Southern Literary Journal 

About: Southern Literary Journal is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): White (horse) & Political sociology. It has an ISSN identifier of 0038-4291. Over the lifetime, 567 publications have been published receiving 2121 citations. The journal is also known as: The Southern literary journal.

The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels and the Border Trilogy

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's appearance on the national literary radar with the successful publication of All the Pretty Horses, after years of largely "academic" interest in his work, also inaugurated on a substantive level a clearly defined second phase in his career as a writer. Chronology alone would mark McCarthy's first phase as a novelist as the two decades between 1965 and 1985 that saw the publication of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian, while the Border Trilogy spans the 90s, including All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and his latest, Cities of the Plain (1998). A historicist approach to McCarthy's fiction, however, corroborates the chronological separation in that it reveals the correlations between the work of McCarthy's two major periods on the one hand and the cultural moments, popular and otherwise, with which their conception and composition coincided. A clear and discernible correlation exists between the novels of McCarthy's first period and the era of American history defined by the military involvement in Vietnam, while the novels of the Border Trilogy exhibit a similar imaginative and thematic debt to the changing political and cultural landscape of America beginning in the 1980s, a landscape best evoked by the Reagan presidency and the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. The correspondences between McCarthy's work and his times are part of a larger cultural equation whereby contemporary historical events influenced prevailing cultural attitudes on the one hand, and cultural production on the other, a form of influence manifested in film and literature generally, but felt with equal force in the arena of national media culture, in the campaigns for president in 1980 and 1984, and in the political discourse of the 1980s. Perhaps all cultural artifacts are a product of their times, but the novels of McCarthy's first phase are recognizably so in ways worth exploring, as is the case with the Border Trilogy. To understand how the works display this influence, in some cases a covert influence, requires situating McCarthy's novels afresh in their historical contexts. The two separate cases of correspondence between McCarthy's work and his cultural milieu are united primarily by the representation of violence and issues closely related to violence in the novels, a circumstance not surprising given that two wars have had a major impact on the cultural terrain of McCarthy's career. Between the novels of the early phase and the work of the Trilogy, a major shift occurs in McCarthy's storytelling and that shift is directly a product of a changing aesthetic of violence in his work. The transformation of McCarthy's aesthetic of violence takes shape as a movement from the serial event to the symbolic drama: the former representing conflicts always contingent and soon to be superseded by fresh eruptions of violence; in the latter, a central act of violence is the single event itself toward which the narrative proceeds and which regularly contains the work's larger thematic conflicts if not in every case their resolution. McCarthy's transition between the serial and the symbolic returns him to the tradition of southern literary violence that relies on violence as the site where divergent interests converge for dramatic effect. While all literary violence can be viewed as formal in the sense that it has achieved literary form, normally we make a distinction between formal violence on the one hand--violence governed by rules, agreements, and cultural assumptions, typified by the formal duel--and informal violence on the other hand--violence that is fragmentary, unconsidered, "random," or "senseless," as public discourse of our time denotes it. Southern literature--from which Cormac McCarthy emerges in terms of our understanding of his work, especially in his early, Tennessee-centered vision--favors a narrative strategy in which violence represents a climax of tensions and stress with the literary text. …

The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's novels are as innocent of theme and of ethical reference as they are of plot. On the other hand, each of them constitutes a densely created world as authentic and persuasive as any that there is in fiction. The worlds are convincing not because the people in them do normal and recognizable things, or represent us metaphorically, or even inhabit identifiable time and space, but because McCarthy compels us to believe in them through the traditional means of invention, command of language, and narrative art. To enter those worlds and move around in them effectively we are required to surrender all Cartesian predispositions and rediscover some primal state of consciousness prior to its becoming identified with thinking only. There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy's novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy's world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone. The vivid facticity of his novels consumes conventional formulae as a black hole consumes light. He is Walker Percy turned inside out--intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teleological fashions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the strange heterocosm of his own making. Ethical categories do not rule in this environment, or even pertain: moral considerations seem not to affect outcomes; action and event seem determined wholly by capricious and incomprehensible fates. His stories are lurid and simple; they seem oddly like paradigms without reference and are all the more compelling because of that, since the matter of the paradigm does not lose its particularity in abstraction. The characters--without utilitarian responsibilities to well-made plots and unrelated to our bourgeois better natures--are real precisely to the degree that they resist symbolization. At the end of Outer Dark (1968) the road that Culla Holme is following brings him abruptly to a swamp, and absurdly ends there: Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth's curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place. (1) This is as close to a conventional paradigm as McCarthy usually comes, and it, of course, is a paradigm of a dead-end, paradigmless world (and for its novel also a kind of gothic, self-referential joke). A more sophisticated Cornelius Suttree, in McCarthy's most recent novel, Suttree (1979), dreams in a delirium that his life is being voided into "a cold dimension without time without space and where all was motion." When, past his crisis, he speaks with an attending priest he tells him that what he has learned close to death is that God "is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving." (2) This is McCarthy's metaphysic: none, in effect; no first principles, no foundational truth; Heraclitus without logos. At the end of Child of God (1973), Lester Ballard, the logic of whose poignant, homicidal loneliness we have attended step by relentless step, is permitted in death a last socially redeeming value: at the state medical school in Memphis he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. …

Randall Kenan beyond the Final Frontier: Science Fiction, Superheroes, and the South in A Visitation of Spirits

Abstract: Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989) opens with two epigraphs, one from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and another from William Gibson's landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer. Critics have frequently remarked upon the significance of the Dickens quotation, noting that it anticipates the Scrooge-like evening of visions endured by protagonist Horace Cross as part of his attempt to come to terms with his homosexuality in a traditional religious culture that abhors any form of sexuality it deems aberrant. (1) The quotation from Neuromancer, however, has drawn almost no comment at all. This omission may seem minor, yet it becomes more glaring when we consider how densely the novel is woven with allusions to science fiction tales and superhero comic books--literary genres that we might include along with fantasy narratives under the broad category of speculative fiction. (2) Although such narratives are not conventionally associated with the rural southern settings and African American folkways that figure prominently in Kenan's work, A Visitation of Spirits implicitly argues for a reconsideration of those conventions. At the heart of many such texts and at the heart of Kenan's novel lies the highly vexed issue of embodiment: the complex relationship between what we define as mind and what we define as body, and how African American southerners such as Horace have learned from multiple sources either to see themselves as all body with no mind or as minds housed in bodies that are no more than wayward and unreliable vehicles. Kenan's novel draws upon tropes from comic book superheroes and science fiction not only to dramatize this dilemma but also to reconceptualize the very notion of embodiment. Kenan's earliest writerly ambition was to be a science fiction novelist. He writes of growing up in Chinquapin, North Carolina: "I had been a dreamy kid, aloft in fantasy and make-believe. Comic books, fairy stories, tales of the amazing and especially of the fantastic were my real world. Paying little attention to the outside world, I lived for Star Trek and Spiderman and the vampires, werewolves, and bigfoots of horror novels" ("Mr. Brown" 65). Kenan describes himself in his teenage years as "besotted and beset" by science fiction (Walking 610); he even composed novels in that genre while still in high school, and his ambitions remained focused on science fiction as he entered college. He enrolled in the University of North Carolina with the desire to become "a black Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov" (614). Although Kenan has not gone on to write science fiction--at least as the genre is traditionally conceived--neither did he abandon his interest in it. He stresses that his literary turn toward the rural southern settings of his childhood did not come about because he began to "think any less of" science fiction (qtd in Rowell 141). Kenan describes himself as still an "avid comic book collector" ("Identity" 9) and an "unapologetic fan" of science fiction (qtd in Cornett 62), and in The Fire This Time (2007) he writes, "comic books were my original vice, and they still have more allure to me than sex or drugs" (82). Given Kenan's frequent emphasis on the importance of these fantastic modes for the development of his imagination and of his ambitions as a writer, the critical silence on his references to them in A Visitation of Spirits is all the more striking. One reason for this silence may simply be that these allusions do not seem "southern" enough. In the various literary-critical subfields in which Kenan's work is most often discussed, the regional nature of his work is a frequent locus of interest. Queer studies scholars such as Robert McRuer (Queer Renaissance) and Sheila Smith McKoy ("Rescuing the Black Male Homosexual Lambs") find in Kenan's work a model of black gay masculinity different from those found in works with more urban settings. Within southern literary studies, where Kenan enjoys a high profile, scholars have been particularly interested in those aspects of his fiction that recall some of the field's sturdiest tropes: his evocation of place and of the tension between the individual and the community, his chronicling of agrarian traditions as they are lost in the wake of encroaching modernization. …

Revisiting the Southern Grotesque: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Case of Carson McCullers

Abstract: "Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art from is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, `I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.'" -- Carson McCullers, "The Vision Shared" Writers of the "southern grotesque" or "southern gothic"(1)--for example, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor--conjure up the strange worlds of freakish outsiders placed in lovelorn barren landscapes, penetrating heat, and closed spaces, with themes of miscegenation, sexual deviance and bloody violence. Perhaps not surprisingly, critical readers have, on the whole, concurred that the southern grotesque aligns itself with a gloomy vision of modernity, according to which the soul of man is both aimless and loveless. The grotesque worlds of southern literature, it is argued, allegorize the human condition itself as existential alienation and angst. In my view, however, these accounts of the southern grotesque do not tally with the type of art which McCullers describes in the prefatory quotation above, as well as in other essays (for example, "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature" and "The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing") and the fiction itself. McCullers, like O'Connor in "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," accentuates the vitality of the grotesque vision. Without wanting to dismiss the real pain that is so often at the heart of the southern grotesque, including McCullers' writings, I want to suggest that the grotesque is not limited to an alienating modernity. Rather, it is to do with the affirming qualities and practices of growth, promise and transformation. What I am advocating, then, is a crucial need to revisit the grotesque. In doing so in this essay, I note different theories of the grotesque, and find Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of it the most fruitful not only for describing the dynamics of McCullers' grotesque subjects, but also for promising a radically new construction of how we read the southern grotesque.(2) I then perform a reading of McCullers' novels of adolescence--The Heart of the Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946)--as an example of how we might reframe what I suggest are limited readings of the southern grotesque. Julia Kristeva first brought Bakhtin to the attention of western scholars with her 1969 essay, "Word, Dialogue and Novel." With the translation into English of Rabelais and His World in 1968, and The Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in the early 1980s, Bakhtin became a key name in literary studies, particularly in response to his theory of the novel. Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin's reading of Gargantua and Pantagruel, contains a revolutionary conceptualization of the grotesque that I suggest can free not just McCullers' fiction but much southern writing from the almost paralyzing burden of more traditional accounts of the grotesque, to celebrate, instead, McCullers' pronouncement, "but anyway I am alive." As I have noted, most readers of the southern grotesque submit that it allegorizes a kind of existential anguish. William Van O'Connor accounts for the grotesque in southern writing as a response to a world of violence and upheaval; Joseph Millichap makes a connection between the grotesque and a dark modernism; and Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), links the grotesque with terror and violence. More specifically, McCullers' worlds are said to represent alienation, loneliness, a lack of human communication, and the failure of love.(3) Although there is no denying the validity of these constructions of the southern grotesque, I do not think they tell the full story. …

"You Nothing But Trash": White Trash Shame in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina

Abstract: "Americans love to hate the poor" and, in particular, to hate poor white trash, observe Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz in their analysis of the white trash phenomenon in America (1). A "classist slur" and a "racial epithet that marks out certain whites as a breed apart, a dysgenic race unto themselves" white trash is "the most visible and clearly marked form of whiteness" (2, 4). The fact that the term "trash" means "social waste and detritus" (4) points to the social degradation and shame implicit in this derogatory class designation. Referring to whites who live in poverty--classically in rural poverty--the term also invokes long-standing stereotypes of poor whites as "incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid" (2). That there is a "relationship between social formations and structures of feeling" (Fox 14) and that the feeling of shame and the experience of being socially shamed are crucial to the development of a white trash identity are revealed in Dorothy Allison's many public remarks on her white trash upbringing in Greenville, South Carolina, and in her semi-autobiographical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina. If American culture is often described as competitive and success-oriented, it is also a shame-phobic society in which those who are stigmatized as different or those who fail to meet social standards of success are made to feel inferior, deficient, or both. Living in a "shame-based" society in which there is "shame about shame and so it remains under strict taboo" (Kaufman, Shame 32), Allison takes decided risks in describing her shameful white trash origins and her experiences of physical and sexual abuse, including the risk of being re-shamed in a mass-media, talk-show culture that often ruthlessly exposes and shamelessly sensationalizes the stories of victim-survivors. Allison, who remarks that "shame was the constant theme" of her childhood ("Skin" 229), describes her upbringing as a prolonged immersion in shame. "What may be the central fact of my life" writes Allison, "is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family.... That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it" ("Question" 15). "Born trash in a land where the people all believe themselves natural aristocrats" Allison's family, the Gibsons, had "a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness" (Two 32). The Gibson women--"bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt" (Two 32-33)--were marked as racially and sexually inferior. "We were all wide-hipped and predestined. Wide-faced meant stupid. Wide hands marked workhorses with dull hair and tired eyes, thumbing through magazines full of women so different from us they could have been another species" (Two 33). Although Allison was proud of the stubborn determination of the "hard and ugly" Gibson women, she was also "horrified" by them and "did not want to grow up to be them" (Two 37, 38). What Allison found absent or caricatured in romantic depictions of poverty and the noble and heroic poor was the "reality of self-hatred and violence" among poor whites. "The poverty I knew was dreary, deadening, shameful.... "Her people, the Gibsons, were the "bad" poor people: "men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes.... We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed" ("Question" 17-18). …