that revealed its presence through a vital order in an apparent multiplicity. “The story of Christ” broke the hold of “the classical rule of styles” (p. 555) and started us on a course toward “a common life of mankind on earth” (p. 552). Skeptics like Voltaire (p. 403) and “arbitrary” stylists like Joyce (p. 544) have not helped that progress, but the force of mimesis, guaranteed from beyond history, is big enough to overcome local setbacks. Mimesis is the process by which the historical and contingent becomes the mythical and universal; it is consensus supercharged with transcendental truth.
HSL advocates an analogous mimetic or transhistorical reality. It grants “South” the privilege of icon: sacred rather than historical, “South” is seldom subjected to the instruments of history- politics, ideology, race, class, gender. If, as Sacvan Bercovitch states, the new American literary histories are undertaken with the knowledge that their authors lack the “authority for synthesis” (p. 101), the same cannot be said of HSL. Synthesis, backed by a transcendent mimesis, works in ways almost astonishing to behold.
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953).