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Literary history because our critical attention is aimed backwards or forwards rather than at the moment and its context.
HSL further reveals its strict mimetic purpose in the way it deal with two other issues in the southern literature of the post-bellum era: the status of the black as author and character, and the nomination of a major figure as the latter counterpart to Poe. The status of the black as author and character is discussed in an essay on plantation fiction in which stereotyping as a literary device dominates the discussion. We are persuaded to read the story of race within the safer discourse of literary criticism: the black as image avoids the issue of the black in history. Cable kicked against this literary deflection in his time; he fates no better in HSL than he did then against hostile southern readers. No mention is made in the HSL essay of Cable’s call to peel away cultural illusions about the black man in his essay “The Freedman’s Case in Equity” (1885) or the stern rebukes he suffered for endowing a black (Clemence in The Grandmissimes) with the faculty of reason and a knowledge of European history. Cable is relegated to the category of local color when he might legitimately be considered for the status of postbellum partner to Poe. In his own day he was considered the equal of Twain and the peer of Hawthorne. And Cable seems to have darkly known what Simpson says of Simms’s black character Tom: “The mind of the slave is the source of Southern history” (p. 174).
HSL’s nominee for the award as major figure of the postbellum era is, in fact, one who berated the South and southernness with a “pen warmed up in hell”: Samuel Clemens. Clemens himself set up the obstacles to identifying this most ambivalent of southerners as the major exponent of the region’s literature in the latter half of the century. Louis Rubin’s attempt to do so shows the deficiencies of orthodox critical practice. Clemens is identified by Rubin as a southern writer by virtue of his resemblance to “major figures of the twentieth-century Renascence,” even though in his own time Clemens “declined to serve as any kind of public spokesman for his community’s official attitudes and institutions” (p. 233). How are we to resolve this contradiction? The “major figures” who contributed to I’ll Take My
Gray cities Hubbell, p. 822. Hubbell cites Howells’ My Mark Twain as the source for the non-southern appraisal of Twain.