94 American Literature
Ing, the writing of “Faulkner” and the critical consensus, as significantly as they have mirrored the actual, empirical South, its land, its people, its “ways.” In fact, as that traditional mimetic relationship between “South” and history has become increasingly self-conscious, through criticism and reviewing, the act of writing has become mediated. Definition becomes part if not all of the reality it defines. The orthodox definition is ill-equipped to deal with this self-reflecting phase of its own life cycle.
We can see the weakness in the orthodox definition in Noble’s projection of it into the future. As cultural “homogenization” sets in, Noble says, traditional ways will still operate, but at a diminished rate (p. 578). As, for instance, race relations seem to improve, there will be less “conflict,” and less brutality in the handling of it. As southerners become more secular, “religious wholeness” will cease to be a major theme. As more of the south becomes urban and suburban, the family on the land will be a less powerful, and negotiable, image. It seems clear that this exercise in resuscitating and “immemorial” definition is a losing battle against obsolescence. “Less” of the standard is not an adequate description of modern southern literature. Southern critics and literary historians must reopen the relational aspects of our work and admit the elements of dissensus (race, class, gender, ideology, history) that the orthodoxy has excluded.
One of the most telling, and volatile, aspects of the dissensus debate is the conviction that awareness of one’s politics and the political climate of one’s time is both inescapable and necessary to the writing of literary history. Bercovitch would make a virtue of the necessity (p. 100) and Kolodny insists upon a full and detailed accounting of the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s (pp. 306-07). Even Emory Elliott, the self-confessed “aging 60’s liberal” (p. 612) and honest broker among more ideologically extreme colleagues, admits that the political situation cannot and must not be edited out. But HSL by virtue of its heavy debt to the conservative consensus of the renascence, does just that.
Signs of this editing appear in M. Thomas Inge’s “Appendix A: The Study of Southern Literature.” Inge’s opinion of Richard King’s A Southern Renaissance (1980) is the specific occasion. King’s study, Inge argues, errs methodologically and ideologically when it “moves beyond history and sociology into cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis, which in conjunction with his