GOOD HEARTS
Reynolds Price
New York: Atheneum, 1988
275 pages, $18.95
Duckness used to be fairly easy to spot. If it had feathers like a duck, waddled like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then the irrefragable rules of logic dictated that it was a duck. Southern novelists seem determined to deny their duckness. Lure twenty of them to a literary conference (large quantities of cheap bourbon will usually do the trick), and at least nineteen of them will obdurately refuse to be introduced as a Southern novelist. Why disclaim your duckness when it is an old and honorable condition? If a man or woman, born and raised in the South, sits down at a typewriter, fills page upon page with words about characters who dwell in the South, the result is a Southern novel, right? Wrong! shriek the authors: A duck is not always a duck.
What is going on? To begin with, the king of that particular jungle known as Southern fiction is indisputably William Faulkner. His roar tends, by comparison, to reduce everyone else to a squeaky meow. This was not always true, for at the height of the "Southern Renaissance," that tidal wave of novelmaking that swept the South from, say, 1925 to 1955, Faulkner faced a raft of competitors for the throne. Literary critics (and what Gore Vidal derides as "book-chat people") discerned enough common themes and shared regional markings to warrant calling these writers "Southern." Those so designated did not protest. Who wouldn't be proud to be numbered in the surge of creativity that boosted the South to preeminence in the world of letters?
By establishing himself as the epitome of the Southern novelist, Faulkner erected for succeeding writers not only a model to emulate, but a goal seemingly impossible to attain. By the 1950s a curious phenomenon emerged: Young Southerners published Faulknerian novels while simultaneously denying that they were Southern Writers. As the critic Louis Rubin put it, "getting out from under Faulkner" became the enduring problem for Southerners. By repudiating the regional tag--by disowning their duckness--they hoped to obviate the inevitable comparison with the master.
Other Ducks and the Problem of Duckness
If some ducks wish to deny their duckness, others have been transformed into swans. To wit: Young novelists in the South today can perhaps legitimately claim not to be Southern because the South, once a distinctive region of the country, has merged into the American mainstream. If there is no South, there can be no Southern novelists.
Obviously one can still descry the lineaments of an older and unique Southern region. But "sunbeltization" (it's an ugly word, but so is the phenomenon) has taken its toll. Today's young writers grew up in suburbs, not in small towns or on farms. The old order of manners and mores is at most a flickering of childhood memory for them. The Civil War resonates in their minds with all the immediacy of the War of Austrian Succession or the War of the Roses. Faulkner is not a contemporary to compete with or an intimidating father to evade, but a classic author, entombed in the sepulchral halls of academe. Walker Percy is the prototype of these youthful writers, for though born in 1915, his
...
Read Full Article
|
