The Extra 93
The theme of racism stands in the background (p. 397). The modernist, and renascence, fixation with technique, then, takes over this critical view, obscuring ideology and history. There is ample criticism in the field of black literature and literary theory (e.g., the work of Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates) to lead us to a re-reading and a re-positioning of black writers in the southern canon and to address the question of a viable, unique black aesthetic that does not depend, significantly, upon the orthodox definition. This view is not represented in HSL. In the case of Richard Wright, for instance, a case in which one might expect such a repositioning to begin, there is only the familiar regionalist and renascence appraisal. Blyden Jackson argues that Wright is “no less a Southern writer than his fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner” (p. 445). This approach to Wright testifies in a powerful way to the “anxiety of influence” that saturates modern southern criticism- each individual writer must find accommodation in a canon dominated by the construct “Faulkner” as designed by the renascence critics.
IV
The long-range impact of HSL and the promulgation of its orthodoxy of its orthodoxy are palpable in two essays near the close of the volume. One of them, Donald R. Noble’s “The Future of Southern Literature,” predicts a future southern literature based upon the orthodox definition. Not surprisingly he foresees a future that differs from the iconic past only in degree: every quality Young identified (p. 263) will appear in the future diminished. The orthodoxy, silencing critical self-examination, never accounts for its own interests, nor does it admit its own part in shaping the “entity” it seeks to define.
Southern writing since Faulkner’s elevation to laureate in 1950 is nearly universally influenced by that fact: the Nobel, and the immense prestige it brought, verified the conservative, formalist ideology of the renascence- southern critics could, and did, erect the edifice of Southern Literature upon that foundation. We critics, in other words, inhabit a construction largely of our own building. The writers, too, have been influenced. From Styron on, and perhaps retroactively through academic criticism, southern writers- men and women- have mirrored prior writ-