The End of a Romance
ROMANO, JOHN
The End of a Romance A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 By Richard H. King Oxford. $13.95. 320pp. Reviewed by John Romano Department of English,...
...Yet Faulkner's work also has a quality we associate with the grander, vaster novels of the 19th century itself: a thoroughgoing vision of a society in relation to its historical experience...
...I put it that way—the South wrote Faulkner's book—because I do believe that Richard King has an unarticulated Foucault-like bias: He discounts the individual's for the culture's voice in a text...
...author, "Dickens and Reality" Many people would agree, I think, that William Faulkner is the finest 20th-century American novelist...
...I must own, though, to a sharp disagreement with King over the merits of Thomas Wolfe, whom I consider persuasively poetic, sturdy and evocative, albeit seriously flawed...
...Here the usual Oedipal burden of the son's relationship to his parents is aggravated by the dominance of the grandfather...
...On the other hand, the family romance also claimed that blacks were "childlike" and thus permanent members of the metaphorical Southern family...
...He sees Southern writers as speaking—from the couch, as it were—for the whole of their culture...
...Indeed, it is part of Faulkner's greatness that he is so free of the characteristically American illusion that the raw truth about ourselves is not to be found in our social origins, debts or dependencies...
...American intellectual history should always be written by those with a prejudice in favor of regional tendencies...
...Yet there was a central contradiction at the core of the notion of the South as a "family...
...and finally, when he recognizes the role of the past in the making of his identity without distorting it, positively or negatively (the author borrows Nietzsche's concept of "forgetting"), he is in a position to move beyond it...
...Characters populate this vision, rather than dominate it...
...It is witty, learned and felt, with a relevance beyond the geographical borders of its subject...
...Conversely, King brings a sharp literary sensibility to bear on the work of Southern historians such as C. Vann Woodward, V.O...
...He alone can compare in greatness—that is, in greatness of the human spirit-with Joyce or Woolf, Proust or Mann...
...Key, and particularly W.J...
...it operates more on the unconscious than the conscious level...
...Sometimes, as in the case of The Sound and the Fury's Quentin Compson, they serve as prisms for viewing the social whole...
...But for those who came of age between the two World Wars, it was inexorable, a given from which a writer like Faulkner at the outset did not dare even to imagine himself free...
...This pattern is by no means immutable: On the contrary, it has been molded by Southern history from antebellum days down to the present...
...he then becomes critical, alienates himself from the inherited trauma...
...and this is what happened in the writings of Faulkner and Lillian Smith...
...certainly it will not lead to an illuminating reading of Faulkner in an esthetic sense...
...On the problem this creates King is especially instructive: "If [in the family romance] the white father and mother assumed dominant positions, blacks occupied the role of permanently delegitirnized and often literally illegitimate children...
...King clearly undervalues Wolfe because he will not fit into his paradigm...
...She is an eerie lacuna, present by dint of her absence, in Southern writing...
...And while they are never merely "representative figures" or pretexts for some literary sociology, neither are they presented as independent of (certainly not antagonistic to) their cultural milieu...
...On the one hand, racial ideology dictated that blacks could not be acknowledged as literal members of the family...
...To take the family romance literally would be to negate it...
...In King's view, the Southern consciousness achieved this freedom when "it" wrote Faulkner's The Bear...
...A professor of philosophy and history, King does not suffer from a narrow "literary-critical" perspective (though he does cite critics like Harold Bloom on occasion...
...To recognize blacks would be to soil the purity of the racial-social lineage, the infrastructure of the tradition...
...Yet it is deeply informative about Faulkner's Southernness, and by way of that, about the mind of the South...
...A Southern Renaissance is organized around the notion of the Southern "family romance," as King calls it, with a nod at Freud...
...There are times and places when I would challenge this method...
...As such, it is entirely appropriate for the purposes of this book...
...The last remark gives a hint of King's method...
...and it carries out a vigorous critique of 19th-century articles of faith...
...As a modernist, Faulkner satisfied the complex esthetic demands of his literary moment: His art is elaborately indirect...
...But the usefulness of a paradigm does not depend upon an absolute fit: Wolfe's departure from the thesis throws light on both the thesis and on himself...
...It is virtually a proof of the dense in-terwovenness of creative self and social context in Southern literature that King can acount for the "Southern Renaissance"—a cultural movement spanning three decades, with its roots deep in the 19th century and involving dozens of writers of varying tendencies —by referring us to a single underlying pattern of kinship relations...
...Reviewed by John Romano Department of English, Columbia University...
...Still, King's failure of generosity here does not detract from his overall success...
...A Southern Renaissance is a richer book than I can begin to convey...
...Meanwhile, the mother, whose sexuality has been denied, becomes an idealized figure, "rarely emerging in full force...
...It is especially useful when he treats the Agrarians (later the "New Critics") Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Perm Warren and Cleanth Brooks...
...Faulkner is the central character of Richard King's excellent book on the literary and intellectual ferment in the South after 1930...
...it embraced blacks as well...
...The Southern family romance was not limited to the regnant white family, however...
...Our culture is a bland and lifeless thing when it is thought of as a light fading the further we travel from the Boston-to-Wash-ington axis...
...Cash (to whose marvelous Mind of the South King's perceptive commentary sent me running...
...Or, one might say, he sees the South as coming to a full, healthy consciousness of its inherited psychic difficulties by proxy, through the texts of its writers...
...It is plain that Wolfe's relation to the Southern family romance is, well, finicky (as is Agee's, on whom King is rather better...
...King charts the course of the "Awakening" in his subtitle according to one familiar version of the psychoanalytic cure: The patient (the Southern mind) begins as a captive of the family romance, condemned to perpetuate it...
...Therefore the son must come to terms not only with his "unheroic and prosaic" father, the product of the defeated South, but also with his grandfather, the darkly glamorous Confederate veteran and remnant of the heroic prewar South...
...The breadth of his approach bears dividends for the study of literary figures—including, along with Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Will Percy, James Agee and Thomas Wolfe...
Vol. 63 • July 1980 • No. 14
