Sense of Place
WALSH, PATRICK J.
Sense of Place Thinking globally, while writing locally, in the South. BY PATRICK J. WALSH Cleanth Brooks once described Marion Montgomery as "one of the most acute and profound critics of...
...Walsh is a writer in Massachusetts...
...A person immerses himself in reality as a mysterious gift, and resists the temptation to abstract oneself from it as if it were a mechanical problem to be solved...
...He knows man is on a journey, though as "we travel from local to local [we] sometimes gain brief visions of the transcendent and the timeless— through the local...
...He is concerned about the order of civilization because it leads us toward the cause of all order...
...BY PATRICK J. WALSH Cleanth Brooks once described Marion Montgomery as "one of the most acute and profound critics of present-day American culture...
...Capote detached himself from his writing...
...Only a male and a female joined together in marriage are naturally creative with the gift of procreating and fostering children...
...Flannery O'Connor stated in stark language our ongoing crisis: "The moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat...
...private moment and wider than his mailing address, though his participation in that community will very likely show itself at the local level...
...Montgomery contrasts Capote's output with the timeless work of O'Connor and Faulkner...
...She fits Montgomery's definition of a provincial without roots in time or place—unless it be the island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, where residents seek to extract sunshine from cucumbers and build houses top first without any foundations...
...When a particular writer succumbs to the provincialism which is everywhere rampant in our 'national spirit,'" he says, "he will cease to be regionalist and increasingly become a provincial writer with all the weaknesses that provincialism intrudes upon art...
...The Southern regionalism advocated by Marion Montgomery is a defense of Western civilization and its essentially Christian makeup...
...Provincialism is its opposite...
...Montgomery contrasts the Southern, or regional, writer with the provincial one, concentrating on three native-born Southern writers: William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor...
...Capote's provincial world is a "dream world through which characters float in search of an awakening...
...Provincial writing is all too common today, and is truly cold-blooded, lacking any moral sense or sensibility, and uninspired by any transcendent reality...
...Montgomery further examines all three writers' use of violence...
...Both "superimpose distortions upon the reality of being that is the prime source of art's life...
...it is more of a cultural delineation than a geographic one...
...The Southern writer approaches man and the nature of reality with "wonder, curiosity and piety...
...As a Southern writer, Montgomery occupies an advantageous position because he still knows what a man or woman is...
...The perspective allowed by place enables a clearer vision of the distortions and grotesques of reality so prevalent among us from those who are busy trying to recreate man's nature and the nature of created reality...
...Let me offer an example...
...Appreciation of place is not something peculiar or restricted to the American South...
...This makes all community possible...
...Montgomery believes "we are giving birth to a new paganism such as the world has never before imagined...
...Says Montgomery: The "Southerner" of whom I speak, the person to whom some place separate from his own mind is of importance, discovers in his acknowledgment of a place other than his own mind that he thereby becomes a member of a community of creatures, a community larger than his PatrickJ...
...Montgomery, a writer and poet, essays that the breakup of family is the primary factor in the great disorder of Western civilization: "For we are in an age which is at once decaying as Athens decayed before the frustrated eyes of Euripides...
...This is a generation of wingless chickens, which is what I suppose Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead...
...In these essays, Montgomery explores the breakup of our civilization and also how it impinges upon the art of the writer...
...Montgomery states the problem clearly: In our day, the "pure love" required of the craftsman for the thing he makes has been increasingly set aside in favor of techniques of making, whereby in the end there is an imposition of intentional form upon the made thing in the interest of technique itself, as if technique assured "originality...
...Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Court recently attacked this most basic component of civilization in proclaiming gay marriage...
...It is a literature that, in America today, finds an all-too-receptive audience, and, sadly, the South is rapidly becoming like the rest of the nation...
...Eric Voegelin's more encompassing term was "secular Gnosticism...
...He revels in the small particulars of the world...
...This is in opposition to the travesty of art synthetically manufactured in academia, and those who write for commercial success...
...Yeats prayed his daughter would be "rooted in one dear perpetual place...
...For modern man is a new nomad—one of speed, living everywhere and nowhere...
...In this regard, Yeats is a kind of "Southerner...
...Flannery O'Connor noted modernity's radical instability in both time and place, observing: "You know what's the matter with all that kind of folks...
...The characters have a grotesqueness which defines them as separate from mankind, while Faulkner's and O'Connor's characters have their grotesqueness as a definition of their relationship...
...Allen Tate thought of provincialism as "that state of mind in which regional men lose their origin in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday...
...And by those who see "literature as a sector of our intellectual estate to be seized by the pseudo-sciences of sociology and psychology and turned to political and social ends...
...On Matters South^^n is timely, coming as it does on the 75 th anniversary of the publication of I'll Take My Stand...
...They ain't from anywhere...
...This volume contains 26 essays in testimony to the truth of that statement...
...O'Connor thought such detachment "reflects a sickness...
...He knows from his vast study of history and literature that man is a creature living in time, yet possessing an eternal destiny...
...It is a species of our religion of technology adapted to the production of art...
...He knows human beings have an essential nature...
...Flannery O'Connor called this provincialism "secular Manichaean...
...Ignoring natural law, and the experiences of history and civilization, Marshall said that the family is really an "evolving paradigm...
...Of the three, Capote is the provincial, the kind of writer suited for Hollywood...
...Like those Agrarian writers, Montgomery, a native of Georgia, advocates a regionalism rooted in time and place as opposed to the provincialism pandemic in modern man...
...Montgomery believes in "the person, an intellectual soul incarnate, who by the gift of being is required to address history and nature, and the accidents of time and place, as steward to the inherent goodness of creation itself...
...Being rooted in a place is a hallmark of civilization that enables the development of the person and family...
...Faulkner's and O'Connor's is a more human violence than that in a story by Capote where the violence lacks a "burden of responsibility...
Vol. 11 • April 2006 • No. 28
