The Extra 91
T.D. Young’s introduction to the section culminates in a paraphrase of Cleanth Brooks’s orthodox definition of southernness in literature. Southern literature can be identified by “a feeling for the concrete and the specific, an awareness of conflict, a sense of community and of religious wholeness, a belief in human imperfection, and a genuine and never wavering disbelief in perfection ever developing as a result of human effort and planning; a deep-seated sense of the tragic, and a conviction that nature is mysterious and contingent” (p. 263). The italics, mine, indicate the grip of southern mimesis on critical thought: the operative nouns in each phrase of the definition are general and elusive. The orthodox definition blocks any appeal to the rational or historical intellect; it seeks refuge in a prior authority that is veiled, self-sustaining, non-relational, apart. If you have the right feeling, belief, sense, or conviction, you are part of the order; only then can you read the texts.
Even Faulkner can be reduced to conformity. Cleanth Brooks continues his planning down of Faulkner’s roughness (carried out in his trilogy) by construing him as an agrarian conservative in social philosophy and no more complex in psychology than he was “old-fashioned” in his treatment of women in his fiction (p. 339). “The Fiction of Social Comment,” an essay on southern novelists during the renascence who chose non-agrarian themes and platforms, seems, by its exclusion of such novels as Tate’s The Fathers and Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, designed to persuade us that all political or social statement is necessarily “liberal” and modern dissent from the truth as the agrarian critics had revealed it. Dissensus would be helpful here if only to prod us to acknowledge that Tate’s novel is as political as Stribling’s works. On Faulkner, of course, revision has been going on for some time.
Anne Goodwyn Jones’s essay “Gone With the Wind and Others: Popular Fiction, 1920-1950” does succeed in injecting some degree of dissensus into the period. She demonstrates how such instruments of “intellect” as race, gender, class, and ideology (the tools of dissensus) have determined the shape of “popular” southern fiction. Jones effectively argues that the romance plots is gender related and that Mitchell’s classic is in fact the story of Scarlett’s willful graduation from the enforced limitations of love and motherhood: Scarlett is a “woman who